Winter’s Rebirth: B1 - 1. The Way of the Strong (Patreon)

Winter’s Rebirth Index

-The Present-

The supernatural cold didn’t bite in this frozen hellscape. It gnawed.

It found seams in fur and leather, crept through wool, nested in bone. It scraped lungs raw and made every breath a little prayer. And it was fifty miles to their south that the last fortress of civilization had left them.

They were breaking new ground here at the edge of the Radiant Crystal's magical protection, which beat back the Creeping Winter.

Now reincarnated, fifteen on paper, and more than twice that inside, he led one hundred of his parents’ barony’s citizens north through a thinning snowstorm.

If he survived the winter and established a stable settlement, he could attract immigration, leading to a second wave. But that was no small feat in a mystical northern tundra, where the cold itself was deadly, and the monsters were even worse.

With him were mostly civilians: carpenters, blacksmiths, miners, and masons trudging beside shepherds and hunters. A handful of raw soldiers kept order, while herbal healers and scribes guarded the supply ledgers in oil-wrapped packs.

Behind this vanguard, more marched. A hundred souls, charged to carve a city’s bones and seed it amidst the harrowing frost. Their sleds creaked, ropes sighed, and the wind peeled at them like a stripping tool as the storm beat them.

However, the storm was dying. To Victor, that wasn’t exactly a good thing.

Its last breath scoured the ridge before falling away into the valley, leaving behind a sky the color of hammered steel. The cold still gnawed, but beneath it, the faint drip of meltwater and the whisper of wind through thawing reeds filtered through. Spring’s first tremor.

He halted on the rise, the semi-veiled terrain ahead opening up.

A white valley ribbed with white-covered black rock was revealed below. The half-buried teeth of an old keep jutted from the drifts. A standing structure was unexpected.

To the west, the Iceflow shimmered under a skin of glass, its current moving beneath like a beast still half-asleep. The frozen river wove into the land like an iron vein. 

His father’s retired general, Caldren, pushed forward beside him. He shielded his eyes from the first beams of light piercing the mystical northlands. It flashed across his white beard, eyes still flint.

“Dire wolves will be hunting soon, My Lord. We must be careful beyond this point. The monsters are active even during the spring and summer.”

Victor pulled his dire wolf cloak tighter, free hand brushing against the sword his father had helped him forge.

“Good to know. We’ll wait until the rest catch up.”

He looked back, analyzing their stamina.

“The snow is too deep beyond this point. I’ll carve the trail forward.”

The muscular elder glanced toward him with a slight frown.

“Don’t tire your soul out channeling fire, My Lord. Allow me to take the lead. My reflexes aren’t what they used to be if we’re attacked.”

Victor smiled, head rising to peer beyond the ridge.

“We’ll take turns.”

The Frozen Fields stretched toward the unseen harbor, one of his priority builds for gathering supplies from their closest city to their south. He squinted into the distance, beyond the ancient, untouched plains, tundra, and forests, to the colossal mountains, shoulder-locked on the horizon.

Spring would come late. Death would not wait.

“So,” he mumbled, feeling a chill run through his bones as his breath plumed before him, “do you believe the stories that this area has never been conquered due to Icebane nesting in those mountains?”

Caldren peered into the distance, his gloved hand tightening on the hilt of his sword as their tired party of settlers caught up.

“If the legendary ice drake is here or not matters not, Young Lord. If it attacks, we’re dead. Best not to worry about the impossible. What we should be concerned with is there…”

He pointed west, then east.

“The ocean and ancient Blackwood Forest are the immediate dangers… The northern woodland and mountains are a concern after we get established.”

The man chortled, running his hands through his free-flowing hair. He channeled the ruby around his neck, keeping him warm in the frigid landscape.

“The Emperor—forever, may he reign—has certainly given your family an unforgiving task.”

Victor’s vision chilled at the mention of humanity’s supreme ruler in this small world. His fingers curled into a fist at the impossible situation his parents had been placed under when he’d reincarnated.

“It doesn’t matter… The road ahead may require a relentless toll, yet I will face the mountains themselves as night falls.”

Caldren grew quiet for a moment, his eyes drifting east, his voice lowering.

