vaelora/Stories/Crown of Blood/manuscript.md

C1S1 Snow on the towers and siege

The snow fell like ash.

Not the swirling, playful flakes of childhood winters, but the slow, deliberate descent of a funeral shroud—coating ramparts, helmets, and the splintered bones of the city below. From her perch atop the highest tower of the palace, Telaryn watched the storm drift across the broken skyline, each flake catching in her lashes like the touch of old ghosts.

Talpis was dying.

Below her, the lower wards of the city smoldered in silence. Smoke rose in long, slow columns from rooftops charred by siege fire. The market square—once bright with wool tents and spice carts—lay blackened and abandoned. Somewhere, deep in the maze of the slums, a bell tolled once. Not a call to arms, but the last note of a ruined chapel sliding into the frost.

She gripped the stone balustrade until her fingers ached. The chill bit through her gloves, but she welcomed it. Cold was honest. Cold did not pretend.

Beyond the far wall, the enemy waited. Their banners—dull red and sun-bleached bronze—were visible in clusters on the ridges overlooking the lake. The Third Legion, the butcher’s blade of the Temerian Empire, had not advanced in three days. They didn’t need to. Talpis bled without their push.

And still, the snow fell.

A soft crunch of boots on stone announced a presence behind her.

“You’ll freeze standing there,” came a voice. Light, careful. Alisha. Her handmaiden. Her shadow.

Telaryn didn’t turn. “It suits the mood.”

Alisha stepped beside her, pulling her own cloak tighter against the wind. She was shorter than Telaryn by a handspan, her dark hair pinned in a simple twist, cheeks flushed pink from cold or worry—likely both. She did not speak immediately. Alisha never rushed words; she laid them out like thread, measured.

“Another flare went up an hour ago,” she said at last, nodding toward the valley. “West quarter. Grain stores, we think.”

Telaryn nodded absently, eyes still on the snow. “It doesn’t matter. There’s no one left to feed.”

Alisha shifted uneasily. “The south wall still holds.”

“Until it doesn’t.”

They stood in silence. A gust of wind swept across the parapet, dragging banners like torn flesh along their poles. The palace behind them loomed tall and grim, its spires rimed with frost, its stained-glass windows dark. Once it had been called the Jewel of the Lake, a city of towers and terraces, of snow-lanterns and storm hymns. Now, the lake froze around its edges and the towers burned from the base up.

Telaryn exhaled, watching her breath curl away like smoke.

“They’ll come tonight,” she said.

Alisha hesitated. “Your father thinks—”

“My father,” she cut in, voice low, “is still trying to win a war that ended when the gates fell.”

From below, a trumpet sounded—long, low, and mournful. One note, sustained too long.

The king was calling his banner.

Telaryn turned her gaze toward the courtyard below, where armored men gathered like dark birds in the snow. Her father stood at the center, tall and still, his crown glinting dully under the stormlight. No armor. Only the black furs of the old bloodline, and a sword older than the Shattering. He looked like a statue carved from grief.

She gripped the edge of the wall again and whispered, “He’s going to ride out, isn’t he?”

Alisha didn’t answer.

She didn’t need to.

---

C1S2 Marcas preparing for the Siege

Far below the snow-veiled city, at the edge of the half-frozen Danals River, Marcas Tervain, Legate of the Third Legion, watched the storm bleed across the heights. White wind sheared along the cliff faces, rattling the canvas walls of the command tent behind him. His breath steamed in the cold, but he made no move to step inside.

He’d never cared for warmth before a battle. It dulled the blood. Slowed the hands.

Marcas stood wrapped in a black-hemmed cloak of wool, his gloved hands clasped behind his back, his boots sunk ankle-deep into mud and melt. Behind him, the camp bustled with its quiet, murderous rhythm—steel sharpened, wounds bound, banners dusted of frost. No one shouted. The Third didn’t need shouting.

“Cold for a siege,” said a voice beside him. “Colder than it should be.”

Marcas didn’t glance at the speaker. He knew the voice—Optio Darlan, one of his senior officers. A southerner, always chewing something, always talking too much before a fight.

“It’s a mountain war,” Marcas replied. “Cold is honest here.”

Darlan grunted. “And blood steams prettier.”

Neither of them laughed.

Marcas narrowed his eyes at the city above. Even at this distance, he could see the firelight flickering behind the palace walls, hear in his memory the crash of stones from days past. The outer wards had crumbled quickly. The inner walls, slower. Talpian stone was old and arrogant—it broke like bone, not brick.

“How long until the west gate breaks?” he asked.

“Another twelve hours. Maybe less, if the sapper crews can finish tunneling through the godsforsaken ice.”

Marcas exhaled slowly through his nose.

“I want it done by nightfall.”

“You’ll have it,” Darlan said. Then, quieter: “You still think the girl’s alive?”

Marcas’s jaw tensed slightly. He hadn’t spoken her name since the siege began. Not aloud.

“She was never the prize,” he said. “The city is.”

But even as he said it, he saw her—in his memory, not in truth. The tall daughter of the high king. Black hair braided in the old style. Proud eyes that made you want to bow and strike her in the same breath. A woman raised by altars and banners. Not a soldier. Not a ghost.

Not yet.

“They’re calling her The Last Antler in the camps,” Darlan offered. “Makes for good morale.”

“Morale is for poets,” Marcas said.

He turned from the city, finally, and strode back toward the tent. Inside, the maps waited. The orders. The timing. The end.

Behind him, the white winds carried the faint sound of a trumpet, echoing down from the heights.

---

C1S3 - Telaryn talking to her father

The courtyard below was a study in ritualized despair.

King Aran of Talpis stood surrounded by his remaining honor guard, the black antlers of the royal crest stitched across their cloaks, their spears dull with soot. No drums. No cheering crowd. Just the soft crunch of boots on snow and the occasional jangle of mail. The pageantry was performed for no one, save memory.

Telaryn turned from the ledge as her father ascended the outer stair. His breath smoked in the air before him, his face drawn and pale against the fur-lined mantle. She saw the tremor in his hands, though he tried to hide it in the folds of his cloak.

“Daughter,” he said, his voice a brittle thing. “You shouldn’t be alone up here.”

“I wasn’t,” she answered. “Alisha left when the trumpets sounded. She didn’t want to see it.”

The king gave a small grunt—approval, amusement, or sorrow, she couldn’t tell. He moved to stand beside her, looking out over the smoking rooftops. The firelight danced across the city like fever.

“You mean to ride,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“I must,” he replied.

“No. You want to.”

Silence. Then: “Would you have me rot behind stone, waiting for the legions to pull me out like a rat from a hole?”

She didn’t answer. He continued.

“There are vows older than this war. Older than our walls. My grandfather swore never to die in chains, nor beneath another’s banner. So did I.”

“Then die,” she said, the words burning her throat. “But don’t call it duty. Don’t pretend it’s for us.”

The wind caught his cloak and flung it out behind him, as if the mountain itself wanted to pull him away.

“You think me proud?” he asked. “Do you think I don’t know how this ends?”

“I think you would rather die a legend than live a man.”

He turned to her, and for a moment—just a moment—she saw the tiredness beneath the steel. The cracked foundation of a king built too tall.

“If I fall today, they will remember me for what I tried to protect.”

“And if you lived,” she asked, voice low, “would they not remember what you built instead?”

He said nothing. Only reached up and touched her face, a gesture that belonged to a warmer season, a different life.

“You are my legacy,” he said. “Not these stones.”

Then he turned and descended the steps, footsteps vanishing into the snow.

---

C1S4 - Telaryn and Alisha

The wind returned the silence he left behind. Telaryn stood unmoving, staring out over the city as if she could still hear her father's footsteps echoing on the stone. The cold now bit sharper—through her boots, through her skin, through the thin shell of conviction she’d worn since the siege began.

She didn’t turn when she heard Alisha arrive. She never needed to.

“I brought your gloves,” came the soft voice behind her. “The lined ones. Your fingers are blue.”

Telaryn looked down. She hadn’t noticed. She accepted them without a word and pulled them on.

Alisha stepped to her side and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear without asking. A gesture so small, so practiced, it nearly broke her.

“You’re shivering,” Alisha murmured. “But you won’t go inside.”

“There’s nowhere left to hide inside,” Telaryn said, her voice low.

Alisha said nothing. She rarely disagreed with words.

Telaryn studied her now—not as a lady observes her handmaiden, but as a woman clinging to the last familiar thing she could still touch. Alisha’s face was drawn, the kind of exhaustion earned by long days of firelight and too few meals. Her brown eyes were wet, not from tears, but from the wind. Always too brave to cry. Always too soft not to feel.

“How long have you served me?” Telaryn asked suddenly.

Alisha blinked. “Since I was ten, Your High—”

“Not that name,” Telaryn interrupted. “Just… how long?”

Alisha hesitated. “Twelve years.”

“Twelve years,” Telaryn echoed. “And I still don’t know what you fear most.”

“I’m not sure I do either.”

Telaryn gave her a rare, small smile. “Liar.”

Alisha lowered her eyes. “Losing you,” she said, so quietly the wind nearly stole it.

The silence that followed was heavier than before.

Telaryn stepped away from the parapet and brushed a hand along the cold stone. The wind shifted, carrying with it the scent of smoke and old snow.

“When the palace falls,” she said, “I want you to run. Not fight. Not burn. Run.”

“No.”

“You will.”

“I won’t.”

Telaryn turned to her then—really turned—and for a moment their faces were close enough to share breath.

“I don’t need loyalty,” she said. “I need someone left to remember me.”

“I’d rather stand with you than remember you,” Alisha whispered.

Another trumpet sounded far below. Louder. Closer.

This time, it was the call to war.

---

C1S5 - The King rides

Below the tower, in the wide, frostbitten courtyard of House Talpis, a handful of riders formed the king’s last honor guard. Their mounts were restless, steaming with breath, stamping into the snow. Some bore the great helms and thick cloaks of the noble houses. Others wore little more than scavenged plate and cracked leathers. They lined up in ritual silence beneath the pale flame of the standard—silver-antlered stag against black wool, rippling weakly in the wind.

The great gates creaked open. Chains groaned. Wood protested. What had once been a triumphal arch—the Gate of Sorrow, carved with images of the city’s founding—now looked more like a maw torn into the side of the palace. Ash and snow coated the reliefs. The faces of saints had been chipped away by siege fire.

King Aran emerged last, astride a white destrier draped in funeral gray. He wore no armor. Only the black mantle of the mountain kings, trimmed in white fox and bound at the throat with a single clasp of antler bone. His sword—Calvenra, broken in half a generation ago and never reforged—hung sheathed at his back, not to be drawn. He bore no shield. His crown sat heavy and crooked atop silver-threaded hair, the points of iron antlers dulled from age.

To Telaryn, watching from the high tower, he looked not like a warrior, nor a ruler, but like a memory walking into its grave.

“Does he truly believe he can change the outcome?” Alisha asked quietly. “He can’t break the lines. Not with so few.”

“No,” Telaryn said. “That’s not why he rides.”

Alisha glanced at her, uncertain. Telaryn didn’t explain.

In the square below, the king raised one hand. The motion was smooth, practiced—the signal of a man who had trained his whole life for this gesture, though he had hoped never to use it. The riders followed. Swords were drawn. A single horn blew—low, steady, mournful.

The last ride of Talpis began.

The hooves struck the stone like a heartbeat. Then again. Then faster.

Down the long road through the outer keep, the king led them. Past the shattered statues of forebears. Past the burned-out guardposts and the crumbling wall banners. They rode not as men marching to war, but as ghosts returning to the site of their death.

No one shouted. No war cry split the wind. No drums rose to meet them.

Even the Third Legion, gathered in disciplined ranks across the field, seemed to watch in reverent quiet.

They met at the edge of the frost-scabbed causeway, where the rubble of the outer defenses had created a kind of gauntlet—narrow, broken, flanked by debris. A killing ground.

And still they rode.

King Aran did not slow.

His horse reared, teeth bared to the sky, and then the charge struck.

It was a good charge. One that would have been studied in other wars, remembered in scrolls. The first line of legionaries broke—too slow to brace against the fury of dying men. Two went down beneath the hooves. Another impaled on a lance. For a moment—a blink, no more—it looked like they might break through.

But the Third Legion did not falter.

They rotated formations with brutal grace, shields locking, spears rising in a wave. The second rank surged forward.

A red-fletched javelin struck the king’s mount in the neck.

The white horse screamed—then collapsed, dragging the king down beneath it.

Aran vanished in a cloud of snow and blood.

The rest of the riders tried to wheel around, to reach him, to hold the line. But the tide closed. Metal clanged. Hooves slipped. Men fell screaming. The standard-bearer was the last to fall, curling over the banner as if to protect it from the snow. A legionnaire drove a blade through both cloth and spine.

It was over in under a minute.

From the tower, Telaryn stood unmoving, her gloved hands clenched white on the stone.

No horns sounded for the king’s fall.

No name was called.

Only silence. And snow.

The white flakes landed on blood-soaked ground, melted, and vanished.

She turned away.

“He died for them,” Alisha whispered, not quite meeting her eyes. “For us.”

Telaryn’s voice was very quiet. “He died for the memory of something already dead.”

Alisha flinched.

Telaryn didn’t.

She crossed the balcony, her boots crunching in the snow. Behind her, the city burned. Beneath her, the king lay somewhere in the ash.

And ahead of her, a different kind of legacy waited.

One she hadn’t chosen. One she could no longer escape.

---

C2S1 - The king is slain

The wind changed when her father died.

It slipped through the tower like a whispered curse, brushing the banners with just enough force to lift them—then letting them fall limp again, as if the very air had sighed and given up.

Telaryn stood motionless in the observation arch, eyes fixed on the field below where the Third Legion finished what they had come to do. The battle—if it could be called that—was already dissolving into silence. No thunder of hooves. No last, defiant cry. Just the distant clatter of iron and the flutter of something dark on the snow. A broken banner, maybe. Or a wing.

There was no clear moment when he fell. No heroic death for ballads to cling to. King Aran had disappeared into the churn of the charge, his white horse folding under him like parchment. Then he was gone. No hand raised in defiance. No flash of the crown. No final strike.

Just snow. And blood. And the black tide of the Empire closing over everything that had once been his.

Telaryn did not cry. She had already wept, days ago—when the granaries burned, when the old temple fell, when she first saw the legion standards appear across the lake like red scars. But now… now there was only cold. And not just the air. Something colder. Something deeper.

She pressed a hand to the stone sill. It was smoother than she remembered—worn by time, not touch. Her father had once lifted her onto this very ledge when she was small, showing her the rooftops, the towers, the winding roads of the city that would someday be hers.

A city of smoke now.

Beneath her, legionnaires moved in silence, efficient and without cruelty, gathering the dead with quiet purpose. A formation of spearmen closed ranks again—perhaps expecting another charge. But there would be none. The blood of Talpis had spent itself on the frozen earth.

And still the snow came. Slow, unbothered, endless.

Telaryn squinted toward the far edge of the field, where a broken standard lay half-buried in churned ice. For a moment, just a moment, she imagined seeing him—her father, not as a king or symbol, but as a man. Alone in that vast emptiness, standing amid the ruin, his eyes turned upward toward her. Accusing. Or pleading.

But it was only a shadow. A trick of the smoke.

“Princess,” said a voice behind her. A guard. Quiet. Hesitant. “The council has gathered. They… they await your word.”

Telaryn turned from the window. Her gloves were stained with frost and stone dust.

“Tell them I’ll speak when I have something worth saying.”

She did not wait for acknowledgment. The guard bowed and withdrew.

She cast one last look across the field. Then she whispered, not in grief, but in contempt:

“He died chasing a poem.”

And she left the tower.

---

C2S2 - The gates are broken

Marcas did not flinch when the gate gave way.

He had seen cities fall before. Walls crumble. Fires take hold. But there was something about the sound—when the great western gate of Talpis finally broke—that struck him in the chest like a slow, sure hammer.

It wasn’t a single crash. It was a series of cracks. Groans. Screams of wood sheared by time and war. Then the sharp, iron shriek as the hinges twisted inward. For a moment, the gate hung crooked in its frame like a broken jaw. Then it collapsed entirely, dragged down by its own ruined weight.

The wind carried the dust upward in a slow spiral, mingling with the snow, until it looked almost holy. Like ash in the breath of the gods.

Marcas lowered his hand.

“Advance,” he said.

The Third Legion moved as if it had been waiting for this moment all its life. No war cries. No fury. Just motion—tight ranks, precise steps, formation drills executed in silence. Spears forward. Shields up. Eyes ahead.

“Second and fourth columns forward through the breach. No looting. No fire unless provoked. Detachments sweep the flanks. We want the palace isolated by nightfall.”

Orders flowed from him like water from a broken cask. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. His men were trained. Hardened. Bred not from vengeance, but efficiency. If they feared the Talpians, they did not show it. If they pitied them, that too was buried beneath layers of iron and snow.

Darlan, his optio, stood at his side, chewing some root like he always did. His helmet was off, tucked beneath one arm.

“You want to lead the entry yourself?” Darlan asked.

“No,” Marcas replied. “Let the city fall before I step on it.”

Darlan spat. “You think she’s in there? The girl?”

“I think she knows we are.”

The ground rumbled faintly as the first phalanx passed through the shattered gate, shields glinting dull gray beneath the snowlight. Arrows rained from the inner buildings—pitiful volleys, fired in desperation. One struck a shield and bounced off. Another found a gap and took a soldier in the neck. He fell without a cry. The formation didn’t pause.

“Sad thing, really,” Darlan muttered. “This place. They fought like it still mattered.”

