A Whisper in the Shadows

Book One: Chapter One
Deep in the thick morning fog, a figure was enshrouded in a mist that swirled like smoke and curled tendrils of humidified air, seemingly surrounding the covered figure. As Jes walked through the grassy plains, each step she took formed a footprint, which turned the grass into ice instantly. She knew she was being hunted, but was taking great care to elude her presence. A great mountain loomed in the distance, and as the lady of frost trudged on through a field covered in the morning dew, she sensed that her opponent was near.

Jes stopped and placed her staff in the ground. The mist that had previously been like fog splattered onto the ground, as Jes's frustration was expressed appropriately through her use of magic. Water began to harden and combine, until an icy figure rose out of the mist. A smile tugged on her young face as the first layer of her trap was set into motion.

A fierce wind began to blow. But this wind was not natural, it was a magical wind, created by an unknown force. It was a wind created by a great magic, the magic of the hostile Blademasters passed down by generations of silent killers. Now this great magic, this magnificent spell, was being employed by a most ruthless killer, a killer who lives for the hunt and will do anything to get his hands on a valuable prize. This wind cut through the unnatural mist like a knife in butter, carving the trail of the agile bounty hunter. As the fog thickened, a frown began to form on the native of outland. The fog was now as thick as to prevent him from seeing his own weapons, two wicked falx-like mechanisms that could hack off the arms of a lesser man in a single swoop. Suddenly, his perceptions caught the figure of the target: the Crystal Maiden of the Lost City of Dalaran. As he sped off like a lightning bolt towards her figure, he raised his falx above his head and began to bring it down upon the stationary image...

As the vicious weapon slammed into the figure, ice shattered into a thousand pieces. Graeme quickly recoiled as he realized his mistake; Jes had created a dummy of herself out of ice and hidden herself within the mist. This all went through his head in half a second, and he realized quickly afterwards that he needed to get out of this place he was in right now. He quickly jumped out of the area and hid behind a bush. And was not a moment too late; the area he was in two seconds ago quickly became an icy tomb that sealed everything inside it in a freezing block. Graeme knew that he had been tricked, but he wasn't willing to give up this fight, as the ones he picked, he never lost. He stored one of his falxes in a holster, brandished a handful of shurikens and tossed them in a wave in front of him.

Jes saw the shurikens incoming towards her, and dropped into a crouch to evade the deadly spinning projectiles. Suddenly, from behind her, another shuriken just barely grazed her thigh, sending her hand in an automatic attempt to prevent the blood from escaping.
“Damn... His weapons are sharper than I thought. This isn’t good.” And, to her horror, the shurikens began to clear the mist away. And though she began to generate more, she realized that she would be sapped of energy by the time he was out of shurikens. So she slowly began to absorb the remaining condensed mist to recoup as much chakra as possible and searched for her attacker in the directions from whence the shurikens were thrown. However, there was nothing there but empty field. She stood, and winced; limping from the cut; mobility was going to be limited now. As a light breeze passed over her, she paused. The grass didn't move all around, just in a straight line.
Again Graeme brought down the fearsome weapons into the seemingly fragile form of the Maiden. However, already aware of his presence, she quickly whipped around and thrust her staff up, catching one blade directly in the staff through the hole in its center, and deflecting the other, which simply grazed her cloak with the blunt side. Graeme swung the falxes again, one for the head and the other for the heart. Jes jumped backwards and fired off a powerful Frost Nova spell, her signature technique, and blasted Graeme backwards, ending his desperate attempts to kill her. She quickly recovered and launched a flurry of magical blasts from her staff, but to her dismay, Graeme evaded with his incredible Jinada skills. He dodged the last blast and revealed an enormous shuriken easily ten times bigger than the usual and tossed it at Jes with a furious speed. She scrambled to chant her next magical spell and when the shuriken was no more than a meter from her, several layers of ice formed into a large barrier, deflecting the shuriken in its attempt to breach it - proving Jes’s Frost Wall spell successful.

Jes was troubled by the ease he was eluding from her every attack, and began to put her genius to work again.
“Logically, Graeme can merely go invisible and speed away any time I try to pin him down with a Frostbite. I could make it larger and it would capture him, but then that would merely pin him, and it wouldn't be cold enough to freeze him to death. He could merely wait until it subsides and finish me off after a couple of minutes. So enlarging Frostbite wouldn't kill him... wait a minute, I have it now!”

Graeme noticed yet another chill in the air. The mist was slowly returning. He smiled to himself, knowing that since Jes’s previous technique failed, it will fail again. However, something was not right about this mist. It was only in a relatively small area, covering only him, Jes, and a fairly small area around them. Suddenly, the air grew even colder, and he realized the trap had been set and he had fallen right into it.

"You see, Graeme, you know and I know that I can't kill you with a Frostbite this large. However, I can use it to pin you down in a small area. Feel lucky, bounty hunter; only a chosen few are privileged to ever see my Freezing Field technique, and none have ever lived to see it again!"

Jes grinned inwardly as the trap began to unfold. Graeme was now encircled by a solid dome of ice, and the mist swirled so thick that it was getting very difficult to see. Graeme leapt at her once again, and she countered with another Frost Nova, which sent him sprawling backwards. She took this opportunity to set the next phase of her trap into motion.

Graeme knew he was in trouble. His muscles were not damaged, but his feet were numb and his body ached with pain. He didn't have long to fight before his body shut down.

And as Graeme looked up, he had quite a sight to behold. He was surrounded by ten figures that were shaped exactly like Jes, all enshrouded in mist to conceal the true Crystal Maiden.
"I'll bet you like this." she said, her voice echoing across the tiny ice imprisonment, making it impossible to track. "Now you have no way of interrupting the channeling of Freezing Field. Going invisible will help you no more, and you cannot pick the real me out of all of these statuettes. Now prepare to die!"

As Jes began to channel her ultimate spell, the Freezing Field, Graeme again activated the Wind Walk to become invisible and sped off. As Jes began to inwardly gloat at her victory, her spell channeling was suddenly cut off by a searing pain in her arms. Or rather, what was left of them. Both had been hacked off by the falxes wielded by the cunning bounty hunter who now stood emotionless over her armless body. As the ice dome began to recede and the mists subside, the ice figures slowly began to melt and then evaporate into the noontime air.

"How..." frowned Jes, falling to her knees and aiming her face down at the crisp, fresh soil, "there was no way you could have known where I was..."

"No, there was a way. Look at your cloak."

Jes's cloak, stained with blood, that had been sliced off along with her arms, was lain in the center of the field. Her eyes widened in realization...
"The blood, how could I have not noticed?"

"How unlike you to be so foolish" smiled Graeme, comfortably maintaining his pride.

Jes let herself sink into the cold numbness of death as the Bounty Hunter sliced her head off and carried it off to be turned in for pawning money, disappearing again into the wind like a shade. But as he did, two figures came looming in the distance, their images enlarging with each passing second. Graeme peered in his sack to view his bounty once again, then fled from the approaching strangers, leaving the dead corpse to rot.