Fenri approached the barren earth just before the Iden Strait at the edge of the Desert of Aeon. The desert was quiet, howling winds wailed across the frozen, sandy flats and Fenri crossed them silently. His nose twinged as the subtle, but pungent odor of scorched glass sifted through the frozen ground. He got a firsthand view at the site of automated artillery that assailed the unlucky pair of interlopers who unleashed a scourge upon all of Vescrutia.
But for what? What could they possibly have gained exploring the Strait of Iden and returning with nothing to show for it but scars and regret?
Fenri’s curiosity overcame him in the dead of night for days after having his hand forced, aligning himself with the B’halian Empire to preserve the longevity of Diamond Dust. It irked him, left a sour taste, just felt bad, but their mission always stood larger than any one generational struggle.
Although Akundae’s ambitions put the Empire at the center of Vescrutia’s next great paradigm, like the phases of the moon, this too would pass.
Diamond Dust would persist.
The calmness at the edge of the Strait of Iden intrigued him, the scene was far less dynamic than what he observed from the front steps of Cold Frontier, watching Zero and Zeik navigate the gauntlet of turret fire. Fenri traversed the field time and’s time again over the weeks since Zero and Zeik retreated, every time he did he wondered more fervently how the two of them, together, could come back from their journey… defea— unsuccessful. Whatever their intention was, this pervasive malaise that sat atop the realm couldn’t have been their goal.
The sea still roiled, and Iden out in the rolling sea laid silent, a crimson-grey aura basking the quiet island in sinister, ominous light. Fenri’s frustration welled within his heart the same as it did every time he journeyed here alone to make sense of the state of affairs. His first few trips found him joined by David or Lana, Frankie even joined him once to give more lighthearted support, but his deep seated determination outlasted the open ended strategy conversations between them. Unfortunately, his trips devolved from meditations on solutions to rumination on the shortcomings of Arcturus’s most infamous remnants.
Nobody but Zero and Zeik knew exactly what happened here.
So Fenri stood there, breathing in the frigid, salty air and convinced himself to finally travel to Iden in person to assess the situation firsthand, regardless of what danger lie waiting there.
The Frozen Moon of Diamond Dust stepped off the coast of the Desert of Aeon, onto a frozen block of ice grown in response to the flick of his wrist, and started across the Strait of Aeon.
A Frosty Counteroffensive: Mending the Mirror
A Frosty Counteroffensive: Mending the Mirror
Last edited by Fenri on Sat Dec 06, 2025 9:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Re: A FrostyCounteroffensive: Mending the Mirror
The rift in the sky drew shut behind Zeik with a long, cosmic groan, as if the heavens themselves were struggling to stitch their torn veil back together. Through the narrowing tear, the beasts that stalked behind him—creatures dredged from starless voids and impossible ecosystems—growled and clawed at the threshold, visible and audible but unwilling to cross into this unnervingly still world. Zeik stepped fully onto the cold sand, felt the unnatural quiet settle around him, and with a sharp motion of his hand, closed the portal entirely—severing the creatures’ path and leaving them behind.
And then the silence pressed in.
No towers.
No shimmering wards.
No artillery belching fire across the Strait.
Only cold wind and the faint, brittle scent of scorched glass.
Zeik took one slow breath, eyes narrowing. This place should not have been quiet. The last time he stood here, Zk at his side, the ground shook beneath them. They had fought a woman interlaced with machine—a grotesque symbiosis of flesh and alloy. Plates of alien metal fused into her skin. Tendrils of conduit running along her bones. Vents breathing for her like mechanical gills. Her movements produced a sound that offended his senses: half biological, half engineered, neither belonging to any natural order.
Not because it was advanced.
Not because it was foreign.
But because it had erased her.
A person turned into an instrument.
A herald of Death’s Subterfuge wearing a human face.
He and Zk defeated her, but the victory was hollow. She lived long enough to lay her hand upon the Traversing Mirror. To corrupt it. To twist its currents. And from that moment, the world shifted.
The Subterfuge bled into Vescrutia like venom.
The dead no longer rested—they rose as monsters, birthed from their own slaughtered bodies. Every battlefield became a womb for new horrors. Death had been inverted, weaponized, and spread across the world.
And at last, the nations of Vescrutia understood:
The horsemen were real.
Their heralds walked openly.
And the war they carried was already here.
