A Cold God, Chapter 32

At some point during the Long Night—the freakish winter I’d thrown over the world—I started seeing through ice and snow. Not just as a metaphor. I mean really seeing. If there was enough of it, and it was cold enough, I could push part of my consciousness into it. Snowdrifts, glaciers, frozen lakes—it didn’t matter. The frost had become an extension of myself. My eyes.

And so, as the Long Night faded, as warmth began to bleed back into the world in slow, cautious pulses, I looked. All across the globe. Through shattered keeps, ruined cities, frost-choked valleys. The cold remained in places—deep in mountain hollows, old riverbeds turned to glaciers, forests where the sun still couldn’t reach. And from those places, I watched the world I had frozen. The world I had remade.

First thing I noticed? The corruption was gone. No more twisted energies slithering through stone, no more sickly lights bleeding through cracks in the sky. The Long Night had worked. The sickness had been suffocated. Quietly. Completely.

Maybe, I thought, the world could finally start healing.

But then I looked closer.

It all went downhill from there.

Civilization? Gone. Blasted apart. Every kingdom and empire that once filled this world had either frozen to death, collapsed under its own weight, or vanished into the snow. All the castles were empty now. Roofs caved in. Courtyards buried under meters of ice. Queen Lysara’s old kingdom didn’t exist anymore. Not even ruins, really. Just outlines in the frost.

Only the People were still standing. My People. The ones who already lived close to the land, close to the cold. The ones who never built too high or carved their names into too much stone. They had endured. Bent with the wind instead of trying to stop it.

Everyone else? Gone primitive. Small clans. Roaming camps. Hunting tools carved from ice and horn. The world had reset itself. All the progress people had made—iron, fire, cities—it was buried now, somewhere under the frost. But the people who were still alive? They weren’t dying. That surprised me.

Honestly, I expected more of them to be dead.

But I watched the survivors. Watched them hunt and gather, scrape together fire, teach their children how to survive in a world without seasons. They weren’t thriving, not by any stretch, but they weren’t giving up either. They adapted. Walked between snowstorms. Built tents out of whatever they could find. Fished through holes in frozen lakes. Dug roots from under half-dead trees. There were more of them than I thought there’d be.

Still, that wasn’t the strangest part.

The White Walkers were.

Lesser Loci, I started calling them. Offshoots. Remnants. About twenty-five of them, scattered across the snow-choked parts of the world. Some alone. Some in small groups. All cold. All quiet. I leaned into their minds, just enough to get a sense of who they were. None of them were born. Not really. They’d all been stillborn once, dead before breath. And then they’d been remade—just like the first one I’d transfigured all those years ago.

That first one, Thell, that stillborn boy I’d pulled from his crying mother’s grasp and imbued with part of my storm… they called him the Pale Elder now. Or the Son of Winter. Some kind of prophet to them. A bridge between my slumber and their existence. My child, in a way. Or so they believed.

And maybe they weren’t wrong.

Each of the new ones had been born dead, and he had touched them. Changed them. Carved frost into their bones, and made them like himself; I didn’t know how Thell managed to perform such a thing, but I wasn’t too surprised by it–all things considered. Now they walked the world as pale shadows. Not dead. Not alive. Something in between. And everywhere they went, the cold followed. After all, they were lesser fragments of me now, bearing their own will and minds, but ultimately just fragments of me, and that meant they had a degree of control over ice and snow and darkness. 

They didn’t speak. They couldn’t. Their minds were connected and no words were ever necessary. But through them, I felt that trace of me. Of my essence. They were echoes of my deeper self, distant reflections of the void I had left buried in the ice. And though they were less than me, they were still enough to be noticed.

Most feared them.

Others worshipped them. A few of the White Walkers had entire altars devoted to them.

Most avoided them, however, especially the tribes who were not of the People and knew nothing of their nature.

They were treated like natural disasters–present, but unavoidable. 

I wasn’t sure what to think of them, honestly. Their very existence was a rather unexpected development that I simply hadn’t thought was even possible. It was neither welcome nor unwelcome. It was… interesting. 

More interesting, however, was the massive ship hovering silently in orbit. Through the faint, faded memories I’d taken from the Astartes linked to me, I recognized its shape immediately—an Imperial vessel. A ship of the Imperium of Mankind. It had taken them long enough. I was beginning to worry they’d never find this planet, and that I might have to leave it behind myself.

Speaking of Astartes—I wondered briefly what they had been up to all these years. Surely they’d—

A voice interrupted my thoughts, sharp and sudden in the vast quiet of my subconscious. “Father, you’re awake!”

I reached for the source instantly. My perception settled within the frozen halls of Lysara’s old castle—no longer a castle, really, but a palace of ice and shadows, walls crusted thick with frost. The voice came from Thell. He stood alone in one of the abandoned halls, his pale form framed by pillars of dark ice, his head lifted as if listening for something in the gloom. Small wisps of frost curled gently from his shoulders and arms.

“It has been years,” he said aloud, breath ghosting into the air, his words bouncing faintly off the frozen walls. He took a step forward, boots crunching softly on the thin crust of ice coating the stone floor. His posture straightened. “I feared you might not awaken in time.”

