Chapter 190: Frostmarch Front
[Campaign Day 2–7]
The northern war began without announcement.
While the kingdom’s attention — its generals, its reserves, its strategic consciousness — focused on the Ashwall’s three breaches and the Pale Coast’s naval siege, Morglith’s army crossed the Frostmarch border on the war’s ninth day. No ultimatum. No diplomatic prelude. The Decay domain god’s forces simply appeared: 15,000 troops emerging from the Blight Wastes in a column that stretched across twelve kilometers of frozen borderland.
Gharrek Fenward — Champion of Fenrath, commander of the Howlist northern garrison — received the contact report at his command post in Frosthold, the kingdom’s northernmost settlement. Frosthold was a frontier fort rather than a city: stone walls, a permanent garrison of 3,000 Howlist warriors, and a civilian population of approximately 2,000 who lived in the shadow of the Frostmarch because the cold didn’t bother them and the isolation suited people who preferred the company of wolves to the company of crowds.
Gharrek was forty-seven years old. Scarred. Patient. A hunter who had spent thirty years in Fenrath’s service and who understood predators with the instinctive recognition of someone who had been both predator and prey. He read the contact report with the measured calm of a man who had expected this attack for weeks and had used those weeks to prepare.
"Composition?" he asked the scout.
"Three elements, Champion. Approximately 3,000 decay constructs in the vanguard — animated bodies, Decay domain reanimation. Biped form, variable size, weapon appendages grown from the organic structure. Movement speed approximately four kilometers per hour. Behind them: 8,000 conventional infantry — Blightkin. Morglith’s mortal worshippers. Behind them: 4,000 additional constructs in reserve configuration, not yet animated."
"The constructs in the vanguard — the ones that age by touch?"
"Confirmed. Forward scouts observed accelerated aging effects on vegetation within contact range. Grass desiccated. Tree branches withered. The Decay domain’s temporal acceleration appears to function through direct contact and through a limited area-of-effect radius — approximately two meters from each construct."
Gharrek considered. The decay constructs were the threat — 3,000 reanimated bodies whose touch aged organic matter by decades in seconds. Armor could be aged until it crumbled. Weapons could corrode in a soldier’s hand. Flesh could wither from youth to decrepitude in the time a construct maintained contact. Against conventional infantry, the constructs were a nightmare.
The Howlist garrison was not conventional infantry.
***
The Howlist military tradition descended from Fenrath’s fundamental nature: the god of Frost, Hunt, and Pack. His worshippers organized themselves not in companies and battalions but in packs — units of thirty to fifty warriors who fought with the coordinated instinct that the Pack domain’s divine enhancement provided and who moved through hostile terrain with the sensory awareness of the wolves that were both their spiritual totems and their literal combat companions.
Each pack included wolves.
The Frost domain’s divine investment in the Frostmarch’s wolf population had, over generations, produced animals that were substantially larger, more intelligent, and more resilient than their unblessed counterparts. Adult pack wolves weighed approximately eighty kilograms — twice the mass of a standard timber wolf. Their fur insulated them against temperatures that would kill unprotected humans within hours. Their bite force, enhanced by the Frost domain’s structural reinforcement of jaw musculature, exceeded 400 kilograms — sufficient to crush the femur of a war-beast or sever the limb of a construct.
The Pack domain’s tactical enhancement was the wolves’ most significant combat capability. Each wolf was neurologically connected to its pack-bonded handler through the divine link that Fenrath’s blessing established — not telepathy, but a shared sensory awareness that allowed the handler to perceive what the wolf perceived and the wolf to respond to the handler’s tactical intent without verbal commands. A pack of forty warriors and twenty wolves functioned as a sixty-member organism with shared senses and coordinated purpose.
Gharrek’s garrison comprised sixty packs — approximately 3,000 warriors and 1,200 wolves. Against Morglith’s 15,000 troops, the garrison was outnumbered five-to-one. Against the 3,000 decay constructs that formed the vanguard, the odds were even in numbers but profoundly uneven in threat calculus: one touch from a construct could age a warrior from fighting condition to death.
"We use distance, the wolves, and the cold. Close combat against those things is suicidal because of the touch-aging effect."
***
The cold was Gharrek’s primary weapon.
