(We're transferring our RP from discord to here so we can continue it.)
The heart of House Frostmarrow breathed in quiet pulses of cold.
The great gate chamber lay sunk beneath the Winter Palace like a chapel buried in a glacier. Necro Ice clung to the walls in layered plates. Each sheet held veins of faint cobalt where the Whispering Vein lines moved under the surface like captive aurora. Above, a soulglass oculus showed the winter moon as a single white eye. Its light came down in a shaft. Clean. Judging. It turned every drifting mote of frost into a slow, falling prayer.
Ixqueya stood in the center of that light.
Her bare feet rested on a disc of black ice that never melted. The disc carried the sigil of House Frostmarrow. A tree of bone. Roots hooked through skulls. Branches blooming with knives of hoarfrost. The sigil encircled her like a frozen halo laid flat. As if the Undying Tree itself had opened an eye in the floor and chosen her as its pupil.
Around the circle, her dead moved.
They did not clank. They did not groan. The loyalists of Frostmarrow were not common corpses. They were winter scripture written in bone and plate and Necro Ice. A ribcage here. A jaw there. Ligaments of woven sinew preserved in salts and prayer. Each servant carried a sliver of her will, lodged in the hollows where marrow had once lived. They drifted between the runic pylons that framed the gate, adjusting glyphs, sliding bone switches, feeding captured souls into crystal fonts.
The gate answered their labor.
At first it was only a bruise in the air. A faint distortion that made the moonbeam smear and bend. Then the bruise deepened. Darkened. Runic pylons flared to life one by one, white fire trapped inside blue ice. The air before Ixqueya thickened into a pane of pale light. Rimed edges. Frost blooming outward like a slow explosion of roses carved from glass.
A tear between worlds held open by faith and engineering.
The Verdant Dynasty waited on the other side. Hot jungle. Spider gods. Wet life that refused to learn the discipline of a proper winter. Tonight her domain would serve as a bridge. Jungle to frost. Frost to desert. A path for the family that Great Grandmother favored. A path for the half sand ape, half Jorgenskull thing that carried their tangled bloodlines.
Ixqueya did not move.
The chill that rolled from the gate slid over her skin in thin sheets. It rose through her like incense lifts through a cathedral. She let it pass. Her spine stayed straight. Shoulders relaxed but set. Neck tall. She wore state regalia rather than armor, yet every line of her frame held the same readiness she took into a hunt.
Her gown fell in cold tiers from a tight collar of Necro Ice links. The collar hugged the long column of her throat and flared over her shoulders like a frostbit halo broken into plates. Below, a bodice of black-blue leather molded to her torso with the ruthless honesty of ice pressed to stone. It left the slope of her arms bare, showing toned muscle sheathed in Marid bronze. A split skirt of layered hoarfrost silk wrapped her hips, slit high on either side to free her stride. Each panel shimmered with stitched sigils of the Undying Tree and the Cold Way, threads of silver and pale jade catching the moonlight as if dew had frozen mid-prayer.
Her hair fell in a dark river down her back. Cobalt streaks glowed faintly where the gate light kissed them. The length was bound in places with bone beads and small chips of Necro Ice, each piece a votive from some past victory. Her face carried the same precision as her bloodline matriarch. High cheekbones carved with the same cruel grace as a glacier’s edge. Full mouth set in a line that looked like it had forgotten how to soften. Nose straight. Strong. Brows groomed into sharp arches that framed eyes of cold blue.
Those eyes watched the gate and nothing else.
Gold flickered behind the blue, faint as embers buried in snow. The color of channeling. The color of a saint about to lift a blade in blessing. She did not need spoken orders to direct her servants. The dead felt the shift of her focus. They adjusted. They obeyed. Silence reigned, broken only by the whisper of ice, the distant murmur of the Whispering Vein, and the wet hiss of souls pouring into crystal.
Her mind strayed, unwillingly, to the one she waited for.
She had seen the sketch. The reports. The laughing description from a cousin who thought it all very amusing. A half sand ape, half Jorgenskull scion who wore the desert like a sin she refused to confess. Smaller than Ixqueya. All of them were. Yet built like a fertility idol carved by a god who had no concept of moderation. Skin the color of sun-warmed bronze. Muscles written under the softness, more dancer than soldier, though the weight in her hips spoke of real strength.
The woman draped herself in heat.
A war crown of feathers rose from her skull in a tall fan. Turquoise. Blood red. Bone white. The plumes framed a face that would have passed for Jorgenskull if it had not been so loud. Strong jaw. Full lips that curved into a smirk even when the artist tried to catch her neutral. Eyes painted with bright sky pigment, lashes dark and thick. The kind of face made for altars and markets both. Part saint. Part scandal.
Her clothing made no attempt at piety.
A narrow top clung to a generous chest. Scarlet fabric cut into triangles, edged in jagged desert patterns. Blue and white sigils that meant nothing to the Cold Way ran along the seams like excited handwriting. The garment covered what law demanded and nothing more. Below, a strip of matching cloth rode high over her hips, strings of beads and tiny bones kissing the curve of her waist and thighs. Fringe and shells circled her legs just above the knee. Ankles and wrists gleamed with metal. Gold. Bronze. Turquoise. Each band an exclamation mark.
And always the heels.
The sketches lingered on them. High, precarious towers of leather and carved wood. Sandals that forced the wearer onto the balls of her feet, calves flexed, posture sharpened into a constant strut. Someone in the White Sand courts had called it an art of walking. Ixqueya read it as a deliberate embrace of imbalance. A choice to live one stumble from the ground.
Bitchy. That was the word her cousin had used.
The artist had captured it. The way the woman’s lips quirked at one corner, as if she had just delivered a joke at someone else’s expense. The slight tilt of her chin. The angle of her hips, turned as if to better display the curve of her body while pretending not to notice any gaze that fell upon her. A kind of aggressive ease. Heat weaponized as posture.
Ixqueya felt frost settle deeper in her chest at the memory.
Great Grandmother saw value in these desert people. Saw something strategic. Saw something spiritual. The old stories said the Lord of Light had once cast his gaze over Hextor and found it wanting. Perhaps this hybrid creature was the Lord’s attempt to bargain. A bridge of flesh between sand and snow. Between lantern and bone-altar. Between the Undying Tree and whatever sun-drunk faith they practiced in those palaces of dust.
To Ixqueya the thought tasted like melted snow. Thin. Impure.
Yet duty was not a flavor. Duty was a stone in the gut. Heavy. Permanent.
The gate brightened. The moon’s single eye became two, reflected in the pale disc of the portal. Within that circle, shadows moved. The outline of jungle fronds. The faint suggestion of a ziggurat draped in vine and spider silk. Distant drums that the chamber’s wards translated into a low, steady tremor in the bones of the floor.
Her dead knelt as one.
They bowed their mismatched heads toward the portal in a gesture that mimicked prayer. Not to the Verdant gods. Not to the desert. To her. To the one who permitted passage. To the winter saint who guarded this throat between realms.
Ixqueya did not bow.
She stood in the shaft of moonlight, tall and unbending, a column of frost crowned in dark hair and Necro Ice. Her hands hung loose at her sides, fingers relaxed, yet every tendon knew the exact distance to Frostfang and Gravechill. Her face remained a mask of carved calm. Only the faintest tightening at the corner of her mouth betrayed anything. It could have been distaste. It could have been amusement. It could have been both.
She offered no word to the servants.
She offered no welcome to the guests yet to arrive.
She let the gate flower fully. A pale, round wound in the air. A halo turned inside out. A communion wafer of light that someone else would step through, still slick with their own heat and noise.
Ixqueya waited, quiet as a tomb between breaths, while winter held open its throat for the coming stain of summer.
The heart of House Frostmarrow breathed in quiet pulses of cold.
The great gate chamber lay sunk beneath the Winter Palace like a chapel buried in a glacier. Necro Ice clung to the walls in layered plates. Each sheet held veins of faint cobalt where the Whispering Vein lines moved under the surface like captive aurora. Above, a soulglass oculus showed the winter moon as a single white eye. Its light came down in a shaft. Clean. Judging. It turned every drifting mote of frost into a slow, falling prayer.
Ixqueya stood in the center of that light.
Her bare feet rested on a disc of black ice that never melted. The disc carried the sigil of House Frostmarrow. A tree of bone. Roots hooked through skulls. Branches blooming with knives of hoarfrost. The sigil encircled her like a frozen halo laid flat. As if the Undying Tree itself had opened an eye in the floor and chosen her as its pupil.
Around the circle, her dead moved.
They did not clank. They did not groan. The loyalists of Frostmarrow were not common corpses. They were winter scripture written in bone and plate and Necro Ice. A ribcage here. A jaw there. Ligaments of woven sinew preserved in salts and prayer. Each servant carried a sliver of her will, lodged in the hollows where marrow had once lived. They drifted between the runic pylons that framed the gate, adjusting glyphs, sliding bone switches, feeding captured souls into crystal fonts.
The gate answered their labor.
At first it was only a bruise in the air. A faint distortion that made the moonbeam smear and bend. Then the bruise deepened. Darkened. Runic pylons flared to life one by one, white fire trapped inside blue ice. The air before Ixqueya thickened into a pane of pale light. Rimed edges. Frost blooming outward like a slow explosion of roses carved from glass.
A tear between worlds held open by faith and engineering.
The Verdant Dynasty waited on the other side. Hot jungle. Spider gods. Wet life that refused to learn the discipline of a proper winter. Tonight her domain would serve as a bridge. Jungle to frost. Frost to desert. A path for the family that Great Grandmother favored. A path for the half sand ape, half Jorgenskull thing that carried their tangled bloodlines.
Ixqueya did not move.
The chill that rolled from the gate slid over her skin in thin sheets. It rose through her like incense lifts through a cathedral. She let it pass. Her spine stayed straight. Shoulders relaxed but set. Neck tall. She wore state regalia rather than armor, yet every line of her frame held the same readiness she took into a hunt.
Her gown fell in cold tiers from a tight collar of Necro Ice links. The collar hugged the long column of her throat and flared over her shoulders like a frostbit halo broken into plates. Below, a bodice of black-blue leather molded to her torso with the ruthless honesty of ice pressed to stone. It left the slope of her arms bare, showing toned muscle sheathed in Marid bronze. A split skirt of layered hoarfrost silk wrapped her hips, slit high on either side to free her stride. Each panel shimmered with stitched sigils of the Undying Tree and the Cold Way, threads of silver and pale jade catching the moonlight as if dew had frozen mid-prayer.
Her hair fell in a dark river down her back. Cobalt streaks glowed faintly where the gate light kissed them. The length was bound in places with bone beads and small chips of Necro Ice, each piece a votive from some past victory. Her face carried the same precision as her bloodline matriarch. High cheekbones carved with the same cruel grace as a glacier’s edge. Full mouth set in a line that looked like it had forgotten how to soften. Nose straight. Strong. Brows groomed into sharp arches that framed eyes of cold blue.
Those eyes watched the gate and nothing else.
Gold flickered behind the blue, faint as embers buried in snow. The color of channeling. The color of a saint about to lift a blade in blessing. She did not need spoken orders to direct her servants. The dead felt the shift of her focus. They adjusted. They obeyed. Silence reigned, broken only by the whisper of ice, the distant murmur of the Whispering Vein, and the wet hiss of souls pouring into crystal.
Her mind strayed, unwillingly, to the one she waited for.
She had seen the sketch. The reports. The laughing description from a cousin who thought it all very amusing. A half sand ape, half Jorgenskull scion who wore the desert like a sin she refused to confess. Smaller than Ixqueya. All of them were. Yet built like a fertility idol carved by a god who had no concept of moderation. Skin the color of sun-warmed bronze. Muscles written under the softness, more dancer than soldier, though the weight in her hips spoke of real strength.
The woman draped herself in heat.
A war crown of feathers rose from her skull in a tall fan. Turquoise. Blood red. Bone white. The plumes framed a face that would have passed for Jorgenskull if it had not been so loud. Strong jaw. Full lips that curved into a smirk even when the artist tried to catch her neutral. Eyes painted with bright sky pigment, lashes dark and thick. The kind of face made for altars and markets both. Part saint. Part scandal.
Her clothing made no attempt at piety.
A narrow top clung to a generous chest. Scarlet fabric cut into triangles, edged in jagged desert patterns. Blue and white sigils that meant nothing to the Cold Way ran along the seams like excited handwriting. The garment covered what law demanded and nothing more. Below, a strip of matching cloth rode high over her hips, strings of beads and tiny bones kissing the curve of her waist and thighs. Fringe and shells circled her legs just above the knee. Ankles and wrists gleamed with metal. Gold. Bronze. Turquoise. Each band an exclamation mark.
And always the heels.
The sketches lingered on them. High, precarious towers of leather and carved wood. Sandals that forced the wearer onto the balls of her feet, calves flexed, posture sharpened into a constant strut. Someone in the White Sand courts had called it an art of walking. Ixqueya read it as a deliberate embrace of imbalance. A choice to live one stumble from the ground.
Bitchy. That was the word her cousin had used.
The artist had captured it. The way the woman’s lips quirked at one corner, as if she had just delivered a joke at someone else’s expense. The slight tilt of her chin. The angle of her hips, turned as if to better display the curve of her body while pretending not to notice any gaze that fell upon her. A kind of aggressive ease. Heat weaponized as posture.
Ixqueya felt frost settle deeper in her chest at the memory.
Great Grandmother saw value in these desert people. Saw something strategic. Saw something spiritual. The old stories said the Lord of Light had once cast his gaze over Hextor and found it wanting. Perhaps this hybrid creature was the Lord’s attempt to bargain. A bridge of flesh between sand and snow. Between lantern and bone-altar. Between the Undying Tree and whatever sun-drunk faith they practiced in those palaces of dust.
To Ixqueya the thought tasted like melted snow. Thin. Impure.
Yet duty was not a flavor. Duty was a stone in the gut. Heavy. Permanent.
The gate brightened. The moon’s single eye became two, reflected in the pale disc of the portal. Within that circle, shadows moved. The outline of jungle fronds. The faint suggestion of a ziggurat draped in vine and spider silk. Distant drums that the chamber’s wards translated into a low, steady tremor in the bones of the floor.
Her dead knelt as one.
They bowed their mismatched heads toward the portal in a gesture that mimicked prayer. Not to the Verdant gods. Not to the desert. To her. To the one who permitted passage. To the winter saint who guarded this throat between realms.
Ixqueya did not bow.
She stood in the shaft of moonlight, tall and unbending, a column of frost crowned in dark hair and Necro Ice. Her hands hung loose at her sides, fingers relaxed, yet every tendon knew the exact distance to Frostfang and Gravechill. Her face remained a mask of carved calm. Only the faintest tightening at the corner of her mouth betrayed anything. It could have been distaste. It could have been amusement. It could have been both.
She offered no word to the servants.
She offered no welcome to the guests yet to arrive.
She let the gate flower fully. A pale, round wound in the air. A halo turned inside out. A communion wafer of light that someone else would step through, still slick with their own heat and noise.
Ixqueya waited, quiet as a tomb between breaths, while winter held open its throat for the coming stain of summer.
Light caught on the broad leaves of looming rainforest trees; rays seldom found the ground, and those that did cast a dappled display of light and shadow. The air hung thick with humidity and the scent of vegetation and decay, permeating every inch of the Dynasty. There was no stillness to be found, only the harmonious cacophony of a thriving ecosystem, one ruled by the sagacity of Verdanites and the essence of nature in tandem. It was familiar, the smell and sounds of life flourishing deep in the heart of civilization, of the Verdant Dynasty’s symbiosis with the world around it—a civilization that saw nature not as a tool to be used, but a world of its own to inhabit. It was this dynamic that allowed her people to build the heart of all civilization at the center of the natural world.
It was easy to see the truth in this, of course; trees were not felled for habitation, but rather they became homes in their own right. Bones of the deceased were not cast aside or reduced to blackened ash, but instead served as the foundation for the next generation. Waste was not a concept, only resources, and there was no exploitation, only cooperation.
Badamlyanhua crossed one leg over the other as she looked out at the courtyard before her—the last sight of the jungles of her home she would have for some time. Today, she would leave it behind to visit untrodden ground. It was time to meet the other half of the family, those who lived in a world of their own, figuratively and literally, she imagined. For now, she only waited for the time of departure to be upon her.
The courtyard she rested in was a pleasant sight; not on par with the Boneyard by any metric, but it was difficult to mimic greatness indeed. A short distance away was her hadrosaur mount, Cihuatlatoani, who had been laden with the burden of carrying her luggage. It was a small weight to such a majestic beast, but it certainly appeared cumbersome all the same. Nonetheless, it was a temporary burden; they would be departing in due time, and she received the impression that their journey would be rather swift.
Amongst the goods Cihuatlatoani carried, a box carved of Iron Bark wood and bone sat with them, one which contained gifts Lyan had collected for her cousin. This would be a most providential meeting, and she imagined it would be a fine act of good will to bear presents for her estranged kin whom she knew of, but knew not.
Beneath the piled goods on its back, her hadrosaur adorned a caparison of spider silk that had been dyed turquoise, golden, and red, emblazoned with fine geometric symbols and jade depictions of the Tree of Life and the lotus flower. The edges were trimmed with threads the shade of obsidian, and from the saddle hung lengths of jade and turquoise beads that ended in a knot of vibrant feathers.
She turned back to the table before her and returned to her journal, a large bound book, and picked up her brush.
…I anticipate my departure now with nigh bated breath, and as the moment draws near, the distant gnawing of anxiety rears itself in full. I have no fears of going forward, but leaving behind my homeland will nonetheless be a somber affair. The time to cross bridges yet untrekked has arrived, and one can only hope the silk from which it has been made will hold.
There is an excitement to be felt nonetheless; these kin of mine in their faux-Hextor are strangers to me now, but we hail from the same line, and are bound in spirit and united in purpose. I look forward to meeting them and to seeing this world of undeath they’ve carved out in distant lands yet unseen by my own eyes. The things I hear are ambivalent and I know not what to make of them, so I will cast my verdict upon seeing these lands for myself and meeting their matrons.
As she returned her brush to the dyes she had laid out, she was disturbed by a shift in the air around her. Her gaze lifted from her writings in time to bear witness to a schism taking form in the courtyard air. A pale disc bloomed, a tear in the fabric of space, it seemed, one which she was destined to cross. A cool breeze washed out from the tear, misting upon contact with the humid heat of the Dynasty to create a cloud of fog around the opening, as if heralding her arrival.
She cast her gaze back down to her journal for a moment and returned her brush to the page.
The time is upon me now. The air of the courtyard has been split by a gateway, my path into uncharted woodlands. The air from beyond runs cold, and it fights the warmth of my home in a battle it cannot win on this side of the portal. I imagine I’m in for a surprise on the other side, a chill unlike any I’ve come to know in my tropical homeland. Whatever happens now, it will undoubtedly be very interesting.
She dated the page and painted a lotus flower beside that, before shutting the book entirely. There was no point in delaying this; the sooner she arrived, the sooner she would settle into this new realm. Lyan rose from her seat and strolled to her mount, placing the book amongst the rest of her belongings. She placed a hand on the neck of Cihuatlatoani and turned her head upward to the canopy above.
“It’s time to go, Ani. There are new horizons to see and people to meet, no more time to waste.” She patted the dinosaur on its side, before pulling herself up into her saddle and setting off forward toward the rift. She drew out a bottle of spider milk from her mount’s saddle pouch. “Yes, to new horizons,” she chuckled, downing the bottle.
As she returned the empty container to its pouch, Cihuatlatoani pressed onward at a measured pace. She felt the air grow cooler as she neared the rift, and it was only a few moments later that she passed through the divide. The world shifted; the trees of the jungle vanished, taking the heat of the world with it. The other side was cold, warmth retreating through the fissure she had emerged from and leaving behind a chill.