Marcas didn’t answer. He kept his eyes on the breach.

Through the gate, he saw glimpses of Talpis: shuttered windows, abandoned carts, doors barricaded with furniture. Snow drifted through open roofs. A child’s toy—a carved stag—lay discarded beside a pool of half-frozen blood.

He felt no triumph. Only the familiar ache in his shoulder, the tightness in his jaw, and the old, tired question in the back of his mind:

What will we do with it once it’s ours?

Behind him, another detachment of sappers began clearing the outer path, dragging debris to the sides to allow more troops through. Fires had already started—small ones, but they would grow. They always did. War had its own rhythm, and the city would burn in its time.

Marcas turned and walked away from the gate.

He had no interest in watching a kingdom bleed out in real time.

He had work to do.

---

C2S3 - Arguing before the court

The Great Hall of Talpis was half-shadowed when Telaryn entered, lit by patchy firelight and the failing glow of stained glass. Smoke drifted through the rafters. The doors had been thrown open hours ago to let in wounded and word—and neither had stopped flowing since.

She moved past the line of guards, through the ring of servants, and toward the old stone dais where the throne sat like a tomb. No one sat upon it now. They had draped it in black furs, a gesture that was meant to be respectful, but only made the space seem colder.

Half the royal court had gathered in the chamber. Most of them stood, cloaked and dust-caked, arguing in sharp, desperate voices. Their faces were flushed with wine and panic. What had once been a circle of kingsguard, diplomats, and high-born clan lords now looked like a pack of drowning men, arguing about who deserved the last breath.

“—We must parley!” barked Lord Caerin, his cheeks red from either drink or fury. “Send a flag down to the outer wards before they torch the upper city!”

“They will not honor parley now,” spat Lady Brythe, widow of the Eastern Vale, her voice brittle and hoarse. “They broke the first walls under truce. You’d trust them again?”

“They’ll hang us all the same,” mumbled an old scribe. “At least with surrender, they may spare the children…”

“Surrender is death dressed in silk!”

“They’ll breach the inner walls by nightfall!”

“They have breached the walls,” Telaryn said.

The words cut the air like a blade, and for a moment, the hall was silent.

She stepped into the center of the room, pulling back her hood. Her cheeks were pale with wind. Her eyes were sharp, clear—not filled with rage, but focus.

“My father is dead,” she said, calm and deliberate. “I saw the charge from the towers. He fell. The guard fell with him. Talpis is now without a king.”

A few gasps. A few bowed heads. But no one moved.

“I will not die for your performance,” she continued. “We will not make a martyr of this court. We will survive.”

Caerin scoffed, loudly. “You’re not crowned, girl.”

“She is blood,” Alisha snapped from the shadowed edge of the room.

“A child’s blood,” Brythe muttered. “Not yet tempered.”

Telaryn stepped forward, placing a gloved hand on the map table. The table where her father had planned every futile maneuver of the siege.

“They are coming through the gates. We have one chance to slip the noose. There are tunnels—old ones, from the time of the Shattering. The palace crypts connect to the lake caves. From there we can scatter into the Mourning Peaks. If we move now, we can save what’s left of the crown.”

“Run like thieves in the dark?” Caerin snarled. “You want to be queen of cowards?”

“I want to live!” she snapped. “I want something left to fight with tomorrow, instead of wasting blood in a hall too proud to admit it’s already a tomb.”

The nobles recoiled—not from the words, but from her tone. From the raw force of her will.

“That isn’t the Talpian way,” someone murmured.

“No,” Telaryn said. “It’s the only way left.”

Brythe shook her head. “The girl’s afraid. Let her run. Let the wind take her. I will remain, and I will die as I was born—Talpian.”

And like that, the moment passed.

The others nodded, muttered, turned away. The court fractured into silence.

Telaryn stood alone by the map.

No crown. No backing. No time.

Just Alisha at her shoulder, quiet and loyal. And the weight of blood in her veins, growing colder by the hour.

“They won’t follow,” she said, her voice low.

“They don’t have to,” Alisha replied. “Just say where we go.”

Telaryn’s eyes burned—not with tears, but clarity.

“Beneath,” she said. “Into the dark.”

---

They were still arguing when Telaryn left the map table.

Not even fighting anymore—just whispering and accusing in low, tired voices. Hands wrung. Tempers dulled. The last flicker of royal order dying not in flame, but in exhaustion.

She pushed through the antechamber doors into the lesser hall, where her inner circle—those few who still answered to her name—waited.

Ser Deyran, her sworn shield.
Lutha, scout-captain of the hill riders.
Old Marec, who had once guarded her cradle and now limped with a sword at his side.
And Alisha, always Alisha, half in her shadow.

They stood in a loose semicircle near the tall window where snow filtered through shattered glass.

“They won’t follow,” Telaryn said simply.

Marec grunted. “Court never did know which way was down until it broke beneath them.”

“We don’t need the court,” said Lutha. “Give me ten men, and I can get you to the Mourning Foothills by nightfall. There are clan-holds there. Caves.”

“You won’t reach the foothills,” Deyran snapped. “Not through open ground. The gates are lost. The streets are taken.”

“There’s still the crypt tunnels,” Alisha offered. “They run beneath the lake wall, don’t they?”

“They haven’t been walked in twenty years,” Marec muttered. “Might as well throw her to the lake spirits and see who answers.”

“We’re wasting time.” Lutha’s voice rose now, sharp. “The princess needs to move, not stand here listening to tomb-dwellers whine about ghosts.”

“She is not going to flee like a thief,” Deyran snapped, rounding on him. “She is Talpian. She stands her ground.”

“She’s alive,” Alisha said, softly. “And we want her to stay that way.”

Silence followed.

Then: “I swore an oath,” Deyran said. Not to her. To her father. “To defend the crown. Not to run from its grave.”

Telaryn looked at him. His armor still bore the scratches of the last wall breach. One side of his helm had been caved in and crudely hammered back into shape. His blood had already been spilled for her house. And now he wanted to die for it.

“Then stay,” she said.

Deyran blinked. “Your Highness—”

“No.” Her voice was level. “I release you. You’ve done more than was ever asked. But I won’t let my bones decorate their road to conquest.”

He looked wounded, but said nothing. He bowed. Deep. And walked away.

Marec followed him, muttering something under his breath. Perhaps a prayer.

Only Lutha remained, arms crossed. “They’ll call you a coward.”

“Let them,” Telaryn replied. “They’ll call me worse before this is done.”

She looked to Alisha. “How long to gather the others?”

“Those still loyal?” Alisha asked. “An hour. Maybe less.”

“Good.” Telaryn turned to the door. “Then let the nobles write their own songs. I’ll write our future.”

The arguments had begun again. Lord Caerin and Lady Brythe now bickered over what words should be spoken when the palace finally fell, as if the right phrasing might sanctify their failure. A few lesser nobles had already slipped out, robes trailing in the soot.

Telaryn stood alone by the war table, staring down at her father’s map—creased and curling at the corners, wine stains where ink once lay. No one noticed her anymore. Not really. She was the princess, but not the voice they wanted. Not the ghost they revered.

Then the doors slammed open, hard enough to crack the stone frame.

The chamber turned. Spears were drawn—late and uncertain.

A figure staggered in through the smoke.

Captain Varin.

Blood ran from his temple. His left shoulder was soaked, his arm hanging limp at his side. His cloak was torn, and ash clung to the lining of his armor.

He took three steps before his knees buckled. Telaryn was the first to reach him.

“Captain,” she said, steadying him.

“My lady,” he gasped, voice thick with pain. “They’ve taken the king’s road. The palace gate won’t hold an hour.”

He looked around the room. Looked at the nobles. The map. Her.

“I saw him fall. Your father. He struck down three before they pulled him under. He didn’t scream.”

A silence spread across the hall like frost.

Varin fumbled at his side, fingers slick with blood. Alisha knelt to help him. Together they lifted the cloth he had clutched—a torn scrap of the king’s banner, black with silver thread, soaked through in red.

He pressed it into Telaryn’s hands.

“My oath,” he whispered. “Passes to you.”

And then he died. There, before the throne. Before the lords and ladies. Before the stone walls that had once echoed with music.

No one spoke.

Even Brythe said nothing.

Telaryn rose slowly, the bloodstained banner scrap folded in her fist. The warmth of it soaked through her gloves.

When she looked up, the hall was watching her—not with reverence, not yet. But with recognition.

The king was dead. The crown had no heir.

Only her.

And the path she chose now would be written in blood.

The king’s banner still dripped onto the marble floor.

No one moved to lift it. No one moved at all.

The nobles remained frozen in a loose circle around the war table, avoiding each other’s eyes, their robes heavy with the stink of smoke and indecision. None reached for the throne. None knelt. None spoke her name.

And yet the air had changed.

The court no longer looked at her like a child. Nor did they speak over her as they had before. Something had passed between them—not reverence, but inevitability.

Captain Varin’s blood, pooled in the center of the chamber, had made it real.

The king was gone. And she stood in his place.

Footsteps echoed at the edge of the hall.

Three palace guards entered, their armor soot-streaked and dented. They moved without a lord’s summons. Without protocol. One bore a wounded arm, hastily bound. Another’s sword was bloodied to the hilt.

They stopped in the center of the hall and turned—not to Brythe, not to Caerin. To her.

The lead guard stepped forward and bowed, lower than he needed to.

“Your Highness,” he said. Not question. Not hesitation. Statement.

“We await your orders.”

The words struck like steel against stone.

Alisha stood still behind her, breath caught in her throat. Even the nobles faltered.

Telaryn looked at them all—at the crumbling court, the cracked throne, the guards with blood still drying on their blades. She looked at the torn map. The dead captain. The crown her father had worn into death.

And she knew, with sudden, terrifying clarity:

This would not be given. It would have to be taken.

Not just the crown. Not just survival. Everything.

The city. The future. Her name.

She stepped forward.

“Gather those still loyal,” she said, her voice clear and loud enough to silence the hall. “Rouse every guard, every servant who can run. Have them meet at the west chapel door within the hour.”

One of the nobles finally found his voice. “You mean to flee? With what dignity?”

Telaryn turned toward him.

“I mean to live. And to make sure Talpis lives with me.”

No one spoke after that.

She didn’t need them to.

The palace groaned in its bones as another impact shuddered through the walls. Somewhere in the distance, a horn blew—low and sharp.

Telaryn turned toward the sound. Toward the throne. Then away from it.

“I am done asking,” she said.

And with the blood of kings on her hands and the weight of silence behind her,
she began to lead.

---

C3S1 - To the Hall of Kings

The palace was dying.

The walls themselves seemed to groan beneath the weight of falling legacy. With every strike of the battering ram against the inner gate, dust rained from the vaulted ceiling. Cracks spread like veins through ancient stone. The mosaics lining the high galleries—once telling tales of Talpian glory—shivered with each impact. A corner of the southern arch collapsed in a gasp of rubble.

Telaryn ran.

Not alone. Behind her came a knot of loyalists—bloodied guards, a limping scribe, a half-conscious bannerman clutching a shattered standard. Lord Devard, one of her father’s old war-councilors, stumbled beside her, pressing one hand to a spreading stain beneath his ribs. His breath rattled. He hadn’t cried out when the bolt struck him on the staircase—he’d only gritted his teeth, torn it free, and kept moving.

Ash clung to them like a second skin. Somewhere above, the screams of servants and soldiers echoed through the broken halls.

The Hall of Kings loomed ahead—dark, ruined, sacred.

They burst into it like intruders. Once, this hall had held feasts and coronations. Now it stank of smoke and shattered memory. Statues lined either side of the great chamber: stern-browed monarchs carved from black stone, cloaked in dust, their eyes sightless. Snow flurried down through holes in the ceiling, mixing with the ash.

“Here!” cried Halven, the steward, pointing with his torch. “Behind the First Throne—there was a passage, sealed long ago.”

They reached the dais. The seat of the first Talpian monarch, carved into the wall itself, loomed above them. It bore no cushion, no ornament—only a bare stone slab, flanked by the sigil of the forgotten queen whose name had been erased from the royal line.

At its base, partially hidden by a fallen tapestry, lay a carved circle of ancient stone. A seam. A buried promise.

“Clear it!” Telaryn shouted.

They tore aside debris—splintered benches, shattered tiles, a crushed ceremonial shield. The iron ring was still there, rusted, embedded in the floor like a wound. Two guards gripped it, grunted, and wrenched it upward with a metallic shriek. A square slab of stone groaned open, exhaling cold breath from the deep.

A stair spiraled down, narrow and slick with ancient frost.

“Everyone down,” Telaryn ordered. “Now.”

The soldiers obeyed first. Then came the wounded, half-carried, half-crawling. Halven and a bannerman took Lord Devard’s arms. He resisted, weakly, blood trailing from his mouth.

As they helped him toward the stair, he looked up at Telaryn—not quite seeing her.

“You know what this place is, don’t you?” he rasped. “She walked these stones before you… the one they buried in silence.”

Telaryn froze. “Who?”

Devard smiled with cracked lips. “The blood returns. Just like she said it would.”

Then the moment passed, and he sagged between them, coughing blood, descending with the others into the dark.

One guard stayed above to pull the door shut behind them, fingers trembling on the hilt of his sword. The battering ram struck again—closer now. The whole hall shook.

Alisha caught Telaryn’s arm just as she turned to follow.

“You’re not leaving me behind,” she said, eyes burning. “Not after all this.”

“Alisha—” Telaryn’s voice faltered.

“I swore to follow you,” she said. “Don’t make me break it now.”

Another crash—louder. Closer. The palace gates were nearly breached.

Telaryn reached for Alisha’s hand. Squeezed it once. Then stepped onto the first stair, heart hammering like a war drum.

Below them, only silence waited.

But above—above came the roar of broken doors, the thunder of legion boots, and the beginning of the end.

She did not look back.

The door slammed shut behind them, sealing the Hall of Kings once more in shadow.

---

C3S2 - Alisha refuses to be left behind

The stone door groaned closed behind them with a sound like a final breath. Darkness swallowed the world, broken only by Halven’s torch and the flickering lights held by the guards ahead. Cold rose from the stairs beneath their feet—ancient cold, untouched by sun or fire. It coiled around Telaryn’s throat like a noose.

She descended in silence. Ten steps. Twenty. Then stopped.

“Alisha,” she said softly, without turning.

The footsteps behind her paused. “Yes?”

“You shouldn’t have come.”

Alisha said nothing. Telaryn heard her shift the torch in her hand. Just behind her, Halven and the others moved onward, their shapes shrinking into the gloom. Soon it would be only the two of them, surrounded by silence and ancestral stone.

“You had time to stay. When the passage opened, I saw it on your face—you hesitated.”

“I didn’t,” Alisha whispered.

“You did.”

A pause. Then: “I wasn’t sure you'd want me to follow.”

Telaryn turned. The torchlight caught on Alisha’s face—smudged with soot, eyes rimmed with red, but unwavering. Her thin cloak was already soaked at the hem, and she carried nothing but a small blade at her belt and the dying flame in her hand.

“I don’t want you to die,” Telaryn said.

Alisha’s laugh came brittle and brief. “That makes two of us.”

“You don’t understand. Where I’m going...”

“I know exactly where you’re going,” Alisha interrupted. “I heard the stories, same as you. I’ve seen what they painted over. I know what they fear.”

The air between them shivered with more than cold.

“You were born to this, Ryn. But you weren’t meant to walk it alone.”

Telaryn looked away. The corridor loomed behind Alisha—silent, black, endless. Above them, war raged. Below, only ghosts and secrets waited. Her heart beat like a funeral drum.

“I need someone to remind me who I was,” she said, voice nearly breaking.

Alisha stepped closer. “Then let me be that someone.”

They stood for a moment in the dark, two women beneath the crumbling bones of a kingdom, holding between them the last spark of something unbroken.

Then Telaryn turned again and descended the stairs. Alisha followed, and the dark closed in behind them.

---

C3S3 - Whispers in Stone

The tunnel narrowed.

Dust choked the air, and the walls pressed in—cut not by mason’s chisel, but older tools that left gouges like claw marks. Their torchlight barely touched the curve of the passage ahead. Footsteps echoed, but never quite in rhythm. Ryn slowed. So did Alisha.

Halven had gone ahead with the others, scouting the breach they’d said led to a frozen aqueduct. Ryn had insisted on hanging back, needing the quiet, or perhaps just space to breathe.

“They carved these tunnels during the Age of Clans,” Alisha murmured, brushing her fingers along the black stone. “Before even the first kings.”

“Older,” Ryn said. Her voice felt too loud here.

As the corridor widened again, the walls changed. The rough-cut stone gave way to reliefs—low and weather-worn, coated in dust. Ryn raised her torch.

Figures stood etched in profile. Women in cloaks of fur and antler. Men crowned in thorns and wielding axes. Spirits, half-human, half-smoke. Time had blunted their forms, but there was still strength in the lines. Still reverence.

Then came the final carving.

A crowned woman.

Her face had been clawed away—not worn by time, but deliberately defaced. But her posture remained proud, arms spread. In her hands: a sword darker than the stone around it, rendered in obsidian inlay now cracked with age. Flames curled along the blade's length. The only color was a flake of dried red where the hilt met her hand.

Alisha took a step back. “Ryn.”

“I see it.”

“She’s not in any of the royal murals.”

“No,” Ryn said. “She isn’t.”

A cold gust whispered through the tunnel—not from behind, but ahead. The torch guttered in Ryn’s hand.

For a moment, she thought she heard something beneath the rustle of flame: a murmur of breath not her own. A hiss of syllables unspoken.

