Outside
COLSAR
The door closes behind him, and they are already on the house.
Bodies slam against the wood before he has taken two steps, hands scraping, weight piling at the walls and windows, the sound thick and constant, surrounding him all at once rather than building toward anything.
The wind drives heavy snow across the open ground in hard white sheets but the figures moving through it are impossible to miss, climbing over each other, forcing themselves into every weakness they can find.
He shifts as he turns, the change tearing through him fast and complete, his body dropping lower as he drives back toward the nearest window. They are there, pushing through the broken frame, trying to make the house give.
He catches the first one before it clears the opening, hooks into it, and rips it backward hard enough to tear it free before throwing it into the snow. Another replaces it immediately. Then another.
He tears through them, dragging bodies away from the wall, clearing the frame, breaking arms, ripping heads free, forcing space that closes again the second he creates it.
One gets far enough inside that its weight presses into the room and he takes it apart where it hangs, throwing what remains back out into the cold.
The door shudders behind him. Something heavy hits it again.
Then he hears her.
The sound cuts through everything else, thin and strained, pulled from somewhere deep inside her, and his body shifts toward the door before he can stop it, toward her, toward the only thing that matters beneath all of this. He stops himself hard enough that it hurts.
If he opens that door they come with him.
If they come with him they reach her. He turns back to the window and tears another one free, then pulls in a breath and forces it out, the fire coming up from his chest and leaving his throat in a low controlled burst, sweeping across the cluster at the base of the wall and dropping several at once.
It clears a strip of ground that lasts half a breath before more fill it.
He forces himself to look beyond the immediate press.
The open ground is gone. The distance beyond it is gone.
The wind carries bodies forward in waves that do not end, figures forcing themselves up from beneath the snow while others already move, already close, their numbers thick enough that the ground shifts beneath them.
He cannot see where they stop because they do not stop, the dark mass of them swallowed by the heavy snowfall and replaced by more dark mass beyond it.
He moves forward into them.
The first few fall easily, torn apart before their combined weight can take advantage of his position, but it buys him seconds and nothing more.
They press in harder, more rising behind the ones he drops, pushing forward without hesitation, snow breaking and collapsing as bodies force their way upward and fill every gap before he can use it.
He draws in another breath and breathes out fire, wider this time, rolling it low across the front rank and catching enough at once to carve open ground. For a moment it holds. Then it closes. They step over what remains without slowing.
He moves again, faster now and less controlled.
He cannot keep them off the house and push them back at the same time, so he forces his way outward through the press of them, drawing their attention away from the structure, buying it whatever time he can while the sounds of bodies slamming against the walls continue behind him.
Her voice reaches him again, louder this time.
It cuts through him and pulls him back toward the house before he can stop himself. He turns halfway and then stops, holding himself there against every instinct he has.
He cannot go back.
He pushes deeper into them.
The wind cuts harder across the open ground, snow driving into his face and eyes, catching in fur and wounds and blurring everything beyond a few strides.
The distance disappears behind it and beyond the distance there are still more of them, still coming, because there are always more, because that is what this is.
He pivots and drives back toward the house, hitting the cluster at the wall with enough force to scatter them, tearing through the closest and dragging others away before they can gain purchase.
He breathes fire into the ones still pressing forward, forcing them back just enough to give the house a moment.
A moment is all he can give it before more take their place.
His movements grow heavier. Each strike takes more than the last. Each breath pulls harder against the cold.
The fire comes slower each time he reaches for it, costing more than it did an hour ago, and he is aware in a way he does not want to be aware that this is not sustainable, that the sheer number of what is out here does not work in his favor no matter how long he holds.
Something tears across the sky above the snow.
He looks up.
The sky darkens further and then something drops, hitting beyond the outer edge of the swarm and tearing through the dead with a violence that breaks their lines apart, bodies coming apart in pieces rather than blows.
It moves once, twice, cutting a path through them, then vanishes into the whiteout as quickly as it appeared.
A Morrak.
He does not follow it. He does not trust it. He does not trust anything that moves through this place without explanation, anything that arrives at the right moment, anything that carries even the faint suggestion of Sevrin’s hand behind it.
He turns back to the dead and keeps moving, tearing through another cluster and then another, his body working on instinct now, each action following the last without pause.
Time stretches in a way that makes it impossible to measure.
His breath pulls harder against the cold with every pass and the fire takes longer to come each time he reaches for it, every burst smaller and more costly than the one before.
The house remains behind him. He checks it when he can, and each time it still stands, and each time it looks closer to not standing, the walls shuddering under the weight of what presses against them, the sound of it carrying even over the wind.
Her voice reaches him again, faint and carried through distance and everything between them, and he does not know what it means.
He does not know what is happening on the other side of those walls.
He knows only the sound of her, and what it costs him each time he forces himself to keep moving away from it, and so he does not let himself think about it, because thinking about it will not keep her alive.
Keeping them back will.
He keeps moving.