The wind howled with the voice of old gods. It had come not like weather, but like judgment—sweeping from the high passes of the Mourning Peaks with sudden fury, erasing sky and road alike. Snow drove horizontal. Breath turned to ice in their throats. Cloaks snapped like sails. The world narrowed to the space of a few faltering steps.

Telaryn pressed on, half-dragging Alisha, eyes stinging. Behind her, the others formed a broken chain: guards bent double against the wind, Halven cursing with each slow pull. They had not eaten in hours. Barely slept. Even fire refused them, choked by wind and cold.

And then—

A shadow rose from the white.

“Look—there!” Halven rasped, pointing with an ice-bitten hand. “The stones!”

They emerged from the storm like memories—**weathered black monoliths**, half-buried in frost, standing in a solemn ring. Not natural. Not by chance. Telaryn felt the shape of them before she saw them, as if her bones remembered what her mind did not. The moment her boots crossed the invisible threshold—

The wind **stopped**.

Utterly. No warning. No tapering. One breath screamed through the peaks—and the next, silence.

Snow still fell, but now it drifted gently, spiraling downward in slow, shining threads. The cold no longer bit. Instead, it felt like breath held too long.

The shrine waited like nature held its breath. **Shrine of the Vigilant Flame**—that was its name in the old songs. A place where the line of Kaelen Flameborne once kept watch, where a king with fire in his veins held the pass against the mountain chieftains for three nights and died with no blade left unblooded.

Telaryn stepped into the ring.

The air felt heavier. As if laden with breath not her own. Around her, the stones moaned softly—not from wind, but from within. Faint, broken syllables drifted across the snow, barely more than thought. **“Daughter…” “Oath…” “Lost and found…”**

Motes danced along the monoliths—**small lights**, like frost catching moonlight. Some glimmered and vanished. Others lingered, humming faintly. Wind-spirits, low and mindless. Ice-spirits, drawn to the stillness. One hovered near Telaryn’s shoulder before fading like breath on glass.

And somewhere—at the edge of vision—a shape moved between stones. Too tall. Too still. Gone when looked at directly.

She did not speak. Only walked.

In the shrine’s center lay a cairn—half-collapsed, lined in scorched stone. It had cracked under years of frost, its seal broken. Within, nestled in pale ice, lay a narrow funerary box of carved bone and waxed leather. Copper runes still shimmered faintly on its bindings—her family’s sigil half-erased.

She knelt.

Here was legacy. The ashes of Kaelen Flameborne. A totem of her line. Perhaps even a charm of war, buried with his name. The air around the box whispered like a sigh: _“Claim… what was kept…”_

Her hand reached out.

Then came the _crack_.

“**Ryn!**” Alisha’s voice, sharp as steel.

Telaryn spun. Alisha had stepped just beyond the shrine, toward a small hollow where old snow blanketed a shallow basin. A stone cracked. Ice gave way. Alisha gasped and dropped, arms flailing—then vanished into **black water**.

A heartbeat passed.

Then two.

Telaryn stood frozen between two oaths.

The relic before her, sacred and binding, its whispers curling like smoke into her ears.

Alisha behind, beneath, drowning in winter’s mouth.

The air thickened. The whispers grew louder.

**“Blood before bond. Stone before soul. Take the past. Take the power. Take the throne.”**

She turned and **ran**.

The basin was deeper than it seemed, its surface barely solid. She fell to her knees, plunged her arms in. Freezing water bit like teeth. Her fingers locked around cloth, hair, flesh. She pulled.

Alisha gasped and choked as she broke the surface, her face blue, eyes wide with pain and gratitude and fear. Telaryn collapsed backward, holding her, shaking.

The others arrived seconds later. Halven hauled them both out with curses. Waylen gasped, heavily leaning on his spear.

And behind them—the shrine stood silent.

The box was gone. Covered again in snow, or perhaps claimed by the spirits. The voices faded, disapproving. The lights dimmed.

A relic lost. A bond kept.

That night, beside a struggling fire hidden between stone outcrops, Alisha lay curled in Telaryn’s arms beneath a shared cloak, her head on Telaryn’s shoulder. They said nothing.

But when Telaryn looked at the pale moon above and remembered the whispers, she spoke softly, a vow meant for no ears but the snow:

**“Let the dead keep their fire. I will forge my own.”**

And far away, in the deep places of the mountain, something ancient stirred and slowly reached out. Like a drop of blood slowly curling down stone.