She turned, quickly. No one was there.

“Did you hear—”

Alisha shook her head. But her hand was on the hilt of her dagger.

“They don’t come this deep,” she whispered.

Ryn looked back at the carving. Something about the blade unsettled her—not its design, but the intent behind it. The way it was drawn to catch the eye. To remember.

Or to warn.

"Let's move," Ryn said.

They walked in silence after that, the flame low and the air heavier with each step.

Behind them, in the dark, the dust of ages shifted. Only slightly.

---

C3S4 - Blood That Binds

The descent had grown quieter. Even the wind above seemed far away now, as if the mountain had swallowed the world. Their torchlight flickered in long, shallow corridors—roots curled between stone slabs, and frost clung to the ceiling like a second skin.

They had carried Lord Devard down with them. His leg had been shattered by debris during the breach. Two guards had supported him down each narrowing stair, but now he lay slumped against the damp wall, pale and shaking.

“I can go no further,” he muttered, sweat slicking his brow despite the cold.

“You will,” Ryn said, crouching beside him. “You only need rest.”

He looked at her with something close to pity. “I followed your father into the rain fields at Alvenhallow. Watched him break a siege with nothing but torchlight and lies. But even he… never dared these halls.”

Ryn glanced at the carvings they'd passed—still visible down the slope behind them. “You mean the Queen Who Was.”

His lips tightened. “She bore a name not fit for the living. And a sword that drank too deep.”

“We don’t even know if she was real.”

“Oh, she was real,” Devard rasped. “Too real. That’s why they chiseled her out. That’s why they buried her in stone and silence.”

He coughed. Blood spotted his chin.

“Ryn,” Alisha said, uneasy.

Ryn reached for the waterskin again, but Devard waved it off. His eyes unfocused. His voice shifted.

“The blood returns…” he breathed, but it wasn’t quite his breath.

His back arched. Fingers curled like claws against the wall. The torchlight dimmed—no gust of wind, no draft—just a slow suffocation of the flame. Whispers bloomed, just out of hearing. The hairs on Ryn’s arms lifted.

Devard’s eyes turned white.

“Daughter of ash,” the voice said through his cracked lips. It was not his voice. “We see you.”

Alisha stepped back.

The air grew thick with dust and a scent like burning roots.

“You come by line unbroken. You come with winter’s sign.”

“Devard—” Ryn began.

“We remember,” said the voice.

And then Devard screamed.

Not a mortal cry, but the scream of something ancient forced into too-small flesh.

One of the guards drew his blade, face pale.

“Don’t—” Ryn began.

But he did.

The dagger thrust into Devard’s throat with a crunch of cartilage and a hiss of escaping breath. The body spasmed once. Then again. Then stilled.

Silence.

The torch burned steady once more.

The shadows retreated. But the feeling did not.

Ryn stood. Her hand was trembling. She didn’t know when she’d drawn her own sword.

Alisha was at her side again. “That wasn’t him at the end.”

“No,” Ryn whispered.

“It was one of them.”

Neither said more. Not then. But as they left the dead man behind in the stone’s embrace, Ryn could feel the watching had not stopped.

It had only begun.

---

C3S5 - The Old Gate

The steps ended not in a chamber, but in a narrow stone corridor lined with bracing timbers and sealed supports. Ancient beams groaned beneath the weight of centuries, and the air turned damp, touched by moss and earth. Someone ahead cursed under their breath—the passage had half-collapsed near its end, requiring them to crawl or squeeze through splintered cracks.

The wounded were carried in silence now. No one spoke of Lord Devard. No one dared.

Telaryn ducked beneath a sagging lintel, her hand pressed to the cold wall for balance. It felt warm beneath her touch—strangely warm. The stone pulsed, just faintly, as if it remembered her blood.

She pulled her hand back.

Ahead, Halven’s torchlight danced over a wall that broke from the regular stonework—older, darker, carved with sweeping arcs and curving runes. It resembled no known script, but the shape was familiar: a crowned woman, arms outstretched, a long black sword resting across her palms like a burden and a promise.

Alisha stopped beside her. “That’s her, isn’t it?” she whispered.

Telaryn didn’t answer.

Because she knew. Not by name—names had been lost—but by blood. This was the queen erased from their line, the one whispered about in parables meant to frighten children and dissuade pride. The sword had many titles in those stories. The Devouring Blade. The Night’s Mouth. But always, it returned in the same hand.

And in some versions, the hand looked very much like hers.

Halven called from ahead. “The gate’s intact!”

The corridor ended in a smooth stone slab mounted with an iron lever, old but recently oiled. With a groan, the mechanism unlocked, and the slab shuddered outward on sunken hinges. Snow flurried in as the hidden gate cracked open to reveal a narrow ledge on the cliffside, overlooking the southern reaches of the city.

Below, Talpis smoked like a dying pyre. The Palace Keep still stood, for now, silhouetted in orange haze. The city’s spires were ash-darkened, and the sounds of battle filtered through the mist like fading music.

“We’re past the walls,” one of the guards said.

A hawk’s cry cut through the wind.

Telaryn stepped out onto the ledge, blinking into the cold. She could see the Mourning Peaks in the distance—jagged, snow-wreathed, waiting.

Waiting for her.

Behind her, the gate ground shut once more. Stone meeting stone. Final. Permanent.

No one looked back.

No one needed to.

---

Interlude - Cinder in the Halls

Marcas of the Third Legion stepped beneath the sundered archway of the Palace Keep, his boots crunching on shards of ancient tile and broken arms. The breath of battle still hung in the air—smoke, iron, and the bitter tang of old wood set aflame. His red cloak, speckled with ash, trailed behind him like a slash of blood against the grey-stone ruin.

The great bronze doors had been torn from their hinges. One lay curled in upon itself, warped by fire. The other rested half-buried in rubble, a broken standard of the kings of Talpis pinned beneath it.

He passed through the Hall of Echoes, where once diplomats and clan lords had debated beneath stained glass now shattered. Wounded guards moaned on the floor, bandaged by Imperial medics. One raised his head at the sound of Marcas’ footsteps, only to flinch and lower it again.

Marcas stopped beside a dying knight still in chainmail, face slick with sweat. The man’s tabard bore the emblem of a mountain wolf, slashed across the chest with a blade.

“She was here?” Marcas asked.

The knight coughed. “She… ran. Below. A stair—sealed. Only the bloodline knows…”

“What stair?” Marcas knelt beside him.

The knight’s eyes began to glaze. “You… can’t follow. Not you.”

Marcas rose. “We’ll see.”

He continued onward, sword drawn more out of habit than need. The palace had fallen. What remained was the hunt.

The Hall of Kings greeted him like a tomb. Statues still stood, though one had collapsed sideways, its face shattered. Snow and ash covered the floor. A trail of footprints led across the chamber, converging at the old dais—where debris had been hastily cleared. A tapestry shoved aside. A scent of opened stone lingered in the air.

Marcas walked forward, his eyes scanning every shadow. At the base of the First Throne, a faint seam cut through the floor: a hatch, now sealed. Melted snow had trickled down the grooves.

“Bring me the archivist,” he said, turning to the officer behind him.

A moment later, the old imperial scholar hobbled forward. “This was… long lost, my lord,” he muttered. “A royal escape shaft. Records said it was sealed three kings ago.”

Marcas nodded once. “Not sealed enough.”

He stood in silence, gaze fixed on the closed gate. She had escaped.

Not through luck.

Through lineage.

He turned, cloak swirling. “Send word to the camps. She’s not in the city. The Princess has fled into the Mourning Peaks.”

“What of the survivors, Legate?” his aide asked.

Marcas glanced back at the wounded still scattered across the halls. Servants. Loyalists. Ruined nobility.

“Interrogate them,” he said. “Then mark the bodies.”

He did not wait for the response. He was already moving, each step heavier with the burden of unfinished conquest.

Behind him, the broken throne of Talpis stood cold and empty.

And beneath it, the blood of kings had already begun to dry.

---

C4S1 - Foothills

Snow fell like a curtain across the broken land—slow and heavy, blanketing the world in white silence. It dulled the edges of the foothills, softened the jagged paths, and cloaked the black scars of war. Trees twisted out of the mist like forgotten guardians, their branches sagging under ice. Wind moaned low through the canyons, as if mourning what had been lost.

Telaryn trudged forward, her legs numb above the knees, boots soaked through. Each breath steamed in the frozen air and turned her chest to iron. The Mourning Peaks loomed above, a wall of distant shadows behind the veil of snowfall. Their true heights were hidden, as if the mountains refused to bear witness to the fugitives crawling at their feet.

Behind her came the rest—Alisha, shivering but unbroken, her cloak wrapped tightly around both shoulders. Halven limped with every step, leaning on a broken spear. Two guards flanked the group, faces gaunt beneath dented helms. No one spoke. The snow swallowed sound and spirit alike.

A scribe—the youngest among them—stumbled. Telaryn caught his arm before he fell and pulled him up with a grunt. He gave her a grateful, frightened look. She didn’t know his name. They’d left the palace in such haste that only fate had decided who escaped and who perished.

She looked back once.

Through a gap in the trees, far to the southeast, the pale smudge of Talpis could still be seen. The city, her city, burned like a wound in the snow—a smear of red and black on the white canvas of winter. Towers had fallen. The smoke reached high enough to choke the moon.

She turned away.

“This path won’t hold much longer,” Halven rasped beside her. His breath rattled like broken leaves. “The old passes… they’re treacherous when the snows come. We’ll have to find shelter by nightfall, or we freeze.”

“There’s a spirit way near here,” one of the guards muttered. “The kind that follow the wind. Some say they lead to safety.”

“Or straight to the dead,” said the other.

Telaryn ignored them. She kept walking.

Her thoughts scraped like knives inside her skull. Her father was dead. The throne gone. The gods silent. And yet here she was—still moving, still breathing, each step a betrayal of memory. Duty should have held her to the last gate. Should have seen her fall beside him. That was the old way.

But she had chosen otherwise.

The snow deepened. The world narrowed to the space between her footprints. Behind her, the wind blew fresh ash across the fallen standard of Talpis, which no one had the strength to carry anymore.

And ahead, somewhere in the white silence, waited the next loss.

---

C4S2 - Steel in Snow

The wind howled like a starving wolf as they climbed the slope, visibility choked to near nothing by the roiling snow. Branches cracked under ice; the ground turned treacherous beneath their boots. All around them, the Mourning Peaks loomed in half-seen shapes—ghostly spines of rock vanishing into the white abyss above.

“We should stop,” gasped Halven, his arm pressed tight against a hastily bound wound at his ribs. “We need rest. Fire.”

“No fire,” Telaryn hissed. “Smoke rises. We keep moving.”

The others didn’t argue. Cold made cowards of all but the dead.

They moved in near silence, the group now no more than six. The scribe had succumbed earlier that morning, breath turning shallow, then still. They had left him beneath a cairn of frost-hardened stones. None had spoken the old words over his body. Not with legion patrols somewhere behind them.

It was Weylan, the youngest of the remaining guards, who first raised his hand.

“Movement,” he breathed. “Downslope.”

They froze.

Through a gap in the snow-flecked brush, just beyond a frozen streambed, figures moved—armor gleaming faintly beneath cloaks of snowmoss. A squad of imperial scouts. Five soldiers, maybe six, moving in a loose crescent. Spears and shortblades. Eyes scanning the white like wolves tasting the wind.

Marcas’s men.

“Shit,” someone muttered.

Then the bark of a commander’s voice rang out—sharp, imperial.

“Hold!” Telaryn hissed, but it was too late.

Weylan’s hand slipped, bowstring snapping. The arrow missed.

The scouts turned as one.

“RUN!” someone shouted.

But Telaryn stood firm.

Steel hissed from her scabbard—not ceremonial this time. The weight bit her palm with forgotten familiarity. She’d been trained to fight, of course. Like all noble daughters of Talpis. But never for this. Never for blood.

The first scout reached her—young, maybe her age. His spear drove forward.

She parried awkwardly, blade sliding across the haft. He twisted. She ducked low, caught him in the thigh, drove her sword in deep as he cried out. Her heart hammered—not from fear, but from something stranger.

Behind her, shouts rang out. The others had formed a loose line. Halven fought like a dying bear—slow, powerful. Another legionary screamed as Alisha buried a dagger in his ribs, face white with terror.

Telaryn’s breath came in clouds. Another soldier charged.

She did not retreat.

This one she killed cleanly—blade slipping beneath the helmet, through the soft of the jaw. Blood painted the snow.

It was Captain Enric—the one who had stayed at her father’s side during the first retreat—who took the wound. A thrown pilum caught him in the back as he turned to shield Halven. He dropped with a grunt, blood already soaking through his cloak.

They drove the last of the scouts back. Two were dead, one fled screaming downslope. But it didn’t matter.

They were found.

Telaryn stood over the bodies, her sword trembling in her hand.

She stared at the blood-streaked snow. At Enric, struggling to breathe.

“I’ll be fine,” he lied.

She knelt beside him, wiped his brow. His eyes were full of pain. Of pride.

“You did well, my lady,” he whispered. “He’d have… been proud.”

She wanted to answer. But words caught in her throat.

From the ridge above, the sound of a horn echoed—distant, but near enough.

More were coming.

“Carry him,” she said.

Alisha moved beside her. “Ryn—”

“Help me. We’re not leaving anyone behind.”

---

C4S3 - The Last Watch

Hours later the wind had softened, but the cold had only deepened.

They’d made camp beneath a bent pine, its boughs heavy with frost, shielding them from the worst of the weather. Snow still drifted in slow spirals, but the howling had stopped, as if the Mourning Peaks themselves were holding their breath. A ring of stones had been cleared, a fire coaxed from bitter roots and broken shields. It crackled low, casting long shadows over tired faces.

Captain Enric lay beneath two cloaks, pale and sweating. Blood had soaked through the bandage across his ribs and frozen at the edges. Each breath came sharp, rattling, like steel dragged across slate. He should have been dead already, but the man was stubborn.

So was Telaryn.

She knelt beside him, a flask of warmed snowmelt in her hands, the firelight flickering across her drawn features. The others had given her space. Even Alisha stood back, watching with red-rimmed eyes. No one spoke. Not yet.

Enric’s eyes cracked open. “Still here, then?”

Telaryn managed a ghost of a smile. “You never were good at letting go.”

He coughed, then laughed—a dry, broken sound. “And you... were always too proud to run. Glad that’s changing.”

She didn’t answer. Just held the flask to his lips. He drank, then winced.

After a long silence, he reached into the folds of his torn coat and pulled something out—clutched tight in a shaking hand.

A pendant. Worn leather, knotted around a flat stone etched with a sunburst—her father’s signet, carved from riverstone and polished by years of wear.

“He gave it to me,” Enric said, voice cracked and low. “Said if he fell, it was yours. Said... you’d know what to do with it.”

She stared at it for a long moment, then took it with both hands.

The weight of it was wrong—far too heavy for something so small. She bowed her head.

“He trusted you,” Enric rasped. “So do I. Don’t waste it mourning us. Don’t waste it trying to be the queen your mother was. Be the weapon we needed when we still had walls.”

“Enric...” Her throat tightened. “I’m not ready.”

“No one ever is,” he said. “But you’ve got fire, Ryn. You’ve got... more than blood in your veins. You’ve got the mountain in you. The city. Don’t forget it.”

His eyes began to dim. His grip loosened.

“I’d like to see the dawn,” he whispered. “But if I don’t... make it hurt, Telaryn. Make the bastards bleed.”

Then, like snow on stone, he was gone.

She sat there long after the fire had burned low, the pendant cold in her hand. At some point, Alisha came to her side. Said nothing. Just stayed.

As the light broke—grey and hollow—they built the cairn together. Stone by stone. No words were spoken. No rites recited. Only the sound of rock settling on stillness, and the memory of a voice that had once commanded a hundred blades.

When it was done, they stood in silence.

The cairn rose waist-high—rough, uneven stone darkened with frost and soot. No marker. No name. Just the weight of memory pressed into rock.

Telaryn stepped back, her breath curling like smoke into the pale morning air. Her hands were scraped raw from the work. Her knees ached. But she felt... quiet. Not at peace, not yet—but grounded, like the stone beneath her feet.

She turned slightly—and Alisha was there.

Wrapped in her threadbare cloak, snow in her hair, eyes red and shining.

For a moment, neither said anything. Then Alisha stepped forward. Slowly. Gently. She reached up and brushed a streak of ash from Telaryn’s cheek with the back of her fingers.

“You always carry it all,” Alisha murmured. “Like the mountain. Like stone.”

Ryn tried to smile. “If I drop it, it might crush me.”

Alisha’s fingers lingered at her jaw. “Then let me carry some.”

Ryn’s breath caught—just for a heartbeat.

She didn’t pull away.

The kiss was soft. Chaste. But it held something fierce beneath it—a promise unsaid, a thread drawn tight between them in a world fraying at the edges.

When they parted, Alisha rested her forehead to Ryn’s, eyes closed.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she whispered.

Ryn nodded, just once. The weight of the pendant still rested against her chest, but it no longer felt cold.

She stood before the cairn, breath misting in the dawn, and whispered one promise: “I will not stop. Not until the Empire knows our name again.”

They turned and the others were waiting. They had a long walk ahead—and a city in the mountains that still flew the old banners. She looked back to the cairn one last time. Winter’s Edge waited. The climb was not yet done.

But at last, her hands no longer trembled.

---

C4S4 - The Choice

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.

---

C4S5 - Winter's Edge

The next morning the sun never really rose. It had vanished entirely by the time they crested the final ridge—if it had ever truly been there. In its place hung a bruised, pewter sky, swollen with unfallen snow. Wind pushed at their backs, less a blessing than a command: move, or die.

