The gore before Sludge had frozen like the cold-storage of an abattoir.

  There was this strange texture that hung in the air; a rustle that wasn't quite tinny, but wasn't quite dense either.

  Ringlets of ice crystallised in a circular pattern, before becoming ankle-sized ridges; then waist-high walls; then curling waves of frozen blocks—everything and anything caught within it. The makeshift alleyways of Skaggad had been bitten by a flash of ice so fierce that the killing scene almost looked beautiful, in some historic, significant, romantic way, like a painting that would have happily hung in a psychopaths parlour.

  And within the frame—directly at the epicenter of this serene cold-snap—Sludge.

  Throughout the assault, the winding hollow of alleyways and trenches had all looked the same, but now, even more so. Spread out in a radius of fifty or so yards, the walkways and spike-ridden sprawl that comprised the goblin city of Skaggad was encased entirely in a thick tomb of ice, frost, and rime.

  Greenskins crawled mid-freeze. Clawed hands clung to crystallised ropes. Goblin bodies—half-twitching and crusted in the chill—met the cold kiss of steel. Wrought iron shimmered. Flamed torches hissed in icy vapour. Disemboweled piles of corpses steamed where freshly spilled body heat plunged in the everfrost.

  The lumberjack's lips were blue, the tips of its fingers drained to a bloodless, fleshy white.

  Yet Sludge could not feel the cold. It had felt it once—weeks before—cold was spiky and sharp as a split bone. This was different.

  Seethe… whispered the Cold Prince from within its folds of flesh and ooze.

  [Soul Fragment Equipped (1/1): Gal-ghuruk, the Cold Prince]

  [Ultimate Ability Unlocked: Chionic Tomb (Rank 1)

  When enraged, the allotted vessel calls upon the frozen halls of Gal-ghuruk, erupting in a ring of ice and frost.]

  The whisper did not linger.

  It caught and settled in Sludge’s throat like a stray apple seed—embedded in the lining and the tissue.

  Not as a voice—a voice implied distance, agency—but as a pressure behind the eyes, a weight in the marrow, a sense that something vast had finally found a hinge it could lean on; softly clicking into place. The cold did not ask permission. It seeped. It recognised ownership.

  Sludge stepped forward and the ice obeyed.

  Where its boots pressed down, the cobbles and crudely packed earth of Skaggad did not crack—it bowed, compacting itself into load-bearing certainty. The ring of frost no longer expanded outward in wild crescents like it had in the snap. Now, it followed Sludge instead, dragging itself along walls and ceilings like a loyal tide, collapsing alleyways behind it into sealed mausoleums of goblinkind and green flesh.

  Skaggad was being erased. Not cleansed or conquered. Cleared, with a prickly, icy, clatter.

  Sludge moved alone now. The Barston boys were long gone—the trappers corpse, the Butcher mid-wail—lost behind walls of ice, trapped in pockets of steam and silence, spared the rest of it by distance or mercy or simple geometry. No shouts followed. No prayers or muttering. Just the slow percussion of cracking timber and the soft, constant sound of freezing blood. A pop of plummeting heat; a burst of vessels.

  A stray goblin burst from a hatchway, eyes wide, mouth open.

  Sludge did not swing.

  Instead, the very air in front of the creature tightened. Frost condensed inside its lungs with a sound like paper tearing. It fell forward, dead before it hit the ground, skidding across glassed stone to rest at Sludge’s feet. Sludge stepped over it without looking.

  The city thinned as it went deeper.

  Skaggad had appeared tight on the approach, though the Barston assailants had made little sense of its municipality. Alleys coiled around each other like intestines—but now those coils straightened, forced into clarity by the ice. False walls split. Crawl-spaces burst open. Secret paths revealed themselves in the language of fractures and stress-lines, as if the cold itself could read the laid-out goblin lies and correct them.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  It walked for minutes, though it felt like miles. Sludge could make little sense of time, though its comprehension of this squat, hovelled city came with the ease in which it was now traversed. It stepped and frost followed.

  The cold thickened the further it went, air growing heavy, almost syrupy. The rustle returned, stronger now—a sound like distant banners snapping in an unfelt wind. Frost gathered in architectural shapes here: buttresses, ribs, vaults of ice clawing outward from old goblin stonework, remaking the place in the Cold Prince’s image without instruction. A glacial cathedral of goblin gore and ridden flesh.

  Beautiful, it smiled inwardly.

  The drums had long since stopped. Goblin percussionists frozen mid-thud; faces still snarling in delight. The silence that followed their absence was both intentional and deafening.

  The chamber before Sludge opened wide, sudden and cavernous—a queen’s den hollowed out from deliberately braced palisades and ramshackled concourse, ceiling lost in shadow and frost-fog. It was an amphitheatre, for all intents and purposes, and as Sludge stepped forward bone-lamps hung frozen mid-sway. Gold and junk and scavenged relics lay half-buried under sharp-pillows of rime, wealth rendered meaningless by temperature alone.

