Shadow Weaver: Sole Heir Of The Night-Chapter 184: Smoke

In front of the group a troop of soldiers clad in jagged ice stone armour formed a tight perimeter, their frozen boots grinding against the frostbitten earth as they pushed forward in unison.

Their bodies glimmered faintly beneath the dim glow of the under dark, pale blue veins of frost running through their armor like trapped lightning. Each step they took left behind a thin layer of rime that crept across the ground and sealed cracks in silence.

This was Leon’s star weaver ability.

With a steady breath he could pull threads of frozen light from the air itself, weaving them into solid forms that obeyed his will without hesitation. Spears, shields, archers, vanguards. Each troop carved from cold starlight and hardened ice.

It allowed him to create soldiers of different varieties, tailored to the terrain and the threat before them. Because his powers were ice based, the longer he remained in a frozen domain the more stable and durable they became. The under dark fed him in a quiet, patient way.

But that did not change the fact that this ability was absolutely broken.

He was basically a one man army. Even though his troops were always one rank lower than himself, they moved with discipline and fearlessness no living soldier could match. They did not panic. They did not hesitate. They simply advanced.

"there’s danger west of here, my outliner troops are gone"

Leon’s voice was calm, yet his eyes sharpened slightly. He could feel the threads snapping one by one in that direction, like frost cracking beneath a heavy boot. Something had erased them cleanly.

With his increase in strength, the number of troops he could weave and the distance they could patrol had grown significantly. Their senses were his senses. Their deaths were small cold pricks at the edge of his mind.

It made him a very valuable asset to anyone he stood beside.

"Let’s keep going north towards the ice lake, it must be flowing from somewhere, we’ll go against the waves" Enzo suggested.

His tone carried quiet certainty. In a place like this, confidence alone could anchor a group from spiraling into fear.

The place was simply too vast. Endless pillars of ice rose like frozen forests, and the ceiling above disappeared into suffocating darkness. Their connection to the outside world had long been severed. No signals. No sun. No sense of time.

They could only work within their means to escape.

"Okay" Leon nodded.

He still remembered the scene after Enzo killed that demon bear. The roar that shook the cavern. The oppressive surge of energy that lingered long after the corpse hit the ground. Even now, thinking about it made the air around him feel thinner.

He had felt the residual force of that fight deep in his bones.

Leon had no objections to Enzo becoming the pseudo leader of the group. Strength spoke clearly in the under dark, and Enzo had proven his.

Controlling his soldiers, Leon reshaped their formation. The front line curved outward, forming a bow that pressed forward before the main group, shields overlapping, spears angled slightly inward to funnel anything reckless enough to charge.

They moved like a silent glacier advancing.

Hours passed as they walked through the dark world of ice that was the under dark. Their breath misted constantly. The crunch of boots and the hollow echo of distant drips were the only sounds that accompanied them.

Even Zeke’s flames seemed muted here, their glow swallowed quickly by the vast frozen expanse.

Finally they came to a halt atop a slope.

Before them lay a river rushing down the incline, its current churning with a dull grinding sound. The water was caught between states, half of it frozen into jagged ridges while the rest flowed sluggishly around the solid masses.

It looked like a wound that could not decide whether to heal or bleed.

The surface shimmered faintly, hair thin sheets of ice forming and breaking apart in cycles, clinking softly like brittle glass. The cold radiating from it was sharper than the air itself.

"This is not sailable, we’ll have to climb up to find the source" Zeke muttered.

His body slowly engulfed in flames, orange and crimson light licking against the oppressive blue surroundings. Steam hissed where heat met frost as he rose into the sky to do a brief scout.

For a moment he became the only warm thing in the entire world.

The others waited below, watching his figure shrink against the darkness above. The silence felt heavier without him.

When he descended this time though, his expression had changed.

"I think there’s something of a village up the hill right beside the source of the river" Zeke frowned.

The word village hung strangely in the frozen air.

The under dark was not a place people could survive in for long. Food was scarce. Warmth was nonexistent. Predators thrived in the shadows.

Yet the structures he had seen were unmistakable. Angular shapes against the ice. Thin trails of smoke curling upward in defiance of the cold.

""Yeah, that’s not a village. I ran into something like that once. They are complicated. Maybe once human, but they’ve been seriously corrupted" Raven explained.