Mist flowed through the opening alongside her as she emerged on dinosaur-back, seated above the kneeling corpses and unyielding woman she was greeted with. It seemed rather evident who she was here to meet, and it was only a matter of some minor deductive reasoning to deduce that it was the woman before her. She was crowned by flowing dark hair and adorned in frost and leather, but she was a Jorgenskull all the same, that much was evident.
She remained seated for a moment, if only to survey her surroundings. What a strange place, the likes of which she had never seen. Bone and frigid ice worked in harmony to construct the realm she could see. She was no stranger to the undead nor the byproducts of carcasses, but such bitter materials were foreign to her. Such sights would never be found in the Dynasty, where the twin suns kept them warm and life flourished. This was a place of death indeed.
The summer princess dismounted Cihuatlatoani in a decisive motion and lowered herself to the ground swiftly and with poise. There was, undoubtedly, much to see in these frostbound lands, but her focus lay solely on the woman who must certainly be her kin.
The two of them must have been the spitting image of night and day, though perhaps that was fitting. Lyanhua was dressed rather lightly, more suited for the lands of heat and sunlight she heralded from than this place, whatever it was. Her head was crowned in a headdress of tall feathers of turquoise, red, and gold. Her auburn hair cascading down her back in braids adorned with beads and latches of bone, shell, and jade, small bells of gold, and golden wires. A stripe of twin turquoise and red ran from her forehead down to her chin, dots of gold lining her cheeks horizontally.
Clothing her chest were cloths of spider silk, her bust contained by fabrics dyed a bright red and turquoise, the edges trimmed with geometric patterns of gold. The attire was rather minimal, serving only to contain her breasts. Below, her midriff was exposed—a wall of dense flesh and muscle painted with a line of gold running down the center and paralleled with jade green dots. Likewise, her arms were equally bare, strong limbs not etched with chiseled muscle, but thick and dense with honed flesh.
Her waist was wrapped in a skirt split at the sides, fastened by a belt, its large buckle made of polished, varnished bone into which the Tree of Life had been engraved in jade. The skirt itself was dyed much the same as her top, boasts red, turquoise, and gold and highlighted with traces of obsidian black. Hanging from her belt were lengths of jade and shell beads that ended in feathers. On her feet were open-toed sandals of leather dyed crimson.
Around her neck was a necklace of jade, gold, and shell beads that ended in a pendant of shell engraved with jade and accented with gold. Her arms and ankles were likewise adorned, enclosed by bracelets of gold and jade that were studded with amethyst.
Lyan’s broad face was ambivalent, a look that displayed neither surprise nor disappoint resting neutrally. Her monolidded eyes were a dark amber flecked with speckles of jade, and her gaze took in the scenery before her.
“Kindred of mine,” she smiled at last. “How nice to finally meet you. I must say, you certainly know how to make a statement—these portals of yours, I’m unfamiliar with them, but how convenient they are. I’ve never known travels quite so brief.”
Under the pale light of the winter moon, Lyanhua shone, her skin polished by oils and the sweat of Dynastic heats. It seemed the latter would no longer be a concern, not here. She had arrived in a new world, and here she had left behind the heat of life for the chilling kiss of death.
It was easy to see the truth in this, of course; trees were not felled for habitation, but rather they became homes in their own right. Bones of the deceased were not cast aside or reduced to blackened ash, but instead served as the foundation for the next generation. Waste was not a concept, only resources, and there was no exploitation, only cooperation.
Badamlyanhua crossed one leg over the other as she looked out at the courtyard before her—the last sight of the jungles of her home she would have for some time. Today, she would leave it behind to visit untrodden ground. It was time to meet the other half of the family, those who lived in a world of their own, figuratively and literally, she imagined. For now, she only waited for the time of departure to be upon her.
The courtyard she rested in was a pleasant sight; not on par with the Boneyard by any metric, but it was difficult to mimic greatness indeed. A short distance away was her hadrosaur mount, Cihuatlatoani, who had been laden with the burden of carrying her luggage. It was a small weight to such a majestic beast, but it certainly appeared cumbersome all the same. Nonetheless, it was a temporary burden; they would be departing in due time, and she received the impression that their journey would be rather swift.
Amongst the goods Cihuatlatoani carried, a box carved of Iron Bark wood and bone sat with them, one which contained gifts Lyan had collected for her cousin. This would be a most providential meeting, and she imagined it would be a fine act of good will to bear presents for her estranged kin whom she knew of, but knew not.
Beneath the piled goods on its back, her hadrosaur adorned a caparison of spider silk that had been dyed turquoise, golden, and red, emblazoned with fine geometric symbols and jade depictions of the Tree of Life and the lotus flower. The edges were trimmed with threads the shade of obsidian, and from the saddle hung lengths of jade and turquoise beads that ended in a knot of vibrant feathers.
She turned back to the table before her and returned to her journal, a large bound book, and picked up her brush.
…I anticipate my departure now with nigh bated breath, and as the moment draws near, the distant gnawing of anxiety rears itself in full. I have no fears of going forward, but leaving behind my homeland will nonetheless be a somber affair. The time to cross bridges yet untrekked has arrived, and one can only hope the silk from which it has been made will hold.
There is an excitement to be felt nonetheless; these kin of mine in their faux-Hextor are strangers to me now, but we hail from the same line, and are bound in spirit and united in purpose. I look forward to meeting them and to seeing this world of undeath they’ve carved out in distant lands yet unseen by my own eyes. The things I hear are ambivalent and I know not what to make of them, so I will cast my verdict upon seeing these lands for myself and meeting their matrons.
As she returned her brush to the dyes she had laid out, she was disturbed by a shift in the air around her. Her gaze lifted from her writings in time to bear witness to a schism taking form in the courtyard air. A pale disc bloomed, a tear in the fabric of space, it seemed, one which she was destined to cross. A cool breeze washed out from the tear, misting upon contact with the humid heat of the Dynasty to create a cloud of fog around the opening, as if heralding her arrival.
She cast her gaze back down to her journal for a moment and returned her brush to the page.
The time is upon me now. The air of the courtyard has been split by a gateway, my path into uncharted woodlands. The air from beyond runs cold, and it fights the warmth of my home in a battle it cannot win on this side of the portal. I imagine I’m in for a surprise on the other side, a chill unlike any I’ve come to know in my tropical homeland. Whatever happens now, it will undoubtedly be very interesting.
She dated the page and painted a lotus flower beside that, before shutting the book entirely. There was no point in delaying this; the sooner she arrived, the sooner she would settle into this new realm. Lyan rose from her seat and strolled to her mount, placing the book amongst the rest of her belongings. She placed a hand on the neck of Cihuatlatoani and turned her head upward to the canopy above.
“It’s time to go, Ani. There are new horizons to see and people to meet, no more time to waste.” She patted the dinosaur on its side, before pulling herself up into her saddle and setting off forward toward the rift. She drew out a bottle of spider milk from her mount’s saddle pouch. “Yes, to new horizons,” she chuckled, downing the bottle.
As she returned the empty container to its pouch, Cihuatlatoani pressed onward at a measured pace. She felt the air grow cooler as she neared the rift, and it was only a few moments later that she passed through the divide. The world shifted; the trees of the jungle vanished, taking the heat of the world with it. The other side was cold, warmth retreating through the fissure she had emerged from and leaving behind a chill.
Mist flowed through the opening alongside her as she emerged on dinosaur-back, seated above the kneeling corpses and unyielding woman she was greeted with. It seemed rather evident who she was here to meet, and it was only a matter of some minor deductive reasoning to deduce that it was the woman before her. She was crowned by flowing dark hair and adorned in frost and leather, but she was a Jorgenskull all the same, that much was evident.
She remained seated for a moment, if only to survey her surroundings. What a strange place, the likes of which she had never seen. Bone and frigid ice worked in harmony to construct the realm she could see. She was no stranger to the undead nor the byproducts of carcasses, but such bitter materials were foreign to her. Such sights would never be found in the Dynasty, where the twin suns kept them warm and life flourished. This was a place of death indeed.
The summer princess dismounted Cihuatlatoani in a decisive motion and lowered herself to the ground swiftly and with poise. There was, undoubtedly, much to see in these frostbound lands, but her focus lay solely on the woman who must certainly be her kin.
The two of them must have been the spitting image of night and day, though perhaps that was fitting. Lyanhua was dressed rather lightly, more suited for the lands of heat and sunlight she heralded from than this place, whatever it was. Her head was crowned in a headdress of tall feathers of turquoise, red, and gold. Her auburn hair cascading down her back in braids adorned with beads and latches of bone, shell, and jade, small bells of gold, and golden wires. A stripe of twin turquoise and red ran from her forehead down to her chin, dots of gold lining her cheeks horizontally.
Clothing her chest were cloths of spider silk, her bust contained by fabrics dyed a bright red and turquoise, the edges trimmed with geometric patterns of gold. The attire was rather minimal, serving only to contain her breasts. Below, her midriff was exposed—a wall of dense flesh and muscle painted with a line of gold running down the center and paralleled with jade green dots. Likewise, her arms were equally bare, strong limbs not etched with chiseled muscle, but thick and dense with honed flesh.
Her waist was wrapped in a skirt split at the sides, fastened by a belt, its large buckle made of polished, varnished bone into which the Tree of Life had been engraved in jade. The skirt itself was dyed much the same as her top, boasts red, turquoise, and gold and highlighted with traces of obsidian black. Hanging from her belt were lengths of jade and shell beads that ended in feathers. On her feet were open-toed sandals of leather dyed crimson.
Around her neck was a necklace of jade, gold, and shell beads that ended in a pendant of shell engraved with jade and accented with gold. Her arms and ankles were likewise adorned, enclosed by bracelets of gold and jade that were studded with amethyst.
Lyan’s broad face was ambivalent, a look that displayed neither surprise nor disappoint resting neutrally. Her monolidded eyes were a dark amber flecked with speckles of jade, and her gaze took in the scenery before her.
“Kindred of mine,” she smiled at last. “How nice to finally meet you. I must say, you certainly know how to make a statement—these portals of yours, I’m unfamiliar with them, but how convenient they are. I’ve never known travels quite so brief.”
Under the pale light of the winter moon, Lyanhua shone, her skin polished by oils and the sweat of Dynastic heats. It seemed the latter would no longer be a concern, not here. She had arrived in a new world, and here she had left behind the heat of life for the chilling kiss of death.
An icy silence received her.
The instant Badamlyanhua and her great hadrosaur pierced the portal’s pale membrane, Verdant heat was torn from them like a veil. Jungle humidity curdled into ghostly plumes that spiraled once around beast and rider before the chamber’s merciless chill devoured them. Behind her, the rain-forest’s living chorus did not fade so much as sever. In its place came the whisper of settling hoarfrost and the remote groan of ancient ice turning in its sleep.
They had arrived inside the heart of House Frostmarrow.
The gate hall rose like a cathedral hollowed from a single glacier. Walls of Necro Ice soared, black as drowned obsidian, yet threaded with veins of dim, glacial blue. Each pulse in those veins suggested a buried heart laboring far below, forcing cold up through the palace like sacramental blood. Around the circumference, columns of articulated bone stood in ranks. Ribs, femurs, and vertebrae had been sutured into white trunks whose branching crowns cradled chandeliers of skulls. Within each hollow cranium burned a single grain of pallid fire, smokeless and motionless, a congregation of dead stars. Their collective glow did not warm. It only outlined. Every chisel stroke in the ice, every rune etched into bone plates, every frozen crystal along the floor gained a surgical clarity.
That floor was a single, seamless disc of Necro Ice. At its center sprawled the sigil of the Undying Tree. Roots coiled around stylized skulls. Branches opened into thin crescent moons and serrated leaves like broken knives. In the hollow of the Tree’s core the gate still glimmered, a round wound in the air, its rim furred with delicate fractals of frost arrested mid-bloom.
Around this luminescent iris the dead knelt in ordered devotion.
They were not refuse dragged from pits. They were curated reliquaries of strength. Each thrall had been built from the choicest bones of many lives. Long limbs. Broad clavicles. Well-shaped skulls. Black ice and bone armor grew over their frames as if ossified directly from prayer. Breastplates carried the split sigil of Frostmarrow in muted gold and winter blue. They knelt with weapons grounded, skull-helms inclined. No tremor, no unconscious fidget betrayed them. Only the unwavering coals within their sockets gave evidence of animation, steady as altar flames.
At the far edge of the sigil, within the full fall of soulglass moonlight, stood their mistress.
Ixqueya claimed the chamber without podium or throne. Height sufficed. Authority did the rest. Her bare feet rested on the carved roots of the Undying Tree. Shoulders were squared, yet relaxed. Spine rose in an unbroken plumb-line of discipline. The posture said quite plainly that this was her weather, her dead, her law.
She was colossal and unmistakably Jorgenskull, yet carved for winter rather than jungle. Broad shoulders tapered into a narrow, cinched waist before flaring again into hips with a heavy, deliberate amplitude. Her build was buxom in the most architectural sense. A prodigious bust swelled against the confines of her cuirass, not the soft excess of idleness, but monumental, weighty flesh anchored to a ribcage forged for battle. The cuirass itself had been shaped to that abundance with reverent cruelty. Midnight leather cupped and lifted, while plates of Necro Ice arced over the upper curve of each breast like pale reliquary lids. Moonlight slid along that armor and caught in the shaded valley between, turning her cleavage into a narrow ravine of shadow framed in glacial sheen.
Below, her waist narrowed sharply beneath the underbust ridge of leather. The cinch emphasized the full amphora of her torso. From that tight middle, her hips swept outward with almost obscene generosity, bearing the dense strength of a born marcher rather than the softness of a courtesan. Hoarfrost silk and leather accommodated this mass without apology. The inner skirt of black hide hugged the swell of her hips before parting high along the outer thigh. Over it, a veil of translucent hoarfrost silk flowed, stenciled with pale sigils that resembled snowflakes in slow descent. The outermost layer, a mantle of overlapping Necro Ice scales, rode her hips like a crystalline sash. Each step set them whispering against one another, a hushed metallic susurrus that suggested both chainmail and rosary.
Her thighs, visible between skirt slits and greaves, carried silvered spirals of frostbite tattoos that climbed the columns of muscle in deliberate, liturgical patterns. Greaves of black ice clasped her shins and flowed into sabatons that left her toes bare upon the shining floor. The skin there had a faint bluish cast, a testament to long familiarity with this cold. Toenails were lacquered the color of thunderclouds. Bone and quartz circlets encircled each ankle, and every subtle shift of weight turned them into tiny chiming orreries of past victories.
Her arms were naked of armor by intention. Biceps and forearms carried that same sculpted density as her legs, an economy of musculature that spoke of hours with weapon and drill, not mere ornament. Bracelets of Necro Ice, carved bone, and dull gold wound in precise stacks along her wrists and upper arms. In her right hand she rested Frostfang on the ice like a saint resting a crozier. The mace’s jagged crystal head had been grown into something like a black-green crown. Its internal light glowed sullenly, suggesting an imprisoned aurora that remembered the sensation of shattering bone.
Her hair was a cataract of midnight, thick and heavy, tumbling to the small of her back. Streaks of cobalt cut through the darkness like veins of ore. Moonlight and gate-glow found those streaks and turned them into deep rivers of blue fire. Near her face several sections had been plaited tight and threaded with slivers of bone, ice, and tiny quincunx moons carved from opal. Frost had taken an especial liking to her crown; a fine crystalline dust lay over the upper layers of hair, catching light so that the entire mass read like a nocturnal comet.
Her face could have been sculpted from a glacier’s edge. High, hard cheekbones. A straight, imperious nose. Full lips painted a deep claret, the exact color of blood cooled on fresh snow. The cosmetics around her eyes were executed with the merciless precision of a scribe copying holy text. Ground azurite and charcoal swept along the lids in clean, winged arcs that flared toward her temples. At the outer corner of each eye a single vertical stroke of white descended, stylized icicles that marked her rank within Frostmarrow’s inquisitorial choir. Nothing bled, nothing smudged. Even here, in the living breath of portal-winds, every line remained immaculate.
Her eyes were the true cold.
The irises were glacial blue, almost clear, ringed thinly in molten gold. That gold did not soften them. It made the gaze carnivorous. Even at rest, there was the sense of something watching from behind the frost, weighing, tabulating, deciding what could be used and what must be buried.
Those eyes moved to Badamlyanhua.
They did not rush. They travelled.
She began at the sandals. Open-toed, high-heeled, crimson leather that forced the summer princess onto the balls of her feet and sculpted her calves into taut cords. Anklets of jade, shell, turquoise, and tiny gold bells climbed the muscular columns of her lower legs, each ornament catching the cold light and insisting on its own heat.
Her gaze ascended to the thighs. Vast, powerful, smooth as carved amber. Where the Verdant garments ended, winter’s illumination took over, turning each curve into a polished topography of muscle and adipose held in defiant harmony. Feathered garters of bone, shell, and turquoise leaflets clung to the generous sweep of those legs, trembling with each subtle breath Cihuatlatoani took.
At the hips, Ixqueya’s attention sharpened. The Nokhoi giantess had been constructed on a scale that could almost have been a parody if not for the coherence of it. Her pelvis carried the planet-like weight of an earth goddess, yet the distribution was balanced by a tight, serviceable waist and a back that had learned early how to carry such abundance without crumpling. The skirt, split high at both sides, framed this display rather than concealed it. Spider-silk panels dyed in brilliant turquoise, sanguine red, and molten gold clung to a waist cinched with a belt whose great polished bone buckle bore the Tree of Life inlaid with jade. Beaded tassels of shell and jade cascaded from the belt, ending in feather clusters that looked like escaped fragments of sunrise.
Her torso rose above this explosion of hips like the trunk of a sacred ceiba. The midriff lay bare, a plane of dense, honed flesh marked by a single vertical stroke of gold paint, paralleled on either side by small jade dots. It resembled a ritual axis mundi drawn along the line of her core. Above, the spider-silk top battled heroically with a breastline that existed somewhere between anatomy and myth. The fabric had been dyed a brilliant red and turquoise and edged with geometric gold patterns, but all artistry served a single, obvious purpose. It contained. It lifted. It embraced a monumental bosom that heaved gently with each breath, the sort of buxom architecture more often seen on temple idols than on living women. The garment seemed to succeed through some combination of Verdant engineering, spider alchemy, and faith.
Her shoulders and arms were broad and bare, their mass less chiseled than Ixqueya’s yet equally honest. There was no artifice of leanness. Power sat under the skin like coiled roots. Bracelets of jade and gold, studded with amethysts, encircled her wrists and upper arms. Around her throat, a collar of shells, jade, and gold framed a central pendant inscribed with jade sigils, resting in the hollow where throat met chest.
Her head was crowned in a riot of feathers. Tall plumes of turquoise, scarlet, and bright gold fanned outward from a band of patterned cloth. The entire headdress framed her face like a burst of tropical sky captured and frozen at the moment of dawn. Her auburn hair cascaded from beneath it in thick braids interlaced with bone, shell, gold wire, and tiny bells that chimed softly with each movement. Painted upon that broad Verdant face was a vertical stripe of turquoise and red running from hairline to chin, bordered along the cheeks by precise dots of gold.
Her features themselves carried a generous grandeur. Wide cheekbones. Strong jaw. Monolidded eyes in a dark amber shade, each iris freckled with minute flecks of jade. Her mouth, full and expressive, curved now in a measured smile, neither overeager nor disinterested. Under the cold light her oiled skin gleamed like polished bronze, the last memory of Dynastic heat clinging stubbornly to her.
Summer incarnate, Ixqueya thought. A solstice in high heels.
Yet there was nothing flighty in the way the Nokhoi princess looked back at her. Lyanhua’s gaze catalogued just as clinically, just as patiently. Night examined day. Day evaluated night.
At the perimeter of the sigil, the thralls responded to their mistress without a word.
Two rose from their kneel and approached Cihuatlatoani, skeletal hands open, movements measured, reverent. They circled the hadrosaur like acolytes around an altar, ready to relieve it of burdens when bid. A second triad ghosted toward the stacked luggage. They halted with absolute precision one pace from the goods, awaiting sanction.