Old enemies whispered alliances in dim rooms. Neighbors who once sharpened blades for one another now stood shoulder to shoulder. Even the B’halian War, with all its political poison, shrank beneath the enormity of what stalked the world.
Zeik had come to undo the corruption of the Subterfuge—to unravel Death’s grip on the planet thread by thread. He had come to quiet the blight that twisted fallen bodies into monsters, to halt the unnatural birth of horrors from corpses that should have known peace. If he could sever the Subterfuge’s influence here, even in part, Vescrutia might finally breathe again.
His appearance matched the fire inside him. He no longer wore the torn and trench-stained remnants from the Onyx Trench. Now his clothing was tailored, composed, ceremonial and martial in equal measure. A long battlecoat of storm-grey cloth and obsidian-threaded lining, sigils stitched into the interior seams—a sorcerer’s armor, a seer’s mantle, and a warrior’s uniform bound in one.
He looked like someone who had walked through prophecy and fire and returned carrying both.
But as his boots touched the sand, all that preparation dissolved into confusion.
The artillery that once tore the sky apart sat cold and empty.
The scorch marks were old.
The air unmoving.
The land felt as though time had taken a breath and forgotten to release it.
And then he saw the lone figure at the icy shore.
Fenri.
The Frozen Moon of Diamond Dust.
The last time their paths crossed, Fenri had spoken of aligning with Akundae—War’s herald. He claimed it was for the defense of his people… and perhaps it was. Zeik understood the burden of choosing a poison for the sake of those you must protect; he had lived that truth more times than he cared to remember.
But it still burned him.
Because Fenri had been critical in aiding Zk.
Because Fenri knew what they were truly up against.
Because the thought of someone like him bending even partially toward War’s shadow felt like a betrayal of the fragile world they were struggling to hold together.
Zeik had expected to arrive to an enemy fortification.
Instead, he found him.
Zeik stepped forward, Naten unraveling from his clenched fist like dissipating storm vapor. His coat fluttered behind him, stirring the snow.
He spoke without raising his voice, and yet the air felt carved by the words.
“…Fenri.”
The name fell into the quiet and was swallowed whole by it.
He had come to end a corruption—
—and found only silence.
And the silence felt wrong.
And then the silence pressed in.
No towers.
No shimmering wards.
No artillery belching fire across the Strait.
Only cold wind and the faint, brittle scent of scorched glass.
Zeik took one slow breath, eyes narrowing. This place should not have been quiet. The last time he stood here, Zk at his side, the ground shook beneath them. They had fought a woman interlaced with machine—a grotesque symbiosis of flesh and alloy. Plates of alien metal fused into her skin. Tendrils of conduit running along her bones. Vents breathing for her like mechanical gills. Her movements produced a sound that offended his senses: half biological, half engineered, neither belonging to any natural order.
Not because it was advanced.
Not because it was foreign.
But because it had erased her.
A person turned into an instrument.
A herald of Death’s Subterfuge wearing a human face.
He and Zk defeated her, but the victory was hollow. She lived long enough to lay her hand upon the Traversing Mirror. To corrupt it. To twist its currents. And from that moment, the world shifted.
The Subterfuge bled into Vescrutia like venom.
The dead no longer rested—they rose as monsters, birthed from their own slaughtered bodies. Every battlefield became a womb for new horrors. Death had been inverted, weaponized, and spread across the world.
And at last, the nations of Vescrutia understood:
The horsemen were real.
Their heralds walked openly.
And the war they carried was already here.
Old enemies whispered alliances in dim rooms. Neighbors who once sharpened blades for one another now stood shoulder to shoulder. Even the B’halian War, with all its political poison, shrank beneath the enormity of what stalked the world.
Zeik had come to undo the corruption of the Subterfuge—to unravel Death’s grip on the planet thread by thread. He had come to quiet the blight that twisted fallen bodies into monsters, to halt the unnatural birth of horrors from corpses that should have known peace. If he could sever the Subterfuge’s influence here, even in part, Vescrutia might finally breathe again.
His appearance matched the fire inside him. He no longer wore the torn and trench-stained remnants from the Onyx Trench. Now his clothing was tailored, composed, ceremonial and martial in equal measure. A long battlecoat of storm-grey cloth and obsidian-threaded lining, sigils stitched into the interior seams—a sorcerer’s armor, a seer’s mantle, and a warrior’s uniform bound in one.
He looked like someone who had walked through prophecy and fire and returned carrying both.