“…You may be a ghost among far-off lands, My Lord. You may survive against the fire and the cold. Yet we should focus on what is ahead of us rather than the lingering ties of the past.”

Teeth tightening, Victor felt the band coil around his chest.

“What are you suggesting, General?”

The old man nodded slowly, shifting his stance to scan the distant horizon from their high perch. 

“…Nothing more than to temper your expectations, My Lord.”

“I have no expectations,” he muttered in return, releasing a long, visible stream of air with visions of his past life in The War flooding back, “only a mission to fulfill. That includes the mission of a big brother.”

Silence passed between them as he waited.

In the ensuing silence, the chill flared, and Victor checked his attire.

He wore what the frontier required: layered wool and leather. On his back, a steel-forged claymore. An ice axe at his belt. A dagger for close work.

Then there was the heavy composite war bow that a soldier carried; his men treated it like a shrine. On Victor’s wrist was the mechanical release to spare his fingers and sinew from the bow’s cruelty. Only Caldren or Victor could draw it.

The reason for that came from the strangest part of this world, the item looped around his throat. A ruby and an amber, the size of walnut halves, set in an amulet tucked under his shirt and pressed against his hot skin: magic stones.

He lifted a gloved hand to rub his raw throat. The column of settlers stilled, breath plumbing as they got their first look at their new home.

He studied the valley with them, the way he’d once studied a beach before an amphibious landing: approach lines, shelter, water, angles of fire.

It may have been a different world, but the repetition was the same.

The wind screamed through the pass. In the pitch of it, his mother’s voice in this world rose—not memory so much as habit—carrying a hymn she had sung over the hearth, the one his father had taught him to march to when the hunt turned long.

It came from his throat.

The wind sings the longest tune,

Adrift beneath the ashen moon;

The frozen road ahead exacts its toll…

Victor let the words pass through his mind, drawing upon their faith.

As if infectious, behind, someone hummed it. Then another. A murmur spread through the line until a hundred throats carried the refrain.

The Song of the North:

Walk in the deepest of footprints,

Step into the frost;

Follow the way of the strong.

Caldren shifted to pace the flank with a crooked stick as he broke away from Victor, letting him stew. A younger guard shadowed him, carrying Victor’s bow as the general barked orders.

“Perimeter marks there, there, and there,” he shouted over the wind, pointing with the lower limb. “Sleds in a crescent. Snow tarps, ready to pull. No fires yet. We’re taking a short rest. Make use of it.”

He paused as the howl of the frigid wind drew into a whimper.

“Aye, that’s it,” he grunted. “Storm’s dying, but watch the skies in its passing, My Lord. Hmm…” The elder slowed his pace, fingers returning to his hilt. “Smell that?”

Victor tasted heat in the air—not natural.

The hair on his arms rose.

“Down!” Caldren barked as the last veil of the storm broke, voice cracking like a whip. “Eyes low! Mirrors covered!” He jabbed his stick at the paling clouds. “Sunfire family on the drift!”

Panic hit animal and settler alike—gasps, a dropped line, a child’s stifled squeal.

Victor felt the fire low on the northern wind, like furnace doors yawned wide.

Heat pressed against Victor’s cheeks as a first flash touched the ridge—white-hot, then gold, then the rolling howl of air itself catching fire.

“Under tarps!” Victor snapped, already moving. “Snow over edges—seal yourselves in! Soldiers too!”

A fresh-faced spear carrier hesitated, eyes flicking between Victor and the sky.

“But My Lord, what about—”

Caldren rapped the youth on the back of the head.

“When your lord gives an order, you listen. First lesson.” He cut Victor a winter’s smile. “Your first real frontier fight. Show them what a Winterhart looks like in battle.”

The light swelled.

A male sunfire eagle broke from the clouds—a knife of sun and ember, feathers flaring sparks as if every barb were a flake of burning steel.

With eighteen-foot wings, talons like chisels, and a scream that turned marrow thin, these birds were certainly a sight to behold. Behind the alpha, seven shadows circled, holding the hot wind they’d made.

Heat hit in a wave that made the snow steam; reflected light blazed off the white like the glare of a hundred mirrors.