Ixqueya lifted two fingers.
That was enough. Bone hands closed around rope and carved handles. Bundles shifted from animal to undead shoulder with a quiet efficiency. The box of Iron Bark and bone that housed Verdant offerings was cradled by one thrall against its plated chest as carefully as any living midwife would hold a newborn.
Only when every motion settled back into stillness did Ixqueya allow the silence to break.
“Welcome to Winter.”
The words were low and smooth, shaped by a patrician drawl that turned courtesy into something edged. In them lay no overt warmth, yet there was recognition, and in Frostmarrow that was already a lavish gift.
Her gaze slipped for a heartbeat to the thinning gate, to the ring of rime licking its edge, then returned.
“These apertures you admire are little more than disciplined arithmetic wrapped in devotion,” she said. “A child with the right tutors can manage the sums. Once one has pushed armies through such circles, guiding a single princess and her beast becomes… elementary.”
The statement carried no swagger. Only fact. In her mouth, fact was often sharper than any boast.
She turned, a controlled pivot on bare toes. Hoarfrost silk and Necro Ice scales swung around her legs in a crisp arc. Frostfang scraped a pale crescent into the sigil where its head left the ice, then came to rest at her side with a crystalline chime. The gesture created a natural avenue beside her, half a pace back from her shoulder, the place appropriate for honored blood that was still guest rather than house.
As she stepped toward the nearest archway, passing under bone columns and skull chandeliers, Ixqueya allowed herself the smallest ghost of a smile, a quick glint at the corner of her wine-red mouth.
“You present impressively, Badamlyanhua,” she remarked. “When we are somewhere warmer than a gate room, you may tell me what the jungle has made of you. Once you have finished deciding what winter has made of me.”
It was as close as she came to flirtation on first meeting. A dry, crystalline jest. Half invitation, half reminder of who owned the cold under their feet.
Beyond them, soulglass windows opened on a panorama of black water, pale reeds, and towering ice buttresses that rose like the vertebrae of a buried colossus. Braziers of bottled breath burned with glacial blue flame. Prayer strips of skin and parchment muttered softly in unseen drafts. Behind, the portal still glowed, stitching jungle, mire, and desert into a single line of improbable geometry.
The dead kept their vigil. The cold kept its counsel. And at the center of it walked Ixqueya Frostmarrow, weighing the buxom thunderstorm of summer at her side and deciding, with the quiet cruelty of winter, exactly where this vivid new thread would be woven into the long, pale tapestry of her house.
The instant Badamlyanhua and her great hadrosaur pierced the portal’s pale membrane, Verdant heat was torn from them like a veil. Jungle humidity curdled into ghostly plumes that spiraled once around beast and rider before the chamber’s merciless chill devoured them. Behind her, the rain-forest’s living chorus did not fade so much as sever. In its place came the whisper of settling hoarfrost and the remote groan of ancient ice turning in its sleep.
They had arrived inside the heart of House Frostmarrow.
The gate hall rose like a cathedral hollowed from a single glacier. Walls of Necro Ice soared, black as drowned obsidian, yet threaded with veins of dim, glacial blue. Each pulse in those veins suggested a buried heart laboring far below, forcing cold up through the palace like sacramental blood. Around the circumference, columns of articulated bone stood in ranks. Ribs, femurs, and vertebrae had been sutured into white trunks whose branching crowns cradled chandeliers of skulls. Within each hollow cranium burned a single grain of pallid fire, smokeless and motionless, a congregation of dead stars. Their collective glow did not warm. It only outlined. Every chisel stroke in the ice, every rune etched into bone plates, every frozen crystal along the floor gained a surgical clarity.
That floor was a single, seamless disc of Necro Ice. At its center sprawled the sigil of the Undying Tree. Roots coiled around stylized skulls. Branches opened into thin crescent moons and serrated leaves like broken knives. In the hollow of the Tree’s core the gate still glimmered, a round wound in the air, its rim furred with delicate fractals of frost arrested mid-bloom.
Around this luminescent iris the dead knelt in ordered devotion.
They were not refuse dragged from pits. They were curated reliquaries of strength. Each thrall had been built from the choicest bones of many lives. Long limbs. Broad clavicles. Well-shaped skulls. Black ice and bone armor grew over their frames as if ossified directly from prayer. Breastplates carried the split sigil of Frostmarrow in muted gold and winter blue. They knelt with weapons grounded, skull-helms inclined. No tremor, no unconscious fidget betrayed them. Only the unwavering coals within their sockets gave evidence of animation, steady as altar flames.
At the far edge of the sigil, within the full fall of soulglass moonlight, stood their mistress.
Ixqueya claimed the chamber without podium or throne. Height sufficed. Authority did the rest. Her bare feet rested on the carved roots of the Undying Tree. Shoulders were squared, yet relaxed. Spine rose in an unbroken plumb-line of discipline. The posture said quite plainly that this was her weather, her dead, her law.
She was colossal and unmistakably Jorgenskull, yet carved for winter rather than jungle. Broad shoulders tapered into a narrow, cinched waist before flaring again into hips with a heavy, deliberate amplitude. Her build was buxom in the most architectural sense. A prodigious bust swelled against the confines of her cuirass, not the soft excess of idleness, but monumental, weighty flesh anchored to a ribcage forged for battle. The cuirass itself had been shaped to that abundance with reverent cruelty. Midnight leather cupped and lifted, while plates of Necro Ice arced over the upper curve of each breast like pale reliquary lids. Moonlight slid along that armor and caught in the shaded valley between, turning her cleavage into a narrow ravine of shadow framed in glacial sheen.
Below, her waist narrowed sharply beneath the underbust ridge of leather. The cinch emphasized the full amphora of her torso. From that tight middle, her hips swept outward with almost obscene generosity, bearing the dense strength of a born marcher rather than the softness of a courtesan. Hoarfrost silk and leather accommodated this mass without apology. The inner skirt of black hide hugged the swell of her hips before parting high along the outer thigh. Over it, a veil of translucent hoarfrost silk flowed, stenciled with pale sigils that resembled snowflakes in slow descent. The outermost layer, a mantle of overlapping Necro Ice scales, rode her hips like a crystalline sash. Each step set them whispering against one another, a hushed metallic susurrus that suggested both chainmail and rosary.
Her thighs, visible between skirt slits and greaves, carried silvered spirals of frostbite tattoos that climbed the columns of muscle in deliberate, liturgical patterns. Greaves of black ice clasped her shins and flowed into sabatons that left her toes bare upon the shining floor. The skin there had a faint bluish cast, a testament to long familiarity with this cold. Toenails were lacquered the color of thunderclouds. Bone and quartz circlets encircled each ankle, and every subtle shift of weight turned them into tiny chiming orreries of past victories.
Her arms were naked of armor by intention. Biceps and forearms carried that same sculpted density as her legs, an economy of musculature that spoke of hours with weapon and drill, not mere ornament. Bracelets of Necro Ice, carved bone, and dull gold wound in precise stacks along her wrists and upper arms. In her right hand she rested Frostfang on the ice like a saint resting a crozier. The mace’s jagged crystal head had been grown into something like a black-green crown. Its internal light glowed sullenly, suggesting an imprisoned aurora that remembered the sensation of shattering bone.
Her hair was a cataract of midnight, thick and heavy, tumbling to the small of her back. Streaks of cobalt cut through the darkness like veins of ore. Moonlight and gate-glow found those streaks and turned them into deep rivers of blue fire. Near her face several sections had been plaited tight and threaded with slivers of bone, ice, and tiny quincunx moons carved from opal. Frost had taken an especial liking to her crown; a fine crystalline dust lay over the upper layers of hair, catching light so that the entire mass read like a nocturnal comet.
Her face could have been sculpted from a glacier’s edge. High, hard cheekbones. A straight, imperious nose. Full lips painted a deep claret, the exact color of blood cooled on fresh snow. The cosmetics around her eyes were executed with the merciless precision of a scribe copying holy text. Ground azurite and charcoal swept along the lids in clean, winged arcs that flared toward her temples. At the outer corner of each eye a single vertical stroke of white descended, stylized icicles that marked her rank within Frostmarrow’s inquisitorial choir. Nothing bled, nothing smudged. Even here, in the living breath of portal-winds, every line remained immaculate.
Her eyes were the true cold.
The irises were glacial blue, almost clear, ringed thinly in molten gold. That gold did not soften them. It made the gaze carnivorous. Even at rest, there was the sense of something watching from behind the frost, weighing, tabulating, deciding what could be used and what must be buried.
Those eyes moved to Badamlyanhua.
They did not rush. They travelled.
She began at the sandals. Open-toed, high-heeled, crimson leather that forced the summer princess onto the balls of her feet and sculpted her calves into taut cords. Anklets of jade, shell, turquoise, and tiny gold bells climbed the muscular columns of her lower legs, each ornament catching the cold light and insisting on its own heat.
Her gaze ascended to the thighs. Vast, powerful, smooth as carved amber. Where the Verdant garments ended, winter’s illumination took over, turning each curve into a polished topography of muscle and adipose held in defiant harmony. Feathered garters of bone, shell, and turquoise leaflets clung to the generous sweep of those legs, trembling with each subtle breath Cihuatlatoani took.
At the hips, Ixqueya’s attention sharpened. The Nokhoi giantess had been constructed on a scale that could almost have been a parody if not for the coherence of it. Her pelvis carried the planet-like weight of an earth goddess, yet the distribution was balanced by a tight, serviceable waist and a back that had learned early how to carry such abundance without crumpling. The skirt, split high at both sides, framed this display rather than concealed it. Spider-silk panels dyed in brilliant turquoise, sanguine red, and molten gold clung to a waist cinched with a belt whose great polished bone buckle bore the Tree of Life inlaid with jade. Beaded tassels of shell and jade cascaded from the belt, ending in feather clusters that looked like escaped fragments of sunrise.
Her torso rose above this explosion of hips like the trunk of a sacred ceiba. The midriff lay bare, a plane of dense, honed flesh marked by a single vertical stroke of gold paint, paralleled on either side by small jade dots. It resembled a ritual axis mundi drawn along the line of her core. Above, the spider-silk top battled heroically with a breastline that existed somewhere between anatomy and myth. The fabric had been dyed a brilliant red and turquoise and edged with geometric gold patterns, but all artistry served a single, obvious purpose. It contained. It lifted. It embraced a monumental bosom that heaved gently with each breath, the sort of buxom architecture more often seen on temple idols than on living women. The garment seemed to succeed through some combination of Verdant engineering, spider alchemy, and faith.
Her shoulders and arms were broad and bare, their mass less chiseled than Ixqueya’s yet equally honest. There was no artifice of leanness. Power sat under the skin like coiled roots. Bracelets of jade and gold, studded with amethysts, encircled her wrists and upper arms. Around her throat, a collar of shells, jade, and gold framed a central pendant inscribed with jade sigils, resting in the hollow where throat met chest.
Her head was crowned in a riot of feathers. Tall plumes of turquoise, scarlet, and bright gold fanned outward from a band of patterned cloth. The entire headdress framed her face like a burst of tropical sky captured and frozen at the moment of dawn. Her auburn hair cascaded from beneath it in thick braids interlaced with bone, shell, gold wire, and tiny bells that chimed softly with each movement. Painted upon that broad Verdant face was a vertical stripe of turquoise and red running from hairline to chin, bordered along the cheeks by precise dots of gold.
Her features themselves carried a generous grandeur. Wide cheekbones. Strong jaw. Monolidded eyes in a dark amber shade, each iris freckled with minute flecks of jade. Her mouth, full and expressive, curved now in a measured smile, neither overeager nor disinterested. Under the cold light her oiled skin gleamed like polished bronze, the last memory of Dynastic heat clinging stubbornly to her.
Summer incarnate, Ixqueya thought. A solstice in high heels.
Yet there was nothing flighty in the way the Nokhoi princess looked back at her. Lyanhua’s gaze catalogued just as clinically, just as patiently. Night examined day. Day evaluated night.
At the perimeter of the sigil, the thralls responded to their mistress without a word.
Two rose from their kneel and approached Cihuatlatoani, skeletal hands open, movements measured, reverent. They circled the hadrosaur like acolytes around an altar, ready to relieve it of burdens when bid. A second triad ghosted toward the stacked luggage. They halted with absolute precision one pace from the goods, awaiting sanction.
Ixqueya lifted two fingers.
That was enough. Bone hands closed around rope and carved handles. Bundles shifted from animal to undead shoulder with a quiet efficiency. The box of Iron Bark and bone that housed Verdant offerings was cradled by one thrall against its plated chest as carefully as any living midwife would hold a newborn.
Only when every motion settled back into stillness did Ixqueya allow the silence to break.
“Welcome to Winter.”
The words were low and smooth, shaped by a patrician drawl that turned courtesy into something edged. In them lay no overt warmth, yet there was recognition, and in Frostmarrow that was already a lavish gift.
Her gaze slipped for a heartbeat to the thinning gate, to the ring of rime licking its edge, then returned.
“These apertures you admire are little more than disciplined arithmetic wrapped in devotion,” she said. “A child with the right tutors can manage the sums. Once one has pushed armies through such circles, guiding a single princess and her beast becomes… elementary.”
The statement carried no swagger. Only fact. In her mouth, fact was often sharper than any boast.
She turned, a controlled pivot on bare toes. Hoarfrost silk and Necro Ice scales swung around her legs in a crisp arc. Frostfang scraped a pale crescent into the sigil where its head left the ice, then came to rest at her side with a crystalline chime. The gesture created a natural avenue beside her, half a pace back from her shoulder, the place appropriate for honored blood that was still guest rather than house.
As she stepped toward the nearest archway, passing under bone columns and skull chandeliers, Ixqueya allowed herself the smallest ghost of a smile, a quick glint at the corner of her wine-red mouth.
“You present impressively, Badamlyanhua,” she remarked. “When we are somewhere warmer than a gate room, you may tell me what the jungle has made of you. Once you have finished deciding what winter has made of me.”
It was as close as she came to flirtation on first meeting. A dry, crystalline jest. Half invitation, half reminder of who owned the cold under their feet.
Beyond them, soulglass windows opened on a panorama of black water, pale reeds, and towering ice buttresses that rose like the vertebrae of a buried colossus. Braziers of bottled breath burned with glacial blue flame. Prayer strips of skin and parchment muttered softly in unseen drafts. Behind, the portal still glowed, stitching jungle, mire, and desert into a single line of improbable geometry.
The dead kept their vigil. The cold kept its counsel. And at the center of it walked Ixqueya Frostmarrow, weighing the buxom thunderstorm of summer at her side and deciding, with the quiet cruelty of winter, exactly where this vivid new thread would be woven into the long, pale tapestry of her house.
The world she departed seemed to fade away, becoming a distant memory in this new land of undeath. Heat evidently had no place here, where frost reigned, its chill encompassing the room with a coldness one would never find in the heart of the rainforest, not even in the darkest of nights. Whatever warmth remained with her from her homeland was eager to flee back through the portal, leaving her to the mercy of this land where heat seemed a foreign concept.
Nonetheless, she remained stalwart. Even as the cold of the air kissed her skin, she would show no sign of discomfort. She would not be so easily put off by a chill of the air—it was no different than a mild spike of heat in the midst of summer, one need only weather the proverbial storm until it passed. Still, it seemed she would be sleeping with furs and blankets in this realm.
Rising walls of black veined with a dim, icy blue rose around her, making up the chamber she had arrived within, pillars of ivory white bone rising into the frigid air. Even the fire here was unnatural, pale and deathly, much like the rest of the room; it seemed to burn without smoke or warmth. The sigil resting on the floor was not right, not quite the Tree of Life, rather seemingly more akin to a Tree of Death than anything living.
A convocation of the undead silently knelt in waiting, their forms seemingly caught frozen in the chill of the icy chamber. The uneducated may have thought of them as statues, but Lyan noted their presence for what they were. They certainly seemed to be of some quality as well, no doubt they were of good stock, back when they were alive and not quite so deceased. The bone they wore as armor was familiar to her, but the blackened substance which served as auxiliary to that was unfamiliar to her, seemingly the same material the structure had been crafted out of. It wasn’t obsidian, so she wasn’t quite sure what it was.
And of course, at the end of the procession was the woman of the hour—the hostess of this dreary little meeting of theirs. Ixqueya had certainly made herself presentable for their encounter; she had garbed herself in leather the color of the night sky, with more of that unfamiliar black crystal plating her garb as armor. She seemed half prepared to fight and half prepared to settle down for a fine discussion in a courtyard.
Her torso had been dressed rather modestly in her bodice of black, save for her tasteful display of decolletage. The rest of her, though, not so much. Her arms, shapely and toned, were bare to the cool air of the chamber, and her legs were sparsely garbed beneath a skirt of leather and translucent silk. She imagined this attire did little for the incessant chill ever present here. Her right hand rested on a weapon of great scale, a jagged mace made of a black-green crystal. It seemed their choice of weaponry was similar, though her cousin had pushed the poor thing to its furthest extreme.
Even her hair seemed of this strange place, as if she had been born of this realm, or the realm of her. It was dark, much like the leather she wore and the substance this place of hers had been built of, streaked brightly by cobalt. The locks of midnight tumbled down in thick waves, crowning her sharp face like the night sky around the radiant moon. Of course, it was the eyes that stood out the most—orbs that burned with the same bite the bitter air carried, sharp enough to cut and heavy enough to bury the weak under their oppressive gaze.
This princess of the ice was impressive, she thought, and her presentation was certainly one worth remembering. She was sculpted like a statue of ice made flesh, standing tall and with a weighty presence fitting one that wore the name of Jorgenskull. How… winsome.
The duo of ice and fire stood statuesque in the chamber of black crystal and white bone, their meeting of two realms now begun. Even so, a blanket of silence hung in the air, one that seemed nigh underwhelming. Were she a dullard, she might have been concerned, offended, even. She watched Ixqueya closely, instead, and found herself being observed, perhaps even admired.
And so, she waited in the silence, allowing for the princess of undeath to take her in. It was good to be appreciated, there was great effort put into play in the cultivation of her form, and it would be a shame to be ignored; though she doubted many could, her diligence had surely put her in a league of her own, few beyond her kin could carry themselves with such refinement.
At last, the peace was broken, not by Ixqueya, but by her little minions. Disciples of death brought back from the Tree of Life’s canopy moved with precision and diligence, moving not toward her, but past her to her mount. At their mistress’ behest, they began to relieve Cihuatlatoani of her burdens, bringing them from the back of the beast down to the skeletal hands of reanimated servants.
“Winter,” she repeated slowly, a twinge of amusement in her voice as if she had tasted the word for the first time. “Your winter is certainly something unique. And cold, though that much seems a given.”
She took a half step forward, placing one hand idly on her hip as she briefly cast her gaze over her shoulder at the portal.
“Impressive nonetheless, regardless of its complexity. Perhaps the subways of the Dynasty should be afraid, you may yet put them out of business.” She set into motion the moment her hostess pivoted and set off, moving with a gait somewhere between the long strides of a soldier and the languorous meandering of a nobler on tour in a foreign abode. Her tail flitted idly behind her, a fluffy length of maroon tipped in white, and each step was accompanied by the soft jingling of a dozen tiny bells.
Her gaze caught for a moment the windows that revealed the world beyond, taking in the sights of distant black pools juxtaposed against rising spires of ice. What an insipid place, so dull and devoid of color. It was white, black, and blue, an assortment of colors that seemed to drain what little life remained in this land of the dead. Truly a depressing visage.
“That makes two of us,” she remarked, a light smirk tracing her lips for a moment. “Look at you, though, all shades of grade and only a few accents of color.” She tsked for a moment. “Don’t worry though, I’ve brought you some warmth from the motherland to… stave off the cold, I suppose, just a little bit of this and that for you, dearest cousin of mine. Nonetheless, you’re right though. So long we’ve been estranged, it certainly is about time we became acquainted in full.”
