Chapter 40: When the Fire Went Out

The silver-adorned doors of Roderick’s study were barred and bolted. Yet the wind still screamed through the mortar joints. It didn’t sound like weather. It sounded like something trying to tear the keep apart with its bare hands.

The emergency council was small. The air inside the room was thick with the smell of wet wool, old parchment, and the acrid smoke of a struggling hearth fire.

Lord Roderick sat at the head of the timber table, his face carved from granite. Marcus, the captain of the guards, stood rigidly by the frosted window, his hand resting on his sword hilt as if he could fight the cold. Master Smith stood near the back, his massive frame looking entirely out of place in a lord’s study, still covered in the black soot of a foundry that was currently freezing over.

Elias stood in silence by the door, a steel sentinel.

And Arthur was given a chair at the table.

No one mentioned it, but the hierarchy had fundamentally shifted. The thirteen-year-old boy was no longer just the sickly heir; he was the architect of their survival.

But right now, the architecture was collapsing.

“The wood reserves,” Roderick said. His voice was flat. Empty of any inflection. “Give me the final count. No estimates. I want the exact tonnage.”

The estate’s pale, thin accountant swallowed hard. His fingers trembled as he opened the heavy leather ledger. “Half, My Lord. Exactly half the winter stockpile remains. We burned through our safety margin supplementing the foundry fires and keeping the city warm before the coal breached the surface.”

Marcus turned from the window. “And the burn rate in the lower town?”

The accountant didn’t look up from the page. “At current rationing… the lower rings will be completely out of firewood by the end of next week. Eight days, at most.”

“Eight days,” Marcus echoed grimly. “The snow in the northern pass is already six feet deep and still falling. Carts can’t move. Draft horses sink to their chests. We are entirely cut off.”

Arthur’s chest tightened. He stared at the grain of the wooden table.

Burn rates. Wagon weights. Snow density. Human heat loss.

His mind raced through the numbers like a simulation. If only every path didn’t share the same result.

Negative.

Every single diagnostic resulted in a negative integer.

“Ration the remaining wood,” Roderick ordered. He didn’t blink. “Distribute it to families with three or more children. Cut off the childless couples. Cuff the elderly. Consolidate the survivors into the central longhouses to pool body heat.”

The accountant went completely pale, his hands gripping the edges of the ledger. “My Lord… you ask me to sign a death warrant for over a quarter of the outer ring. The old blood. The newlywed.

“Everyone in this room knows what’s coming,” Roderick’s voice snapped like a whip, carrying the terrifying, crushing weight of a ruling lord. “This is field triage. We do not have the resources to bandage a corpse. If we spread the wood evenly, it burns out in four days, and over half of the outer ring will die instead. We save the roots, or the tree dies. Issue the order at once.”

The room fell into a suffocating silence. Master Smith looked sick while Marcus just closed his eyes.”

Arthur’s heart pounded against his ribs. It was an algorithm. A ruthless, binary filtering function. He hated it, but his logical brain knew Roderick was mathematically correct.

Everything was collapsing.

Arthur shot up from his chair. The sudden movement made his bandaged arm throb with a vicious, phantom heat, but he ignored it.

“The coal is still at the mine,” Arthur said rapidly, his voice cracking. “Marcus and I—we can use magic. We walk ahead of the carts. We don’t need to clear the whole valley, just the tire ruts. We use our fire to melt a path through the main road just enough to get the wagon wheels moving—”

Roderick looked at his son. The warlord’s eyes weren’t angry. They were full of a deep, exhausting pity.

“Sit down, Oliver,” he said softly.

“I can pull enough ambient mana to clear a path,” Arthur insisted, his voice rising, panic finally bleeding into his tone. “If we cycle in shifts, we can maintain the thermal output. We can force the supply chain open—”

Roderick raised his right hand, looking at his son dead in the eyes, and he snapped his fingers.

Nothing happened.

Not a spark. Not a shimmer of heat. Not even a trace of mana.

Arthur froze.

“The deep winter blizzards don’t just freeze the water,” Roderick explained, lowering his hand. “They freeze the ambient aether. The air becomes a void zone. Once the whiteout hits, we have no magic until the sky clears.”

All color drained from the young heir’s face.

Refusing to believe the grim reality, he cast “Ignite!”

Silence. And cast.

“Ignite!”

The same deathly silence remained.

He sank back into the wooden chair.

The last variable vanished.

━━━━━━━━━━━━ ◦ ❖ ◦ ━━━━━━━━━━━━

The meeting ended shortly after. Arthur didn’t hear the rest of the logistical commands. He walked back to his chambers like a ghost, his steps echoing in the empty hallway.

Tap. Tap.

His room was freezing. He didn’t light the hearth nor did he call for a servant. He just sat on the edge of his mattress, staring blankly at the frosted glass of his window.

A soft flutter of wings broke the silence. The majestic owl hopped down from the bedpost, landing gently on Arthur’s thighs. It ruffled its feathers against the chill and nudged its head against his left hand.

Arthur gave it a weak, trembling pat. The bird was warm. He was completely numb.

His mind was unspooling. In his past life, logic was absolute. If he calculated the load distribution, the bridge held. If he traced the stress lines, the cracks revealed themselves. The variables were always contained within the brackets.

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It was clean.

It was manageable.

He thought he could apply that same logic here. He thought if he just built the right machine, forced the right thermodynamics, and managed the supply chain, he could conquer this medieval world.

He was wrong.

Nature didn’t care about his blueprints. The frost didn’t care about what he achieved.

The blizzard simply reached down and severed the roadway, erasing the path as if it had never been laid.

The very people he promised to shelter from the cold are now waiting to freeze to death.

━━━━━━━━━━━━ ◦ ❖ ◦ ━━━━━━━━━━━━

To the fifteen-year-old Aria, the blizzard didn’t sound like wind. It sounded like a massive, grinding millstone slowly crushing the stone walls of the estate.

By the third day, the frost had crept right through the mortar of the inner keep. It coated the inside of their private quarters in a thick, glittering white crust. Aria sat with her knees pulled tight to her chest, wrapped in three heavy wool blankets, staring at the crackling fire in the iron hearth.

Her father, Marcus, rarely sat by the fire.

As the Head Guard and the estate’s High Mage, he was usually a pillar of heat and authority. A man who could summon a roaring flame with a flick of his wrist. But the blizzard had killed the ambient mana. The void zone had stripped him of his magic, reducing him to nothing but a normal man in freezing iron armor.