The lead male banked hard and began to spin, building a reverse fire-tornado—a corkscrew of incandescent air and whirling embers boring down fast enough to melt a sled clean through.

Victor rubbed his thumb over the ruby beneath his tunic and let it bite.

The world narrowed.

Options rose in his mind the way they always did when a stone took hold—three paths his will must select between in a heartbeat:

The ruby: step into a blazing forest and endure the heat.

The amber: enter a mental battle of blades with himself.

Uniting them: charge into the hell of a fortress siege, meteors falling across a battlefield, every enemy wearing his own face.

He chose the siege.

A woman near the sled froze, eyes fouled by the flashing.

Caldren moved without thinking like old soldiers do, lowered his shoulder, and took her full on, rolling them both into the lee as the first tongue of heat slammed the ridge and turned the zone to hot steam, but the ruby-coated tarps held.

The ruby’s warmth braided up his arm, combustion curling around him as his spirit held the focus of the internal war. His breath glowed like a small lamp. To the eye, nothing changed; to his nerves, fire and kinetic force became a tool.

He stepped into the tornado as the lead eagle roared past, its vortex bursting the air into steam. Sleds caught flame.

“Bow,” he shouted, palm up.

He slipped between the patches of fire, moving through them like water. A soldier threw off a tarp, his people trembling beneath it, as the man thrust the giant weapon toward him.

“My Lord!”

Victor caught it in his free hand.

“Ruby arrow!”

The same man fumbled with a quiver, pulling out a skirmisher’s shaft, steel-sleeved hardwood, long and stiff, slim bodkin point. The nose glittered dull red. Ruby dust clung like fine ash.

“Snow tarps!” Victor barked as the alpha eagle spun back around, wind blowing steam past his cheeks, sweat gathering under his arms. “Faces down!”

The fire collected at the arrowhead as he caught the shaft near it. He set the nock into the reinforced notch, the bird’s own flames spiraling tightly around the edge. He hooked the mechanical release and drew back on the 1,000 lb bow.

The amber’s strength pulsed into his bones—ligaments sang tight, back and shoulders knit, the draw became a clean, straight line through the body to the ground. He breathed. The bow bent. It took everything and more. He welcomed the tension.

Flame spiraled along the shaft to where the ruby dust waited. It caught without smoke, a tight-wound ribbon like a forged spring, bound along the bodkin’s length, a controlled twist of heat made to stay with the arrow through wind shear.

“Wind left by a hair,” Caldren called over the rising roar, leaving the cover on its second spiral and calling upon his own ruby to draw in the remaining fire. “Take the joint!”

Victor exhaled, felt the world settle—the way it had at Tarawa, when the lagoon knocked boats sideways, and you had to pick your way through the slit in a bunker, through steam and screaming.

He saw the target: the male’s right wing becoming visible just before it ignited its strike, where primaries met secondaries, a hinge of bone and tendon masked by light.

He loosed.

The bow didn’t thrum; it cracked.

The arrow vanished and reappeared as a line of heat that crossed the space with a wasp’s cruelty. It struck the joint and bit.

The eagle screamed, light wobbling, feathers flaring as the flame ribbon bored in and stuck. The wing faltered. The spin failed into a ragged twirl, heat and air ripping loose from the centerline as the bird fought for lift.

It chose violence to the end.

It tucked, dove harder, and churned the torn spiral into a bigger thing—an incandescent auger tearing down toward the sleds. Snow ran like wax, the canvas caught fire, and the ruby hissed away; another strike would destroy them.

The woman that the elder had tackled coughed black smoke and curled over her child beneath the tarp.

“Caldren—divert!” Victor barked, already moving.

The old general slid like an avalanche, palm up, ruby in his own poor-man’s tie flaring. 

“Who do you think you are, boy—giving me orders?”

His way of saying, “Did you have to ask?”

He was grinning, and the air bowed to him; the fire that wanted to rush and devour found a basin instead. He cupped it like water, dragging the heart of the corkscrew sideways to keep it off the tarps.

Victor drew steel.

