They say one should never meet one's heroes.

  Koleen Andor had heard the phrase repeated countless times throughout his life. The reasoning was straightforward: heroes, by their very nature, existed on pedestals. They were figures of legend, their accomplishments magnified by distance and time until they became something more than human. And humans, unfortunately, had a tendency to disappoint when examined up close.

  Koleen had believed this. He'd considered it logical, even wise. After all, he'd been disappointed before. Repeatedly, in fact.

  Aldric Eryndor had been one such disappointment. A colleague he'd respected for years, revealed to have brought Corruption back into the world. The shock of it still sat uncomfortably in Koleen's chest, a weight he hadn't quite processed.

  Before that, there had been others. Mentors who turned out to be petty. Colleagues who prioritized politics over scholarship. Students he'd believed in who had squandered their potential for easier paths.

  The pattern was consistent enough that Koleen had developed a certain cynicism. Not bitterness, exactly—he was too pragmatic for that—but a measured skepticism. An understanding that people, no matter how talented or accomplished, were still just people.

  And then there was Sael the Great.

  Koleen hadn't been sure what to expect. The man was a legend, yes, but legends were notoriously unreliable. The father of modern magic. The Archmage who had survived the Age of Ash. The architect of the academy system itself, alongside Bran the Brave.

  Just having the man standing in front of him had been surreal. Koleen had questions, so many questions he felt too insignificant to ask. How did you survive when everyone else died? How strong are you, truly? What was it like, watching the world burn and knowing you were one of the few who could stop it?

  The first few minutes, before meeting Sael in person, Koleen had been skeptical. Oh, he'd believed the reports, the evidence, the sheer weight of testimony. But believing intellectually and accepting emotionally were different things.

  But If there had been any doubt left in his heart, it had dissipated now.

  Because right now, Koleen was standing in Hel.

  And he wasn't cold.

  The wind howled. It wasn't the sort of wind that rustled leaves or carried the scent of rain. This one could strip flesh from bone if given enough time. It tore across the landscape in violent gusts, carrying ice crystals that glittered like broken glass in the pale, perpetual twilight.

  The ground beneath Koleen's feet was not snow; snow implied something soft, something that might melt under warmth. No, this was permafrost, hard as stone, stretching in every direction as far as he could see. The terrain rolled in gentle, deceptive curves, each hill and valley identical to the last, creating a disorienting sameness that made navigation without landmarks nearly impossible.

  The sky was wrong. It hung low and oppressive, a bruised purple-grey that never brightened, never darkened. No sun. No stars. Just that unchanging twilight that made it impossible to tell if minutes or hours had passed.

  In the distance, jagged formations of ice jutted from the ground like broken teeth. Some were taller than buildings, others smaller but no less sharp. The wind carved them into strange, almost organic shapes—twisting spires and hollow arches that moaned when the air rushed through them.

  There were no plants. No trees, no grass, no signs of life at all. Just endless frost, ice, and wind.

  Koleen looked down at himself.

  He was wearing his usual robes. The same comfortable, well-worn fabric he'd put on this morning in his warm office at the academy. The robes that should have been utterly inadequate in a place where the temperature could kill an unprotected person in minutes.

  He felt warm, as if he were standing in front of a fireplace with a cup of tea in hand.

  He lifted one hand, watching the way the wind tore at his sleeves without effect. The fabric rippled, but he felt nothing. No bite of cold. No sting of ice crystals. Nothing.

  The protective spells Sael had layered on him were holding perfectly.

  Koleen flexed his fingers experimentally, then reached down and touched the frozen ground. His hand made contact with the permafrost—he could feel the texture, the hardness of it—but no cold seeped through.

  "Extraordinary," he murmured.

  "The protections are holding well, then?" Sael's voice cut through the screaming wind, raised to be heard over the constant roar.

  Koleen looked up. Sael stood a few feet away, perfectly at ease in the hostile environment. His posture was relaxed, his expression calm. He might as well have been standing in a meadow.

  Behind Sael, Duke Richter was examining the landscape with the same attention. The faint shimmer of protective magic surrounded him as well, barely visible but undeniably present.

  "More than well," Koleen called back, raising his own voice. He gestured at the howling wasteland around them. "I can't feel any of this. The cold, the wind—it's as if it doesn't exist."

