The transformation was not what Eirik expected.

  He had braced for pain—for the sensation of bones breaking and reforming, of flesh tearing and knitting into new configurations. The stories always described it that way.

  Instead, there was only expansion.

  The platform beneath his feet shrank to insignificance, then vanished entirely as his new form lifted into the air. The wind that had chilled his skin became something he moved through, parted with wings that he felt as naturally as he had felt his own arms mere moments before.

  The bowl fell from hands that no longer existed.

  He was vast.

  That was his first coherent thought from the exhilaration of flight. His body stretched across the sky as the tower he had climbed was now a needle of stone far below.

  He opened his jaws and frost spilled out, unbidden.

  This, he thought, this is what gods feel like.

  The thought should have frightened him. Instead, he laughed—and the sound that emerged as a roar, shaking snow from rooftops below.

  The horn was sounding now.

  Three ascending notes, again and again, carrying across the predawn stillness. He could feel the city waking beneath him, the terror as they looked up and saw not the black dragon of their legends but something pale and terrible and new.

  Let them all have a good look.

  The wind parted at the leading edge of his wings and closing again behind in a wake of frost crystals that fell upon the city below. Eirik banked left, and the motion was too fast—his right wing dipped sharply and he dropped forty feet before correcting.

  He was not used to this body.

  His hind legs hung beneath him at an angle that felt wrong, though he could not say what the right angle was. When he tried to climb, his wings beat too hard on the left side and sent him listing to the right. When he tried to level out, he overcompensated and pitched forward until his snout was aimed at the ground and the city rushed up at him with terrible speed.

  He pulled back. The motion was violent, graceless.

  But he was flying.

  He was flying, and below him the world was small.

  The Sunless City passed beneath his shadow. The triple walls that had seemed overwhelming from the ground were lines he could have stepped across in a single stride. Beyond it, the open plain stretched north and east and west, white with snow, and upon that snow—

  The Khorath.

  They covered the earth. Tens of thousands of men that turned into the snow-covered plains into brown and grey and black—hide tents, horse lines, cooking fires, supply wagons, latrine trenches, and men.

  And everyone was waking.

  He circled once, banking wide over the eastern edge of the camp, and felt a faint tremor in his chest. It lasted less than half a second, and then it was gone.

  That was his warning.

  He did not know how long the transformation would last. The blood he had consumed was a single bowl—whatever the General's normal dosage was, Eirik suspected it was more. Every minute he spent circling and admiring the destruction was a minute wasted.

  He could see it happening in real time. Men emerged from tents, looked up, and froze. One by one, then in clusters, then in waves, faces turned skyward. Small groups of riders mounted and rode hard toward the main camp, then signal fires ignited along a chain that ran from the perimeter to the central pavilions.

  They were fast.

  Eirik turned his head—an action that involved rotating a neck as long as a ship's mast—and looked directly down at the camp's northern edge. A cluster of riders had assembled there, perhaps five hundred of them, and they were nocking arrows. Heavy war bows, the recurved kind that nomadic cavalry favored.

  They loosed.

  Hundreds of arrows rose toward him in a dark cluster. The arrows reached the peak of their arc and fell back. Not one came within a hundred feet of his belly.

  A second volley. Same result.

  Eirik opened his jaws.

  He exhaled.

  The breath emerged as a torrent of white vapor. Where it touched, ice formed instantly—a sheet of solid frost that spread outward from the point of impact in all directions. The five hundred riders and their horses disappeared beneath it.

  The twitch came again.

  It lasted longer this time—a full second, perhaps two—and Eirik felt his left wing lock mid-stroke. He dropped fifty feet before the wing resumed its rhythm, and the jolt of resumed flight sent a sharp pain through the joint where wing met shoulder.

  He understood now.

  The breath was not free. Each exhalation of frost drew from the same well that sustained the transformation itself.

  He needed to be precise.