She followed Ixqueya in long strides, her gaze flitting between the alien architecture of this palace of black and white and her hostess before her; more accurately, her derriere. Perhaps not everything here is quite so dull after all.
Nonetheless, she remained stalwart. Even as the cold of the air kissed her skin, she would show no sign of discomfort. She would not be so easily put off by a chill of the air—it was no different than a mild spike of heat in the midst of summer, one need only weather the proverbial storm until it passed. Still, it seemed she would be sleeping with furs and blankets in this realm.
Rising walls of black veined with a dim, icy blue rose around her, making up the chamber she had arrived within, pillars of ivory white bone rising into the frigid air. Even the fire here was unnatural, pale and deathly, much like the rest of the room; it seemed to burn without smoke or warmth. The sigil resting on the floor was not right, not quite the Tree of Life, rather seemingly more akin to a Tree of Death than anything living.
A convocation of the undead silently knelt in waiting, their forms seemingly caught frozen in the chill of the icy chamber. The uneducated may have thought of them as statues, but Lyan noted their presence for what they were. They certainly seemed to be of some quality as well, no doubt they were of good stock, back when they were alive and not quite so deceased. The bone they wore as armor was familiar to her, but the blackened substance which served as auxiliary to that was unfamiliar to her, seemingly the same material the structure had been crafted out of. It wasn’t obsidian, so she wasn’t quite sure what it was.
And of course, at the end of the procession was the woman of the hour—the hostess of this dreary little meeting of theirs. Ixqueya had certainly made herself presentable for their encounter; she had garbed herself in leather the color of the night sky, with more of that unfamiliar black crystal plating her garb as armor. She seemed half prepared to fight and half prepared to settle down for a fine discussion in a courtyard.
Her torso had been dressed rather modestly in her bodice of black, save for her tasteful display of decolletage. The rest of her, though, not so much. Her arms, shapely and toned, were bare to the cool air of the chamber, and her legs were sparsely garbed beneath a skirt of leather and translucent silk. She imagined this attire did little for the incessant chill ever present here. Her right hand rested on a weapon of great scale, a jagged mace made of a black-green crystal. It seemed their choice of weaponry was similar, though her cousin had pushed the poor thing to its furthest extreme.
Even her hair seemed of this strange place, as if she had been born of this realm, or the realm of her. It was dark, much like the leather she wore and the substance this place of hers had been built of, streaked brightly by cobalt. The locks of midnight tumbled down in thick waves, crowning her sharp face like the night sky around the radiant moon. Of course, it was the eyes that stood out the most—orbs that burned with the same bite the bitter air carried, sharp enough to cut and heavy enough to bury the weak under their oppressive gaze.
This princess of the ice was impressive, she thought, and her presentation was certainly one worth remembering. She was sculpted like a statue of ice made flesh, standing tall and with a weighty presence fitting one that wore the name of Jorgenskull. How… winsome.
The duo of ice and fire stood statuesque in the chamber of black crystal and white bone, their meeting of two realms now begun. Even so, a blanket of silence hung in the air, one that seemed nigh underwhelming. Were she a dullard, she might have been concerned, offended, even. She watched Ixqueya closely, instead, and found herself being observed, perhaps even admired.
And so, she waited in the silence, allowing for the princess of undeath to take her in. It was good to be appreciated, there was great effort put into play in the cultivation of her form, and it would be a shame to be ignored; though she doubted many could, her diligence had surely put her in a league of her own, few beyond her kin could carry themselves with such refinement.
At last, the peace was broken, not by Ixqueya, but by her little minions. Disciples of death brought back from the Tree of Life’s canopy moved with precision and diligence, moving not toward her, but past her to her mount. At their mistress’ behest, they began to relieve Cihuatlatoani of her burdens, bringing them from the back of the beast down to the skeletal hands of reanimated servants.
“Winter,” she repeated slowly, a twinge of amusement in her voice as if she had tasted the word for the first time. “Your winter is certainly something unique. And cold, though that much seems a given.”
She took a half step forward, placing one hand idly on her hip as she briefly cast her gaze over her shoulder at the portal.
“Impressive nonetheless, regardless of its complexity. Perhaps the subways of the Dynasty should be afraid, you may yet put them out of business.” She set into motion the moment her hostess pivoted and set off, moving with a gait somewhere between the long strides of a soldier and the languorous meandering of a nobler on tour in a foreign abode. Her tail flitted idly behind her, a fluffy length of maroon tipped in white, and each step was accompanied by the soft jingling of a dozen tiny bells.
Her gaze caught for a moment the windows that revealed the world beyond, taking in the sights of distant black pools juxtaposed against rising spires of ice. What an insipid place, so dull and devoid of color. It was white, black, and blue, an assortment of colors that seemed to drain what little life remained in this land of the dead. Truly a depressing visage.
“That makes two of us,” she remarked, a light smirk tracing her lips for a moment. “Look at you, though, all shades of grade and only a few accents of color.” She tsked for a moment. “Don’t worry though, I’ve brought you some warmth from the motherland to… stave off the cold, I suppose, just a little bit of this and that for you, dearest cousin of mine. Nonetheless, you’re right though. So long we’ve been estranged, it certainly is about time we became acquainted in full.”
She followed Ixqueya in long strides, her gaze flitting between the alien architecture of this palace of black and white and her hostess before her; more accurately, her derriere. Perhaps not everything here is quite so dull after all.
Ixqueya let her heels kiss the Necro Ice with a deliberate, sovereign languor, as though each footfall were a rubric she inscribed upon her own dominion.
The stilettos, wrought of blackened bone and lacquered ice, elevated her already prodigious stature into something almost hierophantic. Every measured step drove the needle points a whisper’s depth into the crystalline floor. Sharp, crystalline reports rang out. Tik, tik, tik. Akin to a sculptor’s chisel striking sapphire in a vaulted gallery. The sound rebounded from the jagged walls and fractured pillars. It multiplied into a chorus of spectral counterpoints. So that it seemed an invisible procession of shades marched in cadence behind their mistress.
Her calves, forced into perpetual tension by the pitiless incline of the heels, curved into taut, elegant arcs beneath greaves of obsidian ice. Above them, the full articulation of her thighs and hips transformed motion into liturgy. Each stride bred a slow, pendular sway in her pelvis, a deliberate oscillation that suggested not indulgence but dominion; an empress choosing to weaponize the ungentle geometry of her own flesh.
Her cuirass was midnight leather armored with inlaid frost-steel and ribbed plates of Necro Ice. It was enshrined the prodigious grandeur of her bust like a reliquary built to cradle twin eclipsed suns. The armor did not so much conceal as consecrate. As she walked, that thoracic bounty moved with a solemn, measured gravitation. Not the vulgar jostling of a tavern wench. Rather, the grave, stately swing of censer-bowls heavy with incense. Each subtle rise and fall setting the corridor’s chill to a new and private rhythm. Along the upper curvature of each opulent globe, slivers of crystalline filigree caught the corpse-light and returned it in thin scimitar crescents that drew a line of pallid radiance over the shadowed valley of her décolletage.
Beneath that constricted isthmus of waist. Her figure erupted into the grand architecture of a huntress-goddess. Hoarfrost silk and umbral fabric had been tailored to a cruelty bordering on the devotional. The garment sheathed her pelvis like a second integument. It then cleaved into high, audacious slits along the thighs. Unabashedly granting the cavernous hall an unobstructed view of the full amplitude of her stride. Each time her weight shifted, the fabric stretched taut over the regal orb of her hindquarters, tracing the convexity of each hemisphere with cartographer’s precision before relaxing into a susurrus of silk and whispering scales.
Her posterior itself was a doctrine.
High, emphatic, and impossibly rounded, it bore the disciplined abundance of a deity who had never once ceded sovereignty over her own body. In motion it rippled with a luxuriant yet controlled undulation, a gluteal procession that suggested twin moons held in perfect orbit by an invisible, implacable gravity. Layers of hoarfrost silk, chitinous Necro Ice lamellae, and shadow-dyed leather conspired not to hide it, but to frame it; an icon set into an armory.
Behind her, Badamlyanhua followed, and Ixqueya felt the weight of the Verdant princess’s gaze as distinctly as the chill on her own cheek. Attention had its own temperature. It ran over her: down the line of exposed calves, up the curvature of knee and thigh, lingering with unembarrassed absorption upon the sumptuous amplitude of her croupe and the regal buoyancy of her cuirassed chest.
She allowed it.
For several paces, she affected the negligent poise of one wholly absorbed in her own thoughts. Ixqueya permitted her cousin’s eyes to map and remap the cathedrals of her form. Then, at a narrow choke in the corridor, she altered the choreography by a hair’s breadth. Her next footfall crossed minutely over the last, and that minute recalibration sent a more dramatic tremor through the lavish territories of her rear. The silks hitched the slightest degree higher upon bronzed flesh, and the twin, sovereign orbs of her rump rolled with devastating, cosmic majesty—less like mortal flesh and more like worlds shifting in their ordained courses.
Only then did she gift the jungle-born princess a backward glance.
One iris, glacial and preternaturally pale, slid over her shoulder and speared Badamlyanhua’s gaze precisely at the hemline where it had stalled. Cold blue met warm amber. The look that Ixqueya bestowed was not scandalized, nor coy. It carried the placid, amused superiority of a shrine idol catching a devotee in the act of furtive veneration.
Her lips, lacquered with the color of old sacrificial wine on new snow. they curled at one corner into a subtle, surgical smirk. A soft scoff, it was more exhalation than word had left her nostrils. A little plume of vapor that coiled in the air and dissipated before the frost reclaimed it. Without deigning to comment, she pivoted with the grace of a blade returning to its scabbard and led her guest through the next arch.
The laboratory opened before them like the interior of a frozen lung mid-breath.
Walls of tinted Necro Ice swelled and receded in brutal facets. Within those translucent planes, shrouded forms lay entombed. Here a Shaitan arm floated, skin flensed to render each sinew and tendon into harp-string clarity. There an elven-fine face, stretched into an asymptotic grimace, lips frozen around a final unspoken litany. Djinn sigils glimmered beneath the frost-suffocated flesh, once incandescent geometry now strangled in hoarfrost and silence. In other alcoves, organs hovered in crystalline suspension. Hearts, lungs, coils of viscera; arteries and veins branching like winter-bare trees inked in burgundy.
Copper racks marched along the aisles, heavy with instruments built for scholarly butchery. Bone saws honed to monastic exactitude; articulated probes etched with minute calibrations; needles thin as spider fangs, their tips thirsting for tissue. The floor beneath their heels was a palimpsest of concentric circles, each ring inscribed in tenuous gold ink with sigils, formulae, and fragments of theology—a polar grammar of agony and understanding interwoven.
Ixqueya inhaled, as though drawing sanctity into her lungs.
“The Shaitans,” she said, her voice a low, unhurried contralto smooth as water sliding under black ice, “are a walking admonition. Half Djinn, half elf, yet somehow less than either. Their courts have accomplished what many empires only dream of: they have fine-tuned two exalted bloodlines into a broth so insipid it scarcely feeds the dogs.”
Her heel punctuated the observation with a crisp click as she angled toward one particular cadaver suspended in the wall, its jaw locked open in an eternal, mute homily.
“I unmake them to trace the channels they obstruct,” she went on. “Parasites are loathsome, but instructive. They reveal the hidden veins of a body by their very clinging. Alone, they are refuse. Through them, the host is revealed.”
She lifted two fingers and laid them gently against the cold pane. Where her skin met the Necro Ice, frost thinned in a narrow, vertical track, exposing the occluded iris behind—a pale, milk-swollen Shaitan eye staring back in impotent, perpetual terror. Ixqueya’s expression did not flex so much as a muscle.
“There is no elven dilution in my marrow,” she continued softly. “The Djinn within me is Marid, deep-water and pressure-forged, not sky-addled storm vapour. The remainder is giantess. Crude, perhaps, but inexhaustible. Stone and tide.”
Her attention slanted back toward Badamlyanhua, and now she allowed herself a full, deliberate appraisal.
“You,” she said, “bear the desert’s contagion in a different configuration. Nokhoi ferocity twined around Jorgenskull bone. A hybrid. A chimera. A mongrel, if one wishes to be ungentle—but clearly a mongrel produced by competent engineers.”
Her eyes descended to the crimson leather sandals forcing the Verdant princess onto their merciless elevation, studied the slender, bell-laden ankles, then climbed the sculpted columns of calf to the lavish, lacquered breadth of her thighs. Each step sent a slow, viscous undulation across those honey-gilded pillars, oil and muscle and disciplined flesh conspiring in a symphony of movement.
Ixqueya’s gaze lingered, with calculated indecency, upon the wide amphitheater of Lyanhua’s hips. Fastened at their summit by the Tree-of-Life buckle, the waist narrowed into a credible span before exploding again into the monumental, honeyed continent of her rear. Two gleaming, convex provinces shared a border barely maintained by Verdant silk. Feathers, beads, and jade trinkets swung along that equatorial line like indecorous satellites, dancing attendance upon the vast, undulating landmass they framed. Above, the spider-silk bodice strained heroically against a thoracic plenitude that would have humbled most statues of fertility divinities. Each inhalation redrew the topography of her chest, tension and fabric combing new, ephemeral contours across the monumental frontage.
Ixqueya made no attempt to disguise the extent or precision of her scrutiny. Let the princess feel catalogued.
“For a mongrel,” she murmured after a beat, tone deceptively contemplative, “you are unexpectedly… coherent. The giantess strain has accepted more of the architectural burden than I anticipated. If you were entirely sand ape, I would already be debating which stretch of wall best suited your silhouette.”
A shard of amusement, cold and wolfish, flashed in her eyes. It was not kindness. It was, perhaps, recognition.
She abruptly turned then. Her heels cracking smartly against the inscribed ice. The skeletal cortege flowed aside like parted reeds. At the laboratory’s terminus rose the column: a colossal stalactite of Necro Ice. it was jagged and irregular, as though a glacier’s fang had punched upward through the palace floor. Within its translucent heart, veins of cobalt and phosphorescent gold wound and spiraled. It formed vortical geometries that never quite resolved into repetition.
Ixqueya’s locomotion changed as she approached her altar.
Her strides lengthened just a fraction. The cadence of her heels slowing into something almost languorous. The sigils carved underfoot painted pale, flickering ideograms up her greaves as she passed. Her cuirass rode the measured expansion of her lungs. Ixqueya’s chest rose with a gravitas that made the armor seem suddenly inadequate to its task. It then subsided with equal poise. Her hips, in response, moved like a well-practiced invocation, rolling in a deliberate, sinuous arc that whirled her rearward opulence into a slow, hypnotic procession. Silk whispered. Necro Ice scales chimed like frozen rosary beads rubbing together.
At the column she widened her stance a finger’s breadth, bowed from the hips, and set her palm upon the living ice. The effect was ruinous.
Her spine stretched into a long, feline curve, each vertebra a bead on a bowed string. The cuirass framed the forward spill of her prodigious bust. Those heavy, sanctified masses pressing with disciplined insistence against the binding clothing as gravity took its due. Behind, her hindquarters blossomed into their fullest and frankest articulation. The skirt, already unkind, drew itself across the opulent breadth of her derrière in a new, unforgiving tension. Outlining the lofty crown of each gluteal hemisphere and deepening the shadow at their juncture. Every micro-adjustment of balance sent a minute, rolling tremor through those exalted curves, more felt than seen, like a distant avalanche glimpsed in peripheral vision.
In that posture, she was sacrament and torment in equal measure.
The instant her fingers made full contact with the Necro Ice, the atmosphere modulated. The marrow-deep cold that had gnawed at Badamlyanhua’s oiled skin loosened its bite. Her exhalations no longer billowed in thick vaporous clouds. The pinprick ache in cartilage and extremity ebbed. Frost receded from the shoulders of the nearer thralls by an almost imperceptible margin. It did not become warm—but it became bearable, as if Winter itself had been ordered to step back one pace.
“The climate of this fortress,” Ixqueya said, hand splayed as though upon the breastbone of some slumbering titan, “is not a negotiation with the heavens. It is a jurisprudence. This spine imbibes the mire’s chill, the final sighs of the dead, and in return it submits to my will. When I instruct Winter to scour, it flays flesh from bone. When I command it to furl its claws, it curls up obediently at my feet.”
She let that pronouncement hang, then angled her head, allowing that glacial gaze to slip back along the line of her own body. And over the generous cantilever of her backside, the sweep of her waist, the taut cord of her spine. Until it caught Badamlyanhua’s attention once more. Ice-blue met amber, and something keen and sardonic glittered in the contact.
“Only fools defy such edicts,” she continued. “Fools, and corpses who no longer recall that their present condition is the bill collected for earlier defiance. I keep ample case studies in these walls.”
A fractional nod toward the embedded Shaitan made the point unnecessary to elaborate.
“You, however, do not carry yourself like a fool,” she said. “There is too much arithmetic in how you stand on those ludicrous stilts, too much practiced geometry in the way you distribute that extravagant ballast you are so proud of.”
Her mouth curved into that same razor-delicate smile, half-blessing, half-threat.
“So I will dispense with ornament and ask you as plainly as I ask anyone who dares my threshold.” Her voice dropped, acquiring a flinty undertone. “Why are you in my Winter, Badamlyanhua Jorgenskull. Well, beyond the very obvious gratification you derive from stalking behind me and auditing the procession of my curves? Gifts are a preface, not a thesis. Curiosity is tolerable, but I do not squander hours on guests who confuse admiration with intent.” She aired her suspicions that the “travel” was a ruse for some ulterior aim.
She lifted her hand from the column and rose to her full, intimidating height, her haunches giving one last, luxuriant shiver as they settled back into their habitual, imperial repose. The cuirass strained and then accommodated as she filled her lungs and let the air go in a slow, measured exhale.
Facing her cousin now, framed by the phosphorescent spine and the fresco of entombed Shaitans, Ixqueya regarded her with all the chilled focus of a magistrate weighing the fate of a city.
“I will know,” she said, enunciating each word with surgical clarity, “what you intend to draw from this realm, and what you propose to contribute to it. Only then will I decide whether you stand beside me as kin, sit at my table as ally, or decorate my ice as precedent.Don’t chide, I am a good mistress, I promise.” She quipped.
The icy severity in her gaze eased by the slightest, most perilous increment. The corner of her mouth climbed into a smirk that bordered on blasphemy, as though she had just made a joke at the expense of a god and fully expected the god to take it in stride.
“In the interim,” she conceded, tone turning wry, “you may continue to indulge your fascination with the view. A modicum of veneration is excellent for my humility.”
What followed was not a dainty laugh but a low, rich chortle. It was dark and resonant. It was like distant thunder rolling beneath a frozen sea that reverberated through bone, ice, and corpse-light. She turned once more and strode deeper into the palace, utterly certain that the jungle princess’s eyes would obediently follow.
The stilettos, wrought of blackened bone and lacquered ice, elevated her already prodigious stature into something almost hierophantic. Every measured step drove the needle points a whisper’s depth into the crystalline floor. Sharp, crystalline reports rang out. Tik, tik, tik. Akin to a sculptor’s chisel striking sapphire in a vaulted gallery. The sound rebounded from the jagged walls and fractured pillars. It multiplied into a chorus of spectral counterpoints. So that it seemed an invisible procession of shades marched in cadence behind their mistress.
Her calves, forced into perpetual tension by the pitiless incline of the heels, curved into taut, elegant arcs beneath greaves of obsidian ice. Above them, the full articulation of her thighs and hips transformed motion into liturgy. Each stride bred a slow, pendular sway in her pelvis, a deliberate oscillation that suggested not indulgence but dominion; an empress choosing to weaponize the ungentle geometry of her own flesh.