  At the heart of it—upon a throne of stacked skulls, lacquered insignia, and hammered scrap—sat the nameless Goblin Queen.

  She was vast by goblin measure. Broad. Old. Vile. Her skin sagged in thick folds, studded with ritual scars filled with ash and resin. A crown of antlers and jawbones framed a face that had learned patience the way others learned cruelty. Her eyes were black and bright and watching—oddly kind despite her insidiousness.

  She did not rise, nor did she scream. She smiled, slow and knowing, and spread her hands.

  Chains rose with her movements

  Not metal—people. Bound goblins, dozens of them, yanked up by hooks and barbs worked through flesh and bone, strung together into a writhing curtain between queen and intruder. Beside her, folded into the shadows of the throne, stood Hag-nash-pag, its eyes set firmly on the lumberjack—limbs tensed taut in the icy bite.

  She spoke, and her voice carried weight, thick with old rites and rot.

  “Big thing comes alone,” she crooned with a shrill cackle. “Thinks itself winter.”

  She clenched her fist, and the daisy-chain-link of bound goblins surged forward as one, hurled bodily toward Sludge in a screaming, flailing mass.

  The cold answered it long before Sludge could.

  The air folded in on itself. Every goblin froze mid-flight, limbs locked, mouths open, eyes bulging, tongues lolling. They did not fall flat. They hovered—suspended in a lattice of ice that grew outward from their bodies, interlinking, thickening, forming a solid wall of frozen flesh and terror.

  Sludge raised his axe—slashing downward—slashing through it. The head of the steel glowed in a bright, white, blue. Icicles cracked along the surface of the steel.

  [Soul Fragment Equipped (1/1): Gal-ghuruk, the Cold Prince]

  [Active Ability Unlocked: Rimeforged (Rank 1)

  The allotted vessels melee attacks are empowered by the frozen heart of Gal-ghuruk, dealing additional cold damage and amplifying the effects of frost magic on hit.]

  The impact shattered the whole, ice-ridden construct into a storm of fragments that rang against the walls like thrown cutlery. Shards skittered across the floor. Goblin faces broke clean apart in mid-expression.

  The Queen’s smile finally slipped.

  “Scum lord of the March,” she cawed.

  She rose then, unfolding herself from the throne, towering now—robes sloughing off her frame, charms and fetishes exploding as frost claimed them. She drew a blade that steamed with poison heat, runes burning along its edge to keep the cold at bay.

  She charged as Hag-nash-pag slipped away into the shadows. The lithe goblin retreated, though it's regent seemed oblivious to the desertion. The bonds of goblin kinship seemed a curious arrangement; half-forged and still brittle, like a blade built from necessity rather than oath.

  The Goblin Queen was fast, far faster than she looked. Though her globular form spilled out like half-churned butter, she was deft in all the right places. The blade slashed, scored Sludge’s chest, burned through fur and meat in a line of hissing black.

  Sludge did not slow. The pain registered somewhere distant instead, like weather on the far side of a mountain.

  Seethe, whispered the voice once more.

  The Queen struck again, and again—each cut a defiance, each blow screamed with ritual power—but the frost crawled up her arms regardless, numbing joints and fatty folds, stealing speed. Her breath came out ragged and crackling, smoke pluming from her blade thick and uneven.

  Sludge raised the axe.

  She screamed a curse and lunged—

  “KINN EATTERR!”

  —and the axe came down once. Hard. Final. Percussive in its crunch.

  The impact drove her into the floor, ice erupting outward in a perfectly formed circle, entombing the throne, the glittering of trinkets, and her frozen corpse alike in a single, seamless bloom of white.

  [Quest Completed!: Pacification of the Southern March]

  [Return to quest giver to claim your reward]

  The Queen’s last expression—rage, disbelief, something like awe—froze with her, preserved forever in the Cold Prince’s keeping.

  Sludge stood alone in the cryogenesis. Frost clung to the matte of its lumberjack beard, cold cornered in the creases of the bound leather, the splint braces—the pulsating muscle beneath.

  The cold receded slightly as the lumberjacks rage subsided. It didn't know entirely why it had angered; just that it had answered in kind. Or at least something deep within it had.

  A familiar prickle skittered over the liminal ledger in its psyche.

  [Notoriety: 15/20]

  Skaggad was silent now. No drums. No chants. No movement but the slow settling of ice and the distant crack of something lurching in the city-wide wound that had been carved out before it.

  Somewhere deep within the lumberjack’s borrowed body, the Cold Prince shifted—content, but awake.

  And then a voice came. Not a voice—words, skittering shapes and symbols etched out into some interface held deep within it. One that the sludge nor the lumberjack could never comprehend.

  [Halbrecht69 whispers: holy shitballs dude did you just solo skaggad ???]