  The timber lines lay to the northeast, exactly where the captured officer had described them. Eirik turned his body—the motion still clumsy, his tail swinging wide and throwing off his center of gravity—and beat his wings hard to gain altitude.

  The higher he flew, the more ground he could cover with each pass. Simple geometry.

  The officer had given him distances, landmarks, the position of the waystation relative to the main camp. He had spent hours studying those details, and all of that preparation was about to pay for itself.

  The main camp fell behind him. Ahead, the terrain changed—the flat plain giving way to low ridges that ran roughly north-south, channeling the wind into corridors of blowing snow.

  Between two of these ridges, a supply road.

  He followed it.

  Three miles northeast of the main camp, the first supply depot appeared below.

  Eirik descended.

  He did not breathe on the waystation itself. Instead, he circled it at a height of perhaps three hundred feet, releasing a continuous, thin spray of frost vapor that drifted down over everything below. The ice settled on the timber stacks, on the roofs of the waystation buildings, on the horse corral, on the packed earth of the supply yard, on the wagons that sat loaded and ready for the next run south.

  The guards scrambled. Arrows rose toward him, but at three hundred feet, none found their mark. The shafts clattered off the ice that had formed on the ground around the waystation, adding to the general confusion.

  Eirik felt the twitch in his chest again.

  He turned north.

  The third timber camp lay twelve miles beyond the waystation, according to the officer's account. What he needed was to cover as much ground as possible between here and there—the supply road, the staging areas, the small camps of woodcutters and prisoners that dotted the route.

  He climbed.

  At five hundred feet, the world below was a white sheet scored with dark lines. He spread his wings wide and let the wind carry him north, breathing in short, controlled bursts that sent thin curtains of ice vapor drifting down over everything beneath his path.

  The ice fell like rain that froze before it landed. It coated tents. It coated wagons. It coated the supply road itself, filling the wheel ruts with a thin glaze that caught the growing dawn light. It coated the hide covers of the smaller camps, the woodpiles stacked beside them, the horse blankets hung on lines between posts.

  Below, the Khorath watched him pass and did not understand.

  The great white dragon was flying north, away from their main army, and doing nothing more threatening than leaving a light frost in its wake.

  He had covered perhaps eight miles of supply road. Below and behind him, a continuous trail of ice stretched from the main camp's northern edge to the farthest woodcutting station he could reach. Every depot, every waystation, every camp and staging area along that route now wore a thin skin of frozen water.

  Eirik turned south when he was done.

  The supply road lay behind him now. Ahead, the main camp spread across the plain in its vast sprawl. He could see the movement from five hundred feet.

  Not five hundred this time. Not a thousand. The formations stretched back into the camp's interior, regiment after regiment pulling together.

  Twenty thousand. Perhaps more.

  Eirik watched them assemble and felt nothing so much as professional respect.

  They had been waiting for this.

  Of course they had. The Khorath had besieged a city defended by a dragon for years. They would have planned for exactly this scenario.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  The main column rode directly beneath him, matching his heading.

  Eirik beat his wings and climbed another hundred feet.

  The twitch came again. His left wing locked for a full heartbeat and his altitude dropped sharply before he recovered.

  He was burning through the transformation faster than he had anticipated.

  Below, the riders spread wider. They were not pursuing in a single mass but fanning out in a crescent that grew broader with each passing minute.

  And then he saw the dozens of wagons.

  They were heavy, drawn by teams of four horses each, and they moved in clusters of three and four among the cavalry columns. The wagons carried platforms of thick timber, and on those platforms stood mounted crossbows of enormous size.

  The first volley came without warning.

  Three bolts rose from the engines on his left flank. Eirik banked right and the shafts passed through the air where his body had been a half-second before.

  A second volley from the right. Four bolts this time, aimed at the space ahead and above his flight path. He ducked again. Left volley. Right volley. Every eight to ten seconds, a fresh set of bolts rose from one flank or the other.