Morglith’s decay constructs were organic — reanimated dead tissue held together by the Decay domain’s divine energy. Arrested decomposition. The Decay domain suspended the natural processes that would reduce dead flesh to component elements, preserving the tissue in a state of functional animation. But organic was still organic — proteins, fats, cellular structures that responded to temperature drops the way all biological matter did.
Cold made them brittle.
The Frost domain’s environmental manipulation — Fenrath’s gift to his territory — operated on the Frostmarch’s ambient temperature with divine precision. Under normal conditions, the Frostmarch’s winter temperatures averaged minus fifteen degrees. Under divine amplification, a localized area could be reduced to minus forty — cold enough to freeze organic tissue solid, form water crystals in cellular structures, and shift the mechanical properties of dead tissue from flexible to fragile.
Gharrek’s plan was simple in concept and demanding in execution: draw the construct vanguard into terrain where the Frost domain’s environmental manipulation was strongest, reduce the ambient temperature in the engagement zone to extremes that would freeze the constructs’ organic structure, and then shatter them.
The engagement zone was the Whitefell Pass — a narrow valley twelve kilometers south of Frosthold, flanked by granite ridges that channeled both wind and divine cold into a natural temperature depression. In normal conditions, Whitefell Pass was five degrees colder than the surrounding terrain. Under Fenrath’s divine amplification, it could become the coldest point on the continent.
The construct vanguard entered Whitefell Pass at dawn on the tenth day — 3,000 reanimated bodies advancing in a loose formation, their weapon-limbs extended, the two-meter aging aura around each construct producing a visible effect on the Pass’s vegetation: the frost-grass darkening, curling, aging from seasonal dormancy to desiccated death.
Gharrek watched from the northern ridge. The wolves lay beside their handlers, silent, their breath visible in the already-cold air. The packs waited. And the temperature dropped.
The Frost domain’s amplification was not dramatic — it was gradual. The cold deepened by one degree per minute, a progression that the constructs’ limited sensory apparatus could not detect because dead tissue didn’t feel temperature change the way living tissue did. The constructs marched through the Pass at their standard four-kilometer pace, unaware that the air around them was approaching the threshold at which their organic structure would become vulnerable.
At minus thirty-five degrees, the first construct stumbled. Its left knee — a joint of reanimated tissue whose flexibility depended on the organic material’s mechanical properties — had frozen. The ice crystals that formed in the joint’s tissue made it rigid, the knee locking at approximately twenty degrees of flexion. The construct continued to advance on the locked leg, its gait reduced to a lurching drag.
At minus forty, it shattered.
A Howlist arrow — iron-tipped, fired from a composite bow at the northern ridge — struck the stumbling construct’s frozen torso. The impact force — approximately 45 joules — was insufficient to penetrate living tissue or flexible organic matter. But the frozen tissue had the consistency of ice. The arrow’s impact point became a fracture origin: cracks propagated through the frozen organic structure in radial lines from the point of impact, and the construct’s torso broke apart along those lines like a ceramic vessel struck with a hammer.
The construct collapsed into frozen fragments. The Decay domain’s animating energy — the divine force that held the dead tissue in operational configuration — released in a visible pulse of grey-green light, dissipating into the cold air.
Around the first shattered construct, a hundred more began to stumble. The Pass was at minus forty degrees, and the vanguard was freezing.
The arrows came in volleys. Sixty packs, eighty archers per pack, firing from the ridges into the frozen vanguard at ranges where accuracy was academic — the targets were slow, rigid, and incapable of evasion. Each arrow that struck a frozen construct produced the same shattering effect: impact, fracture propagation, structural disintegration, divine release.
The constructs died in the cold. The constructs died in geometry — the Pass’s confining walls preventing dispersal, the ridges providing elevation. The constructs died because they were dead things animated by divine will, and the Frost domain’s environmental mastery had turned their organic structure from an asset into a vulnerability.
But the constructs were the vanguard, not the army. Behind them — beyond the Pass, outside the temperature-manipulated zone — 8,000 Blightkin infantry waited with the patient discipline of soldiers whose god had 250 years of military experience.
Morglith would adapt. The Frostmarch’s cold was a defense, not a solution.