Chapter 415: The Battle Within (Part One)
In a space that greatly resembled the ancestral cave where he had once confronted an abomination formed of blood and ice, Hauke struggled against heavy chains of ice that bound him to a stone slab at the center of the vast cavern.
Rather than the crumbling and neglected shrine to his clan’s greatest protectors that he had entered with Ashlynn, the ancestral cavern constructed in Hauke’s mind appeared the way it had in the memories of the ancestors who were entombed there. Powerful weapons hung on the walls, waiting for the hands that had once carried them in battle to pick them up again.
Five platforms ringed the space, each one large enough to hold an oversized ice statue bearing the iridescent horn of a powerful ancestor. Only, within this mental space, the platforms didn’t hold statues but the spirits of the ancestors themselves. At the moment, two of those platforms, the ones belonging to Ines and Ansgar, stood empty while their owners shared control of Hauke’s body to fight against Ashlynn, Heila, and the rest of Nyrielle’s forces.
The sounds of battle filled the cavern, and one of the walls was missing entirely, displaying instead the view from Hauke’s eyes as the icy walls of Lord Ritchel’s Ice Tomb closed around the young Frost Walker lord and the Mother of Trees.
"Please," Hauke pleaded, straining against the chains that bound him. "Please, you have to let me go before it’s too late! This is all just a misunderstanding," he said. "Just, just let me go, and I can talk to Ashlynn. She’ll understand, and she can put a stop to this before it gets worse."
"It’s already irreparable," an old woman said from a small stool made of ice. Kimsel the Wise Crone was the oldest and most fragile of all the ancestral spirits that had formed a bond with Hauke, and arguably one of the weakest, but when it came to teaching, she was second only to Ines in her ability to persuade the young Frost Walker lord.
"Once they taste the power of weapons crafted from our horns, nothing stops the greed of hunters who wish to possess another," she said in a tone that sounded desolate and forlorn. "Perhaps this little horned witch is not a wicked person. Perhaps she would never desire another weapon for herself, but so what?"
"Witches gather in covens," Kimsel pointed out. "And this little girl will use her blade around her brothers and sisters within the coven. How long, then, until the others of her coven desire a blade of their own? How long before they return to us, seeking a horn to craft into a wand or a severing knife?"