The knights stood motionless with their brains refusing to accept what they were seeing. This was Rose, their Rose held up like this?!
Her dainty feet and slender ankles were utterly encased, as were her legs from the knees down. Just above that point, icy tendrils crept spider-like up her thighs, preserving her intimately in chilling, lifelike detail.
Further up, her arms had been stretched out in a cruel mimicry of crucifixion – wrists and hands completely entrapped in ice that glinted with a million fractal, prismatic shards. The frozen shackles extended up her arms nearly to the elbows, binding her in perpetual torment.
Rose's head lolled at an unnatural angle, a shock of her hair obscuring most of her face. What could be seen of her features showed an expression twisted in agony, lips parted in a forever scream of anguish.
As the knights looked on in abject horror, the ice continued its relentless, insidious creep upward – advancing in agonizing increments to further entomb their lady in its merciless grasp inch by torturous inch.
"What is the meaning of this atrocity?!" The roar that ripped from Reggie's throat was more akin to the bellow of a maddened beast than anything remotely human.
As one, the knights shifted into combat stances, instincts overriding reason as scarlet began bleeding into the whites of their eyes. Their faces contorted into masks of preternatural fury and menace, elongating fangs bared in feral snarls.
"Why have you done this to Rose?!!" Reggie demanded in a guttural, nearly unhinged tone, body practically vibrating with the force of his rage. "Answer quickly if you value your miserable life, demon!"
Damien watched the transformation with an air of detached bemusement, seemingly unconcerned by the three enraged vampire warriors facing him down. He lifted one pale hand in an idle, placating gesture.
"Such emotion...surely you can appreciate there are larger designs at work here. Designs which required certain...sacrifices to be made along the way." His mouth curved in a cold smile utterly devoid of warmth as his heterochromic gaze raked over Rose's agonized, half-frozen form.
Gunther took an abortive step forward. "Sacrifices?" he spat, voicing dripping with malice. "You dare defile our master in such an unholy way and dismiss it as a mere sacrifice?"
Damien's eyes flashed dangerously. "I dare do whatever I please when it comes to that...woman." He sneered the last word with unmistakable derision. "Rose brought this treatment upon herself through her own deceit."
Randall's brow furrowed in evident confusion. "Then why go through all this? Preserving the child, luring us here under false pretenses of it being harmed or killed?"
Damien's eyes glittered with sinister mirth as his mouth stretched wide in a taunting mockery of a grin. "Isn't it obvious? I needed to bring you all here - to collect and ensure your complicity in what's to come."
There was a tense beat of silence as his words sank in with disquieting implications. Gunther was the first to find his voice.
"You'll release Rose at once," he growled in a tone that brokered no argument. "And you'll tell us where this child is before there's bloodshed you'll regret for eternity."
But Damien seemed utterly unfazed by the threat, regarding the bristling knights with an air of patronizing amusement. "Such bravado...but sadly lacking in foresight as always, my friends."
His smile took on a feral edge that caused the strange woman at his side to shiver. "I'm afraid it's far too late for bargaining. The die has already been cast - by Rose's own prideful arrogance and your blind obedience to her."
As he spoke, an unnatural, frigid wind began to whistle through the chamber. Icy mist swirled and contracted into roiling vortices that steadily encompassed the entire space in a sheathe of blinding, frozen white chaos. The temperature plummeted further in drastic increments, causing the knights' preternatural senses to prickle with instinctive unease.
"You had such potential," Damien's disembodied voice seemed to issue from all around them amidst the howling blizzard. "Together we could have ushered in a new age - a true epoch of deserved supremacy."
Icy bluish smoke began to coalesce and take form amidst the whirling ice devils, their features twisted into terrifying, demonic visages. They were like gargoyles except made completely from ice and Damien was in control. Gunther bellowed a challenge and lashed out with his blades, but the wicked steel passed through the specters without causing any damage.
"But in your arrogance and blind servitude, that will never come to pass now," Damien's voice resonated with a sense of finality, of paths taken and bridges burned. "So be it - you've all made your choices and delivered your own damnations."
The knights huddled in a tight defensive circle as the monstrous, shrieking forms closed in from all sides - only to freeze solid mere inches from reaching them. Suspended in grotesque, eternal rictuses of torment and agony.
Then, the blizzard dissipated as abruptly as it had arisen - leaving the knights encased in a hollow sphere of absolute, bitterly slick ice. Their shadowed breath plumed in frosty bursts as they took in their sudden, crystalline prison with rising trepidation.
"Consider this a gift," came Damien's disembodied taunt as his sibilant voice seemed to penetrate the frozen barrier from all sides. "A fleeting reprieve before your souls are forfeit and inextricably bound to my service for all eternity..."