They had ridden hard for four days and four nights without sleep.

  Through frostbitten meadows and rot-choked marshes, across wind-lashed ridgelines and bridges half-swallowed by the wild, the procession moved in silence like a curse crawling across the land. No banners flew. No heralds rode ahead. Only the pounding of hooves and the creak of blackened carriage wheels echoed behind them—eerie, slow, steady.

  Villages they passed were small and too frightened to speak. Some tried to hide, others to pray. It made no difference. When the torches dimmed and the guards grew drowsy at their posts, the Lich King descended like a phantom. A breathless whisper in the dark. A door ajar in the dead of night. Always unseen. Always quiet. And always, always feeding.

  He left no blood. No wounds. Only slack-jawed corpses, their faces stretched in ghastly delight, eyes white and lips curled in unnatural peace—as if whatever they’d seen at the end was something divine.

  Only Chronos Chessire and High Cleric Zentich dared approach him between dusk and dawn. Xavert, for all his silver tongue and magical prowess, stayed near the rear of the line, cloaked in silence and suspicion. He did not speak to Malekith. Few did.

  But on the fifth morning, as the sun bled behind a wall of smoke-colored clouds, their destination revealed itself.

  It came not as a landmark nor a fortress, but as a void.

  They crested the rise of a narrow hill to find the land ahead shorn of color, as though some great painter had taken a blade to the canvas of the world. Gone were the trees. Gone were the birds. Even the wind refused to blow too much. The Endless Plains stretched out in every direction—flat, lifeless, and quiet as a sealed tomb. The grass was gray and dry as desiccated bone. The soil was black. Not the black of rich earth, but of rot—old blood turned to dust.

  Malekith stepped from the wagon without a word. His long robes whispered against the ground, threaded with runes that shimmered faintly in the dusk. He stood still for a moment, skeletal hands folded behind his back, hood drawn low, unmoving beneath the shadow of his twisted crown.

  Chronos dismounted first, gauntleted boots crunching the brittle grass. Zentich followed in silence, his dirtied white robes trailing on the earth behind him. Last came Xavert, still clad in the silver-and-shadow leathers of his trade, his gloved hand never far from the hilt of the thin blade at his hip.

  “What is this place?” Xavert asked, voice hushed as if the very air demanded reverence. “There is… nothing here.”

  “There is everything here,” Malekith replied.

  Then he stepped out further.

  Not toward a ruin or monument, but into the center of a shallow depression in the plain—nothing more than a circle of half-buried stones, ancient and unremarkable at a glance. But as he stepped into its heart, the very air changed.

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  A sharpness came to it. Not cold, not heat, but something wrong. The way the world felt just before a thunderclap. Static. Heavy. Expectant.

  Malekith raised his arms, and the wind died completely.

  Then he began to speak.

  But it was not speech. It was summoning. Tongues not heard in ten thousand years spilled from his mouth like black water. Words born in the bellies of gods who had long since been forgotten. Each syllable bent the air, made the earth groan, and forced the bones beneath the ground to remember.

  The sky darkened though no cloud passed.

  The sun vanished as if ashamed.

  Then the earth responded.

  First came the sound—a sharp metallic rasp as the tips of long-buried weapons kissed the surface of the world. Then movement—hands clawing upward, splitting the dry earth, fingernails torn and bones cracked as the dead fought their way free.

  One by one. Ten by ten. Then hundreds.

  Some were soldiers, their armor fused to their flesh by rust and time. Others wore the faded tatters of nobles still clutching the cracked remnants of their crowns. Blackened skin clung to brittle bone. Helmets caved in by ancient blows still covered half-shattered skulls. Empty sockets locked upon their master.

  And still they rose.

  A host of the forgotten. A tide of the damned. Rank upon rank, shoulder to shoulder, row upon row. Thousands.

  Chronos muttered a prayer. Zentich only smiled, lips twitching beneath the folds of his mask. Xavert said nothing at all.

  Then the ground itself convulsed.

  It began with a tremor. A soft shudder beneath their feet. Then came the sound—deep and low, a groan like the continent itself was giving birth. A mound of earth in the far distance collapsed, spilling outward like a lung exhaling its final breath. From it clawed something so massive that even the dead recoiled.

  A giant.

  A titan of war, half flesh, half ruin.

  He rose slowly, as if awakening from a dream that had lasted centuries. Skin sloughed from his arms in patches, revealing veined muscle as thick as tree trunks. His chest bore the scars of a thousand battles—stab wounds, burn marks, lash cuts. One arm ended in a gauntlet fused to the bone itself. Across his back was slung a colossal double-headed axe, each blade etched with glowing runes that pulsed with the heartbeat of the abyss.

  His face was a mask of ancient savagery—both eyes burning red. His jaw had been broken and healed wrong, giving his mouth a permanent snarl. As he emerged fully, the plains around him seemed to bend, as if struggling to contain the sheer weight of him.

  Then he knelt.

  Before Malekith.

  One knee sank deep into the earth. The wind returned just to howl around them. His voice came low and slow, like thunder beneath stone.

  “My master.”

  Malekith regarded him without expression. “Rise, Asterok,” he said, and the words echoed far too long. “Slayer of kings. Breaker of thrones. War-God of the Howling North. Rise, my general.”

  And so Asterok rose.

  He towered above them all, a god-made-flesh—or something worse. He turned to face the army of the dead now arrayed before him and let out a sound that was neither word nor roar. It was war. Pure and primal. A sound that carried across the Endless Plains and beyond, into the bones of the living.

  He raised his axe and bellowed, “War!!!”

  The dead answered in one voice—an inhuman, cacophonous scream. It was not joy. It was not pain. It was hunger. A hunger old as the world, for vengeance, for fire, for conquest. The very stars above seemed to dim in answer.

  At the ridge, Chronos swallowed hard. Xavert took a step back. Zentich dropped to one knee and whispered a psalm of his church.

  Malekith turned his back on them all and walked calmly toward the waiting wagons, his robes fluttering, crown gleaming faintly with a light that was not light.

  “Ready the march,” he said without turning. “There are kings yet unbroken. Thrones yet unburnt. And gods… yet unpunished.”

  Behind him, Asterok towered.

  The ground cracked.

  The sky trembled.

  And the world, would once again, remember fear.