  "Good." Sael nodded. "That's the intent."

  Koleen looked around again, taking in the barren expanse with new appreciation. This was Hel. The continent that had broken countless expeditions, and had claimed the lives of adventurers and mages who thought themselves prepared.

  And he was standing in it, in his regular robes, feeling like he was having a pleasant afternoon stroll.

  The sheer power required to make that possible...

  "How far does this protection extend?" Koleen asked, his voice competing with the wind's shriek. "If I were to, say, stick my hand directly into one of those ice formations, would it still hold?"

  "Yes," Sael said simply, shouting to be heard. "The [Perpetual Shield] would prevent direct contact. You'd feel resistance before your hand made contact with the ice itself. And even if the shield were somehow breached, the [Frost Resistance] would prevent damage."

  Koleen processed that. "And if something attacked me? Physically?"

  "The shield would absorb the impact up to a considerable threshold. Anything that could break through would need to be..." Sael paused, considering. "Quite strong. Level 900 at minimum, assuming a direct, sustained assault."

  "I see."

  Richter had walked closer during this exchange. "I've been attempting to gauge the temperature," he called out over the wind. His breath misted slightly in the air—one of the few visible signs of the cold. "Based on the ice formations and atmospheric conditions, I would estimate we're experiencing temperatures well below freezing. Perhaps negative sixty degrees, possibly colder."

  "Colder," Sael confirmed, his voice steady despite having to project it. "Closer to negative eighty in this region."

  Koleen felt his eyebrows rise. "Your mother taught you these spells?" He asked, nearly shouting. He hadn't meant to do it, but his mouth just went at it.

  "Yes." Sael's replied, raising his voice. "She traveled through Hel frequently. These protections kept her alive."

  There was a story there, Koleen thought. Several stories, probably. But this didn't seem like the time to pry.

  The wind screamed across the frozen plain, and one of the distant ice formations moaned in response. The sound was eerie, almost musical in a discordant way.

  "Where exactly are we?" Richter asked, scanning the horizon and shouting to be heard. "In relation to the portal?"

  Sael turned, pointing back the way they'd come. Koleen followed his gesture and saw it: a faint shimmer in the air, barely visible against the twilight. The portal, still active but dormant, waiting to carry them back to Aldric's office.

  "We're approximately fifty meters from the portal's exit point," Sael called out. "I wanted to give us some distance in case the area immediately around it had been disturbed or trapped."

  Practical, Koleen thought. Even in a place like this, Sael was thinking tactically.

  "And the Cerberus?" Koleen asked, raising his voice over the howling wind. "How far?"

  "I'm not certain." Sael's eyes swept across the landscape. "When I freed it, the creature fled through the portal almost immediately. I didn't track where it went afterward. But I have remnants from the chains it was bound with, I collected a section before I left. Those should be enough to establish a tracking connection."

  Koleen watched as Sael reached into his robes and pulled out what looked like a small piece of metal chain. Even at a distance, Koleen could see the faint magical residue clinging to it, the lingering traces of binding enchantments. But there was something else too: dark fur, matted and stuck to the metal links.

  The fur of a creature that had been chained long enough for its own body to become part of the restraints.

  Koleen felt something cold settle in his stomach.

  "May I see that?" he asked, projecting his voice.

  Sael handed it over without hesitation.

  The metal was cold in Koleen's palm, though whether that was its actual temperature or just the residual magic, he couldn't tell. He turned it over, examining the runes etched into its surface.

  The fur clung to the links in clumps. Black, coarse, with an oily quality that suggested the creature had been unable to properly groom itself. Koleen had seen enough evidence of prolonged captivity to recognize the signs.

  "These are..." Koleen frowned, forcing himself to focus on the enchantments rather than what they represented. He raised his voice to be heard. "These are quite advanced. Whoever created them had significant knowledge of binding magic."

  "Aldric," Sael said flatly, his voice cutting through the wind.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Koleen handed the chain fragment back to Sael, careful not to look too closely at the matted fur. "What do you need to do to track the Cerberus?" he called out.

  "The fur should make it easier," Sael said, turning the fragment in his hand and raising his voice. "With direct biological material, I can use it to locate the creature precisely."

