Freezing
by FrostedLights
"Alright troops, fall in!" the fox general said, marching regally before his lines astride the majestic bird thing. There was a sound of footsteps, running past, and then a scream fading into the depths. The general dug his heels into his mount and it rushed to the side of the canyon where a diminutive fox shrank against the distant river and finally disappeared. Where his silhouette had vanished, water rushed up in a column like an erupting geyser. An otter's head popped up out of the churning water and waved at the onlookers before retrieving the dazed, water-logged soldier.
It was then that Virmir realized he had been joined by his entire unit, and they were all on their hands and knees peering over the side.
"Hey are you okay?" a ferret called down. Though it was much too far to be heard.
"He cannot hear you from up here," said another creature of indistinct but decidedly vulpine ancestry. The ferret nodded his understanding, and then yelled again, much louder.
"BACK IN LINE!" Virmir barked. His soldiers were quick to comply, all standing in a row in crisp uniforms of gray and black.
When they were all assembled, he addressed them again. "When I say 'fall in', I mean get in line."
"Sir, but we were already in line?" someone asked in the back. Virmir growled toward them and there were no further questions.
Across the canyon lay the palace of the enemy. Tall towers of ice stood above the keep like glass spires piercing into the heavens. The sunlight danced through the faceted turret roofs and cast an aurora of color across the canyon walls as though they were the movie screen of the divine. There was a single rope bridge that spanned the gap between Virmir's keep and the walls of the ice fortress. The river below seemed wanting of alligators, but perhaps those simply had not been delivered yet. Lady Auramori was a formidable foe, that could be respected. If it weren't for that blasted singing!
Even now the fox general could hear her tittering on like a songbird to the impassioned wails of her violin. Sometimes the mage could be seen on her balcony, fiddling away as she looked out over her icy dominion. Today was not one of those days, so they might yet have the element of surprise. That is, if his troops would stop hurling themselves off the edge of canyons.
"The enemy is cunning! We invade, take the snowshard, and leave before the palace begins to melt. Does everyone understand?"
Half the troops raised their hands.
"Blast it all, this is war, not elementary school!" Virmir shouted. his troops looked to each other in confusion, then all started asking questions at once, creating a cacophony the likes of which was nearly as bad as the ice mage's singing.
"Sir, what if we encounter the enemy, sir?" someone asked when the others had at last calmed down.
Virmir rubbed his chin, thinking it over. "Technically we are the homeowner's association, so we should probably not kill them. On the other hand, I am the king..." Blast, this was hard. Was murder in the neighborhood by-laws? Virmir dug out the handbook. It was stored in his cape pocket, but no larger than the size of a pea. When he had pulled it out it grew to enormous size and fell into his hands, having the heft and girth of a dictionary. The bird thing squawked a complaint at the added weight.
"According to this... Ah, yes, singing, capital crime."
"Since when?" the soldier asked in wide-eyed alarm.
"Since I wrote the book last night," Virmir said, and shrank it back to pocket size. "Onward!"
The soldiers marched in quiet procession across the swinging rope bridge, and the icy fortress loomed closer, towering over them like a great glacier come to make its slow invasion of the warmer urocyon province.
Two figures stood at either side of the bridge on the far end. They were foxes of snow, with sticks crossing out where the eyes should be. King Virmir, frozen in effigy!
"She's got no dignity, she does," one of the soldiers remarked. Virmir drew his hammer from its holder, undoing the straps that held it in place. With a mighty blow he beheaded the snow statue, sending the head hurtling toward the iron gates like a cannon ball. It hit with deafening force, denting the gate. For a moment the iron wall shuddered, then the chains let go and it teetered on its end before falling out into the courtyard. Virmir and his men spilled through, shouts of revenge rising up from their ranks.
The great hall had a sapphire carpet running up and down its length, and in lieu of white stone, soft, well-manicured snow lined the floors where the carpet did not lay. Violin music sang through the halls, seeming to echo from everywhere, frenetic and wild and passionate like the fires from the kingdom over the chasm. Was this a greeting?
The iron wall rose up behind them and slammed shut, trapping the invasion force inside. Torches of pale blue fire lit all along the walls.
"Oh blast," Virmir said, gripping the haft of his hammer. There was a tingling sound above, like a wind chime. All eyes went to the ceiling, seconds before the chandelier of ice shards fell. Cries of fear echoed against the violin music as Virmir's troops raced off in all directions. The dark hallways swallowed them, leaving Virmir with only three swordsmen by his side.
"We'll rendezvous at the dining hall!" Virmir shouted over the din. He hoped his lieutenants had heard him.
