❄️ CHAPTER 9 — PART 1 ⭐ “Whispers Beneath the Citadel”

HELLO AND WELCOME TO HONORS CORNER

❄️ CHAPTER 9 — PART 1 

BRIDGE FROM CHAPTER 8

The echoes of Chapter 8 lingered like smoke that refused to disperse.

Zenobia's final words still clung to the air — half-truths, half-fears — but her last glances had been the most telling. The way she watched Himiko as the guards led her away suggested there was something she had not dared speak. Something she believed Himiko already knew.

Below the war-room, the cracked Wind Sigil continued to bleed green vapour across the archive floor, curling like a serpent waiting for its master's return. The archivist's body lay cold in the vaulted stairwell, shrouded beneath ceremonial cloths. And far from the Citadel, Merlin still sat shackled in the Scarab King's subterranean chamber, the steam from his untouched tea drifting like a whisper of prophecy.

Those threads — Zenobia's silence, Merlin's missing pages, the archivist's death, the cracked sigil — all pointed in one direction.

Himiko did not know whose shadow stood at the end of that path.

Not yet.

THE WIND IN THE WALLS

The war-room felt colder than it should have been.

Even with crystal braziers warming the pillars and polished runes pulsing beneath the floor, the air held the bite of Frostborne's night — sharp, watchful, too still.

Himiko stood at the great projection table, her presence quiet but commanding. Frostborne's map hovered above the surface like a sheet of ice suspended in midair — all jagged ridgelines and yawning valleys, dotted with spectral markers that shifted colours like embers fading in a winter hearth.

Beneath the floating map, streams of runic script pulsed:

Contracts, Altar Stones, Energy Core statuses, Legion rotations, and pages of the new Legendary Season progress ledger — the mechanic that had rearranged the continent's fate.

Wu approached from the far side of the chamber, cloak brushing lightly against the carved obsidian tiles. Her breath formed pale curls as the temperature dipped again.

"Three enemy alliances," she murmured. "All hostile. Frostborne has never opened like this before."

"It isn't Frostborne," Himiko replied softly. "It's the new rules."

And the new rules were merciless.

Legendary Frostborne Mechanics — Returning to the Story

The projection zoomed in, showing a fortress shuddering beneath siege.

• Energy Cores now surged at the heart of every major city — glowing engines that only revealed themselves once walls and defenders had fallen to zero. They pulsed like captured stars, vulnerable yet potent.
• Altar Stones — brutal channelling devices built by Craftsmen and Alchemists — were the only tools capable of shattering those Cores. Each triggered with a sickly, resonant hum that could be heard across half a province.
• The old free-for-all chaos was gone. 
• The new Frostborne was a profession.

Master Craftsmen.

Alchemists.

Fighting Masters.

Contracted roles that turned war into labour.

Each completed task ticked a rune on the massive ledger above the continent — four factions racing to fill their progress bars like a civilisation-wide ritual.

But the new structure also meant something more dangerous:

More systems to manipulate.

More points of sabotage.

More places for a mole to hide.

The table flickered again.

Three positions glowed red —

the "failures" of the day.

Himiko touched them with one fingertip. "Here. Here. And here."

Wu leaned forward. "Ambush… counter-sabotage… lost interception?"

"No," Himiko said. "These were not accidents."

She slid the red markers into alignment.

"They are anticipations."

Wu's expression shifted. "The mole?"

"Yes."

Snow thundered against the Citadel windows, rattling the frames. For a heartbeat, the storm outside formed a spiral — an unmistakable pattern — before dissolving.

Himiko stared at the map a moment longer, then shifted the projection to a different front.

A canyon. A shattered cliffline.

And a report penned by their scouts in almost superstitious language.

Wu recognised it instantly.

"Ah," she whispered. "The… wind-storm."

Himiko nodded slowly. "Not a storm. A technique."

Wu swallowed. "His technique."

Himiko didn't speak the name.

She hadn't spoken it aloud in years.

Instead, she let the report speak:

shieldmen lifted sideways as if by invisible hooks;

arrows carried off-course in precise lattice-patterns;

a twisting split of wind that struck in three parallel spirals.

A signature.

A whisper of an Immortal they'd exiled without formally banishing.

Wu steadied herself. "If it is him, then—"

"It means," Himiko said quietly, "that he is close. Closer to this war than he wants us to know."

The war-room dimmed as the map shifted again, this time highlighting multiple scattered incidents across the Frostborne landscape — each subtle, but collectively too precise to dismiss.

"A strategist does not simply vanish," Himiko murmured.

Wu nodded, understanding that they were now speaking in veiled titles.

The former Wind Strategist.

The man who once commanded the NDL's most elusive element.

The Immortal whose doctrines of Wind had once shaped entire campaigns.

The man whose identity had been shattered the day Wind was erased.

The Immortal who stepped down when the gods chose Himko —

publicly dignified, privately undone.

He had believed Wind should rise again.

He had believed the Treaty rewrite was a manipulation.

He had believed Zephyr's sealing was a political act, not a celestial one.

But none of this had ever been proven.

Because the archivist who could have verified it was dead.

Himiko let her breath out slowly. "He was framed once."

"And now?" Wu asked.

"He is being used," Himiko replied. "But not by us."

Wu stepped closer. "Do you think he is the spymaster we've been hunting?"

"No," Himiko said firmly. "I think he is driven by ideology, not treachery. And someone else is weaponising that ideology."

A pause.

"The mole," Wu whispered.

Himiko nodded. "The same hand that shaped his disgrace. The same hand that murdered the archivist. The same hand now threading Frostborne's chaos to its own ends."

The wind outside struck the window again, harder this time, as if demanding entrance.

Wu shivered. "Then what do we do?"

Himiko moved several markers on the map, shifting patrol cycles, tightening command assignments — and deliberately relieving one frozen valley of its usual watchers.

Wu blinked. "You're… creating a gap."

"A corridor," Himiko said. "Wind needs space to move. If he believes no one is watching, he'll move toward Merlin."

"You're going to let him?" Wu asked.

"Yes. Because the moment he makes contact with Merlin — the mole will panic. And panic always reveals the hand."

Her voice lowered, carrying the gravity of prophecy.

"If I corner him now, I lose the only person whose movements mirror the mole's intentions. He is my shadow-guide. Even if he never knows it."

Wu stared at the altered map for a long moment.

"You're risking much."

"So is he," Himiko said. "Every step he takes is a dangerous one."

She looked down at the projection of the cracked sigil beneath the Citadel.

"And someone else is moving in those cracks."

A soft sound drifted up from the archive chambers below — a faint scrape of parchment. A page turning without a reader.

Himiko did not look down.

But her eyes sharpened.

The mole was listening.

And they were already inside her walls.

📘Preview — Chapter 9 Part 2

“In the heart of Norheim, where old oaths crack like winter ice, the Defence League gathers once more. Himiko stands at the crossroads of loyalty and betrayal, haunted by the whisper of a truth she can no longer ignore. Zenobia watches with quiet intensity; Wu’s calm begins to falter; Charles—unbreakable as stone—feels doubt gnaw at the edges of his resolve. And Loki… ever the enigma, ever the trickster—slips between shadows with a smile that reveals nothing. Beyond the citadel walls, Frostborne stirs, its storms heralding a conflict long foretold. As the broken sigil pulses with dormant power, alliances will strain, secrets will surface, and the hunt for the unseen traitor will tighten its snare. Chapter Nine, Part Two: where every ally is a question… and every question leads deeper into the dark.”

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