The two-handed sword sang low as it cleared the leather strap along his back, fur cloak billowing. He breathed the ruby hotter, let a measured coil of that same spiral wrap the blade’s edge, and fed amber into his legs until the snow hissed under his boots.

The eagle hit like summer—talons forward, beak open, a furnace jammed in a skull.

Victor stepped into the fire, felt the rush of steam lick but not own him, and cut on the carriage of the dive—no flourish, no high art—just a clean, hateful line from throat to keel.

Steel met bone. Fire met blood.

The bird parted.

Heat blew through him like a mine fire breaking a seam.

He would have been cooked where he stood without his magic stone, and at least a dozen others would have been, if not for the old man’s quick action.

Caldren’s hands spread wide; the inferno that should have rolled into the line collapsed into his grasp. It gathered and tightened until it hung, the size of a wagon wheel, over his palms as a ball of roaring light, casting night-colored shadows around the sleds.

“We got our campfire,” Caldren laughed, and pitched it at a clutch of winter-burned willow on the ridge. The tangle whoomped into honest flame, cracking and spitting.

Above, seven shapes screamed grief and rage. They wheeled once, twice, measuring the cost, and broke east into the cloud.

The family would remember their faces. That was their way. 

At least, that was what he was taught.

So be it. He would too.

Silence slammed down—wind, breath, the pop of green wood in flame.

Then noise returned piecemeal: a sob bitten off; the burr of a saw; someone laughing the way people laugh when they’ve just cheated death. The boy-spearman, cheeks ash-gray, stared at Victor like he’d grown antlers.

“T-Thank you, My Lord.”

Caldren clapped Victor on the shoulder hard enough to rattle teeth. “Handled that like a lord. Your father and mother would be proud of your first conflict with a northern foe.”

Victor let the ruby’s heat bleed away before it could make a fool of him—hands steady, breath slow, vision widening back to the work. The amber unwound from muscles like a careful teamster easing a load off a bridge. Snow stopped sizzling at his boots. The sword cooled from sunrise to steel. He wiped it once on clean snow and slid it home.

His throat was drier than it should have been, blinking back the spots that dotted his vision. “Keep the focus. That was only the beginning,” he panted, feeling the drain on his soul.

“Check burns. Sled count. Fletchers: two shafts like that ready by nightfall, three tomorrow. That attack probably means we hit a nest season; we don’t get lucky twice, hiding in a blizzard. Everyone else—tarps and windbreaks. We set up shelter now.”

Men and women moved. Orders calmed hands.

He helped the boy re-seat a tarp line and made him say the knot steps out loud until his fingers stopped shaking. He checked the woman Caldren had tackled—singed hair, eyebrows gone, pride intact—and praised her for staying on her child.

The widow cried on his chest, thanking him, and he took the time to comfort her, but it wasn’t long before her little, eight-year-old son set his brow and took Victor’s place.

Breaking away, Victor saw the only medic in his group, Lyra, move to help those she could. Her soul wasn’t the strongest, so she tired easily, though those capable of using emeralds were rare in their lands.

Unfortunately, the girl was the only one her mother could spare to send with him. She’d been a knight’s daughter, which was a legal gray area to train in magic stones. Not that laws mattered here in the north. 

As harsh as it was, Victor Winterhart welcomed it. He’d learned how much a medic was needed in the Great War against the united forces of the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese Empire. 

What he wouldn’t have given for a healer back in the jungle rot with its buzzing flies, sun on blood, and rain that turned foxholes into graves.

Conflicts he could never forget with the savaged men left his mind trudging through the years of battles he’d seen: Guadalcanal. Tarawa. Saipan. Peleliu. Okinawa, and lastly…Kunishi Ridge.

United States Marine Corps, Pacific Theater, World War II.

He carried those names like dog tags in his heart as he dredged through this northern expansion. These men and women would do the same.

Those thoughts were swiftly brushed away as he turned to his weapon.

Victor took the measure of the war bow’s limbs, felt for stress, found none, and thanked the fletcher for the sleeve tolerances. When he looked up, Caldren was watching the valley the way officers watch a road they know they’ll die on one day, hoping it would be worth it.

“You carry heat like a man who learned it the hard way,” the old general said without turning. “Your parents never told me who you were in your past life, but the results speak for themselves, My Lord.”