Quietly he advanced up the gloomy hall, the music high and taunting. His swordsmen followed close behind with the bird thing nipping at one of the slower ones to speed him along. Ahead he heard shouting, and the squad halted with the raise of his hand. A handful of swordsmen crossed the hallway ahead of them, all running blindly into the darkness of the opposite corridor. A straggler followed soon after, though his uniform was torn and he ran on eight spindly legs of black chitin with swirls of white. He skittered frantically after the others, and was shortly thereafter pursued by a spider the size of a horse with markings similar to the victim he pursued.
Virmir's swordsmen muttered in horror.
"Steady..." he said, calmly, then motioned them forward.
The hallway opened into an open air garden, patrolled by frost wolves. The swordsmen all fastened their weapons into their hilts and clambered up the latticework, walking over the garden's vines like tightropes. The wolves followed along, eyes aglow with wicked red light.
"Those eyes..." one of the swordsmen said in a raspy voice.
"Keep moving," Virmir ordered, swiping at one of the wolves with his hammer. They were out of reach, but it was an effective deterrent against any impulse they might have had to leap up and grab one of the foxes.
The line stopped all at once, and Virmir nearly ran into the swordsman in front of him. Blast! The front of the procession had almost made it into the window.
"What now?" he asked in a hushed whisper.
"I... I don't think she wants us to come in," the soldier at the front said. He turned slowly back to go the other way, his eyes glassy and shining with blue light.
"Who?" One of the other men asked. The soldier did not answer. He simply sank to a seated position on the rail, his eyes burning bright blue that glowed a little in the eerie dark.
Behind him, a raspy voice urged him forward. "Get them..."
He reached down to grab the rail, his hands squirming. They had shrunk to little points by then, and his legs had thinned to match. Two more emerged from the gap between his shirt and his trousers, and a dark abdomen, marked with an icy blue hourglass burgeoned out behind him. He blinked a few moments, shaking his head. The light faded from his eyes, replaced with the brown he had once had. He looked back at himself in horror, and the spider's eyes met his own.
"No, I ... but..." he said, his voice growing frail. His features softened and his shirt drew snug across the curve of a burgeoning chest. "I will..." she said, coldly, and charged.
"TREES! RUN!" Virmir shouted, and he and his other two swordsmen leaped down from the railing and charged away with the wolves and the spider-fox hot in their tails. Through a narrow corridor they ran, making their way toward the banquet hall with all due haste. At the end of the dark walkway, Virmir turned and filled the hallway with a thin wall of fire. The wolves stopped, lest they be burned. They parted to let the spiderfox through. She hissed and clicked her teeth at her escaped quarry.
"We'll ehm.. we'll get that fixed, soldier," Virmir said, rubbing his chin. He wasn't sure how, exactly, but they would find a way. Or, or she would make a fine... ehm... well surely there was something that could be done with an eight-limbed spiderfox.
Other troops had made it to the banquet hall, most of them milling about anxiously. One of the lieutenants had set a few of the better disciplined men up at the other hallways, ensuring that the enemy did not come spilling in unannounced.
"Scamper Squad, fall in!" Virmir barked. Those troops that were not on guard duty all formed a line. One particular soldier could not find a place, and so lay along the back of the line. He had been turned into a snake nearly forty feet long, with light tan belly scales and soft white fur all along his back.
"Sorry sir," the soldier said in a voice that was almost singong. Oh, it was a girl snake.
"That's quite alright, I think," Virmir said. That did sound like singing, but that could be fixed. All of this could be fixed.
At the end of the line, two soldiers stood side-by-side seeming unaltered from the waistline up, but they had the body of leopards from the waist down. Snow leopards, at that. Virmir stopped in front of them, frowning. They looked like the mage.
"You saw her?" he asked.
They looked at each other, then nodded. "She was very nice," one said.
"Yes, she offered us tea and hot cocoa," the other said. Then he pawed at the snowy ground with a forepaw. "I think there was something in it."
Virmir rolled his eyes and followed down the line inspecting the state of his soldiers. Nearly half of them were somehow altered. By his calculation though, half of them were half altered, so this was about three-quarters urocyonese, which sounded better than half and half.
The general's bird thing strode up to him. "Can I go?" he asked.
"...what?" Virmir asked, it had never spoke before. "I should think not! Who shall carry me home?!"
The bird thing scowled and lifted a feathery wing to clumsily gesture to where the general's actual mount was pecking at the spider taur's side, trying to decide if he was food or not. The soldier scampered up the wall in a feat that seemed to defy gravity.
"Oh. Well, no. Still no, we are locked in." Virmir said. Then he heard violin music, much too close.