  Eirik understood it now.

  They bolts served another purpose besides hitting him directly: eliminate his path to safety.

  The bolts were aimed at his flanks but also higher, creating a triangle of sorts with Eirik being caged under the apex. If he climbed, he flew into the bolts. If he held altitude, the next volley would be aimed lower, and the one after that lower still.

  The only direction that remained open was below.

  He couldn't fight through it. The frost breath, already weakening with each use, would kill hundreds at most before the transformation ended and left him stranded on the ground.

  But if he could coat them. All of them. Every surface, every rider, every weapon. If he could spread his ice far enough before the body gave out...

  The thought invigorated him.

  He dropped.

  The riders beneath him had been waiting. Ten thousand bows rose as one and the sky darkened.

  Most of the arrows had exhausted their momentum by the time they reached him. They struck his scales with the force of thrown pebbles, bouncing off the white armor and tumbling back toward the earth. It did not hurt yet.

  But they were doing it again.

  Another salvo of siege bolts from the left, lower this time, passing perhaps fifty feet above his back. Another from the right, lower still. And from below, another wave of arrows, thicker than the last because the riders had compressed the formation to increase the density of fire.

  The band of safe air contracted. Three hundred feet became two hundred. Two hundred became one fifty.

  The riders below had thinned their formation in one section, creating a gap that funneled him southwest.

  He did not follow the path.

  Instead, he turned hard to the east, directly into the densest part of the cavalry formation, and he opened his jaws.

  The breath came out ragged.

  The tremor in his chest seized him as the frost vapor poured from his throat, and his left wing locked completely for three full seconds. He fell. The ground rushed up and the riders below scattered as his shadow descended over them, and for one horrible moment he thought the transformation would end right there.

  His wing unlocked.

  He beat it once, hard, and the jolt of resumed flight sent agony through the joint. He roared, and the sound that came out was no longer the thunderous bellow.

  But the breath had done its work.

  The thin curtain of frost vapor drifted down over the eastern cavalry formation, settling on horses and riders and the engines they escorted. It covered armor and hide and the taut cables of the siege engine windlasses. It coated the iron-tipped bolts stacked in their racks and the leather gloves of the men who loaded them. It fell on the packed snow beneath the horses' hooves and on the manes of the horses themselves and on the upturned faces of men who watched the white dragon falter and thought they were winning.

  For a moment, the riders froze.

  Every man who felt that frost settle on his face or hands braced for the killing cold—that which had buried five hundred of their brothers in a single heartbeat.

  Nothing happened.

  A roar went up from the eastern formation. Then another. Then hundreds. The dragon's weapon was broken. Its breath was nothing but cold air and vapor.

  Meanwhile, Eirik climbed. Every foot of altitude cost him. The tremor had spread from his left side to his chest and was working its way down his spine.

  He leveled out at two hundred feet and turned south.

  Horns sounded along the formation and the riders wheeled to match his new heading. The siege engines rumbled forward on their heavy wagons, their crews already cranking the windlasses for the next volley.

  They were invigorated now.

  He could see it in the way they rode. The hesitation that had marked the first minutes of the pursuit was gone. The white dragon that had seemed invincible over the city walls was laboring.

  This creature could be killed.

  That understanding rippled through the Khorath formation in a way that required no horns or messengers. Riders spurred their horses forward, closing ranks, the formation compressing from a wide encirclement into a dense mass that surged toward the faltering creature above.

  Bolts from the left. Bolts from the right. Bolts from directly ahead, fired by engines that had raced forward to cut off his flight path. Arrows rising in sheets from below, so thick and so numerous that the dawn light dimmed as they passed between him and the ground.

  A bolt struck his right wing.

  The impact was nothing compared to the arrows. The iron-tipped shaft punched through the membrane and lodged in the structural ridge of ice that formed the wing's leading edge. Pain, real pain, flooded the joint. The wing buckled. Eirik dropped forty feet before he could compensate with his left wing, and the asymmetry sent him into a spiraling descent that he barely pulled out of a hundred feet above the ground.