They obeyed.

The road ahead was barely a road at all. Just a flattened scar across the windblown rise, half-lost beneath drifts and scattered cairns that marked long-dead trails. But beyond it, nestled in the crags where the Mourning Peaks gave way to the outer cliffs, Winter’s Edge held fast to the living world.

At first it was only a jagged shadow behind sheets of blowing ice. Then came the signs of life: a flicker of orange flame behind battlements, a dark banner flapping in the wind, the shimmer of torchlight refracting through frost-covered watchtowers.

Telaryn paused to take it in, her breath fogging the air. The sight made her knees weak.

“They’re watching,” murmured Halven behind her, his voice barely audible above the wind. “We’ve been seen.”

Ahead, shapes began to move—figures emerging from the town’s outer slope. A scouting party, five riders in snow-dappled cloaks, their lanterns swinging like captive suns. They carried long spears and shields of old wood marked with the glyph of Winter’s Edge: a mountain peak crowned in ice.

“Hold!” a voice called out from the lead rider—sharp, commanding, not unkind. “Name yourselves!”

Telaryn moved forward, her posture instinctively straightening, though her body ached and her boots were soaked through. The others slowed behind her, the wounded leaning on each other, their clothes stiff with frozen blood and soot.

She did not shout her answer. Instead, she let her words drift across the silence, a single name carried by the wind:

“Telaryn of House Talpis.”

For a heartbeat, nothing. Then:

“The princess?” one rider whispered, disbelief crackling in his breath.

Another dismounted, hurrying forward on foot, his eyes darting across their faces as if unable to reconcile what he saw with what he’d thought dead and buried. A horn blew from the ramparts above—a long, low note that trembled in the snow like something sacred remembered.

Torches flared along the battlements. Townsfolk began to gather, wrapped in layers of wool and fur. A boy stood atop a half-buried cart, pointing. An elder dropped her sack of wood with a gasp. A girl whispered the old chant of winter kings beneath her breath. Even the guards, hardened men and women of the border clans, stared as though beholding a myth returned.

The gates creaked.

Heavy, groaning things of iron and pine, carved with ancient runes half-buried by rime. They opened slowly—not with the panicked rush of fear, but with the weight of reverence. As they parted, warmth spilled out into the cold. Not heat, not safety—hope. Fragile. Flickering. Real.

Alisha brushed against Telaryn’s shoulder. Her eyes shimmered. “They thought you dead.”

“So did I,” Telaryn whispered, not taking her eyes off the firelit path before her. Her hand found Alisha’s again, this time without shame.

They passed beneath the arch. Inside, bells tolled—not in mourning, but in welcome. Atop a nearby wall, a soldier saluted. Another fell to one knee. Snow blanketed the courtyard, but here, within the walls, the air felt different—charged, as if the mountain itself had been waiting for her return.

Winter’s Edge had endured.

Now, it would remember.

Telaryn walked in silence, her face pale but unbowed. Behind her trudged the last of her loyalists, half-frozen, hollow-eyed, bearing the weight of all they had lost. Somewhere behind them, buried beneath snow and ash, Enric slept his final sleep. The smoke of Talpis still curled on the horizon.

But here, at the edge of the world, a gate had opened.

And not even the Empire could close it again.

---

Interlude - What the Dead Remember

The wind that scoured the ravine felt carved from ice and regret. It howled low between broken stones, slipping through the barren pines like a whisper too old to remember its meaning. Marcas dismounted in silence. The hooves of his destrier crunched into a carpet of crusted snow and ash.

He stood motionless for a moment, scanning the site with the same cold discipline he used to read battle reports. A ring of blackened stones marked a fire, long dead. The snow had not yet fully covered it. Scattered footprints led from the shallow hollow to the east, half-lost to drifting frost. And there—just beyond the fire—rose a cairn of dark stone, shaped in haste, but not without care.

Marcas moved toward it without a word. He removed his gauntlet and pressed his hand to one of the stones. It was still faintly warm from the sun. A smear of blood clung to the edge, half-frozen in place. The print was full-handed—someone had died here, and someone had buried him.

“Here,” he said.

Behind him, the soldiers stood at silent attention. Their cloaks snapped in the wind, crimson against the bone-pale world. None of them looked toward the other rider—the one in darker garb, whose uniform bore the black-on-bronze seal of the Imperial Practicum of Theurgical Operations.

His name was Magister-Legate Daen Verrin, an officer of the Sixth Scholam, educated by the Magi of Anderon. His blade was regulation length, bone-hilted, and meticulously polished. No crude talismans adorned him. The glyphs stitched into the seams of his cloak were tight, geometric, and symmetrical: language bound by law, not faith.

Daen dismounted and stepped beside Marcas, squinting at the cairn.

“It’s recent,” he said. “Three nights, perhaps. The binding should hold.”

Marcas nodded once.

“What do you need?”

The theurge gestured to the prisoner.

Lord Caerin had stopped pleading long before they reached the hills. Now he merely watched with a gaunt, sunken stare, as though hollowed out by the weight of lost titles. His noble coat was torn at the shoulder; his feet bled into the snow from too many hours of forced riding.

“I told you,” Caerin rasped. “She was a child. You let her run. That was mercy.”

“There is no mercy in fire,” Marcas replied. “And she did not burn.”

Verrin moved smoothly—ritual, not cruelty. He drew a line in the snow with a wand of ironwood capped in silver. Ash from the soldier's own kit was scattered with precision, forming a sigil of concentric rings. He produced a ceremonial knife, standard-issue, from a lacquered box. Not chipped. Not bloodstained. Not crude.

He looked to Marcas.

“Authorization?”

Marcas gave a short nod.

The euphemism came, as it always did, clean and practiced.

“Proceed with sanctioned invocation of vital residue. Consent assumed by condition of active rebellion.”

Caerin never screamed—only gasped, once, as the blade moved. Verrin's incantation followed, precise and sterile. His voice echoed unnaturally through the ravine.

The blood spilled into the snow, hissing faintly. Glyphs flared beneath it—crimson and gold. Cold air contracted, the very sky seeming to draw breath.

From the cairn, something stirred. A shimmer began to bleed from the cairn.

It rose slowly, not with ceremony, but like something disturbed from sleep too long denied. The spilled blood hissed in the snow, soaking into the carved sigils. It was not the death that drew the spirit—it was the excess, the squandering of life, a raw invitation cast crimson into the snow.

The air thickened, the wind slowed, and a pressure gathered, humming deep in the marrow. Even the veterans among them shifted uncomfortably. The horses stamped nervously, ears pinned.

Then, it came.

No face. No limbs. Only an outline, an echo of a man rendered in frosty light and regret. It hovered over the cairn like a question half-asked, trembling. As it moved, thin flakes spiraled in its wake—motes of wind and bone, stirred by memory. It rose from the stones like steam from ice, no face, no voice, only shape. The shape of memory and duty, carved in frost and aching bone. The spirit hovered above the cairn—its form flickering, tremulous.

Daen Verrin stepped forward, his voice steady, ritualistic.

“Warrior,” he said, for no name had been carved into the stones. “We call you to testify.”

The spirit twitched as though struck. A ripple of force passed through it—grief, recognition, pain. The blood in the glyphs pulsed once.

“Where did the heir go?”

There was no speech. Not truly. But something passed through the gathered men—a weight of thought, foreign and cold.

The spirit turned east. Not its head. It had none. But the intention moved, and the snow caught the gesture. The wind flared briefly, revealing a trail of footsteps hardening beneath fresh fall. A gust of wind whipped around the cairn, violent and sudden. The eastern tracks lit up, as if outlined by spectral breath. Snow hissed upward, spiraling into a short-lived vortex. The trees bent eastward. Something unseen pointed—not with limb, but with will.

Then—a whisper, curling on the edge of hearing. Edge... the edge... of winter... Then the “voice”, if it had ever been one, fractured into a wail. Not audible, but felt. The presence suddenly collapsed inward, wind swirling violently before falling still.

Only silence remained.

Marcas narrowed his eyes, stepping into the line of motion. “What lies east?”

A soldier came forward, fumbling with his pack. “Sir—map of the highlands, if I may—”

He unfolded the cloth map on a flat stone. Marcas traced a gloved finger along the marked paths. One waystation stood east of the ravine: Winter’s Edge, a remote stronghold clinging to the cliffs, long used as a final retreat for royal forces.

“There,” Verrin said, tapping a small mark near the foot of the Mourning Peaks. “A border-hold. Winter’s Edge. Fortified. Last known to be loyal.”

Marcas studied the mark. Then the cairn. Then the blood.

“Then that is where she runs.”

He looked to the trail beginning to vanish beneath new snow.

“Then that is where we ride.”

Then, like breath exhaled in midwinter, it faded—dispersing into the wind, into the cold, into memory.

No one spoke for a time.

Marcas stepped forward at last, his voice a low thing:

“We ride east. They’ll not reach sanctuary unchallenged.”

He glanced once to the body in the snow. It was already cooling, the light drained from Lord Caerin’s face.

“See that he’s buried,” he added, before turning from the ring of blood and snow.

There was no triumph in his bearing. Only forward motion. Only purpose.

Behind him, Verrin murmured one last word to the wind—part absolution, part procedural closure.

The snow closed over the scene. And the ravine, once again, remembered nothing.

---

C4.1S1 - The Weight of Survival

Telaryn stood in silence, high above the sleeping city.

From the keep’s frost-rimed window, Winter’s Edge sprawled below—its rooftops layered in soft snow, its chimneys thinly breathing. The lower wards were little more than a cluster of houses and tents pressed into the crags, a fragile sprawl of tarps and prayer flags caught between stone and sky. Smoke curled upward in hesitant lines. Somewhere, a hammer rang against metal—too light to forge, perhaps, but strong enough to remind someone they were still alive.

She did not feel it.

Her hand rested against the cold stone frame, fingertips tracing a shallow crack that ran through the mortar. Her thumb caught on the edge of it again and again, until the skin tore. She did not stop.

Enric’s name clung to the air behind her lips. She had not said it aloud. Not since the cairn. But the shape of it lingered in the back of her throat—weightless and terrible.

Her armor was still ashen from the flight—clay-caked greaves, a dent in the left pauldron, dark spatter stiffening the laces of her gloves. She hadn’t removed it, not fully. Just loosened the clasps to breathe. There was a comfort in its embrace, like the stone walls—cold, enclosing, unyielding.

A soft knock.

She turned as the heavy door creaked open, letting in the scent of bitter stew and melted tallow. Alisha stepped inside, a tray balanced in her arms.

“I brought food,” she said, voice quiet. Her eyes darted toward Telaryn, then away. She set the tray on a narrow table by the hearth, where the fire had guttered to coals.

“Thank you,” Telaryn said. The words tasted brittle.

Alisha hesitated. Her fingers lingered on the tray. Then she turned to go.

“You haven’t eaten,” Telaryn added, not sure why.

“I will,” Alisha replied. Her hand paused on the doorframe. “Later.”

The door closed gently behind her.

Telaryn did not move to eat. She let the cold return. From the window, the snow continued its silent descent, soft as regret. And somewhere beyond it, in the hush of a world that had not yet forgiven her, Telaryn traced the crack in the stone once more.

---

C4.1S2 - The Broken Garison

By midday, the sky had cleared to a brittle blue, though the wind off the Mourning Peaks carved through Ryn’s cloak like knives, cold enough to numb thought. She walked the upper battlements beside Commander Vessan, past shuttered watchtowers and half-mended merlons. The frost-stained stone groaned beneath their boots—ancient Talpian masonry, too long left to sleep.

Below, the broken city struggled toward life. Smoke rose thin from repaired chimneys. Old banners had been torn down or cut into strips for bandages. Winter’s Edge had once been a stop for herders and scouts, little more than a fortress-keep with stables and storm shelters dug into the cliffs. Now it was bloated with the weight of the war—refugees, loyalists, deserters, all pressed against one another like too many stones in a dry wall.

“The place wasn’t meant to live,” said Vessan. Her voice was flat, scraped raw by years and wind. “Winter’s Edge was for passing through. Not for holding.”

Telaryn studied her. Vessan was older than she’d first seemed—wiry beneath boiled leathers, streaks of white threading dark hair bound back in a knot. A jagged scar split her cheek. Her sword was plain but well-kept, the blade honed to a razor. Not ceremonial, not for show.

“How many do you command?” Telaryn asked, eyes drifting to the outer palisades.

“Sixty trained,” Vessan said after a pause. “Maybe. If you count the ones who still have both arms and a decent spear. Add another hundred who can follow an order without pissing themselves.”

Telaryn exhaled slowly.

“And stores?”

“Low.” Vessan rubbed her gloved fingers together, warming them. “We’ve got three weeks of grain, two if you ration it hard. Salted goat, turnips, dried root. No oil. No engineers. No siege ladders unless the ghosts in the cellar start building them.” She glanced toward the cliffside where a rudimentary wall had been thrown up with mud and prayer. “If the passes close early, we’ll eat leather before winter’s end.”

They stopped at a crumbled parapet. From here, the broken northern curtain wall was visible—cracked along the seams, its silver-veined ward-stone faded from centuries of disuse. Men were trying to reinforce it with logs and hastily quarried stone. Children ferried firewood, their eyes wide.

“You brought something, when you came,” Vessan said, watching them. “Hope, maybe. Or a symbol. But I don’t know if it was mercy… or a curse.”

“I didn’t ask to lead,” Telaryn said.

“No one who’s worth it ever does.”

The silence stretched. Snow fell quietly now, soft and clean. From up here, the mountains looked peaceful—folded in white, wrapped in stillness. But Telaryn knew better. She felt them watching, the spirits of old stone, the slumbering things that remembered when blood last stained these heights.

Her hand rested on the wall. The frost-bitten surface pulsed faintly beneath her palm. Veins of silver—woven into the old Talpian stones—still shimmered with spirit-warding, though the glow was weak. This place had once been part of a chain of citadels bound by oaths and ritual, meant to withstand not just armies but darker tides.

“I’ll hold this place,” she said, soft as falling snow. “As long as I can.”

Vessan studied her in silence. When she spoke, her voice had lost its rough edge.
“The stones remember lies, Princess. But they remember oaths even longer.”

Telaryn didn’t answer.

Instead, she stared east, toward the pass. Somewhere beyond the fog, beyond the white-shrouded peaks, the Legion moved.

---

C4.1S3 - Dreams beneath the ice

By evening Winter’s Edge did not grow warmer. The night came with a thick and waiting silence, as if the cold itself held its breath.

Telaryn lay on her cot wrapped in too many layers of cloth that did nothing against the marrow-deep chill. The hearth in the chamber had burned low, its embers dulled to ghost-light. Wind scraped against the shutters like a dull blade. Somewhere in the keep below, bells rang the hour of final rest—a hollow tone, iron on iron, the sound of worn faith.

She had meant to sleep sitting upright, sword laid across her lap, boots never removed. But exhaustion claimed her like a tide pulling stones out to sea.

And in sleep, the mountain found her.

She stood atop a jagged peak, alone, high above the world. The sky churned with a storm that did not touch her—snow spiraled upwards, slow as ash, catching fireless light from a moon that wasn’t there.

Beneath her, the summit formed into a plateau of ancient stone—cracked, cold, scorched in places with marks that might have been runes or claw-scars. At its center, a throne rose from the rock itself: no carving, no construction—just raw, fused matter that had grown into the shape of power.

It was made of bone and basalt, veined with faintly glowing seams like lava frozen in mid-flow. Its back was tall, crowned with antlers of pale metal. It breathed, faintly.

And seated upon it was herself—or something wearing her face.

The woman was older, far beyond the years Ryn had seen, but ageless too. She bore a crown of thorns twined with black ribbon, and her robes trailed into mist where they touched the stone. Her eyes were white as glacier-ice, her skin carved with fissures of dim red light, as though her very blood smoldered beneath her.

She said nothing.

But her lips moved.

The words were old, older than Talpis, than the clans. They were the first language, the one the world used before men gave it names. Telaryn could not understand it—but she remembered it. Somewhere deep inside her, something ached in answer.

The figure raised a hand, beckoning downward.

And there, at the base of the throne, half-buried in black frost, lay a sword.

It had no hilt, no jewel, no ornament. Just shadow-forged steel etched with jagged sigils that pulsed faintly with their own rhythm. Chains lay across it, woven from bone and silver and old iron, holding it in place—but not tightly enough.

Ashmire.

The name crashed into her like a wave.

Not spoken. Not seen. Known.

As if she had always known it, and only forgotten.

She stepped forward, drawn toward it. But movement in the snow behind her made her turn.

Alisha.

Standing there at the edge of the frozen peak, barely clothed, her braid unraveling in the wind. Her hands were outstretched. Her face was lined with sorrow.

Her lips moved. Telaryn could not hear what she said.

She took another step, arm lifting toward her.

Alisha flickered*.

Her image blurred—once, twice—and then began to dissolve into falling snow. Her form unraveled thread by thread, until only a shadow remained on the ice. No scream. No sound. Just absence*.

Telaryn ran.

But her feet would not move.

The snow around her turned to ash.

The world cracked open.

She awoke gasping, as if yanked from a pit of cold water.

The fire in the hearth had long died. Her breath came in heavy white puffs. Her chamber was colder than it had any right to be, and the darkness pressed close, like a second skin.

She sat up, throat tight.

Then she saw it.

Across the flagstone floor, from the hearth to her bedside, ran a line of ice. Thin, delicate, and unnatural—no water had spilled there. It shimmered faintly in the darkness, and where it touched the edge of her cot, a single crimson bead welled up on her palm.

