Liam turned to Ethan and when he saw the dagger he grabbed the elf’s arm, his eyes growing wide from shock. “No! You can’t kill him! There must be another way! There is always another way forward!” Ethan looked at him perplexed before a small smile appeared on his face. “I’m trying another way, this dagger isn’t for him but for me. Liam I don’t know if this works but…I have it handled so don’t worry too much, I know we're in unknown territory here but you said it yourself. We have to hurry especially with monsters now able to enter the safe zone, so let me do this okay?”
The guard captain hesitated for a moment longer but let go of the elf and nodded, without another word he turned around and turned around. Helping his men to position the people so they wouldn’t lay in bunched up heaps like corpses anymore. Ethan sighed and focused back on the man in front of him. “Alright friend, this is something new to me I haven’t tried before and I’m honest with you, I’m grasping at straws here and this might kill you. Death is always a possibility, nod if you can understand me.”
It took a while but the man finally nodded, his mumbling growing louder as he moved his head up and down violently. “Okay friend, I don’t know what will happen so be ready for pain and that you might have to suffer through this…” Ethan pulled his sleeve up, revealing his pale arm covered in pale blue veins. He put the knife to his wrist and cut it open. His blue blood leaked from the wound instantly as he hissed from the pain.
“This is my gift to you friend, for my frozen blood is not only the vessel of my life, my magic or my power but also the life blood of my entire race. I offer you this gift in good faith so that you might grow stronger as part of my lost primordial race. Now drink and be reborn.” His voice boomed with gravitas over the town, his words not entirely his own as he spoke them. He pressed the cut wrist to the man’s mouth and squeezed his hand so more was leaking from it.
The man drank from him, gulping the freezing liquid down like his very life depended on it. After around half a minute Ethan pulled his wrist away and sealed it with a sheet of ice. The man had stopped shivering despite the intense cold Ethan radiated. His blood shot eyes had turned normal again but the brown eyes were slowly turning into a clear blue. The man let out a small sigh before an explosion of frost encased him entirely into a jagged block of white ice.
Ethan was thrown away and landed on his back, for a moment he just looked at the sky, a serene smile on his face. Liam appeared in his vision and offered him a hand. “Do I want to know what you did to that man? Because normally people don’t drink blood that looks like antifreeze straight from a man’s wrist.”
The elf grabbed the hand and let himself be pulled back to his feet, his eyes wandering over the block in front of him. “I gave him my blood to turn him into one of my own, it’s not something anyone can do so don’t worry about it but it might save him and even make him stronger in the long term…for now I just hope he survives.”
“Right… well that’s too esoteric for me and I won’t ask again about it, at least until this mess is resolved afterwards, well we see how it goes. As long as we don’t kill them because we have more people waking up by the minute but they’re in even worse shape than this one. Seems the first guy pulled through so fast because he was among the people with the highest level. He’s a carpenter, so it makes sense that he reached a high level as nearly anything is made from wood here so that should’ve power leveled him quite a bit.”
Ethan cracked his neck and closed his eyes for a moment. His vitality had already restored him back to full but he felt a weakness deep inside of him that didn’t come from his body but from somewhere far deeper. He wouldn’t be able to turn everybody at once. “Alright, I’m taking care of them, can you send men into the cave? We have to see what happened to the people down there.” With a snap the thick sheet of ice in front of the gate turned into tiny ice crystals that drifted away.
“Sure we can do that. Do your magic thing, we do our job as guards.” He nodded and left after gathering some men. Ethan approached the next awake person, a young woman with a weaver class. He knelt down next to her and smiled. “I have a gift for you my friend.”
Hours vanished as Ethan worked on giving the people his blood, some of them refused and died over the next few hours which was expected. But this also meant that the people were running out of time faster than he wished. Still he couldn’t force people to accept his blood, so he hurried to the next person that wanted to be saved. During down times when there were no people to take care of he ate and drank as much as possible, his body feeling constantly empty even after eating everything the dwarves had packed him, which should have lasted multiple weeks.
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Liam and Harris managed to pull people from the caves, some were dead but most of them were still fighting, clinging to their lives. Ethan also offered them his blood and almost all accepted it, while this was good news in general the trouble was slowly approaching the closer they came to nightfall. The guards had put up torches around the place so they wouldn’t sit in complete darkness. The last people were dragged from the caves and laid out with those waiting for a burial being placed off to the side. After their work was finished their rest was short-lived as a horn sounded out from the walls.
Harris, who just finished putting one of the more severe cases closer to Ethan, tilted his head and listened to the number and lengths of horn signals. He gently laid the person down and looked over to Ethan. “We have monsters coming, no humans which is good. We had one group visit before but that was about two weeks ago. I’m gonna grab Liam and some guards, are you…able to come with us?”
At this point Ethan looked extremely exhausted. He somehow lost even more color, turning even paler, his eyes had lost their glow and were bloodshot. He sat against the wooden wall of a house, smiling at Harris. “I will wait here, don’t worry about me. I might look exhausted and drained but my mind is still as sharp as ever it just takes a lot out of you. I will rest for some time and hopefully be back to normal by then.”
Harris looked skeptical but didn’t say anything, he just yelled at some guardsmen to gather and inform Liam before he moved out towards the gate. Ethan smiled, his eyes wandering over the hundreds of ice formations spread out over the street. While he didn’t share the goal of his patron to bring the Winter Elves back he was glad that this race, his race might not be lost. How knows he might find some kind of family in them for the time being?
Winter was something magical to him after all and while he still only controlled a small part of winter he hoped that someday he could harness all of it to provide for the people he cared about and fulfill his overall goal to get his sister back. He didn’t know how far in the future that was but until then he would do everything to acquire the necessary strength and trustworthy allies to undertake this absurd journey. He chuckled to himself before closing his eyes, he needed to rest for a little bit to get back in fighting form.
Liam arrived at the gate five minutes after Harris had moved out, at that point he was still in the caves when the horn sounded out. He took a large group of guards with him as they weren’t needed at the mansion anymore. Harris greeted him with a nod when Liam arrived and both men walked up the stairs to the top of the wall. There on the open field was a group of monsters, by the looks of it they were mostly goblins equipped with weapons fashioned from wood and stone. Some of them were riding wolves but what made Liam and Harris gulp was the massive white beast they surrounded which was covered in metal spikes driven into its body, a heavy metal collar was tightly around its neck. The spikes and the collar glowed with a red light that looked menacing.
“Harris what is that? I’ve never seen such a creature before and we saw a lot of weird stuff during the tutorial. Goblins are trash monsters, no more useful than a thrown rock. They barely qualify as scouts so why is such a creature here?” Liam looked over the beast and the goblins that surrounded it. “I don’t know sir, I can’t identify it…not even the scouts with their specialized Identify seem to be able to figure it out. I just know this means trouble.”
Both men looked at each other before turning back, Liam noticing something when his eyes wandered over the creature. “We need Ethan here…look.” He pointed at the beast, pale blue blood leaking from the wounds around the spikes. “We both saw blood like that not long ago and if my guess is right that white color is not by accident. Gather more men Harris and bring Ethan, this could end up badly if they decide to let that thing loose on the town.”
The man saluted and rushed down the stairs. Liam looked over at the approaching horde again, they were still far away and at their leisurely pace it would still take time for them to reach the city. Time they needed to prepare, still Liam had no faith that they could defeat this beast. They were only city guards after all. He just hoped Harris could bring Ethan with him, the elf might know something.