  An arrow struck his underbelly. Then another. At this height they carried their full force, and while his scales held, each impact was a sharp, distinct hurt that announced itself and did not fade.

  He beat his wings and climbed. His right wing dragged where the bolt had lodged. His left wing trembled with the tremor that had now become continuous.

  Two hundred feet. The bolts resumed their crossing pattern above him. He dropped to one fifty. The arrows thickened below.

  He kept breathing.

  That was the only thought in his mind now. Spread the ice. Spread. Spread. Every wingbeat, his jaws hung open and the thin vapor poured out.

  A continuous, gossamer curtain of frost that fell behind him and around him and beneath him, settling on everything it touched.

  The Khorath rode through it without concern.

  He turned west and spread more. The crescent tightened. A bolt struck his tail and the impact threw his hindquarters sideways. He corrected, spread more. Arrows peppered his belly in a continuous rattle. He spread more.

  He turned east. The formation adjusted. The siege engines tracked him. Three bolts rose from a cluster of wagons directly ahead and he rolled to avoid them, and the motion tore something in his right wing that made the world go white for a fraction of a second. When his vision cleared, he was at eighty feet, and the riders below were so close that he could hear the individual sounds of their horses' hooves striking frozen ground.

  He spread more.

  His consciousness was fraying. His wings beat in a rhythm that his mind could no longer control, the movements becoming autonomous as his higher functions retreated to a single, fixed point of intent.

  More vapor. More ice. More, more, more.

  The supply road behind him. The main camp. The eastern formation. The western flanks. The siege engine positions. The reserve cavalry that had not yet committed. The command tents at the camp's center. The horse lines. The provisions wagons. The tents where men slept and the ground where men rode and the air through which men fired their weapons. All of it, everything, every surface and every body and every piece of equipment within a radius that encompassed the entire Khorath army and every mile of supply line he had traced in his first pass—all of it now wore a skin of ice so thin it was invisible.

  He had nothing left.

  His wings would not carry him another minute. The tremor had become a seizure that locked his entire left side rigid. His right wing trailed the bolt like a broken flag. His altitude had fallen to fifty feet, and the ground was close, very close, and the arrows were punching through his scales now.

  He felt his borrowed body unraveling as the blood that sustained it burned away. His tail was already translucent as his hind legs had lost sensation entirely.

  Enough.

  He activated the ability.

  [ICE GENESIS ACTIVATED]

  [DURATION: 60 SECONDS]

  [REDEFINE ICE CONSTRUCT PROPERTIES?]

  He activated it.

  The instruction he gave was simple: burn.

  Below him, the world caught fire.

  It began at the supply road.

  The thin glaze of ice that coated the timber stacks, the wagon beds, the depot buildings, the waystation roofs, the woodcutting camps, and every inch of packed earth along twelve miles of road—all of it ignited simultaneously.

  The timber stacks went up in columns of flame that rose two hundred feet into the air.

  Then the riders.

  The ice on their armor ignited first. Twenty thousand men felt their breastplates and helms and arm-guards turn hot, then searing, then molten against their skin. The ice on their horses' manes and flanks caught a heartbeat later, and the animals screamed—a sound that Eirik heard from fifty feet above. The ice on the saddles, on the reins, on the bow-grips and bowstrings and the fletching of every arrow in every quiver on every rider's back—all of it, every last frozen particle, burned.

  The siege engines died in their cradles. The ice that coated their cables and windlasses and iron-tipped bolts transformed, and the devices came apart in eruptions of burning debris that scythed through the crews who operated them. The heavy wagons that carried them caught from the inside out, their timber platforms consumed in seconds. Horses bolted, dragging flaming wreckage behind them, and where they ran they spread the fire further, because the ice was on the ground too, and the ground itself was burning now, a sheet of white flame that covered the plain from the supply road to the camp's southern edge.

