CRACK!
A piece of black-spotted horse jerky, frozen so hard it looked like a river rock, snapped a sharp white canine tooth right in half.
“Agh! My tooth! My best biting tooth!”
Thirty miles south of the glowing Spine-Mountain Range, in the middle of a howling white blizzard on the Demon Steppes, a burly Tiger-Kin captain spat a bloody lump of ice and broken tooth into the snow. He held his swollen furry cheek with both leather-gloved hands, tears freezing onto his whiskers before they could even drip off his chin.
Beside him, his mount—a twelve-foot-long Giant Saber-Wolf with icicles hanging from its gray belly fur—let out a pathetic, raspy whimper. The giant wolf didn’t even look like a fierce demon beast anymore. Its ears were pinned flat against its skull to keep the wind out, and its tail was tucked so tightly between its hind legs that it looked like a giant furry sausage.
“Quit crying, Captain Tie-Hu!” barked a scarred Rhino-Rider next to him, though his own lips were blue and chapped. “If the Great Warlord hears you complaining about the winter rations, he’ll hang you upside down from the banner pole by your tail!”
“Complain? Who’s complaining?!” Captain Tie-Hu hissed through the gap in his teeth, holding up the remaining piece of frozen black jerky. “I’m just asking why this jerky is harder than human iron! Three days ago, the quartermaster said this batch was smoked over spirit-wood. I just bit into it and found a pebble…