Her cuirass was midnight leather armored with inlaid frost-steel and ribbed plates of Necro Ice. It was enshrined the prodigious grandeur of her bust like a reliquary built to cradle twin eclipsed suns. The armor did not so much conceal as consecrate. As she walked, that thoracic bounty moved with a solemn, measured gravitation. Not the vulgar jostling of a tavern wench. Rather, the grave, stately swing of censer-bowls heavy with incense. Each subtle rise and fall setting the corridor’s chill to a new and private rhythm. Along the upper curvature of each opulent globe, slivers of crystalline filigree caught the corpse-light and returned it in thin scimitar crescents that drew a line of pallid radiance over the shadowed valley of her décolletage.
Beneath that constricted isthmus of waist. Her figure erupted into the grand architecture of a huntress-goddess. Hoarfrost silk and umbral fabric had been tailored to a cruelty bordering on the devotional. The garment sheathed her pelvis like a second integument. It then cleaved into high, audacious slits along the thighs. Unabashedly granting the cavernous hall an unobstructed view of the full amplitude of her stride. Each time her weight shifted, the fabric stretched taut over the regal orb of her hindquarters, tracing the convexity of each hemisphere with cartographer’s precision before relaxing into a susurrus of silk and whispering scales.
Her posterior itself was a doctrine.
High, emphatic, and impossibly rounded, it bore the disciplined abundance of a deity who had never once ceded sovereignty over her own body. In motion it rippled with a luxuriant yet controlled undulation, a gluteal procession that suggested twin moons held in perfect orbit by an invisible, implacable gravity. Layers of hoarfrost silk, chitinous Necro Ice lamellae, and shadow-dyed leather conspired not to hide it, but to frame it; an icon set into an armory.
Behind her, Badamlyanhua followed, and Ixqueya felt the weight of the Verdant princess’s gaze as distinctly as the chill on her own cheek. Attention had its own temperature. It ran over her: down the line of exposed calves, up the curvature of knee and thigh, lingering with unembarrassed absorption upon the sumptuous amplitude of her croupe and the regal buoyancy of her cuirassed chest.
She allowed it.
For several paces, she affected the negligent poise of one wholly absorbed in her own thoughts. Ixqueya permitted her cousin’s eyes to map and remap the cathedrals of her form. Then, at a narrow choke in the corridor, she altered the choreography by a hair’s breadth. Her next footfall crossed minutely over the last, and that minute recalibration sent a more dramatic tremor through the lavish territories of her rear. The silks hitched the slightest degree higher upon bronzed flesh, and the twin, sovereign orbs of her rump rolled with devastating, cosmic majesty—less like mortal flesh and more like worlds shifting in their ordained courses.
Only then did she gift the jungle-born princess a backward glance.
One iris, glacial and preternaturally pale, slid over her shoulder and speared Badamlyanhua’s gaze precisely at the hemline where it had stalled. Cold blue met warm amber. The look that Ixqueya bestowed was not scandalized, nor coy. It carried the placid, amused superiority of a shrine idol catching a devotee in the act of furtive veneration.
Her lips, lacquered with the color of old sacrificial wine on new snow. they curled at one corner into a subtle, surgical smirk. A soft scoff, it was more exhalation than word had left her nostrils. A little plume of vapor that coiled in the air and dissipated before the frost reclaimed it. Without deigning to comment, she pivoted with the grace of a blade returning to its scabbard and led her guest through the next arch.
The laboratory opened before them like the interior of a frozen lung mid-breath.
Walls of tinted Necro Ice swelled and receded in brutal facets. Within those translucent planes, shrouded forms lay entombed. Here a Shaitan arm floated, skin flensed to render each sinew and tendon into harp-string clarity. There an elven-fine face, stretched into an asymptotic grimace, lips frozen around a final unspoken litany. Djinn sigils glimmered beneath the frost-suffocated flesh, once incandescent geometry now strangled in hoarfrost and silence. In other alcoves, organs hovered in crystalline suspension. Hearts, lungs, coils of viscera; arteries and veins branching like winter-bare trees inked in burgundy.
Copper racks marched along the aisles, heavy with instruments built for scholarly butchery. Bone saws honed to monastic exactitude; articulated probes etched with minute calibrations; needles thin as spider fangs, their tips thirsting for tissue. The floor beneath their heels was a palimpsest of concentric circles, each ring inscribed in tenuous gold ink with sigils, formulae, and fragments of theology—a polar grammar of agony and understanding interwoven.
Ixqueya inhaled, as though drawing sanctity into her lungs.
“The Shaitans,” she said, her voice a low, unhurried contralto smooth as water sliding under black ice, “are a walking admonition. Half Djinn, half elf, yet somehow less than either. Their courts have accomplished what many empires only dream of: they have fine-tuned two exalted bloodlines into a broth so insipid it scarcely feeds the dogs.”
Her heel punctuated the observation with a crisp click as she angled toward one particular cadaver suspended in the wall, its jaw locked open in an eternal, mute homily.
“I unmake them to trace the channels they obstruct,” she went on. “Parasites are loathsome, but instructive. They reveal the hidden veins of a body by their very clinging. Alone, they are refuse. Through them, the host is revealed.”
She lifted two fingers and laid them gently against the cold pane. Where her skin met the Necro Ice, frost thinned in a narrow, vertical track, exposing the occluded iris behind—a pale, milk-swollen Shaitan eye staring back in impotent, perpetual terror. Ixqueya’s expression did not flex so much as a muscle.
“There is no elven dilution in my marrow,” she continued softly. “The Djinn within me is Marid, deep-water and pressure-forged, not sky-addled storm vapour. The remainder is giantess. Crude, perhaps, but inexhaustible. Stone and tide.”
Her attention slanted back toward Badamlyanhua, and now she allowed herself a full, deliberate appraisal.
“You,” she said, “bear the desert’s contagion in a different configuration. Nokhoi ferocity twined around Jorgenskull bone. A hybrid. A chimera. A mongrel, if one wishes to be ungentle—but clearly a mongrel produced by competent engineers.”
Her eyes descended to the crimson leather sandals forcing the Verdant princess onto their merciless elevation, studied the slender, bell-laden ankles, then climbed the sculpted columns of calf to the lavish, lacquered breadth of her thighs. Each step sent a slow, viscous undulation across those honey-gilded pillars, oil and muscle and disciplined flesh conspiring in a symphony of movement.
Ixqueya’s gaze lingered, with calculated indecency, upon the wide amphitheater of Lyanhua’s hips. Fastened at their summit by the Tree-of-Life buckle, the waist narrowed into a credible span before exploding again into the monumental, honeyed continent of her rear. Two gleaming, convex provinces shared a border barely maintained by Verdant silk. Feathers, beads, and jade trinkets swung along that equatorial line like indecorous satellites, dancing attendance upon the vast, undulating landmass they framed. Above, the spider-silk bodice strained heroically against a thoracic plenitude that would have humbled most statues of fertility divinities. Each inhalation redrew the topography of her chest, tension and fabric combing new, ephemeral contours across the monumental frontage.
Ixqueya made no attempt to disguise the extent or precision of her scrutiny. Let the princess feel catalogued.
“For a mongrel,” she murmured after a beat, tone deceptively contemplative, “you are unexpectedly… coherent. The giantess strain has accepted more of the architectural burden than I anticipated. If you were entirely sand ape, I would already be debating which stretch of wall best suited your silhouette.”
A shard of amusement, cold and wolfish, flashed in her eyes. It was not kindness. It was, perhaps, recognition.
She abruptly turned then. Her heels cracking smartly against the inscribed ice. The skeletal cortege flowed aside like parted reeds. At the laboratory’s terminus rose the column: a colossal stalactite of Necro Ice. it was jagged and irregular, as though a glacier’s fang had punched upward through the palace floor. Within its translucent heart, veins of cobalt and phosphorescent gold wound and spiraled. It formed vortical geometries that never quite resolved into repetition.
Ixqueya’s locomotion changed as she approached her altar.
Her strides lengthened just a fraction. The cadence of her heels slowing into something almost languorous. The sigils carved underfoot painted pale, flickering ideograms up her greaves as she passed. Her cuirass rode the measured expansion of her lungs. Ixqueya’s chest rose with a gravitas that made the armor seem suddenly inadequate to its task. It then subsided with equal poise. Her hips, in response, moved like a well-practiced invocation, rolling in a deliberate, sinuous arc that whirled her rearward opulence into a slow, hypnotic procession. Silk whispered. Necro Ice scales chimed like frozen rosary beads rubbing together.
At the column she widened her stance a finger’s breadth, bowed from the hips, and set her palm upon the living ice. The effect was ruinous.
Her spine stretched into a long, feline curve, each vertebra a bead on a bowed string. The cuirass framed the forward spill of her prodigious bust. Those heavy, sanctified masses pressing with disciplined insistence against the binding clothing as gravity took its due. Behind, her hindquarters blossomed into their fullest and frankest articulation. The skirt, already unkind, drew itself across the opulent breadth of her derrière in a new, unforgiving tension. Outlining the lofty crown of each gluteal hemisphere and deepening the shadow at their juncture. Every micro-adjustment of balance sent a minute, rolling tremor through those exalted curves, more felt than seen, like a distant avalanche glimpsed in peripheral vision.
In that posture, she was sacrament and torment in equal measure.
The instant her fingers made full contact with the Necro Ice, the atmosphere modulated. The marrow-deep cold that had gnawed at Badamlyanhua’s oiled skin loosened its bite. Her exhalations no longer billowed in thick vaporous clouds. The pinprick ache in cartilage and extremity ebbed. Frost receded from the shoulders of the nearer thralls by an almost imperceptible margin. It did not become warm—but it became bearable, as if Winter itself had been ordered to step back one pace.
“The climate of this fortress,” Ixqueya said, hand splayed as though upon the breastbone of some slumbering titan, “is not a negotiation with the heavens. It is a jurisprudence. This spine imbibes the mire’s chill, the final sighs of the dead, and in return it submits to my will. When I instruct Winter to scour, it flays flesh from bone. When I command it to furl its claws, it curls up obediently at my feet.”
She let that pronouncement hang, then angled her head, allowing that glacial gaze to slip back along the line of her own body. And over the generous cantilever of her backside, the sweep of her waist, the taut cord of her spine. Until it caught Badamlyanhua’s attention once more. Ice-blue met amber, and something keen and sardonic glittered in the contact.
“Only fools defy such edicts,” she continued. “Fools, and corpses who no longer recall that their present condition is the bill collected for earlier defiance. I keep ample case studies in these walls.”
A fractional nod toward the embedded Shaitan made the point unnecessary to elaborate.
“You, however, do not carry yourself like a fool,” she said. “There is too much arithmetic in how you stand on those ludicrous stilts, too much practiced geometry in the way you distribute that extravagant ballast you are so proud of.”
Her mouth curved into that same razor-delicate smile, half-blessing, half-threat.
“So I will dispense with ornament and ask you as plainly as I ask anyone who dares my threshold.” Her voice dropped, acquiring a flinty undertone. “Why are you in my Winter, Badamlyanhua Jorgenskull. Well, beyond the very obvious gratification you derive from stalking behind me and auditing the procession of my curves? Gifts are a preface, not a thesis. Curiosity is tolerable, but I do not squander hours on guests who confuse admiration with intent.” She aired her suspicions that the “travel” was a ruse for some ulterior aim.
She lifted her hand from the column and rose to her full, intimidating height, her haunches giving one last, luxuriant shiver as they settled back into their habitual, imperial repose. The cuirass strained and then accommodated as she filled her lungs and let the air go in a slow, measured exhale.
Facing her cousin now, framed by the phosphorescent spine and the fresco of entombed Shaitans, Ixqueya regarded her with all the chilled focus of a magistrate weighing the fate of a city.
“I will know,” she said, enunciating each word with surgical clarity, “what you intend to draw from this realm, and what you propose to contribute to it. Only then will I decide whether you stand beside me as kin, sit at my table as ally, or decorate my ice as precedent.Don’t chide, I am a good mistress, I promise.” She quipped.
The icy severity in her gaze eased by the slightest, most perilous increment. The corner of her mouth climbed into a smirk that bordered on blasphemy, as though she had just made a joke at the expense of a god and fully expected the god to take it in stride.
“In the interim,” she conceded, tone turning wry, “you may continue to indulge your fascination with the view. A modicum of veneration is excellent for my humility.”
What followed was not a dainty laugh but a low, rich chortle. It was dark and resonant. It was like distant thunder rolling beneath a frozen sea that reverberated through bone, ice, and corpse-light. She turned once more and strode deeper into the palace, utterly certain that the jungle princess’s eyes would obediently follow.
The duo pushed onward through the estate, a prestigious procession of nobility, one the mistress of this icy domain, the other a denizen of the jungle’s warmth and nature’s vibrance. It was a juxtaposition of two worlds, Lyan a vessel of the Dynasty’s verdant splendor, adorned in color and radiating the heat of summer, Ixqueya the epitome of this realm’s icy misery.
It was, admittedly, unimpressive so far. She had heard only whispers before, fleeting tales of distant realms and the kin she had never had the pleasure of meeting in person. In the homeland, her family ruled all that was good and full of life, from the Dynastic jungles to the Skeletal Highway. To the curs of the empire, the rest was left. The Shaitan ruled over ash and sand, while the Dynasty ruled over the cradle of life. Here seemed seldom different from the desert, trading heat and sand for chill and snow. The architecture was somewhat impressive, she supposed, but it was still dull and rather monochromatic.
There was no color or joy here yet, just the solemn dead and their mistress. From what she had heard, the rest of Hextor was not quite so frigid and miserable. Perhaps the rest of her kin liked Ixqueya the least and had put her in the least appetizing lands, or perhaps Ixqueya was simply fond of joyless, miserable tundras and had few qualms making one her home. She supposed she would find out in due time.
It was certainly true that this place, so far, teetered on the cusp of dullness. Perhaps more intriguing secrets lurked deeper within the labyrinth of black ice and pale bone, but as of now, Ixqueya was the only thing here that seemed worth paying any mind to—their meeting thus far had only just begun, but she was, undoubtedly, a Jorgenskull. It was always easy to know when one was kindred in such a way; few possessed the presence that her ilk did.
Indeed, the two of them together would be the most noteworthy thing in this realm, two giantesses of Jorgenskull. All Ixqueya really needed were some better clothes; her current garbs were fine, but there was already so little color in this place, she was in need of some liveliness and life in this place of frost and death. Some greens, reds, and golds would do wonders here.
The two giantesses made for quite the procession, strutting through blackened halls cast in pale light. The halls resonated with the clicking of their heels, a sharp and cutting sound like nails against glass. Lyan was acutely aware of the way the woman held herself, and it was one of the things that she could certainly respect. While their time together thus far had been brief, she was starting to build a picture of who Ixqueya was, and more would fall into place with time. She moved deliberately and with discipline, not like a soldier on a march, no, it reminded her more of a dancer. It was purposeful, each movement a showcase of her oneness of self, her control of her flesh. She did not curl inward to hide her form from the world—quite the contrary—she made sure all would bear witness. Lyanhua understood that; it was something they had in common. Some people were meant to be seen.
She carried herself similarly, though it was no conscious effort now. She was a giantess who towered over lesser species, and she had cultivated her physical form for the utilitarian needs of a soldier. That was one of the differences between the two—Ixqueya’s form was practical, yes, but her muscles were defined, chiseled. Attractive, for certain, but Lyan saw no purpose in discarded fat in such a manner, it would only serve to make her weaker. She kept her limbs thick, her muscles there, but hidden beneath her grander mass. Every feast was fuel to the fire, and she wore the weight it added to her bulky, statuesque form proudly.
Her movement reflected as much. She moved with poise and precision, but not of a dancer. She needed not dainty elegance, only the unrelenting march of a soldier. Those before her would make way, lest she move through them. Her legs moved with long strides, her heeled sandals not a testament to vanity, but a tool of discipline. Any man could wear boots, it took skill and proficiency to perambulate in these stilted shoes.
As they traversed the halls of blackened ice and bleached bone, there was, in theory, a deal to look at. Windows lined the halls, revealing the bleak, frozen landscape beyond, and the unorthodox palace was certainly a fascinating construct. Alas, she cared little for architecture beyond the initial appearance, and so her mind wandered to more interesting matters. Those matters happened to be right in front of her.
Drab as this place happened to be, her gaze fell upon Ixqueya, drifting from the woman’s hair down to her posterior. There, she was greeted with the most interesting sight so far. The mistress of this realm was shaping up to be quite the sight so far. Her derriere was more than shapely and pleasing on the eye, swaying with each step. Even hidden beneath her attire, it made itself known, and each shift saw the fabric go taut, revealing the details once more. She was certainly of giant kind—she knew of no other species that could compare.
She allowed herself to take in the contours of Ixqueya’s plump backside as the two of them walked. It complemented her gait well, and the pendulous sway of her hips would be tantalizing for those of little discipline. As such, it was fortunate that Lyanhua was a woman of restraint, but it didn’t detract from the sight’s appeal. She had nigh grown accustomed to the rhythm of their walk when a subtle alteration occurred, enough so that a ripple was sent through the frost princess’ derriere. The flesh jiggled for a brief moment, the fabric hitching before settling back into its former rhythm, but Lyan had borne witness.
It was then that their eyes met, frigid blue and warm amber locked, if only for some moments. The look on the princess’ face seemed almost smug, as if she had achieved something of note or caught her in some grand act. Lyanhua presented no appearance of embarrassment, only mild indifference laced with amusement. There were many fat asses in the world to bear witness to, so to speak, this would not be the first nor the last. Nonetheless, she could not suppress the mild stiffness she felt manifest beneath her skirt, if only for a moment.
Passage through the next arch brought them to their destination, laying out a macabre sight before the two of them. Lyanhua was greeted with a laboratory of sorts; the crystalline wall did more than support the ceiling here—within its translucent embrace, limbs and viscera lay suspended as if frozen in time. An arm here, a face there, an assortment of offal in the corner, it was a comprehensive anatomical collection, to be certain, though she herself was no scientist, so the sights were only mildly unsightly.
It could be said for certain that this was a poor welcome thus far; had she been hosting Ixqueya inversely, she’d have at least offered her a drink. Instead, she had been brought to a room fit for studies and dissections, things that held no intrigue to her. Perhaps this was an attempt at intimidation? A poor one, if so. Corpses were not a new phenomenon to her, and the Dynasty was quite diligent in its recycling of flesh.
At last, it seemed that the mistress of frost deigned to speak once more. She spoke of the Shaitan now, dwellers of the desert who had built their fortresses of sand and prayed to their illusive deity. It was quite clear where she stood regarding them, and it seemed she bore little love and less respect for the short lantern bearers and their citadels of sandstone.
Lyan stood stationary in the room’s center, allowing her hands to rest on her wide hips as she listened. She imagined that this insightful discussion was building up to some greater point, and that her host had not made a pit stop to showcase her admittedly comprehensive taxidermy collection. Of course, it was then that Ixqueya began her assessment of Lyanhua, wordsmith that she was. Her eyes narrowed ever so slightly for a moment, though her facial expression otherwise remained much of the same—mildly amused, the curve of her lip slightly upturned.
“Such glowing hospitality, and kindness to boot,” she spoke plainly, her voice coming out dry yet satirical. If this is what counted for a warm welcome in this land, then she might start to find Ixqueya’s scathing critiques on the Shaitan hypocritical, but then again, it seemed this place knew little of warmth. “Astute, as well, a woman of many talents.”
She found the princess’ strategy interesting, for certain. Was she attempting to bait her into vitriol, or did she simply lack the social tact to communicate without provocation? Whatever the case, she had no intention of lashing out, it would be a waste of energy, and she was a guest besides, despite the subpar reception of her host. Besides, Ixqueya was kin. Were she some lowborn of no renown, she would have rewarded her with a backhand and continued with her life. Ixqueya was family, though, there must surely be some middle ground to be found between them. Perhaps this was only the rocky beginning of a lovely friendship, who knew?
She allowed the princess to take in her form without protest, spreading her arms on each side and canting her hip as Ixqueya took her time inspecting the jungle princess. Her crimson tail swayed behind her lazily. Truth be told, she enjoyed being inspected; she was no stranger to furtive gazes, but seldom did she have the pleasure of being admired by another princess. It was refreshing.