"THERE!" he shouted, and darted through the doorway. The mage stood before him, a violin grasped in her slender human hands. She waved a forepaw like a conductor's wand, and the armor on the wall rose up and attacked.
Virmir fought to the frantic tunes of the violin, his hammer the percussion in a symphony of destruction. The armor rose again and again until it was too battered and dented and broken to rise. The mage squeaked alarm, her troops felled, and she padded away, swift of foot in the snowy hallway.
"ONWARD!" Virmir called, pointing after the girl with his hammer. His remaining troops surged around him and charged into the antechamber. Ice and wind whirled through the circular room. When the fox general entered, he found all of his troops trapped in heaps of snow and tall shards of ice.
The mage girl grinned at him from the dais where the snowshard spun between two jagged shards of ice that forked up out of the ground. It was a cold light, bright blue like the runes on the spiders and the snakes. Her eyes burned with its power.
"So, it has come to this..." Virmir said, finding it a potently dramatic thing to say. The mage girl put her violin down and picked up.. a flute?
"Trees..." Virmir said as the snow came alive around him. Two great white serpents rose from the perimeter of the room and whirled about him like a tornado of snow. Shards of ice and bits of stone cut at his face and arms, making him draw his cape up around him. One of the snakes seized him about the waist and picked him up. It began to shake him with a violent fervor.
WHAM! Virmir's hammer cracked down on the ice serpent's skull. It dropped him into the snow below. Perhaps the one good use of snow, as it cushioned his fall. Droplets of blood stained the otherwise white blanket as he advanced on the remaining serpent, but the wind soon blew it away, erasing it beneath the driving force of new snow that seemed to be slowly filling the room. The general's hip ached where the snake's fang had pierced him, and he hobbled toward the remaining serpent with the resolve of a desperate man.
The serpent seemed reluctant to attack at first, looking first to Virmir and the wounded serpent on the other side of the room. It slunk along slowly, its head buried in the snow to numb its battered nose. Virmir's thigh felt almost numb with pain, as he half limped, half dragged himself toward the monster.
"I'll get you, I'll get you all," he growled through tight grit teeth, trying to bulwark against the throbbing pain. Then the snake struck, apparently having gathered its courage. Virmir raised his hammer to ward off the blow, taking a swipe at the snake as it darted past. He sank to his knees, feeling only the biting cold against his wound. The snake came again, and Virmir drew himself up into a tight huddle, blocking with the hammer just barely. The snake bit down on the wooden mallet, hissing ferociously.
"That's mine!" Virmir shouted, yanking back on it. The hammer popped out of the ice serpent's mouth with a venomous fang sticking out of it. Virmir grinned wickedly, this was an opportunity.
"Lets see how you like it!" he shouted up at the serpent, drawing the snake fang like a sword.
The ice serpent hissed its outrage and struck at Virmir again, but this time the general waited til the last moment and drove the snake fang up into the open maw of its former owner. The snake jerked away, spasming, then sank to the ground and disappeared in a puff of snow.
The ice mage dropped her flute.
"Uhm... bye!" she said, and grabbed up the snowshard. Virmir jumped to his feet to run after her, but his leg was numb and he instead lunged forward into the snow. He could hear the snow leopard paws crunching snow crystals beneath them as she hurried away, leaping over him and then darting down the hall.
"Blast it..." Virmir groaned, at least the pain had gone. He rolled onto his knees and prodded at the wound, but felt just normal unbroken skin and soft fur. It was white, white where it should not have been, and his leg was not numb at all. He could feel his paw against the round surface. He could feel his knees against the ground, sort of. He could feel the smooth serpent belly where his knees had been. It was a pale creamy color on the underside, and marked with the unruly white mane all along the back. Even more, he could feel the weight of his fox half resting on the serpent form beneath him, as though he were seated on his legs. It was not uncomfortable to rest that way. His not-exactly-hips seated at an angle as though the snake was preparing to strike.
"Oh Blast it all," he grumbled, looking back at the sprawling expanse of his form. Then, to add insult to injury, he felt a little swelling just beneath his waist, where gray fur gave way to white serpent scales. His not-exactly-hips welled up a little.
"Wha...?" he asked, and the answer came as his chest burgeoned out into a modest but respectable curve. The general's muzzle thinned as she stood there blinking.
"GAH"! she yelped, then covered her mouth.
Even grouchier than before, Lady Virmir led her troops back across the bridge. She wanted a HOT bath, an ice sculpture to be melted over a victory feast, and to coil up around her throne and wait for the mages to fix... this!
End.
Blind Written in 90 minutes, please excuse minor typoes/errors.