Hello, Thell, I answered. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I assume you mean the visitors from the stars?

Thell turned, nodding slowly as if I were standing beside him, though nothing but ice and silence surrounded his pale form. He clasped his hands behind his back and stared upward, towards the vaulted ceiling shrouded in shadows.

“Yes, Father. I’ve sensed their presence for days now. They have lingered above us, floating silently among the stars, for nearly a week. Without your guidance…” He paused, his voice trailing off, and his shoulders lowered slightly.

I sent a feeling of reassurance toward him, something gentle to ease the tension I saw creeping into his posture. Well, they're not hostile, but I’ll need to speak with them myself. Soon.

My awareness shifted again. This time I sensed another group—small, scattered, fragile. Five living beings, accompanied by three others who were near-dead. Humans, but not tribesmen, wrapped in thick layers of insulated armor. They trudged slowly through knee-deep snow, huddled close around tiny heaters and feeble flames. I watched one of them clutch a small metallic tag tightly between shaking fingers, staring down at it with eyes rimmed in red. Her breaths were shallow, uneven puffs of steam curling weakly into the freezing air. Scouts from the Imperium, then, sent down to explore the surface. To figure out if the planet was suitable for habitation, perhaps?

I paused for a brief moment, observing quietly as they moved deeper into the storm I’d left behind. One soldier stepped cautiously forward, scanning the sky. Another turned his face from the wind, fingers digging stiffly into his gloves, as though trying to force warmth back into his hands.

If they were truly from the Imperium, then the Icewalker form was the best way to meet them. After all, the Icewalker was a Primarch—a child of their Emperor. That connection alone might keep them from panicking or doing something foolish.

But I couldn’t ignore the People either. They deserved to know what was coming, what their world might face next. Fortunately, splitting my consciousness between forms wasn’t difficult anymore.

This time, I only needed two parts. One half I pushed into the Icewalker, filling it fully, letting its towering body breathe and move again as though it had never been still. That form strode toward the Imperial scouts already, boots crushing snow and ice with every step. The other half of my mind I pressed into a random humanoid Wight—one that still had both arms and hands intact so I could use sign language when speaking to the People. It stirred to life easily enough, the frost clinging to its joints cracking softly as it straightened.

I shifted my focus back to the Icewalker. It had already crossed a great distance in mere moments, long strides carrying it across frozen hills and valleys. The air there felt sharp in my chest, though breathing wasn’t necessary anymore. I did it anyway. A habit, maybe. Or something like it.

I opened my mouth and spoke a single word aloud. “Hello.”

The snow ahead trembled faintly at the sound, ripples shivering across the ground like a thin sheet of ice cracking underfoot. But the voice no longer tore through the air as it once had. It didn’t send flurries screaming across the landscape or peel the flesh from bone with its force.

The Long Night—and the decades of stillness that followed—had given me time to understand why my words used to carry such weight. Back then, I hadn’t realized how even simple speech drew on fragments of my greater being—not my truest self, the void at the edge of all creation, but the storm-self, the endless winter I’d wrapped around the world. Each word was like uncorking a vial of raw power, and I hadn’t known how to keep it contained.

Now I understood. Now I could control it. I could speak without shattering stones or freezing the lungs of those who heard me.

But that didn’t make my voice any less unsettling.

The sound that came out wasn’t warm, wasn’t human. It was the deep cracking of icebergs splitting apart in distant seas. A groaning, grinding resonance that seemed to come from beneath the earth itself.

Still, it wouldn’t rip people apart. And for now, that was enough.

Eventually, my Icewalker form reached these scouts and stopped sprinting about fifty meters from them. I made sure to approach them slowly to ensure that they did not perceive me as a threat. However, they raised weapons at me anyway as I approached, though I honestly already expected that. Lasguns, those things were called, capable of unleashing powerful beams of destructive light that could probably harm this form of mine if I wasn’t careful–probably. I actually had no way of knowing if it’d harm the Icewalker or not, but I preferred if I never had to find out. 

“I mean you no harm,” I said, my voice carrying across the open snow.

The sound was deep and rough, like icebergs groaning as they shifted in distant seas. The scouts flinched anyway, their grips tightening on their rifles. A few of them exchanged quick glances, as though deciding whether to shoot or wait.

I took another slow step forward. The air between us seemed to thicken, the cold curling off my body in faint streams that made the snow hiss faintly where it settled.

“Greetings, friends from the Imperium,” I said. “I am—”

And there it was. A pause. A strange, heavy silence that even the wind didn’t dare cut through.

I realized, right then, that I didn’t have a name.

Not a true one.

I had titles, yes. Plenty of them. The Lion of Night. The Icewalker. The Night’s King. The Great Other. The Nameless Dark. The Heart of Ice. All names others had given me. But I had never chosen one for myself. Never claimed one as mine.

So, in that moment, I made one.

“I am Arthas,” I said finally, my voice steady, the name rolling off my tongue like it had always been there. “I am a Primarch.”