Rage. It’s all I can feel. An overwhelming grief and sadness washed by trauma and despair. Why does it keep happening, what have I done to deserve this. I can’t go yet, I must live on for her. She believed in me.

  The Dark Knight who stood in front of me, had the most obvious look of enjoyment even through the armor. It made my anger fester even greater. My wife lay dead beside me. Her body, slowly disintegrating into air, turning into follicles of light. I reached out to save what I could but my efforts were futile. Tears were brought to my eyes, but they gradually froze over, just like everything else did.

  The battlefield slowly turned from dirt and fire to snow and ice. It surrounded absolutely anything and everything. I slowly stood up, the tears frozen at my eyes, slowly breaking apart and falling off.

  I stared at the Dark Knight, harboring the most intense anger and rage I’ve felt in a long time, and I just let it explode.

  I couldn’t breathe. My chest heaved, my body trembled for the first time– not from exhaustion, not from fear, but from the palpable rage tearing its way through me. It was raw, violent, suffocating. The Dark Knight stood before me, faceless, unfeeling, a mockery of the life it had stolen. My beautiful Temyi’s life.

  A crack split the air. The ground beneath my feet froze solid amongst the snow, spreading outward in jagged veins of ice. The cold roared to life inside me, fed by my fury, expanding past the limits I’d known I was ever capable of. My breath came out in white plumes, my fingers tingling with an energy that wasn’t just my own– our powers combined, and it was hungry for revenge.

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  Then, my sword responded.

  Frost climbed the length of the silver blade, but it didn’t stop. The ice thickened, twisted, shaped itself, fusing into the steel until it became something else entirely. The blade shimmered like frozen glass, runes I’d never seen before etching themselves into its surface. A hum filled the air, deep and reverberating, as if the sword itself was waking from slumber.

  I gripped it tighter. The ice wasn’t just coating the blade– it was part of it now. And when I moved, the air screamed. I lunged. The Dark Knight raised his weapon to parry, but it no longer mattered. My sword cleaved straight through it– armor, steel, flesh. Resistance was all but wasted. The instant the blade passed through, ice consumed what remained. A statue of frost stood where the knight had been, lifeless, brittle. I shattered it into dust and I shattered the dust too. I made sure nothing remained.

  And yet, the cold did not fade. It was hungry for more, insatiable and ravenous for another meal.

  I lifted my gaze. There were more enemies. More to break and torture. More to have crumble away into iminent nothingness.

  I gave a crooked smile to the realization, my sharp fangs revealing themselves.

  Not a smile of ecstasy.

  Not a smile of enjoyment.

  Rather something deeper, all the stored feelings finally reawakening inside me.