Until the Frost Thaws

Hoarfrost coated the firs surrounding the reliquary cave. It had been such a long winter, weighing heavy on bowed branches. The mercenary Avanash trudged forward until a knight materialized from the shadows, the tip of his translucent sword skating over the crusting snowbank. Avanash unsheathed his saber, gaze trained on the knight’s face, an unreadable visage obscured through snow suspended in the bracingly cold air. 

The knight’s mail chimed like icy bells as he dropped his visor. “You’ll approach no further, sir.” His voice was unyielding. 

“I’m entering the cave, Verglas,” Avanash said. The bouquet in his pocket, his gift for the shrine, had leaves sharp enough to draw blood. More barbed than weapons and words. Nothing would stop Avanash from leaving his gift on that altar. “You’ll let me pass.” 

“Then we fight.” The shift of Verglas’s shoulders once mocked Avanash. After so many years, the familiar gesture seemed almost playful.

The knight’s longsword met the mercenary’s steel with a clash like a sheet of ice breaking. Avanash deftly blocked the taller man’s sweeping blows and sidestepped glancing jabs. His leather armor was lighter, making him quicker on his feet, even under heavy furs. Against Verglas, he needed the advantage of speed. 

This mountain’s endless winter, far from the warmth of Spire City, numbed Avanash’s fingers, tendrils of cold cutting deeper than Verglas’s sword ever had. The knight cracked his hart’s head pommel against Avanash’s head. The mercenary stumbled back, ears ringing.

Relentless, Verglas hounded him, pushing Avanash toward a tangle of briar and snow-whitened underwood. A kick from the knight struck the mercenary in the gut. Avanash coughed and fell, braided hair tangling in thorns. Verglas raised his sword but Avanash winced, rolled out of the way, and circled behind his opponent. 

The mercenary spat a glob of pinkened spit into the snow.

“Have we met before?” the knight asked. “Fought before?”

“Many times.” Avanash’s voice came out hoarse and sharper than he intended. This time, he’d planned to tread gently, wheedle out softer memories.

The razor’s edge of Verglas’s icy blade nicked Avanash’s chin. A breath lower, one wrong misstep, and the longsword could have slit his throat. Maybe that was what Avanash wanted, what he needed: a fitting end. But he would fight for it. Blood welled from his chin and dripped down onto the snow, beads bright as holly.

This was a dance they’d rehearsed a hundred times, but only Avanash remembered every step. The clearing should have been Verglas’s domain, but he’d always made for an unsteady fighter in the snow. His heel hit a patch of ice, and he slipped.

An opening, the fissuring crack spreading.

“Yield,” Avanash commanded, breathless and despairing. Verglas’s head tipped back, the hollow of his throat held captive under saberpoint.

Blue-frost eyes flickered up, meeting Avanash’s. This time, instead of abandoning his chivalric code and stabbing at the mercenary’s ankle, like Verglas had tried so many times in desperation, the knight conceded. “I yield.”

Avanash gave Verglas a hand and hauled him up. As the blizzard’s howl grew, the knight waved Avanash into the cave. Gallant as ever.

“It’s been so long since I was first assigned to this lonely place,” Verglas said, sliding his visor up. His easy smile exuded life and light. “You’ll think me foolish, but I’ve forgotten what I’m protecting.” His expression shifted, curling melancholy at the edges. Verglas’s eyes slanted toward the swirling expanse of white beyond the stone entrance. 

Avanash followed his gaze, swallowing the fingers of ice in his throat. The mercenary smiled sadly. “You guarded this place well, old friend.” 

Verglas pulled off his helmet. Years ago, when Avanash had buried him, the knight’s hair had been ashen blond, nearly as white as the foxes that darted between the trees at the foot of the mountain. Death had since tinged Verglas’s long tresses a spectral blue. 

“What is this relic you’ve come to take?” the knight asked.

The prioress queen who had posted Verglas here was long dead. His guard should have ended decades ago. Avanash took a ragged breath. Regret was a hundred years too late, hollow and insincere. “A chalice that grants immortality.”

Avanash had bloodied his fingers that day, digging a grave in the frozen earth. Legend said anything sipped from the chalice would grant immortal life, but the only unfrozen liquid in the cave had been more crimson than claret wine, hot and metallic in his teeth—

“That accent,” Verglas said, distracted. “It’s from the City of Spires, isn’t it? I traveled there once, or lived there. All that hammered gold glittering under the red sun, so beautiful…”

Avanash still remembered wooden swords and duels behind the barracks, a waifish wraith of a blacksmith’s boy and the gawky son of a foreign-born sellsword, ruddy cheeks and redder sweet apples. Their friendship had been as short and sunny as summer. 

“You’re surely mistaken,” the mercenary dismissed. “You’d burn up in that heat. Not to mention how clumsy you’d be on the sand.”

The knight bristled. Maybe next time they’d trade jabs in this manner, duel with words instead of swords.

In front of the frost-covered shrine, long empty of the pewter chalice in its alcove, Avanash knelt and replaced the brittle brown leaves with a new bouquet of holly. The berries always reminded him of Verglas’s blood, spurring him up the mountain each year. Remorse was the true price he paid for immortality.

“The storm rages,” the knight said, as Avanash retreated toward the cave entrance. “Tarry a while with me.”

A different Verglas said something similar a century ago, but Avanash had been frenzied and desperate then. He hadn’t recognized his childhood friend. His frost-bitten fingers had reached for the hilt of his saber, for the chalice, for riches beyond imagining, and a life that was unending.

Some years Avanash agreed and passed time here, making new memories to be buried under snow. But each day he stayed, Verglas’s ghost waned, until Avanash was alone in this cursed tomb.

“I’m called away,” Avanash said. “But you could come with me?”

The Verglas Knight surveyed the shadowed cavern. “I’ve lingered too long. I fear my soul wouldn’t know rest anywhere else, at least until the snow melts.”

Spring never stretched so far up the mountain, but Avanash nodded. “Then I’ll come back for you when the frost thaws.”

The climb down was a chore more tedious than the ascent. Instead of making camp for the night, Avanash waded through snow, feeling out the familiar trail. Outside the cave, Avanash was still haunted by every snowy owl and winter hare. 

The forest maze wrapped around him. Conifers he’d known as saplings were tall and bushy now. If Avanash felled one, he could count rings in the bark to number the years since Verglas.

At the foot of the mountain, two cardinals perched on a shared branch. One bird was jewel-toned, boasting garnet plumage. The other was a phantom, translucent like ice encasing a rosebud. 

Avanash left the mountain with his ghosts. Behind, the cardinals’ duet faded to distant birdsong heralding spring.

© 2025 Sara Omer

About the Author
Sara Omer is a SWANA American writer and poet with work published in The Dark, Apparition Lit, Small Wonders, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. Her debut adult fantasy novel The Gryphon King is forthcoming from Titan Books in July 2025. Sara lives in the woods outside of Atlanta with her cat. You can find her on most social media sites as @‌omersarae.