Pure-white warhorses advanced across a mirror reflecting a sea of stars. Beneath the ice, the blurred reflections of horses and riders were visible too, while orderly hoofbeats rang through the cold wind.
At the rear rode thirty white-robed elites of the White Owl Camp. Unfamiliar with the man leading them, they had remained silent throughout the journey, simply following at a steady pace and routinely scanning the deathly still wilderness.
At the very front was a tall, powerful horse, pure black apart from its snow-white hooves, its shoulders standing a good deal higher than those of the horses behind it.
A young man sat astride it, dressed in a blue robe commonly seen in the streets. He looked about thirty, with heroic, sword-shaped eyebrows and hair bound with a band. Broad-shouldered and broad-backed, he looked sturdy from behind; everything about him should have radiated vigor, the vitality of a dragon and tiger.
Yet the desolation in his eyes made him look thoroughly dispirited, like a wandering ghost with nowhere to go.
The man carried a great halberd over his shoulder in his left hand. Fashioned as an Azure Dragon Halberd, it had a two-foot blade entwined with a golden dragon, a crescent blade gleaming coldly, and an ink-black shaft with a metallic luster. Its workmanship was exquisite, and two characters were engraved along the side of its blade-Stabilize the Borders.
This great halberd was the ancestral weapon of the Xie family of Langzhou Prefecture, east of the lake.
The Xie family had endured in Northern Liang for over two hundred years. They could not be called overwhelmingly powerful, but generation after generation had guarded Northern Liang's borders, earning considerable merit through hard service and the Imperial Court's deep regard.
But military families could never match scholarly households with their pens