She hadn’t cut herself.

And yet she bled.

Her breath caught. Slowly, she stepped down and padded barefoot to the arrow-slit window. The shutters groaned as she pushed them open. Cold bit at her exposed skin.

The city lay below—quiet, dark, smothered in snow. Fires burned in isolated courtyards. Smoke twisted against the stars.

And in the drifting veil of snow...

They moved.

Flickers. Motes. Shapes. Spirit echoes, drifting low over rooftops or coiling through the alleyways like smoke caught on thought. No faces. No eyes. Just presence—small and cold and watching.

One drifted close to the wall, near the temple-roof. It paused beneath a broken gargoyle.

It looked up.

Not with a face. But with intent.

Telaryn did not flinch.

She stared until it faded, until the last of the spirit-light unraveled in the storm.

Then she touched her lips with blood-stained fingers and whispered the name the dream had given her:

“Ashmire.”

The wind paused.

---

C4.2S1 - Wounds in Silence

The chamber might have once belonged to a captain or minor noble, back when Winter’s Edge had been a proper keep instead of a fractured refuge. Now it served as Ryn’s room, though it barely deserved the name. The stone walls leaked cold like a memory refused to die. The hearth flickered dimly, fed with what little dry wood remained. A cracked basin sat on a rickety table beside the bed. Frost curled in the corners of the windowpanes, whispering against the glass.

Alisha sat on the edge of the narrow cot, her knees brushing against Ryn’s thigh. Between her hands, the cloth was already stained pink with old blood and melted snow. The bowl steamed faintly in the cold room, its water tinged with the coppery scent of healing delayed.

Ryn sat still, half-armored, half-undone. One gauntlet lay discarded at her feet. Her tunic hung open at the shoulder, exposing a line of bruises that bloomed from clavicle to rib. She had neither asked for aid nor refused it. She had simply sat when Alisha guided her here—silent, eyes dull with weight that no sleep could lighten.

Alisha dipped the cloth again. Her hands were steady now, though they had trembled earlier. Not from fear. Not from the cold. But from the aching closeness of it all—the ache of being needed and not quite wanted, of love kept quiet for too long.

“Hold still,” she whispered.

Ryn did, though a flicker of pain crossed her face as the cloth touched the gash below her ribs.

Alisha worked gently, dabbing blood, cleaning dirt. She paused when she found a deeper cut at Ryn’s side—a long, inflamed welt where her armor had chafed through the skin. Without a word, she reached for a roll of linen, biting the corner as she cut a strip with her belt knife.

“You should’ve said something,” she murmured. “This could fester.”

Ryn didn’t answer. Her gaze stayed fixed on the hearth—on the waning flames that danced without warmth.

Alisha swallowed. Her voice turned softer. “You don’t have to carry it all alone.”

That earned a flick of Ryn’s eyes, but no more. There was a hollowness there, a grief still too fresh to name. Alisha could see it—the weight of Enric’s death, the burden of every sword that had turned to her when the king’s fell. And deeper still, something older: a dream of frost, a whisper in the blood. Ryn hadn’t spoken of it. Not since the shrine. Not since the ice traced their floor like a curse.

Alisha wrapped the linen, knotting it with care. She rested her palm over the dressing, fingers lingering longer than needed. Still no protest. Still no return.

The silence thickened.

“I brought bread,” Alisha said. “And broth. From the kitchens. It’s not much, but it’s hot.”

Ryn shook her head faintly. “Later.”

“You haven’t eaten.”

“I said later.”

Alisha sat back, stung, but nodded. Her braid slipped over her shoulder, dark hair catching firelight for a moment before dimming again. She turned her face slightly away, hiding the worst of what showed in her eyes.

She wanted to say, You’re pushing me away again.
She wanted to scream, Let me in before you’re too far gone.

But instead, she whispered, “Rest, then. I’ll stay till you sleep.”

And she did.

She sat at the foot of the cot, arms wrapped around her knees, watching as Ryn finally leaned back, muscles tight as drawn bowstring, and closed her eyes. Even in sleep, her brow furrowed. Even in sleep, she looked ready to bleed.

Alisha watched the candle burn low.

Watched the rise and fall of breath she feared would change before she could catch it.

---

C4.2S2 - Glimpse of the Past

The fire had gone low again.

Alisha sat on the stone sill of the narrow window, knees tucked to her chest, watching snowfall drift down through the slitted view. The room was quiet save for the occasional groan of the fortress timbers and the faint wind that swept across the rooftops of Winter’s Edge. Behind her, Telaryn still slept—or pretended to. Wrapped in a cloak, her silhouette was barely visible in the dim orange of the coals.

Alisha spoke softly. Not to wake her. But perhaps hoping the words might still reach her.

“I was born in the lower quarter of Caerthall,” she said, tracing her fingertip along the frosted edge of the glass. “You wouldn’t know it. It doesn’t exist anymore. Burned in the first wave. My mother kept a baker’s stall. My father... I never met. He was a sailor, I think. Or a liar. Maybe both.”

A pause.

“I had two younger brothers. Bren and Cail. They used to chase goats through the alleys and steal apples from the shrine offerings. Cail thought if you ate from the spirits, they had to bless you.” She smiled, bittersweet. “We were hungry a lot.”

Snow gathered on the stone ledge outside. Alisha’s breath fogged against the pane.

“I joined the house when I was fifteen. Palace stewards came looking for girls who could read, who could be taught to serve quiet and unseen. I had sharp eyes, and I never spoke out of turn. That mattered, I think.” A shadow passed her face. “I thought I’d escaped the hunger.”

She glanced toward the bed, but Telaryn did not stir.

“I used to watch you,” she said more quietly. “Before I ever met you properly. From doorways, behind servants’ screens. Always the still one. Even when others laughed or faltered. You didn’t pretend. I liked that.”

Alisha rested her chin on her knees. Her voice, when it came again, was smaller.

“The night they breached the outer walls, they told us to run. The queen’s attendants fled first—carriage in the back tunnel, sworn guards, all gone before the banners even fell.” She swallowed. “I didn’t. I found you in the library, remember? You were still reading.”

A pause.

“I stayed because I couldn’t imagine not staying. Not out of duty. Not for crown or kingdom. I stayed for you.”

The words hung between them like frost on glass.

“I loved you before I even knew what that meant,” she said, voice trembling now. “Before I knew what it might cost.”

Still, Telaryn didn’t speak. But her hand shifted beneath the blanket, just slightly. Enough to make Alisha wonder if she was listening. Enough to hope.

Alisha looked back to the snow, and whispered, “Now it burns. It scares me, how much I’d do for you.”

Silence again.

But something in the chamber had shifted.

Outside, the snow started to fall. Slow. Relentless. Like time that refused to pause for anyone’s grief or love.

And inside, Alisha remained at the window, her past now spilled like embers—quiet, fading, but still warm enough to wound.

---

C4.2S3 - Nightfall Confession

By mid day storm had passed. And by nightfall, the wind no longer howled at the shutters, and the snow drifted down in soft spirals—slow and silent, like the breath of a sleeping world. The small chamber, for all its stone and shadow, felt closer now, held by the hush that comes after a night of grief and telling.

Ryn sat by the fire, her shoulders hunched in thought, gaze fixed not on the flames but on something deeper, further, unreachable. Her armor was gone—folded neatly in the corner—but she still wore the weight of it in her posture.

Alisha stood behind her, holding a thick wool blanket. She said nothing at first. Simply stepped closer, draped it around Ryn’s shoulders, and then, after a moment’s hesitation, slid beneath it too.

They sat that way for a long while. No words. No questions. Just the closeness of warmth shared against the lingering cold.

Ryn’s hand rested beside Alisha’s on the stone hearth. And then—slowly, almost accidentally—their fingers brushed.

Alisha looked at her. Ryn didn’t turn, but she didn’t move away either.

So Alisha leaned her head against her shoulder.

It wasn’t a kiss. Not yet. But it was a choice, a moment of truth made manifest in the nearness of skin and silence. It was a kind of confession, louder than words.

Time moved strangely after that.

The fire crackled. The snow thickened outside the window. Somewhere, far off, a bell rang once—deep and low, as if mourning its own echo.

Later, they lay on the narrow cot, the blanket wrapped around them both, Ryn’s back to Alisha, her breath slow, even.

Alisha’s arm curled around her. She wanted to hold tighter. To speak. To ask.

But she didn’t.

Not until the light began to shift again—the first gray hints of morning paling the edges of the storm. Not until Ryn stirred and gently, almost imperceptibly, pulled away.

It wasn’t cruel. It wasn’t even sudden.

It was simply distance returning. A queen’s armor sliding back over a girl’s heart.

Ryn stood and moved to the window. Her silhouette was stark in the light. Snow still fell outside—soft, unending.

Alisha watched her for a moment. Then whispered into the cold, just loud enough for the wind to hear: “If I lose you to this… what was I ever holding?”

Ryn didn’t turn. And Alisha didn’t ask again.

---

C4.2S4 - Foreshadowed Change

The keep was never silent. Even in sleep, Winter’s Edge murmured. The old stones creaked in the cold, wood beams settled with groans too old to remember comfort, and the wind—always the wind—threaded through cracks like a forgotten song, half-sung.

Alisha moved through the corridor in soft boots, wrapped in her cloak. The candle she carried flickered against the frostbitten walls, casting long shadows that twitched like waiting things.

She hadn’t meant to walk. She’d only stepped out to clear her head, to find a moment of stillness away from the tight walls of their shared room, from the weight of words unsaid. But her feet carried her farther than intended, past old storage alcoves and dust-veiled archways, toward the outer rim of the keep.

There, she stopped before one of the high, narrow windows.

Snow clung to the leaded glass, thick and laced with ice. She wiped a small circle clean with her sleeve and leaned in.

Beyond the walls, the courtyard lay half-buried. Fire pits had gone cold. A few figures moved along the ramparts—sentries, bowed against the wind.

But it wasn’t them that held her breath still.

Across the courtyard, high in the north tower where Telaryn slept, a flicker moved across the stone.

Not firelight.

Not a guard.

A shadow. Or the echo of one—broad-shouldered, indistinct, like the suggestion of a form without mass.

It stood still for a heartbeat too long.

Then it was gone, swallowed by snow and gloom.

Alisha blinked. Her hand tightened on the candle. The flame guttered low.

She told herself it had been nothing. A trick of the wind. A cloud catching the moon. A tired mind inventing shapes where none stood.

But then—A whisper.

Soft as snowfall. Cold as loss.

It held no words. But it spoke all the same—carrying with it something ancient, mournful, and terribly, terribly hungry. It brushed the nape of her neck like breath, even though she was alone.

She turned, sharply.

No one was there.

The candle flared once more, as if reclaiming its courage.

Alisha backed away from the window. Her heart thundered in her chest, and the frost on the glass began to spread again, spiraling outward in silent vines.

She did not look back until she reached the door of their room.

Only then—just before stepping inside—did she glance over her shoulder.

The corridor was empty.

But something had changed.

---

C4.3S1 - Dust-Laden Past

Halven descended the narrow stair behind the old cairn at the edge of the town, his breath fogging in the cold, his lantern flickering with each step. He needed stillness. Not the stillness of a guarded breath in court or the edge of battle, but the kind that only came when no one was watching. The kind hidden beneath stone and silence. He moved slowly, not because of age—though age had come for him in its quiet way—but because haste had no place among the dead.

The air down here smelled of old ink, damp stone, and resignation. Walls bowed slightly, as if bearing the weight of memory. There had been no order to the archive for years—perhaps decades. Scrolls were scattered across warped desks, shelves leaned as if sighing beneath time’s weight, and somewhere in the deeper dark, snowmelt dripped in a steady rhythm, like a heartbeat left behind.

He had always found comfort in places like this. Forgotten spaces. Not sacred, exactly, but respectful. Spaces that remembered, even when the world above chose to forget.

Halven lit two more lanterns and set them on rusted wall-hooks. Warm light spread across the cluttered chamber—revealing a collapsed shelving rack where a tapestry of the old faith had half-melded into the floor, a nest of bundled scrolls tied with faded silk, and something else.

A blood-stained ledger, cracked open along its binding.

He hesitated before reaching for it. His fingers were ink-stained still from years at court. He had once held the ledgers of a kingdom—read balance sheets from port towns, and written royal decrees that bore the signature of Telaryn’s father. But those were numbers. Declarations. This was history carved in ash and ink.

He sat, knees groaning, and unfurled the ledger across a fractured desk. Beneath layers of soot and parchment-mildew, the genealogy emerged: lines of descent inked in sweeping curves, names nested within names. But midway through the tree, the script faltered. One branch had been burned away deliberately—and where a name should have been, there was only a sigil:

A black crown with no base. A sword inverted, wrapped in thorn.

Halven swallowed.

He’d seen that sigil before—half-buried in dust, carved into the wall behind the First Throne as they’d fled the Hall of Kings. He hadn’t spoken of it then. He wasn’t sure anyone but him had noticed. But here it was again—not gone. Buried.

He flipped a few brittle pages further. His breath caught.

A legend. Fragmented. Ancient Tul, inked in faded red.

She who lit the fire beneath the mountain,
Held court where the ash did fall like rain.
Her blade took no light, and no warmth did she give—
But the spirits kneeled in silence,
And the dead remembered her name.

Below it, someone had scratched an annotation in a younger hand—Temple script, perhaps a few centuries old:

Her name is no longer spoken. But her bloodline remains.

Halven exhaled slowly, as though afraid to disturb the dust further. A chill ran down his back.

He glanced toward the stairwell. He was still alone.

But some part of him, the part that had lived long in the shadows of court, in whispers and riddles and politics dressed as loyalty, understood what he had just uncovered.

Telaryn was not just heir to a fallen kingdom. She was heir to something older. A throne never abdicated. A name never spoken. A fire never extinguished.

He pressed a hand gently to the page, feeling the brittle parchment crinkle beneath his palm.

“The bards won’t sing this”, he said quietly. “But it will matter. Ancients help us all—it will matter.”

---

C4.3S2 - Sword of Fireless Flame

Halven moved deeper into the old halls. The door to the inner vault groaned on rusted hinges, exhaling a breath of stale incense and forgotten time. Halven lifted his lantern and stepped inside.

The chamber was narrow, choked with collapsed shelving and frost-kissed statuary. Once a sanctum for pre-Shattering relics and forbidden scriptures, it had become a crypt of misremembered truths. His boots scuffed over scattered bone beads and shards of offering bowls. The stone walls were carved with glyphs older than any surviving script of Talpis.

He moved carefully, reverently—his fingers gliding along broken seals, faded sigils, the wax-cracked bindings of ancestral warnings. A part of him, buried deep beneath discipline and duty, felt like a trespasser. But another part, the one that had walked the palace halls in silence for decades, whispered: If not me, then who?

Near the back, hidden behind a fallen tapestry stiff with mildew, Halven found it—a scroll case wrapped in layers of oilcloth and thread, bound with a knot he recognized from royal funerary rites. He paused, heart tapping a slow rhythm beneath his ribs. Then he opened it.

The parchment inside was brittle as moth wings, its ink faded to the hue of dried blood. But the script was unmistakable. A dialect older than the throne itself.

He read aloud in a whisper:

“...beneath the mount where grief is carved in stone,
lies the throne that drinks no fire,
and a blade that knows no mercy.
Flame that burns without flame,
heat that is stolen, not kindled.”

Halven frowned. The words blurred together like half-remembered prayers. No name was given—but the descriptions echoed what he’d seen in the old murals beneath Talpis, and again in the Hall of Kings: the woman with the black blade, her face chiseled from silence, erased from history by generations too afraid to remember.

Another line struck him oddly:

“Let none unbind what the tyrant-queen sealed with her own blood.
For the hunger she sated sleeps only lightly.”

His breath caught. “Hunger?” he repeated. “What kind of weapon was this?”

He traced the next few lines with care. The text spoke of longing—strange longing—for the flame. Again and again, the phrase recurred:

“They came seeking the cold flame.
They left as ash.”

Halven’s scholar’s mind wrestled with the phrasing. A flame that was cold. A throne that drank sorrow. Could it be a metaphor for sacrifice? A relic of lost nobility? He tried to fit the meaning into known myths—but something resisted.

“Strange,” he murmured. “They wrote of the blade as if it were a lover... or a hunger.”

A sound answered him—not a voice, not words, just the faintest breath of movement. He froze. The flame of his lantern sputtered, dimmed. In the periphery of vision, something shifted—soft, slow, like a woman turning her head. Halven whipped around. Nothing. Only dust motes. Stone. Silence.

He shook his head, pressed his fingers to his brow. “The air is too thin,” he told himself. “Too many nights without sleep.”

Still, as he rolled the scroll closed and tucked it inside his cloak, he could not stop the feeling that something had been listening. Not watching—listening.

---

C4.3S3 - Candle before the forgotten

A couple of hours later, Halven found himself back in the shrine again . It had been sealed for years before the refugees came—its roof cracked, its pews half-rotted, the inner sanctum taken by ivy and dust. Now it served as storage for firewood and wounded pride. But some things had survived.

Halven stepped lightly, as though waking the dead with each footfall. In one hand, he carried a small lantern; in the other, a single wax candle—narrow, white, imperfect.

At the heart of the ruined shrine stood a statue. Or what had once been one.

The face was gone, worn smooth by centuries or perhaps carved away in defiance. What remained was the shape of a woman cloaked in time, her hands resting upon the pommel of a sword planted point-down between her feet. A queen, or something older. The Nameless One. The Erased.