Victor’s mouth ticked, handing the bow back to the soldier to carry.

“I learned in places where sand is soaked in men’s blood, jungles feast on soldiers’ bones, and hurricanes swallow souls. Though my wars were hot, frenzied, and filled with hundreds of thousands of bodies…”

Caldren snorted as Victor joined him. “I see where you get this word ‘hell’ from. Hot wars, hmm? Well, this is a quiet, cold one.” He flicked ash from his sleeve. “Below the ice, who knows how many bodies these northern lands hide…”

Victor looked past him into the white and thought of water turned to steam, of sand turned to glass, of rain that never washed clean. He thought of a ridge with a name he could still taste blood in, of a letter in a tarp-dark trench that had taught him what kind of brother he had been and would not be again.

I fight for something colder now, he told himself, shifting his hard gaze to the eastern, black wooded forest with its massive trees, over five times taller than those he knew on Earth, for something more fragile. Elara, if you’re in this world, I’ll find you.

The hymn of his family rose again, softer this time, as people settled tarps and ringed the willows with snow to keep the flame tame.

On the trail of the ancients, the monsters awake;

At the end of all evil…the battleground shakes.

He let the words pass through and out, then knelt in the snow and pressed his palm to the cold. Somehow, he needed to turn this inhospitable land livable, and, realistically, there was only one way to do that…

Find and slay a fire lord—a monster with a ruby the size of a man’s fist in its chest.

That’s the win condition…

They could live here if they were stubborn enough and lucky enough and if he made sure skill stood where luck failed. But only if he did something few nobles dared to do, and something he could only do once reaching this cursed land.

Rising, he looked at Caldren, directing his gaze to the dead bird several dozen meters away, blood still burning away snow around it.

“You think you can cut out its gem and teach one of our boys how to use it?”

“Mm.” The old soldier’s mouth tilted while turning his twinkling eyes to the stiff spearman. “Now there’s a radical idea… I suppose it’s one way to help your people still have toes by the end of this.”

Victor almost smiled. The heat in his chest guttered, banked, and he felt fifteen for a heartbeat—fifteen and carrying a world he’d already carried once.

He stood taller, rolled his shoulders, and tugged out his father’s amulet from under his tunic—dual walnut-sized magic jewels—something extremely valuable for a noble family and very rare. Trust was given to him to succeed. Now, every hand stilled, and every nearby eye was on him. He repeated the advice his parents gave him when he left.

“Teaching commoners how to use magic stones is an imperial capital offense…inside the empire. We are no longer inside the empire.”

The wind turned. It smelled of stone and something sweet—crowberries beneath snow—and of smoke that was not from willow or sled canvas but from a low hearth far away. He blinked, and the white bled to ember. Snow hissed in the firelight.

“In these frozen lands, monsters crawl, yet I have no fear of death, just the fear of something worse…”

He turned to look at the one hundred souls, most of whom had not volunteered but had been selected by imperial scouts from amongst his parents’ people. How they were chosen, he wasn’t sure, but they were all his people.

“We walk in the deepest of footprints on the trail of the ancients. We have journeys as ghosts, sent to a far-off land. And I know many of you believe you will die here and the road ahead has an unforgiving toll you cannot pay… But know that you are not alone in that price.”

He paused, seeing red noses and tears swelling. “…Each one of you is written on my heart, and I promise you, I will step into the frost with fire in my veins to fight this cold for you… If you will only put your trust in me, work hard, then we will prosper.”

Victor moved forward, placing a hand on the spearman, seeing the kindling flames reflected in his gaze. He moved to the widow, holding her son close to her front, and saw strength flicker in her tear-stained eyes.

“The spirit keeps the focus… I will show you the way. I am with you.”

With that, he moved to support them in setting up camp as Caldren posted lookouts.

The song in his heart thinned into a woman’s voice—his mother’s, more than seven years ago. “Do you still see us as your parents?”

His first complete memory flowed back.

Snowlight flickered through his lashes—then dimmed to firelight.

Eight years old.

The day the pieces of two lives began to fit—and cut.

Step into the fire. Semper Fi…

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