A bitter northern gale whipped across the frozen mudflats of the Great Marsh Plain. He carried the sharp sting of sleet that cut like ground glass against exposed skin. Across five square leagues of barren tundra, two hundred thousand men stood in rigid, shuddering ranks. Their iron armor, once polished to a gleaming lacquered sheen, had turned into cruel frost-traps. The icy metal drew every spark of life from their trembling bodies, numbing collarbones, freezing thighs, and locking gauntleted fingers into claw-like spasms of agony.
Every breath they drew rasped in their throats like dry sand. For three weeks, Crown Prince Zhao Lie had driven the Iron Vanguard Legion through forced marches across snowbound mountain passes. Rations had been cut to a single hard biscuit of moldy millet a day, and firewood had been burned up days ago. Now, their weapons were fully useless. In the preceding hour, the azure sovereign had blanketed the entire front in a barely noticeable mist of sapphire water-ice, sealing every spear tip, axe-spear edge, sword sheath, and giant crossbow cog in a glassy sheath of flexible, iron-hard ice. Not a single blade could be drawn. Not a single bolt could be loosed.
On the front line of the Seventh Conscript Cohort, nineteen-year-old Ah Ming leaned his forehead against the icy wooden handle of his locked pike. His toes inside his thin cowhide boots had long since ceased to feel pain, replaced by a dreadful, deadened wooden numbness. Black patches of frostbite gnawed at the…