  His hand closed around the fragment, and Koleen felt a pulse of magic emanate from him a few seconds before the fragment began to glow.

  Faint at first, then brighter, until it was shining with a soft blue light that reflected off the ice around them. The fur seemed to shimmer with its own light, responding to the tracking magic Sael was casting.

  Sael's eyes remained unfocused for several seconds. Then he blinked, and the light faded.

  "Got it," he said.

  "The creature's location?" Richter asked, shouting over the wind.

  "Yes." Sael turned, pointing to the northeast. "About three kilometers that direction. It's..." He paused. "Moving. Slowly, but moving."

  Koleen looked in the direction Sael had indicated. The landscape was identical to every other direction, endless frost and ice formations. No landmarks, no distinguishing features.

  "Three kilometers," Koleen called out. "We can fly there. It would only take a few minutes."

  "I don't fly," Richter said, his voice barely audible over the howling wind despite being raised.

  Koleen glanced at him. "Ah. Well, I can carry you, your Grace. If you're comfortable with that."

  Richter's expression suggested he was not, in fact, comfortable with that, but he nodded anyway. "If it's the fastest way."

  "It is," Sael confirmed. He was already rising slightly off the ground, his robes barely moving despite the magical forces at work. "Though we should approach with caution. A frightened, injured creature is unpredictable. Even more so when it's a Cerberus."

  Koleen moved closer to Richter and extended his hand. "I'll need to maintain physical contact," he shouted over the wind. "The easiest method is if I hold you—"

  "Just do it," Richter interrupted, though his discomfort was evident.

  Koleen wrapped an arm around Richter's torso, establishing the magical connection necessary to extend his flight enchantment to another person. It was a simple enough spell, one he'd used countless times before, but never in conditions quite like these.

  He rose into the air, Richter held securely against his side. The Duke was tense, his entire body rigid.

  Koleen almost laughed.

  He remembered a boy—small, determined, stubborn beyond reason—sneaking into the academy's libraries. Not even the public ones where visitors were welcome, but the restricted sections meant only for enrolled students. The boy would slip past the wards with a persistence that bordered on impressive, stealing books on magical theory he couldn't possibly understand, reading treatises on spellwork he would never be able to perform.

  Koleen had caught him more times than he cared to remember and had pulled the boy's ears in exasperation, then escorted him out while the child clutched his pilfered books like treasures, and listened to passionate arguments about why the lack of magical ability shouldn't prevent someone from learning magical theory.

  And now that same boy—now a man, a Duke—was being carried through the air above a frozen hellscape, rigid with discomfort at something as simple as flight.

  Some things, apparently, never changed.

  "Try to relax," Koleen suggested, fighting back the smile that threatened to break through. "Tensing up only makes it worse."

  "I'm fine," Richter said through gritted teeth.

  Sael was already moving and Koleen followed, adjusting his speed to match. The frozen landscape passed beneath them, unchanging and hostile. Three kilometers would take mere minutes at this pace.

  The Archmage moved with an ease that suggested flight was as natural as walking. There was no visible effort, nor strain in his posture. It was a smooth, steady progress through the screaming wind.

  Koleen had imagined him smaller, he realized.

  It was a strange thing to admit to himself, but there it was. In his mind's eye, the legendary Sael had always been... more compact. Closer to Koleen's own height, perhaps. Not towering, but not... well.

  Sael was tall. Quite tall, actually. Broad-shouldered in a way that suggested physical training beyond what most mages bothered with.

  Koleen wondered if he'd imagined Sael smaller to make himself feel better about his own stature. Part dwarf, as he was, he'd never quite reached the heights of his fully human colleagues. It had bothered him when he was younger. Less so now, but still.

  Imagining your heroes as more relatable—physically, at least—was a form of comfort, wasn't it?

  He watched Sael navigate the frozen wasteland below with what appeared to be casual indifference to their surroundings.

  Strange man, Koleen thought. Very strange.

  His behavior was unpredictable. One moment he was confident and matter-of-fact, almost bureaucratic in his explanations. The next, he would just say hmm to everything you'd say, as if bored by it all and the all confidence he had earlier had been no more than a fever dream.

  And his demeanor; calm to the point of being unsettling. Koleen couldn't quite pin down whether Sael was simply that certain in his abilities, or if there was something else at play. Some fundamental difference in how the man processed danger.