Halven knelt.

The stone beneath his knees was cold and brittle. Snowmelt from the broken ceiling dripped somewhere behind him, rhythmic and slow. He placed the candle at the statue’s base, struck the flint, and lit the wick.

The flame took hesitantly. Then it stood.

“We forget our monsters too easily,” he said aloud. “We sand their names from stone. Seal their truths in vaults. Call their tools cursed—until we need them.”

The light flickered—no wind, no motion, but a waver all the same. Halven didn’t look up. But he felt it. Something behind the hollowness of the statue. Not presence. Not even judgment. Just... notice. The sense of being remembered in return.

He bowed his head, voice soft. “Forgive her, if you can. And if not... guide her anyway.”

Behind his eyelids, he imagined Telaryn walking alone into snow-choked ruin, the past clawing its way through her ribs.

He stayed like that until the candle burned halfway down. Then he rose, left the chapel, and said nothing of it again.

---

C4.4S1 - Morning Drills

The frost hadn’t melted yet. It clung to the flagstones in jagged lace, whispering underfoot as Weylan moved. His breath came in shallow puffs, rising like ghosts around him as he thrust and turned, again and again, the old spear trembling slightly in his grip.

The weapon was too long for him. Too heavy near the haft. One of the loyalist veterans had given it to him after the flight from the capital—after Enric fell. It was splintered near the tip, bound with pitch cord, and the iron had lost its polish. But it had once belonged to a Talpian royal guard.

Now it was his.

Weylan gritted his teeth and repeated the form.

Step, twist, shoulder-check. Anchor the rear foot. Lunge. Recover. Again.

Each movement played out in the silence of dawn, the rhythm hollow but persistent. From above, on a frost-crusted balcony of the keep, a shadow stirred. He didn’t look up, but he knew it was her. The princess—no, the queen, now more soldier than sovereign. She never spoke during his drills. She only watched. And when he faltered, her silence pressed heavier than judgment.

The spear slipped. He growled, started again.

“Again,” came a voice from the colonnade—rough with age, not the queen’s.

It was Old Kerric, a broad-shouldered loyalist who had once fought in the skirmishes along the Danals River. He stepped forward now, wrapped in a patched cloak, one hand on a cane carved from elk bone.

“You’re leading with your shoulder,” Kerric said. “That’s not Enric’s form. You’ll lose your reach.”

Weylan blinked, then nodded mutely. He adjusted his stance.

Kerric stepped beside him, mimicking the motion. Slower. Measured. “Balance. Not muscle. That’s how they broke us. Precision, not fire.”

Weylan didn’t ask who they were. He already knew.

The Temerian Empire hadn’t crossed the Danals in a generation—border skirmishes, yes, but nothing like war. Until they did. In the space of three weeks, they burned through Talpian defenses like wind through wheat. Not with rage, but with cold, unrelenting brilliance. Logistics like clockwork. Roads cleared ahead of them. Supplies rerouted with perfect timing. Then came the siege—three days, and the city fell. No time for retreat. No chance for glory.

Enric had called it a great work of martial art. Weylan called it the end of the world.

Now he trained because it was all he had. He repeated the form. And again. This time, cleaner.

Kerric grunted approvingly. “Legacy is earned, boy. Not worn like a cloak. Don’t forget that.”

Weylan didn’t answer. But his hands were steady now. Snow began to fall again—light, almost kind.

Above, the princess turned and left the balcony.

---

C4.4S2 - Ghosts of the Journey

The shrine had no name, no altar—just a hollow between two frostbitten buildings, where the wind broke and the candles burned longer.

Weylan approached with the cautious reverence of someone stepping into sacred ground. The small charm in his hands—twine and feathers and a bead painted with his sister’s birth-mark—seemed too small to offer. But it was all he had.

He knelt, brushing snow from the stones to make a space among the offerings. A rusted ring. A child’s woolen doll. A single raven feather. All tokens of memory. All reminders that the living still remembered.

As his breath misted before him, his thoughts carried him back—to the road, the fire, and the man he had followed like a second shadow.

Weylen remembered… By the fire, the night after their escape...

The snow had melted from their boots, and the flames crackled low as Enric passed him a tin cup.

“You hold that like a man expecting poison,” Enric had grunted, smirking.

“It’s just strong,” Weylan had coughed.

“It’s weak,” the old captain had said. “You’ve just never had anything stronger than goat milk.”

Then he'd leaned back, armor creaking, the fire catching in the silver at his temples.

“You know what you are?” Enric had asked.

“A rabbit?” Weylan had said—only half-joking.

Enric chuckled, eyes closed. “You’re a seed. Buried in frost, thinking you’ll never grow. But wait until the thaw. You’ll crack the stone, boy.”

Weylen remembered… In the pass, storm rising…

Weylan had tripped, lungs searing, legs numb. Enric had doubled back, grabbed his arm, and hauled him upright like a sack of barley.

“If I have to drag your sorry ass through this pass,” he bellowed over the wind, “I’ll do it—but only because the princess likes you.”

“You think she likes me?” Weylan had shouted back, dizzy from cold.

“Don’t be stupid. She doesn’t. But she trusts you. And that’s rarer.”

Weylen remembered… On the city wall, just before the fall…

They’d stood in silence, looking east. The storm hadn’t broken yet, but the snow had begun to fall.

Enric had handed him a knife—not ceremonial, not noble, just sharp.

“You keep this,” he’d said. “Not for glory. For grit. Don’t let them make you less than what you are. And when the time comes—don’t wait for someone to say you’re ready.”

Weylan had nodded. He hadn’t known what to say.

Now, kneeling in the shrine’s hush, he spoke aloud: “I’m not ready. But I’ll try.”

There was no wind. No spirit’s breath. Only the sound of his own heartbeat, like footsteps in a hollow hall. He pressed the charm into the snow until it vanished beneath the white. Then he stood, drew in the cold like steel through the lungs, and turned toward the keep.

Tomorrow, he’d drill again. And he wouldn’t flinch.

---

C4.4S3 - A Quiet Talk

In the evening, the wind had quieted for once. Snow clung to the stones like breath held too long. Weylan sat on the narrow stairs of the old watchtower, elbows on his knees, staring at the plains beyond the wall. What little of the world wasn’t white had gone blue in the fading light.

He didn’t hear her at first.

“You’ll freeze sitting there.”

The Princess’ voice, quiet as falling ash, drew his gaze upward. She was leaning against the stone beside him, arms folded over a dark cloak, her hair still damp from melted snow. No crown. No armor. Just her—tired, upright, and staring at the horizon like it owed her answers.

“I’m warmer here than I was in the palace,” Weylan said, smiling faintly.

She didn’t return it. Just sat, a step above him, their shoulders close but not touching.

For a while, neither spoke. The silence wasn’t awkward. It had weight. Like stones placed with care.

“I think about what he’d say,” Weylan finally murmured.

“Enric?” she asked.

He nodded. “He always made it sound like things would hold. Like we’d make it. I know he didn’t believe it half the time. But hearing it… helped.”

The princess looked away. “He was a soldier. Hope is armor.”

A breath passed between them.

“Do you ever feel like we’ve already lost?” Weylan asked.

She didn’t flinch. “That’s how you know it’s real. But we carry what’s left. That’s what matters.”

He wanted to say more—to offer something, anything, that might lift the weight from her shoulders, if only for a moment. But the words never formed. Just a question that buzzed behind his ribs: Why do I care this much?

The princess reached into the folds of her cloak and pulled something out. A loop of old leather, knotted tightly around a flat piece of riverstone, worn smooth, etched with a faint sunburst. It caught the starlight just enough to glint like memory.

“Enric gave this to me,” she said. “He meant to pass it on. I think it’s yours now.”

Weylan blinked. “I… shouldn’t—”

“He would’ve wanted it. Said you had the fire.” She pressed it into his palm before he could argue.

The stone was warm. Not from heat—but from years. From hands. From the life it had known.

He curled his fingers around it, held it like a promise.

“Thank you,” he said, and meant it too much.

She gave a small nod, already turning to leave.

“Princess,” he said, and stood.

She paused in the stairwell’s shadow.

“I… I’ll be at the wall again in the morning.”

She didn’t answer. Just offered a glance—soft, unreadable—and disappeared into the tower above.

Weylan stood alone, clutching the pendant, heart thudding like it wanted to say something he wasn’t ready to understand.

---

C4.4S4 - Banner in the Wind

The horn shattered the morning stillness like a blade cleaving ice.

Weylan was already on the wall, hands raw from the cold, breath rising in slow plumes. The night had blanketed Winter’s Edge in silence and snow, but now it was lifting—carried away on the first winds of something heavier. Inevitable.

The cry passed from tower to tower: “Banners. Imperial. From the south.”

He didn't need to ask what color. He saw it already: a thread of red through the snowlight, crimson flaring in disciplined rhythm. The Third Legion was coming—not with thunder, but with precision. With certainty.

Weylan slipped off his glove and undid the knot at his waist. The banner he had carried since the shrine, since Enric’s fall, since the escape: woolen, weather-worn, patched with his own clumsy stitching. And still, the crest of Talpis rose upon it—a crown of black antlers on a field of grey and pale gold, defiant against the frost.

He climbed the last stairs to the watchtower peak, where the wind snapped hard enough to steal breath. His fingers bled from the cold, but he didn’t stop. He found the old signal notch in the stone, long unused, and rammed the haft into it until it stuck, grinding against the ice-slicked mortar.

The banner caught.

For a breathless moment, it sagged. Then the wind seized it, tore it wide.

Antlers spread like defiance, reaching skyward, silhouetted against the pale dawn.

Weylan stood beside it—not as a herald, not as a soldier, but as a vow given form. Below him, the city stirred: couriers running, horns relayed, old shields hauled from wall niches like ghosts of a forgotten war.

Still, he did not move.

He watched the blood-red tide cresting the horizon, and he planted his feet against the stone. Let them come.

Behind him, far below, the Princess stepped from the shadow of the inner wall. The wind tangled her hair and cloak around her, but her gaze was steady, lifted toward him. She said nothing.

And for a heartbeat, Weylan believed that this—the banner, the wall, the cold—might hold.

That legacy might be earned, not just buried.

He stood tall, alone, beneath the banner of the antlers. And the wind howled like the forest kings of old. Let the empire come. Let their banners blot out the sky.

---

C4.5S1 - Scouts Return

The gates of Winter’s Edge groaned open as the sky was just beginning to pale, the cold breath of morning spilling in with the riders.

Telaryn stood on the stone steps of the courtyard, arms folded against the wind. Snow cracked beneath bootsteps, and the old fortress stirred with nervous breath. Above, banners hung still as death. Below, the guards at the gate parted to admit three riders wrapped in salt-stiff cloaks and mountain frost.

Their horses stumbled in with heads low and steam rising from their flanks. One of the scouts—a wiry man with a notched cheek and broken fingers clumsily bound in cloth—swung down first. He didn’t kneel. He didn’t salute. He only looked up at her and spoke.

“They’re coming.”

The words hung longer than the wind.

Telaryn descended the steps. “How many?”

“Hard to say. Three banners, maybe more. Siege formations. Bannered companies. No foragers—we saw long supply trains moving behind. They’re not chasing.”

“They’re coming to take the city,” she finished for him.

He nodded. “Third Legion colors. We saw a detachment flying the mark of a high officer. Not the general himself—someone sent ahead.”

“Did they see you?”

“Maybe. We broke from the high ridge before they could loose arrows.”

Silence fell again. The horses stamped, restless. Somewhere above them, a bell began to toll—not alarm, but rhythm. It was how Winter’s Edge woke each day now.

But today, the tone felt thinner. Afraid.

Telaryn turned her gaze toward the peaks, where the sun would rise soon. Already, the eastern snowfields shimmered with pale reflection. Somewhere beyond those ridges, the Empire’s machines were winding their way up old roads, their iron pressing into soil that had not yet healed from the last conquest.

She didn’t speak again.

Not here. Not yet.

But as the wind rose, catching the edges of her cloak and stirring the frost around her boots, the guards who watched swore they saw something shift in her shadow—as if it leaned forward before she did.

---

C4.5S2 - Decision atop the Walls

The wind clawed across the high wall, dragging loose mortar and snowflakes over the battlements. From here, Telaryn could see the enemy's approach in full: three banners posted like blades against the earth, a disciplined column making its slow, patient descent into the foothills below.

No horns. No torches. Just the quiet dread of an empire at work.

Telaryn stood at the edge of the wall, her knuckles pale where they gripped the stone. Her armor bore the stain of old ash and newer blood. She hadn't bothered to clean it.

Behind her, boots scraped frost. Commander Vessan joined her, arms folded tight beneath her patched cloak, jaw set like flint.

"You see them," Telaryn said.

"I do."

“Three banners. Well-fed. Disciplined. They’ll be here in two days.”

“If the roads hold,” Vessan muttered. “Maybe less.”

Telaryn’s silence drew long.

At last, she said, “We won’t hold.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes. I do.”

Vessan turned sharply, facing her. “So you’ll run?”

Telaryn didn’t flinch. “I’ll seek something that can change the outcome.”

“Don’t wrap it in prophecy, girl,” Vessan snapped. “You flee now, you shatter what little spine these people have left.”

“I won’t flee,” Telaryn said. “I’ll return. With something more than firewood and courage.”

Vessan’s face creased—not in anger, but weariness. “You took an oath. Here. In this keep. You raised the banner again. Made them believe.”

“I made them hope,” Telaryn replied, eyes still on the horizon. “And I won’t let that hope die beneath stones and starving children. I can’t die here, Commander. Not yet.”

Vessan stepped beside her, both women looking down into the vale. Below, the outer walls had begun to stir—civilians gathering kindling, soldiers moving among barrels of brackish oil and salvaged weapons. A child wore a helm far too large for her head, trailing a wooden sword like a relic of play.

“They’ll see you leave,” Vessan said, quiet now.

“I’ll make sure they understand.”

“They won’t.”

“Then I’ll give them something else to hold onto.” Telaryn’s voice was steel now. “I’ll bring them a reason to survive the siege.”

Vessan closed her eyes for a long moment. Then: “You’ll be called a coward.”

“I’ve been called worse.”

“And if you fail?”

“Then I’ll fail trying to give them more than a grave to kneel beside.”

The silence between them thickened, stirred only by wind and the distant creak of banners far down the slope.

Vessan finally let out a breath, gravel and grief in it. “You’re breaking your oath.”

“I’m not breaking it,” Telaryn said. “I’m bending it to the shape of the storm.”

That earned a short, bitter laugh. “Spoken like royalty.”

Spoken like survival, Telaryn thought. But she said nothing.

Vessan stepped back, slow. “Then go. Take who you must. But don’t die in some cursed ruin thinking it’ll save us.”

“I won’t,” Telaryn said.

“And if you find that thing—whatever it is—don’t forget who you were before it.”

Telaryn looked at her for the first time, eyes sharp in the cold.

“I won’t forget you held the walls when no one else could.”

Vessan gave her a nod. Not warm. Not forgiving. But real.

Telaryn descended the stairs alone, her breath misting before her, each step echoing like a drumbeat.

She would not fall with Winter’s Edge.

She would return with fire in her hands.

---

C4.5S3 - Gathering the Loyals

---

C4.5S4 - The Chosen Few

They gathered in the courtyard before dawn, where frost turned stone to glass and breath to ghosts. The gates of Winter’s Edge stood closed behind them—iron gritted with rime, their hinges stiff from long disuse. Soon, they would creak open again, but not for armies. Only for four souls walking toward a forgotten legend.

Telaryn stood at the center, shoulders squared beneath her cloak, the battered cuirass still unpolished, still marked by ash. Around her: silence. And the three who had chosen to follow.

Halven arrived first. Hood drawn up against the wind, lantern in hand, scrolls tucked beneath one arm like a priest hiding sacred truths. His eyes met hers with quiet resolve.

“I can’t stop you,” he said. “So I’ll make sure you understand what you’re walking into. Even if it costs me.”

Telaryn nodded, her voice low. “I’ll need more than swords where we’re going.”

He gave a tired smile. “I was never good with swords.”

Alisha came next, hair tied back, face pale in the grey light. She carried no blade—only a healer’s satchel and the weight of unspoken things. She didn’t speak, not at first. Just stood beside Telaryn, close enough to touch, but didn’t.

Finally, she said, “You don’t have to protect me from what you’re becoming. I came to walk beside you. Not behind.”

Telaryn looked away before answering. “That may be harder than you think.”

“I know,” Alisha whispered.

Weylan arrived last, out of breath, the haft of his spear tapping the stone with every stride. His shoulders were broad for his youth, but his gaze was sharp now, honed since the riverside, since the first time blood froze on his hands.

“I made a promise,” he said simply. “To the captain. And to you, even if you never asked it of me.”

He wore Enric’s old pendant now—sunburst worn down to a smooth blur, its leather cord frayed but still strong. Around his waist, the antler badge of Talpis was freshly polished, though his boots were torn and his gloves fingerless.

Telaryn studied them—one by one. Scholar. Healer. Warrior-in-the-making.

Not an army. But hers.

Above them, the sky was pale with a coming sun. Behind them, the watchtower stood silent. Commander Vessan watched from the parapet, arms crossed, lips unspeaking. She gave no blessing. Only a nod.

The gates opened with a low, echoing groan.

Telaryn turned toward the peaks, the frost-blind heights where old truths slept.

She didn’t look back.

The townspeople would remember that—how she walked into the mountains, not as a queen, not as a girl, but as something between.

A promise. Or a warning. And the snow swallowed their footprints before the sun could rise.

