The dragon Ozymandias rocketed toward Aerendir, then fell out of the sky just shy of the ice. In his human form he crawled out of the water onto the ice platform where Aerendir knelt.

Aerendir whistled weakly as Ozymandias righted himself, and the blade Balmung rose from the water and flew in a quivering arc back toward Aerendir. He slumped over while looking upward, his one good arm reaching out. The blade returned to him, its movement through the air trailing sibilance in its wake. Aerendir caught it and then set the blade into the ice at his feet. He did not try to stand as a pool of purple blood began to freeze against the ice beneath him. Ozymandias stood in his human form, lessened, shorter than before by half, but still overtowered the kneeling Aerendir.

#

    Siegyrd jolted awake face up in a gray-white lake. A malaise of sinking shadows surrounded him and a distant, cold sun shone high in the sky above. He blinked in pain but floated calmly. A dragon was falling from the sky and the shadow of a dragon was torn outward toward a distant dark horizon. The water around him moved with a delay after Ozymandias struck the lake, as if time were slower to reach. A veil of night had lowered over the whole of existence, and Siegyrd felt the echoes of the place he just was. He tried his song, but his voice would not carry the sound. He swam up behind the thrashing dragon that looked like a faint smudge on the other side of dark blasted glass. He circled around it, but from every angle it was the same. The form became a man and crawled up onto a platform which Siegyrd tried to reach, but could only pass through like a fog. Aerendir’s ice had not pierced here. He swam through the ghost of a platform of ice until he was side by side with the ethereal form of Aerendir.

“Brother.” He cried out, but his voice was stolen by hungry dissonant shadows.

Almost in reply, Aerendir began to sing, and that echoed around Siegyrd, seemed to fill him.

#

    Aerendir sang a minor melody, and the blade at his side glowed ever so slightly. Ozymandias carried an expression like a child lost in a dark forest, on the edge of tears and wonder. He spoke softly, “You are hurt, my son. Allow me to help you.” Ozymandias reached out his hand as he knelt and lifted Aerendir’s chin.

    Ozymandias looked into Aerendir’s eyes and saw something that that struck him like a slap. He stepped back, slipped on the ice and landed on his back. He scrambled up and shook his head as a distant wide-eyed look crossed his face and he said, almost wistfully, “What have I done?” He spun and looked around him at the cliffs and the lake. Then he looked back at Aerendir, “Kin, tell me what has happened. Please, what has…” A keening note played in the air around the two men, and on the darkside of the glass Siegyrd could hear it too, a piercing ethereal carrion cry. He looked back where the flute fell and saw it flickering in the deep waters, in this shadow and then on the other side, and back. The whole time it sent out its piercing note, broken and dissonant. Ozymandias gripped his skull with both hands and fell to his knees screaming.

    All the while Aerendir kept his song and chant going, and silvery runes slowly etched their way up the blade drawing from a thin silvery thread in his own chest.

#

    “No! Brother!” Siegyrd shouted into insensate air. He thrashed in the water and dragged at the image of his brother through the strange film between them. He passed through like less than a ghost in wisps of fog. He began to plead with his distant master, “Apeiron, please! Not like this. This was for you. Save him!” Siegyrd shouted between strange tears that mixed with the shadowed lake. He frantically looked around for any escape. All the while Aerendir smiled as he sang.

#

    Ozymandias stopped screaming and his eyes shot open, shattered black orbs with liquid fire within. He reached out his hand into a portal at his side and drew out a long polearm with a wicked curved black blade at the top. He stood, no longer confused or weary. He stepped firmly, the ice beneath his feet beginning to melt with the heat of him. He stepped over Aerendir who looked up with a smile on his face, the blade Balmung threaded with complex runes over its entirety.

    “It is right that you kneel before your king to accept punishment for this treason.” Ozymandias voice was molten iron.

    “I had hoped it was not so.” Aerendir’s voice was barely a whisper.

    Ozymandias leaned closer, moved his grip up his spear haft and set the tip of the blade to Aerendir’s chest, “What had you hoped, wayward son, murderer of our people, kinslayer, Thankdravok?” The last word was hissed with rage.

    “To restore.” Aerendir nodded forward slightly and felt the prick of the blade, that small pain enlivened him to finish, “I had hoped.” He coughed as he sat up straighter, “I had hoped for home.”

    Ozymandias roared with a wicked laughter scarred by madness and edged with confusion. Ozymandias flexed and moved within inches and shoved the blade through Aerendir’s chest breaching his armour and piercing out the back and whispered in the elder brother’s ear, “Home you go, wayward son.”

#

    Siegyrd screamed with all his might, scrambling against the water. He flailed and yelled and cursed against the dying light of the shadowed world without and the deeper darkness within.

#

    Aerendir winced with the pain of it then whispered back, “Hyperboreas Aeternum,” and released his grip. Silver threads around Balmung exploded outward in a flash of brilliant blue and green which shot like an arrow straight to the bottom of the lake and fired up higher than the surrounding cliffs carrying the blade upward away from the pair. The rest of the surrounding lake froze solid. The trees were coated in droplets of ice ripped from the humid air and half-way up the cliffs all around was a clear coat of frost. Clouds formed and snow began to fall as the light cleared to reveal a towering glacier of impossible blue lined with a complex arcane latticework of silver threads and capped with the blade driven to the hilt in the icy peak. Within the center of the clear icy sculpture were two figures. Aerendir knelt while Ozymandias was locked in an attempted retreat, his hand on the haft of a polearm through the other’s chest. Ozymandias’ head was raised back and face was frozen in a mask of primordial rage. Aerendir knelt upright, his face regal and smiling, peaceful.

#

    At some impossible distance yet directly near, Siegyrd was pushed back by the latticework and fresh ice which pierced into this shadowy place. The world rippled around the magic and Siegyrd felt himself being pulled again as the surrounding shadows destabilized. He thrashed and reached out his hand to touch the lattice just as the whole world bursted around him. Just before he was jettisoned away into a distant darkness, he heard his brother’s deep voice carry out across the expanse, “Dravok naa, little brother. Live well.”