Rebirth and Second Chances

Chapter 281: No Contest

The adult Fachen were about a third the size larger of the juvenile, each standing about twenty-five feet tall. Both of them were had a more advanced connection with their powers, giving them better control of the earth's domain. This became evident as a few clumps of ground and stones were torn from the ground and now orbited each of them.

They had torn trees from the ground to use as clubs before they approached, and as they got within range, each began spinning. The trees grasped firmly in the only hand they had. They looked like giant carrots that had been sent spinning in some strange game of battling tops.

They were focused on Caraid and me, Ag, hidden in shadow at the moment. The degree of control they exhibited as they spun, determined to kill us, was even more impressive because of the control it took to make a coordinated strike. I had Caraid ride Meala and move uphill. I needed them out of range so that I needn't worry.

Each cycle of their revolution, each time they spun, was so synchronized that the trees they held as weapons were always directly opposite of each other. Their ability to spin while maintaining their center of gravity, without getting dizzy, was even more impressive once I realized they were moving in opposite directions. Each spin was perfectly coordinated; each movement flawlessly executed.

The monster's resistance to fire and ice meant I would need to change my attacks. I would still use them, but I would target the environment instead of them directly. A few pulses of Beleros Aura were enough to start to soften the surrounding ground. By channeling a stream of fire, I was able to melt the ground, deep enough that pools of molten earth began gathering. It wasn't lava, not quite, but it was close.

A few fireballs aimed at their weapons set the trees they were brandishing ablaze. I had to bombard them with a stream of fireballs in order to apply the burning effect I was after, but eventually, both trees lit up. The Fachen were able to ignore the flames and continued brandishing the trees they had uprooted. It looked as if they were moving into battle, wielding torches.

This wasn't easy to try to destroy the trees they were carrying, not while dodging two enraged Fachen. I trapped the juvenile. His misjudgment of the surrounding ground had buried him up to his chest. He simply didn't have the leverage to free himself, not with just one arm.

Now that I had a few pools of ground softened, I switched from Beleros Aura to Cyronax Aura. I knew the Fachen could ignore temperature extremes, but that wasn't what I was after. Cyronax's Divine mandate was more than the destruction of winter, it encompassed the cold nature of void. His was the darkness of space that the stars were spread across.

Cyronax was also the father of Jack Frost, God of Winter, and my blood coursed with that same affinity. I released Cyronax Aura to give winter's bite to the air. To make the summoning of snow more easily done. To give the blizzard I would create able to affect the environment so that the blinding snow I would create could be used to confuse and disorient.

I could have done the same thing using glamour and illusion. The Fachen were not Sidhe, so probably wouldn't have seen through it. But there were monsters that had the ability to ignore illusion. They were gifted with enhanced senses of sight, smell, and hearing, perhaps even an instinctive sixth sense that made using illusion against them a risky proposition.

There was no need to take the chance. Not when I could call upon the same winter rage that Jack Frost ruled. His power was a mixture of beauty and death, a power well suited for the Sidhe. The amazing beauty of a single snowflake, the joy of that first snowfall when you laughed as you caught that snowflake on your tongue and allowed it to melt. As well as the howling winds of a blizzard that could blind and kill.

This was his domain.

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Those moments of peace and comfort as you huddled before a fire, drinking warm mulled cider or rich hot chocolate. The calm instances of a dream as the land slumbered, blanketed beneath Jack Frost's snow. The quiet land a reminder of possibilities and that the snow will melt, and life will return.

I ignored the softer side of winter, the promise of new life that was just around the corner. Instead, I embraced the fury and anger that Jack Frost also promised. His was a tale of treachery and deceit. He was once Unseelie, before ascending and claiming his godhood. Cast out by the people who accepted everyone.

Abandoned and forced to endure the hardship of winter without the comfort and protection of home and hearth. His story was one as old as time. A story of first love. A woman that he trusted and courted. A woman that allowed his courting, encouraged it even and did so only to make sport of his affection.

Jack Frost was Winter's child, born of Cyronax, but raised without the tender mercy of mother or family. The Elk, the wolf, the bear protected him. Each teaching him how to survive the desolation of winter. It was a powerful gift of nature, but that unique upbringing came with a cost.

He was Unseelie, perfect and beautiful to look at, but he had none of the social graces that many of the men and women of the Unseelie practiced. The Unseelie accepted him, but only for amusement's sake. They ridiculed him, the butt of a joke that even the Bards regaled in song.

That court of fools had made the mistake of leaving a broken Jack Frost to live or die one winter's night. The revelry and debauchery making the men and women that taunted and attacked him, brave with their drunkenness. Bravery that was stolen from a bottle of wine, encouraged by the drunken idiocy of men and women that had barely claimed adulthood.

He had survived.

Left to die.