---

Interlude - The Cold Trail

The wind scraped across the outpost ridge like a whetstone on steel, its scream thin and high. Marcas stood wrapped in his cloak of slate-gray wool, the Imperial clasp at his throat catching stray flecks of frost. Below, the city of Winter’s Edge hunched against the mountains like a beast awaiting slaughter—its walls patched, its banners threadbare.

He watched the small group wind their way up the pass. Four figures, bundled in black and brown, leaving through the southern gate with neither ceremony nor escort. No horses. No carts. Just resolve.

“Another refugee sortie?” one of the officers muttered beside him.

Marcas shook his head.

“No. They carry themselves differently.”

He adjusted the lens of his field-glass, training it on the smallest of the four. A boy, by the gait. Then a woman with a medic’s satchel. A scholar with a scroll-case strapped to his back. And the one who walked at their front—the one with a cloak unpinned but held in place by will alone.

Even at this distance, the way she moved arrested the eye.

“She’s the princess,” he said aloud, mostly to himself.

The officer beside him frowned. “But why leave the city now? They’ll find no sanctuary in those mountains. No settlements. No loyalist fort. Nothing but ice and bone.”

Marcas said nothing.

Because it didn’t make sense. Not by military logic, nor survival instinct. Winter’s Edge could hold—if only for a few days. It wasn’t wise to abandon it, not unless the city had already outlived its purpose. Or unless—

“Unless she’s not running,” he murmured.

From behind him, a figure approached without sound—Verrin, the Magister-Legate, clad in the austere grey robes of the Third Legion’s esoteric order. His face was pale, his eyes steady and unreadable.

“You feel it too,” Verrin said softly.

Marcas didn’t answer at once. His gaze lingered on the trail vanishing into the Mourning Peaks.

“She’s after something,” he finally said. “Not fleeing. Hunting.”

Verrin inclined his head. “Then the question becomes: what in those mountains could be worth a kingdom?”

Marcas turned.

“Ready a detachment,” he said. “Five riders. No more. Discreet. I want them close, but unseen.”

“A hunch?”

“A warning,” Marcas replied. “Like frost forming on dry stone. You can’t see the water—but it’s always been there.”

The blood sorcerer tilted his head slightly.

“You suspect sorcery?”

Marcas frowned. “I suspect purpose. And that… frightens me more.”

They stood in silence as the wind moaned across the pass. Far below, the last of the four vanished over the ridgeline.

---

C5S1 - The Veyari

Snow had swallowed the world.

Each step was a reckoning—the crunch of ice underfoot, the sting of wind against raw skin. The trail behind them was shallow, ragged, and already vanishing. A storm had passed through the night before, masking their tracks from the scouts below, but the cold it left behind bit deeper than any blade.

Telaryn moved ahead of the others now, her eyes fixed on the pale blue gleam of the morning sky between jagged ridgelines. Her cloak, torn at the hem, snapped behind her like a dying banner. The wind whistled through the broken pines, howling like a voice almost remembered. She did not speak. She could not spare the breath.

Behind her, the party pressed forward—Halven with his quiet strength and tired eyes; Alisha, cloaked and watchful; Weylan, still too young for the weight on his shoulders. There were others, too, loyalists who had survived Winter’s Edge but not unchanged. The mountains stole warmth and gave no mercy.

Far below, in the pine-shadowed valleys, the Temerian scouts would still be searching. Marcas would not give up the chase—not after what he had seen. Not after the way she had left the city.

At a narrow bend in the path, Telaryn paused. A natural overlook opened beyond a splintered granite shelf, offering a sweeping view of the land they had fled.

From here, she could almost see the smoke still rising from Winter’s Edge—thin, ashen threads twisting into the morning. Not yet taken. But soon.

She breathed in, letting the thin air burn in her lungs. The peaks ahead loomed higher still, cruel and cold and without pity. Somewhere among them, if Halven’s map and the whispers of fireless flame were right, the path to the Keep of Ash waited.

Alisha stepped beside her, her voice low, hoarse from the cold.
“They’ll follow us until we vanish, or die.”

Telaryn nodded. “Then we vanish.”

Her hand dropped to her hip—not to the sword she carried, still dulled and notched, but to the pouch that held the old map fragment. It was warm to the touch, as if something within it knew they were drawing closer.

From behind, a voice called—Weylan’s, breathless. “Something ahead!”

Telaryn turned. Across the next rise, the snow shifted strangely. A stone marker jutted from the frost, its surface carved with sigils half-buried by time. Not Talpian. Not even High Tul. Older.

The mountain was watching.

As the party regathers around the marker and the wind begins to pick up again, Telaryn leads them off the visible path. Toward what? She doesn’t say. But her grip tightens on the map. And the mountains begin to whisper.

The peaks narrowed into a gorge, jagged stone pressing in like teeth. Snow fell in fine needles, hissing where it touched the few living pines that clung to the ledges above. The wind here no longer howled—it breathed, low and slow and watchful, like something too old for hunger but still unwilling to forget.

Telaryn trudged forward, half-guided by instinct, half by memory not her own. The map Halven had unearthed led only to a carved symbol etched in stone, barely visible through frost: a spiral wound with thorns. She had seen it once before—on the faded mural beneath the palace. A remnant of the Nameless Queen.

Beyond the crest of the ridge, the snow thinned. What lay ahead was no village in any living memory, yet it bore the bones of one. Low walls rose from beneath drifts, warped with time and ice. Stone arches ringed a hollow plaza where a shrine sat collapsed, the statue at its heart broken at the waist. The head was gone. Moss clung to the shattered feet like prayer.

Smoke twisted faintly from a few half-dug hearths. Eyes glittered in the dark beneath overhangs and caves—silent figures wrapped in slate-gray furs, faces marked by years and soot. Not savages. Not Talpians. Not quite strangers.

Weylan stepped protectively beside Telaryn, hand on the hilt of his worn blade. Alisha slowed her pace, fingers brushing the base of her throat.

Then they emerged—dozens of them. The Veyari.

They wore bone trinkets and cloaks stitched with ancient glyphs. Their hair was braided with ash and cord. None spoke. Some fell to one knee—not reverent, but wary. Others spat in the snow.

An old woman with eyes like granite stepped forward. Her face bore no paint, no jewelry—only creased skin like folded parchment. She did not bow. She looked Telaryn over as one might study a knife left in the open. Beautiful. Dangerous. Better left untouched.

“You wear her face,” the woman said.

Telaryn said nothing.

Another voice rose from the shrine ruins—a man’s, low and echoing. Stones beneath their feet seemed to groan in answer.

“Then let the mountain speak.”

From the shadow of the broken altar, he emerged. Tuaru, the Mountainbinder. His skin was ochre-stained, his beard laced with rings of blackened iron, his arms bare despite the cold—tattooed with fault-lines and spirals. A staff of petrified root and basalt tapped once on the frozen ground.

“If your blood is hers,” he said, “the mountain will know.”

He turned toward the shrine and raised his staff. The wind stopped. Silence rippled outward like a drumbeat swallowed by stone.

“You will take the trial,” Tuaru said. “Or you will turn back and die.”

---

C5S2 - The Blood and the Stone

A murmur passed among the Veyari. Some bowed their heads. Others turned away. The trial was not yet begun, but the tension shifted—like air before a storm. Telaryn’s presence alone had unsettled something. Their silence was not absence—it was weight.

Tuaru raised his staff, carved with lines that shimmered faintly where the light caught them. “If you are what you claim, let the mountain bear witness,” he said.

The shrine had no roof—only a ring of standing stones, half-buried in frost. The broken altar at its center was more root than masonry, as if grown from the mountain’s marrow itself. Cracks spidered across its surface, filled with frozen moss and ancient soot. At its heart was a shallow basin, blackened by centuries of offerings.

Tuaru stood beside it, immobile as the stone. “Blood remembers,” he said. “Yours must speak.”

Telaryn stepped forward, every eye upon her—Veyari and companion alike. She heard no wind. No voice. Only the soft crunch of snow beneath her boots and the ache in her ribs from the long flight.

She unstrapped her glove and drew her belt knife. The blade shook—not from fear, but from something stranger: a weight in her veins, a pulse of anticipation. It felt like the air was holding its breath.

Alisha shifted behind her but said nothing.

Without ceremony, Telaryn dragged the edge of the blade across her palm. The pain was sharp and clean. Blood welled up, dark red in the twilight, steaming faintly in the cold.

She held her hand over the altar and let it drip into the basin.

One drop. Then another.

The third sizzled as it struck stone.

A low hum began—not loud, but deep, like a groan from beneath the world. The cracked altar flickered with dull light—not flame, not sorcery. A memory, waking slowly in rock and ash. In the dimming haze, the grooves around the basin filled with a dull amber glow, tracing a spiral—like the mural beneath the palace. Like the seal she saw in the dreams.

A gasp rose from one of the elders. Tuaru did not move. His voice was low:

“It is not fire,” he said. “But it remembers.”

The humming ceased. The glow faded. The altar darkened again, but the warmth lingered a heartbeat longer.

Telaryn’s blood still dripped into the cracks. But now the stone no longer drank it—it repelled it. As if satisfied.

She staggered back. Alisha caught her by the shoulders and held her steady.

Tuaru stepped forward and touched the rim of the basin. “You carry more than bone,” he said, eyes unreadable. “The mountain has not forgotten your kind. That is both curse and crown.”

---

C5S3 - What stirs below

Alisha kept her hand on Telaryn’s back as they stepped away from the altar. The faint light had gone, but the sense of watching had not. Something had shifted—nothing visible, no tremor of the earth, yet the village felt deeper, as though layers long buried had creaked open behind the world.

Tuaru motioned them to leave the shrine. He said nothing more.

Outside, night was folding itself over the peaks. The fire in the central square sputtered, casting long shadows. The Veyari gathered around it, some murmuring old verses, others simply staring at Telaryn with a mixture of wonder and dread.

Alisha stood at the edge of the firelight, her arms crossed against the cold that hadn’t lifted since the trial. But it wasn’t the mountain wind that chilled her.

Something had shifted in Telaryn’s expression—more composed, more distant. As if her blood had fed something that now looked back through her eyes.

Alisha’s breath fogged in front of her lips, too shallow.

“She’s changing,” she whispered. No one heard. Or perhaps they did, but chose silence.

In the dark corners of the shrine-village, wind moved without breeze. Small stones rattled along the slope. In the sky, the moon thinned behind clouds—but the stars above the mountain ridge shimmered in ways she’d never seen.

When Alisha turned back toward the shrine, she saw it:

A figure—no, a smudge of shape—watching from within the stone ring. There was no face. No movement. But it was there.

Her heart stumbled in her chest.

She blinked—and it was gone. But the sense of its presence lingered like breath on the back of her neck.

Then the voice of one of the elders cut the quiet: “The blade does not sleep. It only waits for a hand.”

Alisha’s gaze shifted back to Telaryn, who now stood alone, silhouetted by the fire. She looked taller in that moment. Or heavier. As if the shadows had finally found a spine to wear.

And for the first time, Alisha was not afraid for Telaryn.
She was afraid of her.

---

C6S1 - Erased Histories

The hearthfire crackled in the Veyari lodge, throwing long, flickering shadows across the soot-stained walls. Telaryn sat with her back to the stone, her fingers wrapped around a clay cup gone cold. The warmth of the flames didn’t reach her bones. It hadn’t in days.

Around her, the Veyari spoke in low, deliberate tones, passing bowls, sharpening knives, murmuring prayers. They were people carved from the mountains, their voices slow and rooted like stone. But their stories—those moved like wind.

One of the elders, face creased like bark, leaned in and spoke to her.

"They never said your name," she said. "But your blood walks with hers. The woman who ruled before there were kings."

Telaryn met her eyes. "I was taught there was no one before the kings."

That drew some bitter laughter from the circle. Another voice, a young warrior named Eris, added, "Then your kings lie better than ours ever did."

She remembered the red-gold genealogy scroll in the Talpian library, the way her tutor had skipped a generation without explanation. A name lost. A sigil scratched away in ink and denial. A crown of ash. A blade with no flame.

"She was called many things," said a spirit-priest draped in frost-dyed robes. "But her true name was burned when the pact was made. We only remember her by what she carried."

Telaryn looked up. "Ashmire."

That name rippled through the circle like cold water spilled on stone. A few muttered warding phrases under their breath. The oldest among them simply stared at the fire.

"It was not a sword," said the priest. "It was a hunger made metal. A debt shaped into steel. It did not kill. It consumed."

Another added, "But it brought peace, once. The mountain clans followed it before they followed flags. It held the terrors at bay when the gods fell."

Telaryn’s fingers drifted to the scar in her palm. It tingled faintly. The fire hissed. Outside, wind moaned through cracked beams, and in it, she thought she heard voices. Not words, just syllables too old for language. The bones of names.

"I need to find it," she said.

The circle fell silent.

One of the elders leaned forward. "You will not return the same, flame-born. That blade never sleeps."

Telaryn did not answer. She stared into the flame, but saw only snow, and shadow, and a crown wreathed in silence.

---

C6S2 - The Last to Remember

The fire had burned low by the time the stories turned darker, as if even the flame grew wary of what would be said.

A second clay pot of bitterleaf stew passed hand to hand, mostly untouched. The smoke from the fire curled lazily toward the rafters, carrying with it the scent of old wood, herbs, and something colder—like earth turned from an ancient grave.

Grandmother, an elder Eris had only called by title, sat hunched at the edge of the hearth. Her eyes were pale and near-colorless, like old ice, her skin a map of years folded into thin creases. When she finally spoke, the words came as though drawn from stone.

“She came with stars in her eyes,” Grandmother murmured, “and ash in her mouth. The queen who bore no name—only a shadow where her legacy should be.”

A hush settled over the lodge. Even the children at the far end, half-asleep under bearskin wraps, stirred at the sound of it.

Across from her sat Tuaru, the mountainbinder. He had the look of stone given motion—his broad face weathered, jaw marked with spiraling ochre tattoos. His eyes were black as obsidian, reflecting the fire but not yielding to it. He wore no armor, only a heavy cloak of layered wool and a belt hung with ritual tools—geomantic chisels, stone hammers, and braided cords of iron and bone. When he spoke, his voice sounded like gravel shifting beneath water.

“She ruled not with temples or gold,” he said, “but with the blade that drank the fire from men’s hearts. Ashmire—the sword of silence and storm. Not made, but awakened. Drawn from the deep places after the Shattering, when stone still remembered the sky.”

Telaryn sat quietly, the words threading through her like distant thunder. Names and fragments. None of them full truths. But the cadence of them struck some chord deeper than sense.

“It was no fortress,” said Eris, seated cross-legged near the younger warriors. Her hair was plaited in long cords wrapped in copper and bone charms, and her shoulder bore a scar shaped like a broken spiral—the Veyari mark for returned. Her voice was low, almost gruff, and her eyes flicked often toward Telaryn, measuring her, weighing the space between myth and flesh.

“The Keep was a tomb before it held her,” she said.

“The pact was sealed with her own blood,” Tuaru added. “And broken by her kin.”

The flames flared faintly blue. A murmur of charms passed between a few of the Veyari, breathy invocations lost to time.

“She was betrayed,” Grandmother rasped, “slain not by her enemies, but by those who feared the blade would never stop drinking.”

“Her generals buried her with it,” Tuaru continued. “Sealed the Keep in rites older than kings. Then they fled. Down into the valleys. They built cities. Raised lines of rule.”

A silence followed, not empty, but thick with unspoken blame.

“But we,” Eris said, voice sharpening, “we stayed.”

Near the doorway stood Sari, silent until now. A younger woman, barely older than Telaryn herself, Sari carried the quiet intensity of a brewing storm. Her hair was loose, wind-tangled, eyes a pale silver-gray—cloudlight trapped in flesh. She wore leathers lined with frostfur and small bone tokens knotted at her wrists. At her back, a staff of white ash bound with metal bands pulsed faintly with stored air, and her breath sometimes came visible even in the warmth of the lodge. They said she was a storm-caller, born in the teeth of a blizzard. Her gaze never left the fire, as if seeing things beyond the dancing light.

Only the wind outside dared speak after that, brushing the doorframe with a sound like breath caught in grief.

Tuaru’s eyes returned to Telaryn. “If your blood is hers,” he said, “you are not heir to a crown. You are heir to a promise. The blade will remember what the kings forgot.”

Telaryn did not reply. Not then. She stared into the fire as if it were a mirror, and for the first time, it did not warm her at all.

---

C6S3 - The Fregment's Path

The silence stretched long after Tuaru’s pronouncement, until even the fire crackled more gently, as if wary of echoing too loudly. Then Eris rose from her place, brushing ash from her hands.

“We kept more than stories,” she said.

She crossed to the rear of the lodge, past weather-beaten talismans and bundles of dried roots hung from the rafters. From behind a woven mat of black goat hair, she drew forth a satchel of treated hide—worn, almost brittle with age.

Eris placed it on the hearthstones between them and knelt. With slow, reverent fingers, she unwrapped the contents: layers of old cloth, each bearing the scent of preserved mountain sage and time. Inside lay a shard of slate, perhaps the size of Telaryn’s palm, its edges worn by handling. One side was smooth but carved—etched in sharp lines that shimmered faintly in the firelight.

Tuaru leaned forward. “Pre-Shattering sigils. Not temple work. Clan-marks. Blood-bound and mountain-bound both.”

And beneath those, curling around the edge like vines creeping over ruin, were letters in the angular script of the Veyari—part mnemonic code, part incantation.

Sari stepped closer, breath fogging faintly in the fire’s glow. “It speaks of a path hidden by weight and waiting. A place not sealed, but dreaming. The Keep lies buried beneath what the stone has forgotten.”