  Perhaps when you were that powerful, a frozen hellscape really wasn't—

  "Here!" Sael's voice cut through the wind.

  Koleen blinked, his thoughts scattering. He looked around and felt his breath catch.

  The landscape had changed.

  They were no longer flying over flat permafrost. The terrain below had shifted into something that reminded Koleen viscerally of the few desert illustrations he'd seen in geography texts. Rolling dunes stretched in every direction, their curves graceful and wind-carved.

  Except the sand wasn't sand.

  It was snow. Loose, powdery snow that drifted and shifted with the wind, forming patterns that were eerily beautiful and deeply wrong at the same time. The dunes rose and fell like waves frozen mid-motion, some towering hundreds of feet high.

  The twilight sky cast everything in that same bruised purple-grey, making the white snow look almost luminescent by contrast.

  It was easy to visualize how one might get lost here. How the endless sameness of white curves could disorient even the most experienced navigator. Just look at how the wind could erase tracks in seconds, leaving no trace of passage...

  "There!" Sael shouted, pointing.

  Koleen squinted, following the direction of Sael's gesture. At first, he saw nothing but more snow dunes. Then movement caught his eye, something dark against the white.

  He cast a quick spell, enhancing his vision. The world snapped into sharper focus.

  A three-headed dog.

  It was massive. Black fur matted with ice and something darker: blood, Koleen realized. The creature was running, bounding across the snow dunes with desperate speed.

  Three heads, each one snarling or panting. Six eyes visible even at this distance, wild with panic.

  One of its legs was missing, he realised. The front left leg ended in a bleeding stump, fresh enough that the creature left a dark trail behind it in the snow.

  "Why is it running?" Koleen called out, raising his voice to be heard. "Should we go to it?"

  "Hel's Maggots," Sael said flatly.

  Koleen's heart skipped.

  "Are you sure?" Richter's voice was tight, alarmed in a way Koleen had rarely heard from the Duke. "Should we—"

  "I'll take care of it," Sael said simply.

  Koleen's mind raced.

  Hel's Maggots.

  He'd read about them, of course. Any scholar who studied dangerous creatures knew about Hel's Maggots. They were native to this frozen part of the continent, and they were famous for very specific reasons.

  An adult maggot was generally around level 500.

  That alone was impressive. Terrifying, even. Most adventurers would die facing a single one. A level 500 creature could tear through a veteran party without breaking stride.

  But that wasn't what made Hel's Maggots so feared.

  They hunted in packs.

  Fifty to a hundred of them, all working together with frightening coordination. They ate other giant monsters native to Hel, creatures that would individually pose significant threats. And they did it by swarming.

  Even dragons thought twice before engaging them.

  Because imagine: a hundred level 500 monsters descending on you at once.

  The Cerberus was doomed.

  Even for a Druid, the maggots were violent creatures. Territorial by nature. They wouldn't just attack the Cerberus and leave. If they detected intruders in their hunting ground they would attack anything that moved.

  Koleen watched the snow dunes ahead of them, his enhanced vision scanning for movement.

  There.

  The snow erupted in dozens of places. Huge, segmented bodies burst from beneath the white powder, each one easily thirty feet long and thick as a tree trunk. Pale, almost translucent skin that showed hints of internal structures beneath. No eyes that Koleen could see, but circular mouths ringed with teeth that rotated like grinding mechanisms.

  They moved with horrifying speed, undulating across and through the snow as if it were water.

  Dozens of them. Maybe more; it was hard to count when they kept emerging and submerging.

  They were gaining on the Cerberus.

  The three-headed dog had managed to take refuge on top of a particularly tall snow dune, but it was a temporary respite at best. The creature was exhausted, bleeding, missing a leg. It couldn't run forever.

  "They're here because of the portal," Sael said, his voice carrying clearly despite the wind. "The tremors when it opened, they probably attracted them. They must have been hunting in this region already, and they located the Cerberus."

  The maggots reached the base of the dune. They began climbing, their segmented bodies allowing them to navigate the steep snow slope with ease.

  The Cerberus snarled, all three heads opening their mouths in challenge. But there was nowhere left to run.

  Sael flew forward, closing the distance with sudden speed.

