Page 1 of Dark Master's Redemption

1

COLD

Snow blows everywhere in the night, and I can see nothing.

Dark like the night’s endless chill, a maelstrom devours this terrible midnight. My heart is dark along with it; everything inside me is echoed by this torturous storm as I fight through the howling gale. The rim of the Twilight Realm sky provides only the barest light. It’s only enough to know this bitter plain of snow and ice goes on and on.

Endless, like the woe inside my heart.

Before me, the Lady Eiseth Pendragon, Mistress of Britain, pushes on through the gale. Marching with her head down, she’s hardly visible as she fights through the hurricane winds in her draping Arthurian gown and silver armor, stalwart to the end.

My bound Summer Fae lover Lucca Bellari struggles through the snow beside me, his white Victorian suit encrusted with ice like a ghost. Only Curio Silverfrost, Head Concierge of the Red Letter Hotel Florence, whistles like wintery sleigh bells as he walks behind us. A Dark Winter Fae, Curio is perfectly at ease in the bitter snow that engulfs us.

As I feel ready to die in this cruel, devouring cold.

It feels like we’ve been walking for decades, since our failed attempt to return a Vampire Revenant before the Vampire Council of Rome tonight. Though it’s only been maybe an hour since we crossed from Florence to Siberia via a portal Eiseth made, I clutch Lucca’s arm, shivering to my bones.

The screaming wind rips through my white and black Vampire couture; as Eiseth gestures ahead through the storm’s fury, I see something. Just a shimmer in the darkness, that bare glimmer stretches far into the blizzard, in both directions as we come to it. Eiseth moves forward and sets her fingertips to that ephemeral nothingness.

Making it blossom with dark and light magic at her touch.

“This is it! We’re here!” Eiseth says, as oil slick rainbows curl outward from her fingers across the barrier. As they spread in a vast wave to either side and straight up, those rainbows reveal a transparent wall now—rising hundreds of feet into the howling snow.

Eiseth sets her palm to that shimmering surface, then closes her eyes. Lucca and I are nearing hypothermia now as we huddle close and do a Summer Fae heating breath to keep warm.

Eiseth concentrates, drawing an enormous breath. As I hear ancient angelic harmonies cascade off of her, I know it’s the Music of the Spheres, something I didn’t know she could create. But at the Music’s rise, that sheen of dark and light rainbows shimmers away.

Creating a portal into a calm, full moon night.

Eiseth leads us through the barrier, and it closes behind us. We’ve entered a place where there is no snowstorm; barren ice stretches all around us now, vast.

A high moon and stars shine on planes of ice so jagged they could only be a glacier. As we walk upon that glacier now, peaks of ice thrust up to the midnight sky all around.

We’re still in the Twilight Realm; I know it because a glowing, blue-white nimbus is still present at the rim of the sky. But we’ve come through the barrier now, as something else is revealed in this incredible plane of ice.

A towering wall rises before us in the night, with a rim of white frost shining off of its black structure. I see it’s a fortress, massive and ancient, as it stretches endlessly across the glacier.

There is no opening, no door nor windows in that gargantuan, black wall of ice. It’s three hundred feet straight up if it’s an inch; as we approach, I gaze up at the fortress’ towering heights. This isn’t just any fortress, however. This is a citadel—the Siberian ice citadel of Novakitsk where Master Vasily Ilyov rules.

An ancient Dark Fae citadel—hidden from the world by magic.

But this ancient city is protected to the nines, I know. Even as we near, horrible monstrosities like undead dragon wraiths hurtle out from towering battlements with ear-splitting shrieks.

As they dive towards us, each bigger than a house and cruelly boned in their jagged awfulness, halos of terrible violet-blue light manifest around them. They open their wraith maws; that light concentrates as they come for us.

Even as they focus those massive flows of magic at us, shrieking to attack, however, Curio whistles a three-note tune that rings through the thin air like sleigh bells.

The creatures pull up; they veer out of their dives, away from us. As they touch down now, settling beside us in two long rows like they welcome a dignitary home, a massive portcullis is revealed in the black ice wall.

It carves right out of the ice as we all watch, snow skirling away on the midnight breeze. Ancient Fae-runes glow a furious blue-white across the fortress now, blazing in the black wall as they show us a doorway.

Those doors part, grinding open as they pivot out towards us. They slam open with a massive boom, revealing a dark hallway of ice behind.

Lit by sorcerous blue-white torches in brackets of ice, that black hallway is forbidding. But as Curio takes the lead, moving to one of the wraith beasts and scratching its dead, bony chin, I hear it whistle an approving sound like a hawk.

As Curio moves forward, the ice beneath his feet polishes smooth like a promenade, etching with glowing white-blue sigils. Where he passes, the fortress carves with the most beautiful whorls and designs now, entire tableaux of tall Fae spearmen and axe warriors riding fell wraith beasts into battle over vast, icy planes.

It’s Winter Fae magic, I know, as our group nears that gargantuan doorway. More intensely beautiful scenes and script carve along both walls now as we approach the high portcullis and open doors. It’s haunting and lovely, as we face the silent black ice citadel under the high moon.

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