“I am glad you find me up to your standards, though it should come as no surprise. One of my mothers may have hailed from the Nokhoi of the Obsidian Canyon, but I was born and raised in the heart of civilization amongst giant kind. Even of mixed origins, the warmth of the jungle rests in my bones and the heart of its people beats in my chest. Only those born under Iron-Bark canopies would understand, I suppose.” She offered a warm smile and clasped her hands together. “Besides, I imagine it would grow awful boring being trapped in a wall, I think I much prefer to remain out here.”
She took only a few steps forward as Ixqueya turned on her heel and made way to the ice. This time, the princess of frost swept downward to bring her hand to the ice itself in a deft, supple motion. Despite the definition that once more manifest at the frost princess’ derriere, Lyanhua made no attempt to gaze upon the sight, turning her attention elsewhere. She brought a hand up and gazed at her nails for a moment, only returning her attention to her hostess when she began to speak once more.
“How convenient, and useful, too. You must be fond of the cold to keep things so frigid,” she commented, giving credit where it was due. If they had this in the Boneyard, she’d never have to suffer sweat between her breasts again. “You must have many fools abound to keep your menagerie of offal so stocked. I can assure you that I will be glad not to be one of them.”
At the mention of ludicrous stilts, she lowered her gaze to her own sandals, then shifted it to Ixqueya’s similar footwear, before bringing it to the princess’ face.
“Tools of discipline,” she said dismissively. “Anyone can walk flat-footed, but elevated? Not so much.”
It was a humorous prospect that, thus far, any type of ornament had been preserved. Nonetheless, it seemed that it was time for them to get down to the essentials of business at last.
“Down to business, then. My journey to this realm of yours is one of multiple purposes,” she would state, her words spokenly now with a steady cadence, yet still laced with the essence of amiability. “South beyond the walls of the Dynasty, the Shaitan of the desert stir like malcontent beasts of a cage. A miasma, so to speak, has spread on the wind, and even we now smell it in the Dynasty, much to our chagrin. Our borders are fortified, but the truth of this brewing situation eludes us, for the time being. I intend to investigate the source of this disturbance myself, and this lovely realm of yours is currently the first stop of my journey.” She folded her hands behind her back, turning her gaze off of Ixqueya and onto the ice walls stuffed with corpses.
“In the same stead, I, for one, am very fond of my family and the lineage we have created. Our bloodline has spread far, so much so that kin such as you and I have remained alienated until now. As kindred of House Jorgenskull, I wish to know this family of mine in Hextor, earnestly. Only through unity can we consolidate the two halves of our dynastic tree; even if we hail from separate branches, we come from the same trunk. I only hope we can come to regard each other as the family that we are, and cooperate towards a productive future.”
She refrained from scoffing as the princess chortled her way down the hall. She was, admittedly, justified in her pride of her flesh, but she seemed to misconstrued her guest’s fleeting interest in her fat ass as some form of deeper reverence. A child’s folly, perhaps true for whatever midwits she may have worshiping her usually, but a folly nonetheless in this case. She made no concentrated effort to indulge in curiosity or pettily withhold her gaze, continuing on with intermittent glances at the shapely rear while otherwise focusing her attention elsewhere.
It was, admittedly, unimpressive so far. She had heard only whispers before, fleeting tales of distant realms and the kin she had never had the pleasure of meeting in person. In the homeland, her family ruled all that was good and full of life, from the Dynastic jungles to the Skeletal Highway. To the curs of the empire, the rest was left. The Shaitan ruled over ash and sand, while the Dynasty ruled over the cradle of life. Here seemed seldom different from the desert, trading heat and sand for chill and snow. The architecture was somewhat impressive, she supposed, but it was still dull and rather monochromatic.
There was no color or joy here yet, just the solemn dead and their mistress. From what she had heard, the rest of Hextor was not quite so frigid and miserable. Perhaps the rest of her kin liked Ixqueya the least and had put her in the least appetizing lands, or perhaps Ixqueya was simply fond of joyless, miserable tundras and had few qualms making one her home. She supposed she would find out in due time.
It was certainly true that this place, so far, teetered on the cusp of dullness. Perhaps more intriguing secrets lurked deeper within the labyrinth of black ice and pale bone, but as of now, Ixqueya was the only thing here that seemed worth paying any mind to—their meeting thus far had only just begun, but she was, undoubtedly, a Jorgenskull. It was always easy to know when one was kindred in such a way; few possessed the presence that her ilk did.
Indeed, the two of them together would be the most noteworthy thing in this realm, two giantesses of Jorgenskull. All Ixqueya really needed were some better clothes; her current garbs were fine, but there was already so little color in this place, she was in need of some liveliness and life in this place of frost and death. Some greens, reds, and golds would do wonders here.
The two giantesses made for quite the procession, strutting through blackened halls cast in pale light. The halls resonated with the clicking of their heels, a sharp and cutting sound like nails against glass. Lyan was acutely aware of the way the woman held herself, and it was one of the things that she could certainly respect. While their time together thus far had been brief, she was starting to build a picture of who Ixqueya was, and more would fall into place with time. She moved deliberately and with discipline, not like a soldier on a march, no, it reminded her more of a dancer. It was purposeful, each movement a showcase of her oneness of self, her control of her flesh. She did not curl inward to hide her form from the world—quite the contrary—she made sure all would bear witness. Lyanhua understood that; it was something they had in common. Some people were meant to be seen.
She carried herself similarly, though it was no conscious effort now. She was a giantess who towered over lesser species, and she had cultivated her physical form for the utilitarian needs of a soldier. That was one of the differences between the two—Ixqueya’s form was practical, yes, but her muscles were defined, chiseled. Attractive, for certain, but Lyan saw no purpose in discarded fat in such a manner, it would only serve to make her weaker. She kept her limbs thick, her muscles there, but hidden beneath her grander mass. Every feast was fuel to the fire, and she wore the weight it added to her bulky, statuesque form proudly.
Her movement reflected as much. She moved with poise and precision, but not of a dancer. She needed not dainty elegance, only the unrelenting march of a soldier. Those before her would make way, lest she move through them. Her legs moved with long strides, her heeled sandals not a testament to vanity, but a tool of discipline. Any man could wear boots, it took skill and proficiency to perambulate in these stilted shoes.
As they traversed the halls of blackened ice and bleached bone, there was, in theory, a deal to look at. Windows lined the halls, revealing the bleak, frozen landscape beyond, and the unorthodox palace was certainly a fascinating construct. Alas, she cared little for architecture beyond the initial appearance, and so her mind wandered to more interesting matters. Those matters happened to be right in front of her.
Drab as this place happened to be, her gaze fell upon Ixqueya, drifting from the woman’s hair down to her posterior. There, she was greeted with the most interesting sight so far. The mistress of this realm was shaping up to be quite the sight so far. Her derriere was more than shapely and pleasing on the eye, swaying with each step. Even hidden beneath her attire, it made itself known, and each shift saw the fabric go taut, revealing the details once more. She was certainly of giant kind—she knew of no other species that could compare.
She allowed herself to take in the contours of Ixqueya’s plump backside as the two of them walked. It complemented her gait well, and the pendulous sway of her hips would be tantalizing for those of little discipline. As such, it was fortunate that Lyanhua was a woman of restraint, but it didn’t detract from the sight’s appeal. She had nigh grown accustomed to the rhythm of their walk when a subtle alteration occurred, enough so that a ripple was sent through the frost princess’ derriere. The flesh jiggled for a brief moment, the fabric hitching before settling back into its former rhythm, but Lyan had borne witness.
It was then that their eyes met, frigid blue and warm amber locked, if only for some moments. The look on the princess’ face seemed almost smug, as if she had achieved something of note or caught her in some grand act. Lyanhua presented no appearance of embarrassment, only mild indifference laced with amusement. There were many fat asses in the world to bear witness to, so to speak, this would not be the first nor the last. Nonetheless, she could not suppress the mild stiffness she felt manifest beneath her skirt, if only for a moment.
Passage through the next arch brought them to their destination, laying out a macabre sight before the two of them. Lyanhua was greeted with a laboratory of sorts; the crystalline wall did more than support the ceiling here—within its translucent embrace, limbs and viscera lay suspended as if frozen in time. An arm here, a face there, an assortment of offal in the corner, it was a comprehensive anatomical collection, to be certain, though she herself was no scientist, so the sights were only mildly unsightly.
It could be said for certain that this was a poor welcome thus far; had she been hosting Ixqueya inversely, she’d have at least offered her a drink. Instead, she had been brought to a room fit for studies and dissections, things that held no intrigue to her. Perhaps this was an attempt at intimidation? A poor one, if so. Corpses were not a new phenomenon to her, and the Dynasty was quite diligent in its recycling of flesh.
At last, it seemed that the mistress of frost deigned to speak once more. She spoke of the Shaitan now, dwellers of the desert who had built their fortresses of sand and prayed to their illusive deity. It was quite clear where she stood regarding them, and it seemed she bore little love and less respect for the short lantern bearers and their citadels of sandstone.
Lyan stood stationary in the room’s center, allowing her hands to rest on her wide hips as she listened. She imagined that this insightful discussion was building up to some greater point, and that her host had not made a pit stop to showcase her admittedly comprehensive taxidermy collection. Of course, it was then that Ixqueya began her assessment of Lyanhua, wordsmith that she was. Her eyes narrowed ever so slightly for a moment, though her facial expression otherwise remained much of the same—mildly amused, the curve of her lip slightly upturned.
“Such glowing hospitality, and kindness to boot,” she spoke plainly, her voice coming out dry yet satirical. If this is what counted for a warm welcome in this land, then she might start to find Ixqueya’s scathing critiques on the Shaitan hypocritical, but then again, it seemed this place knew little of warmth. “Astute, as well, a woman of many talents.”
She found the princess’ strategy interesting, for certain. Was she attempting to bait her into vitriol, or did she simply lack the social tact to communicate without provocation? Whatever the case, she had no intention of lashing out, it would be a waste of energy, and she was a guest besides, despite the subpar reception of her host. Besides, Ixqueya was kin. Were she some lowborn of no renown, she would have rewarded her with a backhand and continued with her life. Ixqueya was family, though, there must surely be some middle ground to be found between them. Perhaps this was only the rocky beginning of a lovely friendship, who knew?
She allowed the princess to take in her form without protest, spreading her arms on each side and canting her hip as Ixqueya took her time inspecting the jungle princess. Her crimson tail swayed behind her lazily. Truth be told, she enjoyed being inspected; she was no stranger to furtive gazes, but seldom did she have the pleasure of being admired by another princess. It was refreshing.
“I am glad you find me up to your standards, though it should come as no surprise. One of my mothers may have hailed from the Nokhoi of the Obsidian Canyon, but I was born and raised in the heart of civilization amongst giant kind. Even of mixed origins, the warmth of the jungle rests in my bones and the heart of its people beats in my chest. Only those born under Iron-Bark canopies would understand, I suppose.” She offered a warm smile and clasped her hands together. “Besides, I imagine it would grow awful boring being trapped in a wall, I think I much prefer to remain out here.”
She took only a few steps forward as Ixqueya turned on her heel and made way to the ice. This time, the princess of frost swept downward to bring her hand to the ice itself in a deft, supple motion. Despite the definition that once more manifest at the frost princess’ derriere, Lyanhua made no attempt to gaze upon the sight, turning her attention elsewhere. She brought a hand up and gazed at her nails for a moment, only returning her attention to her hostess when she began to speak once more.
“How convenient, and useful, too. You must be fond of the cold to keep things so frigid,” she commented, giving credit where it was due. If they had this in the Boneyard, she’d never have to suffer sweat between her breasts again. “You must have many fools abound to keep your menagerie of offal so stocked. I can assure you that I will be glad not to be one of them.”
At the mention of ludicrous stilts, she lowered her gaze to her own sandals, then shifted it to Ixqueya’s similar footwear, before bringing it to the princess’ face.
“Tools of discipline,” she said dismissively. “Anyone can walk flat-footed, but elevated? Not so much.”
It was a humorous prospect that, thus far, any type of ornament had been preserved. Nonetheless, it seemed that it was time for them to get down to the essentials of business at last.
“Down to business, then. My journey to this realm of yours is one of multiple purposes,” she would state, her words spokenly now with a steady cadence, yet still laced with the essence of amiability. “South beyond the walls of the Dynasty, the Shaitan of the desert stir like malcontent beasts of a cage. A miasma, so to speak, has spread on the wind, and even we now smell it in the Dynasty, much to our chagrin. Our borders are fortified, but the truth of this brewing situation eludes us, for the time being. I intend to investigate the source of this disturbance myself, and this lovely realm of yours is currently the first stop of my journey.” She folded her hands behind her back, turning her gaze off of Ixqueya and onto the ice walls stuffed with corpses.
“In the same stead, I, for one, am very fond of my family and the lineage we have created. Our bloodline has spread far, so much so that kin such as you and I have remained alienated until now. As kindred of House Jorgenskull, I wish to know this family of mine in Hextor, earnestly. Only through unity can we consolidate the two halves of our dynastic tree; even if we hail from separate branches, we come from the same trunk. I only hope we can come to regard each other as the family that we are, and cooperate towards a productive future.”
She refrained from scoffing as the princess chortled her way down the hall. She was, admittedly, justified in her pride of her flesh, but she seemed to misconstrued her guest’s fleeting interest in her fat ass as some form of deeper reverence. A child’s folly, perhaps true for whatever midwits she may have worshiping her usually, but a folly nonetheless in this case. She made no concentrated effort to indulge in curiosity or pettily withhold her gaze, continuing on with intermittent glances at the shapely rear while otherwise focusing her attention elsewhere.
Ixqueya watched her cousin’s composure with a priestess’s patience and a butcher’s eye. When Badamlyanhua finished her careful declaration, the Mistress of Hoarfrost let silence settle like new snow. Only the faint creak of ice and the twin staccato of their heels disturbed it.
Then Ixqueya’s gaze descended. Once. Unhurried. Clinical.
The tight spider-silk at Lyanhua’s hips did a poor job of discretion. For a brief heartbeat it had stretched taut, announcing a very mortal reaction to a very deliberate sway. The jungle princess’s face had remained decorous. The skirt had not.
“I commend your discipline,” Ixqueya said at last, voice soft as fur-lined steel. “Although your fabric is less circumspect than your tongue. I require no necromantic rites to make flesh stand in reverence.”
One corner of her mouth lifted, the faintest crescent of wintry mirth. “Do not fret. As you so prettily phrased it, two branches of the same tree may yet incline toward one another. I am seldom offended by honest growth.”
She turned on her heel, Frostfang resting against her shoulder like a ceremonial crozier. “Come. You have had your tour of ossuaries and lecture halls. It is time I showed you where Winter pretends to be kind.”
They walked. The passage widened, vertebral arches of bone curving overhead until the corridor felt like the interior of some frozen leviathan. Ahead, the light changed, cool blue yielding to a softer, aqueous radiance.
The hot springs lay within a vast, vaulted grotto. The walls were formed of stratified Necro Ice, veins of cobalt and ghost-lantern white twisting through them like illuminated scripture. Terraces of black basalt stepped downward in concentric rings. Each shelf cradled pools hollowed from the stone, brimming with steaming water that glowed from within in hues of opaline aqua and faint jade, as though someone had liquefied the aurora and poured it into basins.
Above, the ceiling opened into a great circular oculus. Its rim was carved with skulls and moons in alternating sequence, a coronet of death and tide. The sky beyond brooded, a lid of thick iron cloud.
Ixqueya lifted her hand. Her fingers traced a sigil in the air, spare and absolute, the gesture of a magistrate signing a death warrant. The clouds convulsed. Then parted.
A sheet of hard, crystalline daylight speared through the aperture. The low vault of cloud dissolved, revealing a high, immaculate firmament, a cerulean well that seemed to have no floor. Sunlight struck the vapor rising from the pools and broke into uncountable halos, each droplet a miniature host bearing refracted fire. The cavern brightened until bone and ice and basalt all shone with a subdued, sanctified glow.
“At my convenience,” Ixqueya murmured, watching the sky rearrange itself, “the firmament revises its homily.”
An ossified attendant materialised from a side alcove, its bones polished to an ivory sheen and inlaid with faint sigils of service. It bore a tray of dark metal. Upon it rested two narrow-necked ampullae of fogged glass and cups turned from vertebrae, the rims smoothed to a dull, intimate softness. The liquid within the flasks was pale and viscous, pearlescent, moving with the slow grace of melted snow thickened with sap.
Ixqueya descended the basalt steps toward the nearest pool. Her heels clipped the stone with that sharp, judicial rhythm, each impact a syllable in a cold litany. The new armor that embraced her made the sound fuller, more resonant.
The transformation had not vanished with the laboratory. If anything, the warmer air made the chitin gleam more vividly. Over her cuirass of midnight leather there now lay an over-skin of iridescent plates, scaled like a ceremonial carapace. Each panel caught the light in gradients of ember-orange, deep carmine and electric turquoise, the palette of desert sunset rewritten in insect anatomy. The plates hugged the architecture of her bust and waist, framing her abundant curves as if sheathed in the husk of some divine beetle.
Her shoulders bore pauldron-like growths from which jointed limbs unfurled. Four arachnid appendages rose from her upper back in a splayed, hierarchical fan. Their segments were lacquered in burnished ochre and obsidian, knotted at each joint with whorls of Necro Ice. At their tips, crystalline claws curved inward like frozen thuribles, each capable of either caress or vivisection.
Behind her, the scorpion tail coiled and uncoiled with meditative languor. Its segments resembled prayer beads carved from amber and onyx, each one rimed with hoarfrost. At the terminus, a mace of jagged Necro Ice bloomed, a stellar flail whose spikes emitted a faint inner luminescence, as if it housed captive stars. When it moved, small motes of ice-dust drifted away like extinguished prayers.
Every step made her a living reliquary, something halfway between martyr and predator.
She halted close enough that Badamlyanhua could feel the exhalation from the steaming pool lick at the backs of her calves while Ixqueya’s colder aura brushed the front of her body. The temperature gradient alone felt like a hand.
Ixqueya took the two vertebral cups from the servant. She poured the pale liquor herself, the liquid threading from flask to bone with unhurried luxuriance. Then she turned and stepped into Badamlyanhua’s space, no more distance between them than the span of a joined hand.
She offered one cup. She did it in such a way that Lyanhua had to wrap her fingers over Ixqueya’s knuckles to claim it, skin meeting skin along the back of the hand in a line of cool contrast.
“Drink,” Ixqueya said. The word was not suggestion. It was sacrament. “Frost-flower distillate, laced with marrow-sweet. It baptises the throat against my climate and tells me how quickly your blood and mine find concord.”
She did not move aside. Her presence became a vertical pressure, a column of will. Up close, the scent of her was more complex: cold iron, yes, but also spices that belonged to markets far from here, and a faint sweetness like burnt sugar laid over pine resin.
As Badamlyanhua lifted the cup, the limbs at Ixqueya’s back adjusted their angles with quiet clicks, a choral of chitin. One lowered until its crystalline claw hovered beside the princess’s hip, a polite threat, or a promise of support if the drink proved stronger than expected.
“The desert that vexes you vexes me as well,” Ixqueya said. “I have sifted its storms, peeled secrets from its zealots. The Shaitan call their deformity devotion. I call it an error in script, and I am very adept at correcting text.”
Another of the arachnid limbs extended, but this one delivered no threat. It rested with its claw in the steam, tracing idle circles in the surface, raising pale vortices that soon calmed. Visual punctuation, nothing more.
Her right hand, the one not engaged in the shared cup, drifted down to Badamlyanhua’s abdomen. The talon at the end of her index finger, sharpened chitin with a translucence not unlike carved horn, touched the fabric stretched across the jungle princess’s midriff.
She drew it slowly downward. The point rode the furrow between hard muscles, a glacial stylus mapping out each ridge through the silk. It was not enough pressure to hurt, only enough to assert ownership of the moment.
