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The cold squeezed the warrior's bowels, crippled his kidneys, wrapped along his spine, and slipped to his neck like an obscene caress. His hands clenched on the reins, the muscles of his thighs tetanized against the flanks of his fighting mare, Prysm of Lhorne, Vard-Rah and the regisseur of Kertyr, was angerly focused on the presence of the animal so as not to be crushed by the cold.

A woman's cry pulled him from his trance. Near him, one of his soldiers, a female barbarian at his feet in the mud, held one of those copper necklaces worn by the country married women.  He kicked the soldiering the head, the latter's helmet flew under the impact.

— You don't steal women or children! He barked, partly liberating himself from  tension that was hindering him; get what's missing from the tribute!

These kertyr barbarians in the village of Barkidèh saw their houses ransacked for wanting to play for the finest. They had cut the two-year tax and replaced the precious talga metal they had to pay with money. Prysm had decided to put them back in their place once and for all by coming with his men to recover the difference. The dry cold, fed by the strong wind blowing in the valley, seemed more tolerable than the ice animal that was killing him.

— And will this object supplement the tax? Questioned a juvenile voice in lhornahinn, the language of the conquerors. Prysm lowered his gaze at the mass of villagers gathered in the center of the village in the early afternoon. The natives, most of them as tall as the Vard-Rah, stepped aside to leave the passage to a person he first took for an old man: barely the size of one of their women, wrapped in a cape of wolf fur, advanced a young man with silver hair and complexion almost as tanned as that of a Lhornahinn. He handed a magnificent dragon-shaped bracelet, all in talga, to Prysm.

Prysm evaluated the object for a second, and his gaze slipped to the face of the owner of the jewel. And meet the eyes of a bright blue, as the sky of Kertyr. The wind went down, the cold dispersed and the anger went out.

 Unity_ Prysm and The Mage. Extract Chapter 1

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