  Eirik hung above the inferno on wings that were barely there.

  His body was translucent now. He could see the ground through his own chest. His right wing had dissolved entirely below the second joint, and he maintained altitude through nothing more than the left wing's failing strength and whatever residual magic kept his form from collapsing completely.

  Below him, the Khorath army burned.

  Not all of them. He could see that clearly. The outermost edges of the formation had received less vapor. Men there were throwing off burning armor and rolling in the snow. Horses were being calmed. Officers were shouting orders that no one could hear above the roar of a fire that covered thirty square miles.

  But the core was gone.

  The supply lines, the siege engines, the command structure, the provisions, the timber that fifty thousand men needed to survive a northern winter—all of it was ash, or burning.

  Ten seconds remained on Ice Genesis.

  Eirik felt the timer counting down in a place that existed between his mind and whatever this body was. The construct properties would revert when the duration expired. Ice would become ice again. But the damage was done. What had burned had already burned. What had been consumed could not be unconsumed.

  Five seconds.

  His left wing failed.

  He fell.

  The ground came up fast.His body, what remained of it, tumbled through the air in a graceless spiral that shed chunks of dissolving ice as it went. He drew the last remainder of his strength to slow his descent.

  Two seconds.

  He hit the ground.

  The transformation ended in the instant before contact, collapsing inward with a sound that was felt rather than heard, and what hit the snow was a man.

  Eirik lay on his back in a crater of his own making.

  Above him, the sky was the color of a furnace. White fire consumed the northern horizon. The heat reached him even here, hundreds of yards from the nearest flames, warming his face and the bare skin of his arms where his clothing had torn during the transformation.

  [ICE GENESIS DURATION EXPIRED]

  [TRANSFORMATION ENDED]

  [MANA: 0/200]

  [WARNING: CRITICAL MANA DEPLETION]

  [WARNING: MULTIPLE INJURIES DETECTED]

  He could not move.

  His body lay in the snow and the snow was melting around him from the heat.

  The fire roared.

  He stared up at the sky and watched the smoke climb.

  The sound of hooves came first. Eirik turned his head, his neck refusing to cooperate fully. Through the heat shimmer and drifting smoke, a Khorath horseman emerged. The man's armor was scorched black on one side, his mount foam-flecked and wild-eyed, but he was meant for one thing only.

  Eirik's life.

  Their eyes met across thirty yards of snow-turned-slush. The horseman's hand went to the curved sword at his hip and spurred his horse forward.

  Then the rider's chest exploded.

  The crossbow bolt punched through from behind and the man toppled sideways from his saddle without a sound. His horse bolted. The sword clattered harmlessly onto the snow beside Eirik's head.

  More hooves.

  The men came wore the sigil of the Black Dragon, and carried compound bows that they fired while moving. The lead rider leaned from his saddle and snatched Eirik by the arm.

  Pain.

  When it cleared, he was being dragged across the snow. The rider had him by the collar of his torn shirt and was pulling him toward the horse.

  "Get him up!"

  Hands grabbed him from both sides. Two more riders had dismounted. They lifted him—one at the shoulders, one at the knees—and the world tilted.

  He was thrown over a saddle. His ribs hit leather and he couldn't breathe.

  The horse moved.

  Behind them, the covering fire intensified. Eirik twisted his head that took all his remaining strength.

  And he saw it.

  Between the walls and the burning camp, the Black Guard had deployed.

  They stood in concentric rings. The outer ring was heavy infantry—shield-bearers in full plate. Behind the infantry, the second ring was archers. They stood on raised wooden platforms—mobile scaffolding that Eirik recognized as siege equipment repurposed for field deployment. The innermost ring held the artillery. Ballistae and scorpions, mounted on wheeled carriages, each one crewed by four men.

  At the center of it all, a wheelchair.