  Koleen tightened his grip on Richter and followed, though he had no idea what he could possibly do against creatures like this.

  Sael stopped perhaps a hundred feet from the dune, hovering in the air. His posture was still relaxed and calm.

  He raised one hand.

  Magic gathered.

  Koleen had felt magical pressure before. He was a mage himself, after all. He'd cast spells, he'd been present when other mages cast theirs. He knew what it felt like when power accumulated.

  But this was different.

  The air itself seemed to compress. A sort of sweet taste flooded Koleen's mouth, so strong he almost gagged. His vision wobbled slightly, like looking through water. A dull ache formed behind his eyes, growing with each passing second.

  The maggots must have felt it too. Several of them stopped climbing, their circular mouths opening and closing in what might have been confusion or alarm.

  A light formed in front of Sael.

  It was enormous, easily twenty feet in diameter. The light was bright enough that Koleen had to squint, raising one hand to shield his eyes. Even through his fingers, the radiance was blinding.

  The pressure kept building.

  His throat felt tight. His chest ached with each breath, as if the air itself had become heavy. Next to him, he heard Richter draw in a sharp breath, then hold it.

  What in heaven's name was Sael casting?

  The light grew brighter. Too bright. Koleen squeezed his eyes shut. Then, through the howling wind and the roar of building magical pressure, he heard it.

  [JUDGMENT].

  A voice that seemed to reverberate through the whole sky itself. The word echoed across the frozen wasteland, carried by the wind, amplified until it felt like it came from everywhere and nowhere at once.

  Koleen's eyes were shut tight, tears almost freezing on his cheeks had it not been for the protection wards the Archmage had cast on him earlier, but he heard that word in his bones.

  He opened his eyes out of curiosity, just to confirm if this had been Sael's voice, only to realize that the world went white.

  Pillars of light descended faster than lightning, slamming down from the empty sky above.

  Dozens of them. Hundreds, maybe. Brilliant columns of pure radiance, each one perhaps ten feet wide, crashing into the landscape below with the force of titanic wrath.

  The impact almost felt like the end of the world. And the maggots, evidently, didn't stand a chance.

  The ones climbing the dune were struck first. The pillars of light hit them dead-on, and they simply ceased to exist. The light kept coming.

  More pillars descended, tracking the maggots that tried to flee. Those that had remained at the base of the dune attempted to burrow, their bodies undulating frantically as they dove into the snow.

  The light found them anyway.

  It punched through the snow like it wasn't there, illuminating the white powder from within for a brief, surreal moment before the heat vaporized everything. Steam erupted from dozens of points across the landscape, hissing and billowing in the frozen air.

  The maggots that had managed to submerge deeper weren't safe either. The pillars pursued them, drilling down through layers of snow and ice, seeking their targets with unerring precision. Koleen watched as one particularly large maggot tried to escape, its pale body visible through the translucent snow for just a moment before a lance of light speared straight through it.

  The creature's circular mouth opened in what must have been a scream. Then it was gone, reduced to ash and scattered fragments.

  The spell lasted perhaps five seconds.

  When it ended, the silence was absolute.

  The landscape had changed. Where there had been rolling snow dunes, there were now dozens of perfectly circular holes, each one glowing faintly with residual heat. The snow around them had melted and refrozen into smooth, glassy surfaces that caught the dim twilight and reflected it in strange, prismatic patterns.

  Bodies lay scattered across the white expanse. Or what remained of bodies. Most of the maggots had been completely obliterated, leaving only charred patches and the occasional segment of pale flesh that had somehow survived at the periphery of the impacts.

  The air smelled of ozone and burnt meat.

  The maggots that had survived—and there couldn't have been more than a handful—were fleeing. Koleen could see disturbed snow in the distance, trails of frantic burrowing heading away from this place as fast as the creatures could move.

  They would not come back.

  Silence fell, broken only by the ever-present wind, the faint crackling of cooling glass and, surprisingly enough, the painful whimpers of three dogs.

  Koleen stared at Sael, who was already going down to the Cerberus.

  They say one should never meet one's heroes. That they would inevitably disappoint you.

  No, Koleen thought. Sometimes, very rarely, your heroes turned out to be exactly what you'd hoped they'd be.

  And somehow, that was even more terrifying.

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