He lingered on the edge of death in the snow until Cyronax intervened, and he became more. He was winter personified, those unruly and stupid Unseelie that had tossed him out like so much garbage only realized their mistake when he came to claim his revenge.

Cloaked in the fury of winter. Blizzards howling with the anger that coursed through his soul. Jack Frost was truly born that night.

And the tales the Bard spread, the songs of his nipping at windows, may seem to speak of childish pleasures. But behind those innocent songs, the truth of who and what he was existed. It was not smart to make an enemy of Jack Frost. Not if you hoped to live come winter.

I called that snow, to obscure the vision of the Fachen. To make them pause, worried that they might move into those pools of soft earth I had created. Their spinning slowed, but not completely as they searched, using smell and sound to track me now that sight was missing.

I equipped a sword made of a composite of Mithral and Silinium. Princess Wynne had had the weapon forged for me one day. Once she realized that I depended exclusively on the fire blade I could create using spellcraft. She had warned me there might come a day when the fire was useless, and today I had proven her right.

The weapon itself was a masterpiece. Wynne had supplied the metal, but she had called in a favor or two to have a masterclass blacksmith and enchanter forge the weapon. The composite metal formed a striation of blue and white waves as the blacksmith folded the metal over and over again until he was happy with the shape and function.

It had been buffed and ground to a razor sharpness that would maintain that sharpness forever because of one of the enchantments that had been applied. Enchantments of sharpness and durability. The only spell that had been included was one of utility. The blade would return to my hand if I were somehow disarmed, using a weird spatial glyph that made it appear to teleport when called.

With the Fachen blinded and the ground seeded with traps, I began my attack in earnest. Some might find it distasteful, even immoral, that I would kill the juvenile Fachen, but this wasn't a child of Sidhe. These were monsters. They had some of the shape and features of an intelligent person, but they were feral beasts. They had no desire to control their baser instincts. Even worse, they killed for no reason.

Animals would only kill to protect themselves or their children. They killed for food.

Monsters took a perverse pleasure in leaving devastation and destruction in their path. If they had come upon a Sidhe child, they would have had no compunction in making a snack of that child.

They could not be tamed or redeemed. It was not within their nature or capacity to understand morality. There was no right or wrong for them, there was only the desire to kill, eat, and destroy. And I would feel no regret at killing this juvenile Fachen.

The kill was easy, trapped as it was. A quick attack pattern, a technique using my blade to thrust and slice until I had finally carved a path through skin and bone to bisect his beating heart.

These were not Sidhe. They had none of the protections of Immortality that my people had been gifted. The destruction of the Fachen's heart would not be healed. He would not rise from the dead when my back was turned to exact vengeance.

Ag had initiated this encounter, but I didn't blame her. I think I would have had done the same. The Fachen were too monstrous, even for the Sidhe, to be allowed to live. They were indiscriminate about what and who they would attack. But when they had a choice, they always targeted Sidhe young. They seemed to get a visceral delight out of the anguish destroying such young lives had on those who might survive.

The smell of blood from the Fachen's wound was carried on the wind. The adult Fachen realizing what had happened as they bounded into range. I began casting a glamour of snow and fire to augment the howling blizzard, waiting to release the spell for the briefest moment, just long enough for them to see that death had arrived and claimed one of them.

The Fachen I had killed might have survived if it was older and had managed to gain the same control over earth magic as his parents. And to see me standing over the body of their offspring that was just taking his last breath was too much for his parents and they lost all sense of reason.

What I had done was cruel, but the Sidhe were cruel. Our beauty served to hide that cruelty, but there could be no doubt I acted in harmony with my nature. I wanted them angry. I wanted them lashing out in rage without thought or strategy. I wanted that rage to force them into making stupid mistakes, mistakes that would play a factor in their attack.

They stopped moving as they saw me standing over the body of their child. Their fury and perhaps heartbreak at the death of the Fachen overriding anything else. That pause, that second of grief, rage, and disbelief, was the only respite I had before they attacked. They both jumped at me in the same frenzied anger. Their response expected.

Once I had kindled the spark that set their rage free, I released the glamour of a blizzard, the landscape, and environment inundated with howling winds, lashing each of them with flakes of destruction.

The ground in that area I had been standing was one that had been saturated with my fire spells. The Fachen were gifted with resistances to fire and ice, but as I had already shown, I could trap them. And I had used my magic to 'stand' above the ground, to float on the currents of air as I created my trap.

They arrived in tandem, creating a geyser of splashed earth as they sank, their weight too much for the softened ground to support. Both of them crashing through the softened ground, their bodies buried to their chests.

As soon as they had fallen into the trap, I released the full power of my Cyronax bloodline. A cold so profound that the lava instantly transformed into a block of the frozen earth. I solidified the bedrock enough to make sure they would never get free. With the way their bodies were constructed, they would never find enough purchase to escape, at least not before I moved in with my sword to reunite the family in death.