“You speak of the Iron-Bark canopy,” Ixqueya mused, eyes never leaving Badamlyanhua’s face. “Of the heart of civilisation beating in your chest. Noble poetry. Yet here you stand, under my vault of skulls, drinking my sacraments while your skirt testifies against you.” Her lips curved again. “Taint, cousin, is only what the fearful call power before they learn to wield it.”
The talon slid sideways, insinuating itself between cloth and skin at the line where skirt met abdomen. The sensation was a cool, invasive pressure, the chitin slipping along warm flesh in a narrow arc that traced the waistband. Then Ixqueya hooked the fabric, tugged it outward a fraction, and released. The resulting snap as silk kissed skin again sounded intimate, almost obscene, in the humid stillness.
The scorpion tail lifted behind her, articulating in a slow, sinuous ascent until the mace hovered high, a glacial star suspended over the pair of them. Its shadow fell over Badamlyanhua’s shoulders like a dark benediction.
“Queen Valerna,” Ixqueya said, the name spoken with a mixture of respect and rivalry, “has certainly made a theology of her inheritance. She is not singular in that accomplishment.” A note of rough satisfaction crept into her tone, like gravel beneath ice. “The sand calls it taint. I have made it covenant. Chitin born of milk. Venom baptised in necro-ice. Flesh catechised until it remembers what it was always meant to be.Brood mother, a new catechism. The need for breeding, for offspring, is always palpable. But we all carry our burdens for power that benefits the family…”
Her shoulders rolled, subtle, luxuriant. The motion sent a coordinated ripple through cuirass, chitin, breasts, hips, limbs, tail. She was a whole gospel moving in one body, every line of her promising revelation or ruin.
She leaned in, close enough that Badamlyanhua could see the fine frost crystals caught in the outer lashes of those pale eyes, the thin golden ring around each iris like a solar corona seen through polar twilight. Her voice dropped.
“So yes,” she murmured, almost piously, “you are not wrong to seek answers here. Two branches of Jorgenskull’s tree, one watered in sap and sunlight, the other in brine and grave-chill. They can entangle. They can strangle. They can bear new fruit altogether. The choice of what we prune is ours.”
Her talon gave one last drag along the curve of Lyanhua’s abdomen before lifting away. She straightened, dominance reasserted in the line of her spine, in the way the arachnid limbs reoriented into a halo of articulated spears.
“Finish your drink,” Ixqueya said, tone resuming that cool, inexorable cadence. “Then we will speak of desert miasmas and shared campaigns. Of how your Dynasty and my Dominion might hymn in the same key, rather than merely echo at one another across the wastes.”
A glint of wicked humor sparked again as her gaze flicked, briefly, back to the tight skirt, then up to Badamlyanhua’s eyes.
“In the meantime,” she added, “do not trouble yourself over the occasional… elevation of interest. You may continue to admire what Winter has forged. A little veneration is excellent for my humility.”
Her chortle rolled out then, deep and resonant, a sound like avalanche thunder muffled by distance. It trembled through chitin and stone and steaming water alike, leaving the air around them vibrating with equal parts promise and threat, as if the grotto itself waited to see whether this new branch of the family would become ally, acolyte, or sacrifice.
Then Ixqueya’s gaze descended. Once. Unhurried. Clinical.
The tight spider-silk at Lyanhua’s hips did a poor job of discretion. For a brief heartbeat it had stretched taut, announcing a very mortal reaction to a very deliberate sway. The jungle princess’s face had remained decorous. The skirt had not.
“I commend your discipline,” Ixqueya said at last, voice soft as fur-lined steel. “Although your fabric is less circumspect than your tongue. I require no necromantic rites to make flesh stand in reverence.”
One corner of her mouth lifted, the faintest crescent of wintry mirth. “Do not fret. As you so prettily phrased it, two branches of the same tree may yet incline toward one another. I am seldom offended by honest growth.”
She turned on her heel, Frostfang resting against her shoulder like a ceremonial crozier. “Come. You have had your tour of ossuaries and lecture halls. It is time I showed you where Winter pretends to be kind.”
They walked. The passage widened, vertebral arches of bone curving overhead until the corridor felt like the interior of some frozen leviathan. Ahead, the light changed, cool blue yielding to a softer, aqueous radiance.
The hot springs lay within a vast, vaulted grotto. The walls were formed of stratified Necro Ice, veins of cobalt and ghost-lantern white twisting through them like illuminated scripture. Terraces of black basalt stepped downward in concentric rings. Each shelf cradled pools hollowed from the stone, brimming with steaming water that glowed from within in hues of opaline aqua and faint jade, as though someone had liquefied the aurora and poured it into basins.
Above, the ceiling opened into a great circular oculus. Its rim was carved with skulls and moons in alternating sequence, a coronet of death and tide. The sky beyond brooded, a lid of thick iron cloud.
Ixqueya lifted her hand. Her fingers traced a sigil in the air, spare and absolute, the gesture of a magistrate signing a death warrant. The clouds convulsed. Then parted.
A sheet of hard, crystalline daylight speared through the aperture. The low vault of cloud dissolved, revealing a high, immaculate firmament, a cerulean well that seemed to have no floor. Sunlight struck the vapor rising from the pools and broke into uncountable halos, each droplet a miniature host bearing refracted fire. The cavern brightened until bone and ice and basalt all shone with a subdued, sanctified glow.
“At my convenience,” Ixqueya murmured, watching the sky rearrange itself, “the firmament revises its homily.”
An ossified attendant materialised from a side alcove, its bones polished to an ivory sheen and inlaid with faint sigils of service. It bore a tray of dark metal. Upon it rested two narrow-necked ampullae of fogged glass and cups turned from vertebrae, the rims smoothed to a dull, intimate softness. The liquid within the flasks was pale and viscous, pearlescent, moving with the slow grace of melted snow thickened with sap.
Ixqueya descended the basalt steps toward the nearest pool. Her heels clipped the stone with that sharp, judicial rhythm, each impact a syllable in a cold litany. The new armor that embraced her made the sound fuller, more resonant.
The transformation had not vanished with the laboratory. If anything, the warmer air made the chitin gleam more vividly. Over her cuirass of midnight leather there now lay an over-skin of iridescent plates, scaled like a ceremonial carapace. Each panel caught the light in gradients of ember-orange, deep carmine and electric turquoise, the palette of desert sunset rewritten in insect anatomy. The plates hugged the architecture of her bust and waist, framing her abundant curves as if sheathed in the husk of some divine beetle.
Her shoulders bore pauldron-like growths from which jointed limbs unfurled. Four arachnid appendages rose from her upper back in a splayed, hierarchical fan. Their segments were lacquered in burnished ochre and obsidian, knotted at each joint with whorls of Necro Ice. At their tips, crystalline claws curved inward like frozen thuribles, each capable of either caress or vivisection.
Behind her, the scorpion tail coiled and uncoiled with meditative languor. Its segments resembled prayer beads carved from amber and onyx, each one rimed with hoarfrost. At the terminus, a mace of jagged Necro Ice bloomed, a stellar flail whose spikes emitted a faint inner luminescence, as if it housed captive stars. When it moved, small motes of ice-dust drifted away like extinguished prayers.
Every step made her a living reliquary, something halfway between martyr and predator.
She halted close enough that Badamlyanhua could feel the exhalation from the steaming pool lick at the backs of her calves while Ixqueya’s colder aura brushed the front of her body. The temperature gradient alone felt like a hand.
Ixqueya took the two vertebral cups from the servant. She poured the pale liquor herself, the liquid threading from flask to bone with unhurried luxuriance. Then she turned and stepped into Badamlyanhua’s space, no more distance between them than the span of a joined hand.
She offered one cup. She did it in such a way that Lyanhua had to wrap her fingers over Ixqueya’s knuckles to claim it, skin meeting skin along the back of the hand in a line of cool contrast.
“Drink,” Ixqueya said. The word was not suggestion. It was sacrament. “Frost-flower distillate, laced with marrow-sweet. It baptises the throat against my climate and tells me how quickly your blood and mine find concord.”
She did not move aside. Her presence became a vertical pressure, a column of will. Up close, the scent of her was more complex: cold iron, yes, but also spices that belonged to markets far from here, and a faint sweetness like burnt sugar laid over pine resin.
As Badamlyanhua lifted the cup, the limbs at Ixqueya’s back adjusted their angles with quiet clicks, a choral of chitin. One lowered until its crystalline claw hovered beside the princess’s hip, a polite threat, or a promise of support if the drink proved stronger than expected.
“The desert that vexes you vexes me as well,” Ixqueya said. “I have sifted its storms, peeled secrets from its zealots. The Shaitan call their deformity devotion. I call it an error in script, and I am very adept at correcting text.”
Another of the arachnid limbs extended, but this one delivered no threat. It rested with its claw in the steam, tracing idle circles in the surface, raising pale vortices that soon calmed. Visual punctuation, nothing more.
Her right hand, the one not engaged in the shared cup, drifted down to Badamlyanhua’s abdomen. The talon at the end of her index finger, sharpened chitin with a translucence not unlike carved horn, touched the fabric stretched across the jungle princess’s midriff.
She drew it slowly downward. The point rode the furrow between hard muscles, a glacial stylus mapping out each ridge through the silk. It was not enough pressure to hurt, only enough to assert ownership of the moment.
“You speak of the Iron-Bark canopy,” Ixqueya mused, eyes never leaving Badamlyanhua’s face. “Of the heart of civilisation beating in your chest. Noble poetry. Yet here you stand, under my vault of skulls, drinking my sacraments while your skirt testifies against you.” Her lips curved again. “Taint, cousin, is only what the fearful call power before they learn to wield it.”
The talon slid sideways, insinuating itself between cloth and skin at the line where skirt met abdomen. The sensation was a cool, invasive pressure, the chitin slipping along warm flesh in a narrow arc that traced the waistband. Then Ixqueya hooked the fabric, tugged it outward a fraction, and released. The resulting snap as silk kissed skin again sounded intimate, almost obscene, in the humid stillness.
The scorpion tail lifted behind her, articulating in a slow, sinuous ascent until the mace hovered high, a glacial star suspended over the pair of them. Its shadow fell over Badamlyanhua’s shoulders like a dark benediction.
“Queen Valerna,” Ixqueya said, the name spoken with a mixture of respect and rivalry, “has certainly made a theology of her inheritance. She is not singular in that accomplishment.” A note of rough satisfaction crept into her tone, like gravel beneath ice. “The sand calls it taint. I have made it covenant. Chitin born of milk. Venom baptised in necro-ice. Flesh catechised until it remembers what it was always meant to be.Brood mother, a new catechism. The need for breeding, for offspring, is always palpable. But we all carry our burdens for power that benefits the family…”
Her shoulders rolled, subtle, luxuriant. The motion sent a coordinated ripple through cuirass, chitin, breasts, hips, limbs, tail. She was a whole gospel moving in one body, every line of her promising revelation or ruin.
She leaned in, close enough that Badamlyanhua could see the fine frost crystals caught in the outer lashes of those pale eyes, the thin golden ring around each iris like a solar corona seen through polar twilight. Her voice dropped.
“So yes,” she murmured, almost piously, “you are not wrong to seek answers here. Two branches of Jorgenskull’s tree, one watered in sap and sunlight, the other in brine and grave-chill. They can entangle. They can strangle. They can bear new fruit altogether. The choice of what we prune is ours.”
Her talon gave one last drag along the curve of Lyanhua’s abdomen before lifting away. She straightened, dominance reasserted in the line of her spine, in the way the arachnid limbs reoriented into a halo of articulated spears.
“Finish your drink,” Ixqueya said, tone resuming that cool, inexorable cadence. “Then we will speak of desert miasmas and shared campaigns. Of how your Dynasty and my Dominion might hymn in the same key, rather than merely echo at one another across the wastes.”
A glint of wicked humor sparked again as her gaze flicked, briefly, back to the tight skirt, then up to Badamlyanhua’s eyes.
“In the meantime,” she added, “do not trouble yourself over the occasional… elevation of interest. You may continue to admire what Winter has forged. A little veneration is excellent for my humility.”
Her chortle rolled out then, deep and resonant, a sound like avalanche thunder muffled by distance. It trembled through chitin and stone and steaming water alike, leaving the air around them vibrating with equal parts promise and threat, as if the grotto itself waited to see whether this new branch of the family would become ally, acolyte, or sacrifice.
Silence fell upon the two of them for a moment once she had finished speaking, the sound of dialogue fading into the distance of the crystalline halls. Lyan remained silent, waiting for a response from her hostess, though she was only greeted with the woman’s slow, icy gaze as it wandered downward. It was then that the princess of frost spoke up once more.
Despite her former front of composure, the bronzed skin of her face flushed faintly red as Ixqueya’s remarks. For a moment, she seemed to open her mouth to respond, but ultimately decided against it, offering no rebuttal. Her hostess was proving to be nothing if not perceptive. She was as vexing as she was perplexing, undoubtingly so. In their short time together, Ixqueya had been enigmatic, critical on the brink of insolent, and tantalizingly alluring, all in a matter of minutes. Lyan had thought to say something at first, but nothing witty came to mind and the moment soon passed.
Fortunately, the time had come to move on. It seemed that macabre laboratories and frigid chambers were soon to be left behind them, and new pastures were inbound, ones where ‘winter pretends to be kind’, as Ixqueya put it. Whatever she meant by that would soon be revealed. The princess before her abruptly turned on her heels and set off, her mace of prodigious size resting atop her shoulder, not a threat, but a suggestion of strength. The two of them clearly shared a similar taste in weaponry.
Once again, their little procession advanced, the duo proceeding deeper into the icy bowels of this crystalline citadel. The rhythmic clicking of heels filled the halls once more as Ixqueya led the two of them to a new area in her necrotic palace. The passage they trekked began to widen, the corridor growing in scope from the hallway it had been into a grander chamber, as if they passed through the ribcage of some beast. These lands of undeath hailed from the Dynasty, and that much seemed reflected in their architecture; while the Dynasty didn’t make use of this black ice for their structures—perhaps for the best—the use of bone seemed to remain a shared trait.
The pallid light that had clung to them gave way to softer blue reminiscent of indigo. The hallway slowly ebbed away, making way for the hot springs they were soon to come upon. This new chamber was large and expansive, the ground made of black basalt formed into concentric rings. Within the stone, pools of water nestled in concaves and steamed with heat, the basins glowing with radiant hues of aqua and jade.
Above, the ceiling rose high, giving way to a circular opening ringed with the carved depictions of skulls and moons. The sky beyond was dark and somber, a gray visage the likeness of dull steel. Moments later, the image of gloom and darkness dissipated, clouds splitting to make way for the brilliance of a bright azure sky. The room, previously muted in color, became quite vibrant quite suddenly as sunlight refracted off of rising vapors to create a dazzling display within the sauna. The ice and bone that had once seemed dull now shone with newfound vibrance.
This chamber of steaming water and radiance was a pleasant change of scenery. Some of what she had seen so far had been of mild intrigue, though this was certainly the most interesting. Even outside of the water itself, the atmosphere was salubrious and subtly familiar; past ventures to hot springs and bath houses lingered at the edge of her mind, pleasant memories of hot water and peaceful locale. Even outside of the water, the steam lingered palpably in the air, making the ice and bone shine further from its subtle condensation.
“How useful. The weather here must be sublime,” she remarked, her eyes coming upon the newly appeared attendant once it emerged from hiding. Ixqueya’s attendants all seemed to be well maintained, she noted. This one came bearing a tray, upon which two cups and two correspondent ampullae containing a pearlescent fluid the shade of ivory. Milk, perhaps? She thought so initially, but it seemed too viscous to be so.
Her attention returned to her hostess, who seemed to change before her eyes, altering her appearance into something not entirely of giant-kind. Her attire, which earlier had seemed somewhat drab and monochromatic, adopted an iridescent sheen like the scale of a bug. From pauldron-like growths on her shoulders sprouted insectoid appendages, while a tail tipped in a mace wrought of Ixqueya’s crystalline construct she was so fond of.
Her new appearance was—for better or worse—familiar, reminiscent of Lyan’s own mother and the arachnid additions she possessed herself. Not quite the same, to be certain, but the resemblance was enough that the connection formed in her mind quite quickly. It was certainly an interesting look, if unorthodox. It might have even been strange, if Lyanhua had not some familiarity with giantesses with insect additions, though it was unexpected nonetheless. One had to wonder how she had achieved this form, after all. Presumably a different method had been taken than the one her mother had used?
“Look at you,” she remarked slowly, a smile tracing her lips. “I suppose even distant trees bear similar fruit after all.” The princess of frost drew herself close, enough so that the juxtaposition of humid steam from the nearby pool and the subtle chill Ixqueya carried with herself clashed, creating two separate clashing climates around Lyan. She tenderly took the cup as it was offered, allowing her fingers to briefly trace the landscape of Ixqueya’s hand as she took the cup from her grip.
She did not respond to the revelation of its ingredients, though it dismissed any questions she may have had regarding it. She was correct in assuming it was not milk, it seemed. Nonetheless, she opted to not waste any time and brought the cup to her mouth to drink the unfamiliar fluid, unsure quite what to expect.
She lowered the cup from her lips as her hostess began to speak once more, returning her attention to the matter of dialogue. She spoke briefly of the desert, though just as soon as she began, Lyan was met with a new sensation. She could not see what occurred on account of her bust, but she felt the princess’ touch find its way to her abdomen, slowly descending downward along the expanse of flesh.
She maintained a gaze of neutral indifference for the time, her eyes remaining fixated on the marchioness’ icy gaze. Perhaps weaker beings would succumb to the whims of Ixqueya, but it would take more than a meager touch to unmake her. Acts of little result, should they stand as a challenge, some test of resolve or discipline.
“Testify against me? Surely this serves only as vindication of my very point. You are a Jorgenskull, just the same as I, estranged as you may be. The Shaitan, what have they achieved? The foundations of civilization perhaps, and little more. The bedrock of a religion a few degrees evolved past the likeness of animism. Feats of little consequence. Look at you, though,” a grin returned to her face. “Only a few degrees separated from our Clan Mother and you’ve chiseled out this domain and achieved this wondrous metamorphosis. I shall not play the part of a prude, my body and I simply speak with candor. I have come to this realm expecting nothing and find only the fruits of your labors.”
As Ixqueya’s talon continued its descent and found purchase at her skirt, Lyan brought herself closer to the princess, closing what little distance remained to the point that their busts nigh pressed against one another. While discipline may have proven useful earlier, such provocations were bound to yield results now. Once more, her loins were stirred beyond inaction, spurred on by Ixqueya’s continued temptation. Lyan’s eyes drifted, falling from Ixqueya’s face to her bosom below for a moment, before returning to her gaze.
“I admire your ambition, cousin dearest,” she ran her tongue over her upper lip. Behind her, her tail swayed at her rear in a continuous motion with restrained fervor. “One cannot expect desert troglodytes to understand the beauty of evolution. I, for one, look forward to learning more about this apotheosis of yours.”
She took a single pace back at last, returning the cup to her mouth and downing the remains of her beverage in a single gulp, wiping away any lingering remnants of the viscous fluid with her thumb. Her free hand lowered down to rest on her hip, her gaze breaking off from Ixqueya’s to wander over the glistening pools of steaming water.
“Yes, I do believe it is high time we acquainted our houses. I think that this little rendezvous of ours will prove fruitful.”
Despite her former front of composure, the bronzed skin of her face flushed faintly red as Ixqueya’s remarks. For a moment, she seemed to open her mouth to respond, but ultimately decided against it, offering no rebuttal. Her hostess was proving to be nothing if not perceptive. She was as vexing as she was perplexing, undoubtingly so. In their short time together, Ixqueya had been enigmatic, critical on the brink of insolent, and tantalizingly alluring, all in a matter of minutes. Lyan had thought to say something at first, but nothing witty came to mind and the moment soon passed.
