The Dread-Frost was not merely a season; it was an apex predator. It descended upon the Ironfall Valley with the methodical, crushing weight of a siege tower, intent on starving out whatever it could not immediately freeze.
For the next two months, the House of Walderose became a tomb of the living.
To exist as an infant during this period was an exercise in acute, agonizing sensory deprivation. Seiyuu was bound tight in layers of coarse, unwashed wool to stave off the biting chill that seeped through the very mortar of the keep. The heavy tapestries lining the nursery walls did nothing to stop the draughts that slithered across the stone floors like invisible vipers. He spent his days in twilight, the hearth fire reduced to a sullen, smoky smolder to conserve their rapidly dwindling supply of peat and green wood.
The silence of the manor was absolute, broken only by the shrieking of the wind against the leaded glass and the wet, rattling coughs of the dying.
From his crib, he audited the slow collapse of his father's estate. He possessed no ledger, but he read the balance sheet of their ruin in the sunken, bruised hollows of his mother's eyes. Elara's beauty had been entirely consumed by the winter. Her skin took on the waxy, translucent sheen of parchment. More alarmingly to Seiyuu's immediate survival, her milk began to fail.
Elara was starving, subsisting on half-rations of salted mutton and watered-down oat gruel so that the men-at-arms might have the strength to hold their spears. A starving mother cannot produce rich sustenance.
By the third week of the deep freeze, the milk he drew from her was thin, bluish, and tasted faintly of copper and exhaustion. It barely satiated the gnawing ache in his tiny stomach. To compensate, the household wet nurse—a grim, silent woman named Magda—began supplementing his feed with goat's milk cut with hot water and crushed barley. It tasted of dirt and despair.
Seiyuu swallowed it without complaint. Whining would expend precious calories. He entered a state of calculated hibernation, slowing his breathing, remaining perfectly still for hours on end to minimize his metabolic output. He slept as much as his developing brain would allow, retreating into the fortress of his mind to categorize the dialects he heard from the servants, parse the political structures Vance had mentioned, and mentally map the limited geography he had been exposed to.
He was not the only one forced to endure. The mortality rate of the household skyrocketed.
Captain Thorne, the aging commander of the guard whom Seiyuu had mentally dismissed as a liability in the courtyard weeks ago, was the first man of rank to fall. It was not a Castellan blade that claimed him, but a fever of the lungs brought on by a night watch on the southern battlements. Through the open nursery door, Seiyuu heard the wet, tearing sounds of the man drowning in his own phlegm, followed by the heavy silence that signaled a vacancy in the roster.
There were no grand funerals. The ground was frozen solid, impenetrable to iron spades. Aldous ordered the bodies wrapped in cheap linen and stored in the deepest, coldest cellars, stacked like cordwood until the spring thaw would allow the earth to receive them.
It was an appalling mismanagement of morale.
You do not let the living sleep above the rotting dead, Seiyuu thought coldly as he listened to his father weeping softly by the dying hearth one evening. It breeds pestilence and despair. You burn them. It provides warmth and eliminates the risk of disease. Sentimentality is a luxury for the prosperous.
But Aldous clung to the old ways, to the rituals of a noble house that no longer existed. He spent his days locked in his study, writing letters to the Veridian Crown, to the Arch-Dukes, to any bannerman who might owe his grandfather a favor, begging for relief.
The letters, of course, went nowhere. The mountain passes were choked with twenty feet of snow. The ravens Aldous released from the rookery either froze in the air or were brought down by the grotesque, bat-winged things that hunted in the blizzard—the Abyssal spawn Vance had warned them of.
They were entirely, perfectly isolated.
During the fifth week, the desperation birthed madness. Two servants were caught attempting to pry the silver banding off the main dining table to smuggle to a Castellan outpost in exchange for grain. Aldous, forced by the laws of his station, had them flogged in the courtyard and cast out into the storm. It was a death sentence.
Seiyuu felt a flicker of genuine irritation at his father's methodology. Execution by exposure is inefficient. If they must die for treason, butcher them and feed them to the hounds. Or bleed them to stretch the soup. Wasting protein in a famine is the act of a fool. He recognized that his thoughts were entirely devoid of human empathy, but he did not care. Aethelgard was not a realm that rewarded the soft-hearted. The moral constraints of his past life were an illusion constructed by a society insulated by technology and surplus capital. Here, stripped of those illusions, the fundamental truth of existence was laid bare: devour, or be devoured.
Finally, in the second week of the new moon, the howling stopped.
The silence that followed was so abrupt, so total, that it woke Seiyuu from a shallow sleep. He stared up at the soot-stained ceiling, listening. For the first time in forty days, he heard the rhythmic, musical sound of water dripping. The heavy icicles clinging to the leaded glass were weeping.
The Dread-Frost had broken.
The keep groaned as the timber and stone expanded in the fractional shift in temperature. Down in the courtyard, the faint, hoarse cheers of the surviving guards drifted up to the nursery.
Elara rushed into the room, her breath pluming in the cold air, but a manic, desperate smile stretching her chapped lips. She scooped Seiyuu from the crib, pressing her face against his chest.
"We lived, little one," she sobbed, rocking him violently. "The thaw is here. The passes will clear. We survived the winter."
He endured the embrace, his face a mask of infantile placidity, but his mind was sharp and cold.
We survived the weather, he corrected her silently. The environment has merely shifted from actively hostile to passively lethal. Now, the roads are open and with it comes other dangers.
His first winter in Aethelgard was over. He had survived the cull. But as the snow began to melt, revealing the frozen mud and the corpses of the starved beasts beneath, even the cold-hearted Seiyuu felt taken aback.