At the Turning of Spring

Death had them surrounded.

It had come to cut threads, and today it wore four faces.

A burning death for those too hurt or too afraid to flee the settlement as the firestorm swept through it. A freezing death for those who ran away up the scarp to escape the murder-make. Even in spring, the wind came in off the ice flats with a death-edge that sucked an exposed man’s life-heat out through is lungs, and rotted his hands and feet into black twigs, and left him as a stiff, stone-hard bundle covered in rime.

For others, a drowning death, if they attempted to flee across the blue-ice around the spit. Spring’s touch was already working the sea ice loose against the shore, like a tooth in a gum. The ice would no longer take a man’s weight, not reliably. If the ice broke under you, down you went: fast and straight if you plunged through, slow and screaming if an ice plate tipped and slid you in. Either way, the water was oil black and so cold it would freeze the thoughts in your brain before your lungs were even empty.

For the rest, for those who had remained to fight, a bloody death, the death of the murder-make. This was the death that knocked you down hard onto the ice with an axe or a maul, so you felt nothing except the cold burn of the ice, and the hot burn of your own blood, and the pain-scream of your crippling wound. This was the death that stood over you and knocked you again, and again, and as many times as necessary until you would not rise again, or until you were so disfigured that death could no longer bear to look at you, and moved off in disgust to find another soul to knock.

Any of those four faces would cut your thread as soon as look at you…

Prospero Burn - At the Turning of Spring
Dan Abnett