Fortunately, the time had come to move on. It seemed that macabre laboratories and frigid chambers were soon to be left behind them, and new pastures were inbound, ones where ‘winter pretends to be kind’, as Ixqueya put it. Whatever she meant by that would soon be revealed. The princess before her abruptly turned on her heels and set off, her mace of prodigious size resting atop her shoulder, not a threat, but a suggestion of strength. The two of them clearly shared a similar taste in weaponry.
Once again, their little procession advanced, the duo proceeding deeper into the icy bowels of this crystalline citadel. The rhythmic clicking of heels filled the halls once more as Ixqueya led the two of them to a new area in her necrotic palace. The passage they trekked began to widen, the corridor growing in scope from the hallway it had been into a grander chamber, as if they passed through the ribcage of some beast. These lands of undeath hailed from the Dynasty, and that much seemed reflected in their architecture; while the Dynasty didn’t make use of this black ice for their structures—perhaps for the best—the use of bone seemed to remain a shared trait.
The pallid light that had clung to them gave way to softer blue reminiscent of indigo. The hallway slowly ebbed away, making way for the hot springs they were soon to come upon. This new chamber was large and expansive, the ground made of black basalt formed into concentric rings. Within the stone, pools of water nestled in concaves and steamed with heat, the basins glowing with radiant hues of aqua and jade.
Above, the ceiling rose high, giving way to a circular opening ringed with the carved depictions of skulls and moons. The sky beyond was dark and somber, a gray visage the likeness of dull steel. Moments later, the image of gloom and darkness dissipated, clouds splitting to make way for the brilliance of a bright azure sky. The room, previously muted in color, became quite vibrant quite suddenly as sunlight refracted off of rising vapors to create a dazzling display within the sauna. The ice and bone that had once seemed dull now shone with newfound vibrance.
This chamber of steaming water and radiance was a pleasant change of scenery. Some of what she had seen so far had been of mild intrigue, though this was certainly the most interesting. Even outside of the water itself, the atmosphere was salubrious and subtly familiar; past ventures to hot springs and bath houses lingered at the edge of her mind, pleasant memories of hot water and peaceful locale. Even outside of the water, the steam lingered palpably in the air, making the ice and bone shine further from its subtle condensation.
“How useful. The weather here must be sublime,” she remarked, her eyes coming upon the newly appeared attendant once it emerged from hiding. Ixqueya’s attendants all seemed to be well maintained, she noted. This one came bearing a tray, upon which two cups and two correspondent ampullae containing a pearlescent fluid the shade of ivory. Milk, perhaps? She thought so initially, but it seemed too viscous to be so.
Her attention returned to her hostess, who seemed to change before her eyes, altering her appearance into something not entirely of giant-kind. Her attire, which earlier had seemed somewhat drab and monochromatic, adopted an iridescent sheen like the scale of a bug. From pauldron-like growths on her shoulders sprouted insectoid appendages, while a tail tipped in a mace wrought of Ixqueya’s crystalline construct she was so fond of.
Her new appearance was—for better or worse—familiar, reminiscent of Lyan’s own mother and the arachnid additions she possessed herself. Not quite the same, to be certain, but the resemblance was enough that the connection formed in her mind quite quickly. It was certainly an interesting look, if unorthodox. It might have even been strange, if Lyanhua had not some familiarity with giantesses with insect additions, though it was unexpected nonetheless. One had to wonder how she had achieved this form, after all. Presumably a different method had been taken than the one her mother had used?
“Look at you,” she remarked slowly, a smile tracing her lips. “I suppose even distant trees bear similar fruit after all.” The princess of frost drew herself close, enough so that the juxtaposition of humid steam from the nearby pool and the subtle chill Ixqueya carried with herself clashed, creating two separate clashing climates around Lyan. She tenderly took the cup as it was offered, allowing her fingers to briefly trace the landscape of Ixqueya’s hand as she took the cup from her grip.
She did not respond to the revelation of its ingredients, though it dismissed any questions she may have had regarding it. She was correct in assuming it was not milk, it seemed. Nonetheless, she opted to not waste any time and brought the cup to her mouth to drink the unfamiliar fluid, unsure quite what to expect.
She lowered the cup from her lips as her hostess began to speak once more, returning her attention to the matter of dialogue. She spoke briefly of the desert, though just as soon as she began, Lyan was met with a new sensation. She could not see what occurred on account of her bust, but she felt the princess’ touch find its way to her abdomen, slowly descending downward along the expanse of flesh.
She maintained a gaze of neutral indifference for the time, her eyes remaining fixated on the marchioness’ icy gaze. Perhaps weaker beings would succumb to the whims of Ixqueya, but it would take more than a meager touch to unmake her. Acts of little result, should they stand as a challenge, some test of resolve or discipline.
“Testify against me? Surely this serves only as vindication of my very point. You are a Jorgenskull, just the same as I, estranged as you may be. The Shaitan, what have they achieved? The foundations of civilization perhaps, and little more. The bedrock of a religion a few degrees evolved past the likeness of animism. Feats of little consequence. Look at you, though,” a grin returned to her face. “Only a few degrees separated from our Clan Mother and you’ve chiseled out this domain and achieved this wondrous metamorphosis. I shall not play the part of a prude, my body and I simply speak with candor. I have come to this realm expecting nothing and find only the fruits of your labors.”
As Ixqueya’s talon continued its descent and found purchase at her skirt, Lyan brought herself closer to the princess, closing what little distance remained to the point that their busts nigh pressed against one another. While discipline may have proven useful earlier, such provocations were bound to yield results now. Once more, her loins were stirred beyond inaction, spurred on by Ixqueya’s continued temptation. Lyan’s eyes drifted, falling from Ixqueya’s face to her bosom below for a moment, before returning to her gaze.
“I admire your ambition, cousin dearest,” she ran her tongue over her upper lip. Behind her, her tail swayed at her rear in a continuous motion with restrained fervor. “One cannot expect desert troglodytes to understand the beauty of evolution. I, for one, look forward to learning more about this apotheosis of yours.”
She took a single pace back at last, returning the cup to her mouth and downing the remains of her beverage in a single gulp, wiping away any lingering remnants of the viscous fluid with her thumb. Her free hand lowered down to rest on her hip, her gaze breaking off from Ixqueya’s to wander over the glistening pools of steaming water.
“Yes, I do believe it is high time we acquainted our houses. I think that this little rendezvous of ours will prove fruitful.”
Ixqueya watched the jungle princess tip the cup back, throat working in a slow, stately column, as though even her swallowing observed ceremony. The thick, opalescent draught slid from crystal to bronzed mouth and vanished.
“Good,” Ixqueya murmured. “You take Winterwake’s cordial as if it were birthright, not poison. Honey. bone-marrow. a touch of my own alchemy. You ingested it cleanly. That is a rarer courage than half the boasts I hear in my halls.”
Her eyes descended, unhurried, along the grand architecture of Lyanhua’s torso to the taut band of her skirt. Memory supplied that earlier, involuntary rigidity the fabric had done such a poor job of concealing. A cool, predatory amusement moved under Ixqueya’s ribs.
“And we have already demonstrated,” she went on, tone silk over steel, “that I have no need of necromancy to persuade certain portions of you to rise. Flesh is a devout congregant when addressed in the proper dialect.”
One corner of her mouth hitched, not quite a smile, more the shadow of one. “Do not pretend otherwise, cousin. You wrote your reaction in stretched cloth. I merely proved myself literate.”
She stepped back half a pace, enough to allow the hot spring’s light to rake fully over her newly unfurled form. Then, with a sharp, almost playful crack, she brought her palm against the chitinous thorax mounted high upon her back. The sound rang through the steamy chamber like a muted gong. Segments flexed. The ant-limbs arched and reclined in answer, crystalline barbs catching sun and steam in prismatic shards. Their articulated talons opened and closed with slow, carnivorous poise, as if tasting the humid air for omens.
Ixqueya caught one such talon in her own hand, turning it so that light sluiced along its length, revealing the subtle inward hook meant to catch beneath armor and never quite let go.
“These,” she said, voice dropping into something almost reverent, “are not eccentric adornments. I married a hive to my spine and taught it theology. Every spur, every joint, is an argument in chitin. They answer my will because I bled rigor into them. Not because some desert charlatan muttered over my cradle.”
Only then did she let the claw cant outward, presenting it toward Lyanhua like a sanctified implement.
“You speak of my change as apotheosis,” she continued, dry humor threading the words. “Understand what that implies for you. You stand eye-to-eye with a woman who turned slander about taint into a working covenant with winter. You wish to ‘learn more’ of this. That tells me you plan, at minimum, to survive the lesson. Sensible. I am no longer patient with pupils who confuse curiosity with constitution.”
Her gaze climbed back to Lyanhua’s face. Amber met ice. Heat wrestled with cold in the narrow space between their mouths.
“You argue well,” Ixqueya allowed. “You have the wit to see that our sand-sotted cousins are scaffolding at best, never the temple. You grasp that bloodlines exist to be refined, not adored. That is why we are standing in steam and light instead of opposite ends of a killing pit.”
She inclined her head toward the ringed pools, where azure sky poured through the open oculus and fractured across vapor like shattered stained glass.
“So. Alliance.” Her tone flattened into pragmatic command. “You can dress it in as much familial poetry as you wish, but beneath the silk it is simple: when this desert contagion moves, you intend my frost at your flank rather than at your throat. In return, you offer the Dynasty’s reach and warm bodies when Hextor chooses to cull. I respect candor. I prefer it unvarnished.”
She reached out before the jungle princess could answer. One knuckle brushed the hollow above Lyanhua’s navel. From it, the talon extended, a narrow shard of polar cold insinuating itself between skin and waistband. With the care of a surgeon and the intent of a hunter, Ixqueya traced the full arc of that disciplined abdomen beneath the cloth, the point skating along the inner seam.
“Do not mistake my interest for softness,” she said, voice attenuated to a glacial murmur. “Your flesh already confesses its responses to me. You held yourself earlier, yes. Admirably. But the crack in the ice was there, hair-fine and honest. If I chose, I could strip restraint from you in layers and never once raise my voice.”
She let the talon hook under the waistband, tugged it away from bronzed skin, then released. The snap of fabric against her guest’s lower belly was sharp and satisfying.
“There,” she breathed, amusement dark and intimate. “No liturgical invocations. No circle of skulls. Just touch. And the body answers. You call that prurience if it makes you comfortable. I call it verification of temperament.”
Her hand climbed, slow as incense, up the sculpted terrain of Lyanhua’s midriff. Knuckles pressed, testing each cord of muscle, each plane of cultivated strength, as though she weighed the worth of a war-mount. Behind her, the scorpion tail rose in a sinuous, devotional arc, mace-head tracing a halo above them both. The ant-limbs expanded in a loose corona, an arachnid aureole that framed Lyanhua like an offering set before an unseen altar.
“You speak of heels as instruments of discipline,” Ixqueya went on. “We agree. Suffering is a tool, not a fetish. Remember that when we carve into this miasma. We are not merely defending fences. We will be excising a necrotic limb from a body that was never particularly impressive to begin with. That will demand choices you cannot narcotize with jungle sentiment.”
She leaned in then, closing the last honest distance between them. The cool of her breath met the steam wrapped around Lyanhua’s cheeks and throat; the air where they mingled felt charged, almost metallic. Her eyes held the other woman’s with courtroom severity and bedroom proximity.
“You came here to collect three treasures,” she murmured. “The source of the disturbance. A measure of Hextor’s spine. And a verdict on the cousin whispered of in your courts. Already you have taken my tonic into your belly and my mark onto your skin. Whether you acknowledge it or not, you have crossed the threshold of my jurisdiction.”
Her lips curved. They were predatory and delighted.
“I, in turn, have claimed three things from you. I have taken the full survey of your form. I have seen the calibre of your restraint. And I have witnessed how very quickly that composure can tremble when I choose to press.” Her gaze dropped, deliberately, for a heartbeat to the place her talon had snapped the cloth, then rose again. “That, Lyanhua Jorgenskull, is why you interest me.”
She drew back a fraction, granting the illusion of space, not its reality.
“Very well,” she said, brisk again, like a magistrate pronouncing sentence. “We will unravel this desert together. Your Dynasty’s strength. my necro-ice. If either of us falters, the other will have both cause and right to convert the failure into something useful. Bone. lore. precedent.”
Her attention drifted outward, over the pools, the sun-shot plumes of steam, the slick gleam of condensate on carved skulls and moon-sigils.
“For now,” she allowed, “bask. Let the water leach some rigidity from you. Pride. tension. whatever you insist on armoring yourself with.” Her eyes flashed with sardonic light. “Keep your gaze where you wish; on the springs, the vaulting, or my hindquarters. It sharpens your focus and amuses me in equal measure. Veneration, in measured doses, is excellent for humility.”
A low, velveteen laugh uncoiled from her chest, rich and dangerous as a hymn sung in the wrong chapel. As she laughed, Ixqueya struck her palm once more against the thorax. The ant-limbs clicked into a more pronounced fan, talons poised like a congregation of crystal scalpels waiting for instruction.
“Come then,” she concluded, turning toward the nearest pool with a sway that was both invitation and threat, winter made flesh and given hips. “Let us see whether the springs of Winterwake can keep you from freezing solid in my company. I assure you, cousin—if you seize up entirely, I will feel compelled to thaw you myself.”
“Good,” Ixqueya murmured. “You take Winterwake’s cordial as if it were birthright, not poison. Honey. bone-marrow. a touch of my own alchemy. You ingested it cleanly. That is a rarer courage than half the boasts I hear in my halls.”
Her eyes descended, unhurried, along the grand architecture of Lyanhua’s torso to the taut band of her skirt. Memory supplied that earlier, involuntary rigidity the fabric had done such a poor job of concealing. A cool, predatory amusement moved under Ixqueya’s ribs.
“And we have already demonstrated,” she went on, tone silk over steel, “that I have no need of necromancy to persuade certain portions of you to rise. Flesh is a devout congregant when addressed in the proper dialect.”
One corner of her mouth hitched, not quite a smile, more the shadow of one. “Do not pretend otherwise, cousin. You wrote your reaction in stretched cloth. I merely proved myself literate.”
She stepped back half a pace, enough to allow the hot spring’s light to rake fully over her newly unfurled form. Then, with a sharp, almost playful crack, she brought her palm against the chitinous thorax mounted high upon her back. The sound rang through the steamy chamber like a muted gong. Segments flexed. The ant-limbs arched and reclined in answer, crystalline barbs catching sun and steam in prismatic shards. Their articulated talons opened and closed with slow, carnivorous poise, as if tasting the humid air for omens.
Ixqueya caught one such talon in her own hand, turning it so that light sluiced along its length, revealing the subtle inward hook meant to catch beneath armor and never quite let go.
“These,” she said, voice dropping into something almost reverent, “are not eccentric adornments. I married a hive to my spine and taught it theology. Every spur, every joint, is an argument in chitin. They answer my will because I bled rigor into them. Not because some desert charlatan muttered over my cradle.”
Only then did she let the claw cant outward, presenting it toward Lyanhua like a sanctified implement.
“You speak of my change as apotheosis,” she continued, dry humor threading the words. “Understand what that implies for you. You stand eye-to-eye with a woman who turned slander about taint into a working covenant with winter. You wish to ‘learn more’ of this. That tells me you plan, at minimum, to survive the lesson. Sensible. I am no longer patient with pupils who confuse curiosity with constitution.”
Her gaze climbed back to Lyanhua’s face. Amber met ice. Heat wrestled with cold in the narrow space between their mouths.
“You argue well,” Ixqueya allowed. “You have the wit to see that our sand-sotted cousins are scaffolding at best, never the temple. You grasp that bloodlines exist to be refined, not adored. That is why we are standing in steam and light instead of opposite ends of a killing pit.”
She inclined her head toward the ringed pools, where azure sky poured through the open oculus and fractured across vapor like shattered stained glass.
“So. Alliance.” Her tone flattened into pragmatic command. “You can dress it in as much familial poetry as you wish, but beneath the silk it is simple: when this desert contagion moves, you intend my frost at your flank rather than at your throat. In return, you offer the Dynasty’s reach and warm bodies when Hextor chooses to cull. I respect candor. I prefer it unvarnished.”
She reached out before the jungle princess could answer. One knuckle brushed the hollow above Lyanhua’s navel. From it, the talon extended, a narrow shard of polar cold insinuating itself between skin and waistband. With the care of a surgeon and the intent of a hunter, Ixqueya traced the full arc of that disciplined abdomen beneath the cloth, the point skating along the inner seam.
“Do not mistake my interest for softness,” she said, voice attenuated to a glacial murmur. “Your flesh already confesses its responses to me. You held yourself earlier, yes. Admirably. But the crack in the ice was there, hair-fine and honest. If I chose, I could strip restraint from you in layers and never once raise my voice.”
She let the talon hook under the waistband, tugged it away from bronzed skin, then released. The snap of fabric against her guest’s lower belly was sharp and satisfying.
“There,” she breathed, amusement dark and intimate. “No liturgical invocations. No circle of skulls. Just touch. And the body answers. You call that prurience if it makes you comfortable. I call it verification of temperament.”
Her hand climbed, slow as incense, up the sculpted terrain of Lyanhua’s midriff. Knuckles pressed, testing each cord of muscle, each plane of cultivated strength, as though she weighed the worth of a war-mount. Behind her, the scorpion tail rose in a sinuous, devotional arc, mace-head tracing a halo above them both. The ant-limbs expanded in a loose corona, an arachnid aureole that framed Lyanhua like an offering set before an unseen altar.
“You speak of heels as instruments of discipline,” Ixqueya went on. “We agree. Suffering is a tool, not a fetish. Remember that when we carve into this miasma. We are not merely defending fences. We will be excising a necrotic limb from a body that was never particularly impressive to begin with. That will demand choices you cannot narcotize with jungle sentiment.”
She leaned in then, closing the last honest distance between them. The cool of her breath met the steam wrapped around Lyanhua’s cheeks and throat; the air where they mingled felt charged, almost metallic. Her eyes held the other woman’s with courtroom severity and bedroom proximity.
“You came here to collect three treasures,” she murmured. “The source of the disturbance. A measure of Hextor’s spine. And a verdict on the cousin whispered of in your courts. Already you have taken my tonic into your belly and my mark onto your skin. Whether you acknowledge it or not, you have crossed the threshold of my jurisdiction.”
Her lips curved. They were predatory and delighted.
“I, in turn, have claimed three things from you. I have taken the full survey of your form. I have seen the calibre of your restraint. And I have witnessed how very quickly that composure can tremble when I choose to press.” Her gaze dropped, deliberately, for a heartbeat to the place her talon had snapped the cloth, then rose again. “That, Lyanhua Jorgenskull, is why you interest me.”
She drew back a fraction, granting the illusion of space, not its reality.
“Very well,” she said, brisk again, like a magistrate pronouncing sentence. “We will unravel this desert together. Your Dynasty’s strength. my necro-ice. If either of us falters, the other will have both cause and right to convert the failure into something useful. Bone. lore. precedent.”
Her attention drifted outward, over the pools, the sun-shot plumes of steam, the slick gleam of condensate on carved skulls and moon-sigils.
“For now,” she allowed, “bask. Let the water leach some rigidity from you. Pride. tension. whatever you insist on armoring yourself with.” Her eyes flashed with sardonic light. “Keep your gaze where you wish; on the springs, the vaulting, or my hindquarters. It sharpens your focus and amuses me in equal measure. Veneration, in measured doses, is excellent for humility.”
A low, velveteen laugh uncoiled from her chest, rich and dangerous as a hymn sung in the wrong chapel. As she laughed, Ixqueya struck her palm once more against the thorax. The ant-limbs clicked into a more pronounced fan, talons poised like a congregation of crystal scalpels waiting for instruction.
“Come then,” she concluded, turning toward the nearest pool with a sway that was both invitation and threat, winter made flesh and given hips. “Let us see whether the springs of Winterwake can keep you from freezing solid in my company. I assure you, cousin—if you seize up entirely, I will feel compelled to thaw you myself.”
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