Chapter 177: A Rare Opportunity
Slowly, as if she was teasing the artificer, Zedya walked forward to place a long wooden box bound with leather straps on top of Erkembalt’s counter. When she undid the buckles and pulled the straps aside to open the box, however, Ashlynn felt the temperature in the shop drop sharply, as though someone had just opened the front door on a cold winter’s day.
Inside the box, nestled in beds of dark velvet, lay two perfectly preserved Frost Walker horns and a pair of foot-long sections of weathered ivory tusk taken from a point on the tusk close enough to the face that the ivory was uncontaminated by the lingering energies of Frost Walker horns lashed to the curled ends of the tusks as weapons.
The horns themselves had been carefully removed at the base, leaving behind smooth, polished surfaces where they had once connected to bone. A dim flickering light danced almost eagerly within each of them, as though they were strangely happy to greet the people gathered around the counter gazing upon all that remained of Paulus and Torsten.
The larger horn of the two horns, taken from Paulus, radiated an aura that reminded Ashlynn of fresh, soft, powdery snow in the morning just after a snowstorm. Looking at it for more than a few seconds conjured memories of the mountains of the High Pass, like they were slumbering under vast white blankets made of soft, fluffy snow.
Beneath that gentle, snowy energy lurked something bitter and spiteful, like the deadly fury of a mountain blizzard that would bury everyone and everything beneath that snowy blanket, never to be seen again.
Beside the horn that glowed a soft, snowy white, Torsten’s horn pulsed with a different kind of wintery energy. The icy blue aura that surrounded it carried a solid, unbreakable feeling, like the thick ice of the frozen lake.
More than that, it radiated a dangerous sense of piercing sharpness, like an icicle that could puncture flesh as easily as any spear. Though it was slightly smaller than the one taken from Torsten’s grandfather, the intensity of the energy from the icy blue horn was every bit as intense as the snowy white one, though its energy seemed to lack the complex subtleties at play in Paulus’s horn.
"These, these are remarkable," Erkembalt said as he hovered over the box. At his sides, his paws twitched eagerly as if he could barely restrain himself from reaching out to snatch the precious horns in the box and his bushy ringed tail quivered in excitement. "Madame Zedya, you have outdone yourself in harvesting these," he whispered.
"They have forgotten that they were once people," Zedya said with a hint of pride in her voice. Her amethyst eyes flashed with a brief glow in the dim light of the artificer’s shop and her lips curled into a smile that revealed a hint of her fangs.