But as his boots touched the sand, all that preparation dissolved into confusion.
The artillery that once tore the sky apart sat cold and empty.
The scorch marks were old.
The air unmoving.
The land felt as though time had taken a breath and forgotten to release it.
And then he saw the lone figure at the icy shore.
Fenri.
The Frozen Moon of Diamond Dust.
The last time their paths crossed, Fenri had spoken of aligning with Akundae—War’s herald. He claimed it was for the defense of his people… and perhaps it was. Zeik understood the burden of choosing a poison for the sake of those you must protect; he had lived that truth more times than he cared to remember.
But it still burned him.
Because Fenri had been critical in aiding Zk.
Because Fenri knew what they were truly up against.
Because the thought of someone like him bending even partially toward War’s shadow felt like a betrayal of the fragile world they were struggling to hold together.
Zeik had expected to arrive to an enemy fortification.
Instead, he found him.
Zeik stepped forward, Naten unraveling from his clenched fist like dissipating storm vapor. His coat fluttered behind him, stirring the snow.
He spoke without raising his voice, and yet the air felt carved by the words.
“…Fenri.”
The name fell into the quiet and was swallowed whole by it.
He had come to end a corruption—
—and found only silence.
And the silence felt wrong.
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Re: A Frosty Counteroffensive: Mending the Mirror
A tingle crawled up Fenri's back, sensing a surge in energy appear behind him accompanied by the snarls and grumbles of otherworldly beasts. He turned to look over his shoulder only slightly, to make sure he wasn't going to be ambushed by any of the predators of Aeon. What he found turned out to be a battle ready Zeik, steeped in bloodlust and resolve stepping from a portal a new man, a resolved man with a goal in mind.
Zeik looked more than ready to take on an army if he found it here, probably shell shocked from the first time he and ZK ventured to this part of the continent. Zeik and Zero set off a number of security measures set by the Arceneaux Corporation that allowed Fenri to venture here unencumbered; the guards slept, the barrier vanished, and now the pair of them stood at the edge of the continent heading toward the End of the World across a roiling, freezing sea.
"Zeik... Again. And uninvited, no doubt." Fenri said, standing with one foot placed on a slab of ice, paused mid stride. "I would love to stay and trade pleasantries, but I have to clean up your mess. If you'll excuse me."
Fenri started walking out into the rolling Strait of Iden, a frozen path growing in front of him with every step. The reports from Diamond Dust stations all over Vescrutia replayed in his mind through the symphony of crashing waves and crackling ice. He aligned himself with a brutal Empire for the survival of his organization and had to face the Herald of War at his doorstep all because Zero and Zeik unleashed a curse upon Vescrutia. Whether it was Zero's typical callous curiosity or Zeik's sage wisdom receiving its comeuppance for keeping someone like Zero in close company, Fenri couldn't trust this man's judgment any more than he could trust that the pungent scourge stifling Vescrutia would resolve itself. As the Frozen Moon of Diamond Dust and the last chance to see his organization, comrades, and family survive to see the other side of this dilemma, he had a responsibility to take action.
Zeik looked more than ready to take on an army if he found it here, probably shell shocked from the first time he and ZK ventured to this part of the continent. Zeik and Zero set off a number of security measures set by the Arceneaux Corporation that allowed Fenri to venture here unencumbered; the guards slept, the barrier vanished, and now the pair of them stood at the edge of the continent heading toward the End of the World across a roiling, freezing sea.
"Zeik... Again. And uninvited, no doubt." Fenri said, standing with one foot placed on a slab of ice, paused mid stride. "I would love to stay and trade pleasantries, but I have to clean up your mess. If you'll excuse me."
Fenri started walking out into the rolling Strait of Iden, a frozen path growing in front of him with every step. The reports from Diamond Dust stations all over Vescrutia replayed in his mind through the symphony of crashing waves and crackling ice. He aligned himself with a brutal Empire for the survival of his organization and had to face the Herald of War at his doorstep all because Zero and Zeik unleashed a curse upon Vescrutia. Whether it was Zero's typical callous curiosity or Zeik's sage wisdom receiving its comeuppance for keeping someone like Zero in close company, Fenri couldn't trust this man's judgment any more than he could trust that the pungent scourge stifling Vescrutia would resolve itself. As the Frozen Moon of Diamond Dust and the last chance to see his organization, comrades, and family survive to see the other side of this dilemma, he had a responsibility to take action.
The team