Her voice did not carry fear, only a quiet certainty born from experience. She did not look at them as she spoke, her gaze fixed on the thin ribbon of smoke rising in the distance.

The memory clearly lingered behind her eyes.

She had been here far longer than any of them. The under dark was not an unfamiliar nightmare to her but an old scar she had learned to live with.

And she was a royal of the Ice Kingdom. Matters concerning the under dark were not bedtime stories in her court. They were doctrine, history, warnings carved into frozen pillars for every heir to memorize.

The under dark was said to be one of the wonder zones of the universe.

Chained and tamed long ago, yet never truly subdued. It possessed a unique connection to the concept of cold itself, not merely temperature but the slowing of time, the dulling of motion, the suppression of power.

Down here, strength did not burn brightly. It congealed.

Spells took longer to form. Wounds healed more slowly. Even thoughts seemed to drag, as if moving through thick frost.

It was the High God’s most precious treasure, a vault of concepts too dangerous to leave unguarded. Yet it was also her wildest and most dangerous beast, barely restrained beneath layers of divine will.

Raven did not know how corruption first spread down here.

No royal archive had ever explained it clearly. Some claimed it was the under dark itself that twisted people. Others whispered that the chained divinity beneath the realm leaked something into the air.

Whatever the cause, its effects were very controlled.

People who fell to corruption did not immediately lose their minds. They did not turn into mindless monsters overnight.

They lingered in between.

They would lose pieces of themselves slowly, like frost creeping over a mirror. Their emotions dulled. Their hunger sharpened. Their morality blurred at the edges.

Yet they still spoke. Still remembered their names. Still made decisions.

That is until the inevitable happened.

Until the last fragment of self was swallowed whole.

"Do you think it’s a good idea to head up? They might have information on how to get out" Enzo asked, glancing at Raven from the corner of his eye.

His tone was neutral, but there was calculation behind it. Information was worth risk, especially in a place where wandering blindly could mean death.

Raven shrugged lightly.

"Fifty fifty. You might find reasonable people there. Or you could find people that want to eat human flesh."

She said it as if she were discussing the weather.

The people sent here were not ordinary criminals.

The crimes required to be exiled to the under dark were not small. Entire villages burned. Forbidden rituals performed. Political betrayals that threatened kingdoms.

And most of them were powerful weavers before they were cast down.

Time in the under dark did not necessarily weaken such individuals. In some cases, it refined them into something sharper and more unhinged.

The cold did not only preserve flesh. It preserved hatred. Regret. Obsession.

Left alone for years beneath a ceiling of eternal frost, a powerful weaver would either break apart or condense into something terrifyingly focused.

One could not simply assume victory in a confrontation.

Strength down here was unpredictable. A person who once stood at the peak might have fallen into madness, or they might have discovered a new way to wield their power within the slowed flow of this realm.

The smoke above the hill no longer looked like a distant curiosity. It felt like a test waiting to unfold.

It rose steadily into the dark, thin and stubborn, proof that something up there had endured. Survived. Adapted.

"Hmm. Leon, we’ll need your help for this."

After a brief pause, Enzo made the decision not to act rashly. His voice was low but firm, the kind that settled arguments before they began.

His eyes shifted toward the formation of ice soldiers standing ahead, their frozen armor glinting faintly in the dim light. The edges of their shields were rimmed with frost, spears steady, unmoving.

They looked like statues carved from a glacier.

Yet beneath that stillness was readiness.

If they were walking into a settlement of corrupted weavers, they would not do so unprepared. Charging blindly up the slope would only make them prey.

They would advance with caution.

They would let the army of ice knock first.

Leon inhaled slowly, feeling the threads of power stretch from his core into each construct. At his silent command, the front line tightened formation. Archers stepped slightly back, crystalline bows forming in their hands as strings of pale light hummed into existence.

The air around them grew colder.

Even the ground beneath their feet seemed to harden in response. Frost spread outward in delicate branching patterns, sealing cracks and muting sound.

Enzo adjusted his stance, one hand resting loosely near his weapon. His gaze remained fixed on the hill.

Zeke’s flames flickered softly at his shoulders, casting restless shadows that danced against the ice walls. For once he did not joke.

Raven said nothing more. Her expression had gone distant, as if she were recalling the last time she had walked toward smoke in the under dark.

Above them, the thin trail continued to rise.

Whatever waited at the source of that river was watching the same dark sky.