Halven leaned in, gaze narrowing. “This is a map fragment,” he murmured, wonder dawning. “That curve… that marking… it matches the old clan charts from the deep northern passes.”

Eris nodded. “There were once four fragments. Only one remains. The rest were lost when the world break apart. We have passed this one down through thirteen generations.”

Telaryn reached out, her fingertips grazing the cold stone. It throbbed faintly beneath her touch—not with heat, but memory. As if it recognized something in her blood.

Sari’s voice was nearly a whisper. “She’s calling again. The mountain feels it.”

Tuaru gave a low grunt, neither agreement nor protest. “The Keep of Ash lies beyond the veil of living memory. But this—this points the way. Through ruin. Through frost. Through the bones of the world.”

Telaryn looked to him. “You’ll guide us?”

“No,” Tuaru said. “But I will send those who can. Blood demands it.”

Eris met her eyes without hesitation.

Sari nodded once, lips tight, fingers curling around the haft of her staff.

The fire flared as if exhaling.

From the shadows, Grandmother's voice rose again—soft, cracked, but unshaken.

“If you wake her legacy,” she said, “you must learn to carry her curse.”

Telaryn said nothing. She only held the fragment tighter, and in the firelight, her shadow flickered long across the stone.

---

C6S4 - Embers and Distance

The fire had burned low. Only embers now—soft red hearts pulsing beneath a crust of blackened ash. Most of the Veyari had withdrawn to their shelters, leaving the hearth and its circle to quiet memory. Snow murmured lightly on the rooftops, the sound like the breathing of the mountain itself.

Ryn remained seated near the fire, the stone fragment resting across her knees. She hadn’t moved in some time.

Alisha watched her from a little distance—half-shadowed, hands wrapped around a clay cup of something warm and herbal. Her eyes never strayed far. She’d learned to read the space around Ryn, the tension in her jaw, the way silence hung off her shoulders like a too-heavy cloak.

Eris and Sari had gone to prepare for the morning’s departure. Halven was inside, perhaps scribbling his feverish notes on clan signs and half-remembered maps. Only the two of them remained in the dying firelight.

Alisha hesitated, then crossed to her. Sat down beside her—close enough to share warmth, but not enough to presume.

“She was real,” Alisha said softly. “The queen. The sword. All of it.”

Ryn didn’t answer at first. Her eyes were still fixed on the stone fragment.

“I was raised to believe in symbols,” she said eventually. “But not truths. Not… blood that remembers.”

Alisha’s voice dipped. “I stayed for you. Back in the palace.”

That made Ryn glance sideways, a flicker of surprise in her gaze.

“I told myself it was duty,” Alisha continued. “Loyalty to the line, to the throne. But that’s not what held me back. It was you. Not the crown. Not the cause. Just you.”

Silence again. Not awkward—aching.

Ryn looked back to the fire. Her voice, when it came, was low. “You shouldn’t have.”

Alisha smiled sadly. “I know.”

She reached out, fingers brushing Ryn’s hand. Ryn didn’t pull away. For a moment, they sat like that—hands joined over ancient stone, surrounded by a world that had long stopped caring for softness.

Then Ryn spoke. “I don’t know what I’ll become.”

“I’m not asking for promises,” Alisha said. “Just… don’t forget who you were. Even if the sword remembers something else.”

A gust of wind swept across the shrine. The last embers hissed faintly.

Alisha leaned in, gently rested her forehead to Ryn’s temple. No kiss. Just presence. Just warmth.

And Ryn, for a heartbeat, leaned back.

Then it passed.

She rose, taking the fragment with her, and stepped into the night.

Alisha watched her go, alone with the fire's dying glow.

And to the ash that still lingered in the air, she whispered:

“I’d follow you even if I had to be the last to remember your name.”

---

C6S4 - Whispers in the nIght

That night, after the stories faded and the last embers of the fire collapsed into quiet ash, the wind shifted.

Alisha could not sleep.

She lay beside the others in the shrinehall, wrapped in furs that smelled of old cedar and waxed hide, the ceiling above marked with soot from generations of sacred smoke. Outside, the snow murmured against stone, soft and unceasing.

But it wasn’t the cold that held her awake. It was the voices.

They began low, threading through the cracks in the wood and between the heavy stones—like sighs passed from one century to another. She thought, at first, it was the breath of the sleeping. But the tone was wrong. Too rhythmic. Too purposeful.

She rose quietly, stepping into her boots, and pushed open the door just enough to slip into the snow-washed courtyard.

The Veyari village slept beneath the stars—slumped roofs and half-buried paths, all cast in silver by the moon. Smoke from sacred chimneys curled like thin braids. Yet the air trembled, as if expecting something.

And the wind spoke.

Not in a tongue she knew, but in the weight of words left unsaid. In syllables that itched at the corners of memory. Sharp consonants. Fluid vowels. A regal cadence, distant and solemn. The Queen’s tongue, though no one named her.

Alisha turned toward the shrine and saw the outline of something—no, someone—standing in the treeline. A woman-shaped absence in the snow, robed in veils that moved with no breeze. Her crown seemed made of shadow and frost and antlers. Her face, hidden, yet watched.

Alisha’s breath caught.

She didn’t step forward. Didn’t run. Only listened.

The words passed through her, not into her. Not meant for mortals, but remembered all the same.

She whispered into the cold: “Is it you?”

The wind changed. The figure was gone.

Only the night remained, and the hush of those still sleeping within. But when Alisha stepped back into the shrine, she looked once toward Ryn—still curled by the hearth, brow furrowed in sleep.

She lay back down, but did not close her eyes. The Queen was not finished speaking.

---

C6S5 - The Leaving

By morning, the snow had softened into a light dusting—a brittle crust over the old drifts. The shrine village of the Veyari stirred slowly, as if reluctant to wake from the long memory of the night. Smoke rose in thin lines from stone vents, curling skyward like spirit-threads.

The fire pit had been cleared, the ashes gathered and scattered according to the rites. No one spoke of the stories that had been told, but they hung in the air still—half-remembered verses and flickers of awe pressed between silence and snow.

Telaryn stood near the cracked altar-stone, her hand freshly wrapped in cloth. The fragment of etched stone—sigils faded and flaking—was tucked into her satchel. She wore her traveling cloak again, shoulders squared. Changed, somehow, though she hadn’t said so.

Tuaru emerged last from the shrinehouse, leaning on a staff of bone-pale rootwood. His eyes were rimmed with shadows, and his breath misted in slow, even strands.

“I dreamed,” he said without greeting, voice quieter than frost. “The deep roots shifted. The mountain murmured your name—not in speech, but in pressure. Something old is waking.”

Telaryn turned to him. “You’re coming.”

He nodded once. “I am the last of the binders here. But I was not meant to die among stones that have already spoken. The spirits of the bedrock move now. And I must walk where they point.”

She didn’t thank him. She only placed a hand over his and said, “Then let’s go.”

From the other side of the courtyard, Eris joined them. She wore a short-hafted spear on her back, its head chipped but sharpened again, and thin bands of red clay painted across her cheeks. She looked barely older than Weylan—yet her gaze was older than the peaks.

Sari followed next, taller than both, with storm-gray eyes and a carved talisman hanging from her neck. She nodded to Alisha with a quiet grace and passed her a waterskin made of woven hide and stonecap leather. “For the heights,” she said. “Wind cuts deeper up there.”

Weylan arrived already ready, jaw tight and eyes hollow from too many sleepless nights. He wore the battered armor he had carried from Winter’s Edge, the antler crest on his shoulder repainted but still smeared from the storm. His hand never left the hilt of his borrowed blade.

He didn’t speak. He just took his place at Telaryn’s side, where he had always meant to be.

Halven came last, bundled in layered robes and clutching his ever-growing pouch of notes. He looked exhausted. Determined.

The rest of the Veyari watched from doorways and thresholds, silent and unmoving. A few of the elders had set small stone markers in a line along the exit path—offerings for safe passage. A warning, perhaps, or a prayer.

Tuaru placed a hand on Telaryn’s shoulder.

“You walk toward the Keep of Ash,” he said. “Whatever waits in its shadow remembers you. You must decide whether you will remember it.”

Telaryn looked back at the shrine village—at the lives half-buried in stone, the legacy that had survived not through kings, but through silence, through survival.

She said only, “I will not forget.”

And then they left.

Seven figures moved through the frostbitten woods—princess, steward, lover, storm-caller, mountain warrior, mountainbinder, and last guard—toward a place lost even to legend.

---

C7S1 - Transition

The wind had stilled, but the silence it left behind was heavier. Their boots breaking fresh crust over older snow and the distant clatter of antlers hung to ward ill fortune. In the trees, the frost clung to every bough like memory. Every breath smoked white.

The peaks opened ahead, no longer distant silhouettes, but rising teeth of the world—ice-slick ridges, broken spines, and trails carved by wind and old bones. The path narrowed. The air thinned. Their pace slowed to a crawl beneath the rising burden of hunger, cold, and dread.

Behind them, no horns sounded. No drums. No riders visible through the curtain of weather.

But the feeling of being hunted settled deeper with each step.

Halven walked quieter now, bent slightly. Sari scanned the ridgelines between squalls. Weylan spoke only when asked. Even Eris, ever watchful, seemed less like a girl with a spear and more like something older—drawn forward by instinct and lineage.

Only Telaryn moved with fire beneath her skin. She said little, but her gaze did not waver from the heights. Something waited there. A calling. A cost.

The Mourning Peaks lived up to their name. They swallowed the sound of footsteps and chewed the sky into shreds. The cold became a second skin.

It was in that white hush that the first scout returned—face pale, lips blue, breath shallow.

They weren’t alone.

---

C7S2 - Movement Reported

Eris returned before dusk, breath misting in sharp bursts, her braid half-frozen and cheeks raw from wind. She moved like a shadow slipping between snow-laden boulders, silent until she stood before Telaryn.

“They’re coming,” she said, voice low, urgent. “From the valley below. At least five—maybe more. Moving fast, on foot.”

Telaryn’s expression darkened. She turned toward the narrow ridge path they'd begun ascending. Sari and Halven drifted closer; Weylan stood at a distance, watching with a hand on his spear.

“Who are they?” Telaryn asked.

“Strangers,” Eris said. “Armor not of the mountains. Their cloaks were dyed deep—red, I think. Mismatched plates, but disciplined movement. Not clansfolk. And… something wrong with the air around them. Like the wind didn’t want to touch them.”

Tuaru stirred beside a gnarled pine root, his hand tightening on his staff. “The spirits recoil from those men,” he murmured. “There is blood on their breath.”

Halven looked sharply toward Telaryn. “The Empire.”

Telaryn nodded once. “Scouts. Or worse.”

“They’ll reach the lower slopes by morning,” Eris added. “And if they’re tracking us by scent or sorcery, snow won’t slow them.”

For a moment, the party stood in tense silence. Snow flurried around them in fine crystal threads, the air thin and brittle as cracked bone.

“Then we climb,” Telaryn said.

“To where?” Sari asked quietly. “The higher routes are deadfall and scree. No paths. Not for many winters.”

“Then we find a way,” Telaryn said. Her voice didn’t rise—but something in it steadied them.

Tuaru closed his eyes, and the wooden fetishes on his staff rattled softly. “There are ways not carved by hands. If the stone permits, I will shape them.”

A wind gusted over the ridge, sudden and sharp. The trees creaked in protest.

“We don’t have long,” said Eris. “Whatever they are, they’re not climbing blind.”

Telaryn looked toward the peaks. Already, twilight bled into violet shadows along the spines of the mountains. Far below, darkness pooled like a rising tide.

“Then we climb until the mountain says no.”

With that, she turned and began up the pass, boot crunching ice, cloak snapping in the wind.

The others followed—princess, scribe, storm-caller, mountainbinder, warrior, and boy-soldier—ascending into unknown white.

Behind them, the Mourning Peaks whispered.

And below, the shadows kept coming.

---

C7S3 - Trap above the cloudline

The wind was rising again, whistling thin and high across the ridgelines like a bone flute. Snow hissed underfoot, powder giving way to crusted plates of ice. Each step forward was a negotiation with the mountain—and the mountain had no mercy left to give.

Sari moved at the head of the line, a blur of motion and instinct. Her cloak was streaked with frost, the talismans at her throat whispering in the wind. Where the others stumbled, she moved like a creature born to cold and altitude. Her eyes scanned every drift, every contour of the slope. She murmured to the wind as if to a sibling, listening with her skin as much as her senses.

Behind her, the rest of the group struggled: Eris leaning into the slope, Weylan huffing through chapped lips, Halven muttering oaths as he fumbled with his footing. Telaryn stayed silent, watching Sari more closely with every step.

The trail narrowed. A ledge slanted across a hollow where snow had banked high against the rock, unstable and laced with fracture lines. Sari raised a hand, halting them.

“This is wrong,” she said softly. Her voice didn’t carry—it slid into the wind and dissolved.

“What is it?” Eris asked, lowering into a crouch beside her.

Sari didn’t answer at first. She knelt and placed both palms to the snow. The air shifted—tightened. Telaryn felt the hair on her arms lift.

“The spirits are tense here,” Sari whispered. “The slope is ready. We’re walking on a breath held too long.”

Telaryn stepped closer. “Can we cross?”

“Maybe. But that’s not what we should do.” Sari stood, brushing snow from her hands. Her eyes had taken on the hollow gleam of second-sight. “If we break it the right way, the mountain will bury the path behind us. It will cost us time. But we’ll vanish.”

Halven frowned. “And if we misstep?”

Sari tilted her head toward him. “Then the mountain swallows us too.”

The snow groaned—distant, shifting deep beneath. A warning.

“We try,” said Telaryn. “Set the path. Choose the edge. You lead.”

They moved with painstaking care, following Sari’s whispered directions. Each placement of boot or hand was measured. Weylan slipped once, sending a shower of powder down the slope—he caught himself on Eris’s arm. Everyone froze.

But the slope held.

They finished laying the unstable trail along the edge of the corniced drift, the channel primed. With enough force, the mountainside would fall.

Sari turned once more to Telaryn.

“I can stir the wind,” she said. “Enough to wake the ice. But not here. Not now.”

Telaryn nodded. “Then we draw them in. And you break it when they’re close.”

Sari looked back over the path they'd laid, the glint of rising snow behind them already catching her eye. “The spirits will take their price.”

She did not say from whom.

---

C7S4 - Avalanche Rite

The enemy crested the slope like a breaking wave—disciplined, silent, deadly. Their breath steamed in the cold, swords drawn, boots crunching against the brittle crust. Among them moved a figure clad in black-stained leathers, a crimson sash around his waist, face bare and pale as snow. His eyes were wrong—deep wells with no color, reflecting none of the wind-swirled white around him.

No one spoke.

Then a shriek—metal through the air.

A javelin struck stone just above Weylan’s shoulder, knocking flakes loose. He flinched, blood trailing from a shallow slice across his cheek.

“Positions!” Telaryn shouted, voice hoarse in the cold.

Eris darted to cover, spear at the ready. Halven knelt atop a ledge, bow notched and shaking. Sari stood apart, hands lifted, eyes closed. Her talismans spun wildly in the rising gale as she chanted—wind-words strung like offerings.

“I call you,” she hissed. “Old winds, snow-bound fathers—answer!”

The wind gusted. The spirits stirred—and turned away.

Her breath caught. “They want a price,” she whispered. “A vow fulfilled.”

Another scream. The first attackers reached them.

Steel clanged as Telaryn met the rush head-on, parrying and driving her sword through a shoulder. Weylan lunged, blocked a blade, slipped, and rolled back behind Eris, who fought like a feral shadow.

Halven loosed an arrow. It struck—but did not drop the man. Another enemy closed in on Alisha—she slashed wildly, slicing a cheek. The man reeled, but pressed closer.

And still the storm spirits would not answer.

The blood-sashed officer strode forward, untouched. A soldier beside him stumbled, wounded—and the officer reached out, hand splayed.

The man's body spasmed. Blood burst from his mouth, freezing midair. His limbs snapped stiff. His life ripped free like steam from a kettle and flowed—red and luminous—into the sorcerer’s waiting hand.

A shimmering veil formed around him—like glass veined with pulse-light. Shielded. Empowered.

“Spirits,” Sari whispered in despair. “They’re... devoured.”

Then the mountain shuddered.

Tuaru stepped from behind the stone.

His cloak flared like torn bark in a storm. The markings carved across his bare chest glowed a deep, volcanic red. His eyes were wide—not in fear, but in surrender.

His skin cracked along his arms, glowing from within like molten rock. Veins pulsed with magma-light. The cords of his throat were drawn taut as he dropped to one knee, his staff of rootwood cracking in half from the heat he now bore.

He spoke in the deep-tongue. His voice came not from his mouth alone, but from the fissures in his body, from the snow beneath him, from the marrow of the mountain.

“Let the rock remember us,” he said. “Let the peaks bear witness.”

Sari screamed. “Tuaru, no!”

He turned to her with a smile like sunrise across a frozen lake.

“This is the oath we were born into, daughter of wind. The line of the Queen must rise again.”

Then he drove his burning hand into the snow and screamed one word—not in Tul, nor Veyari—but in the tongue of the stone.

The world cracked.

From above came the grinding roar of gods waking.

The cliff split. Snow fractured. The high shelf collapsed.

An avalanche tore down with furious momentum—snow, ice, stone, roots, trees, bone. It devoured everything in its path.

The officer turned to flee. He stretched his hands to another soldier—and the man shrieked, blood pouring upward in a twisted sacrifice. The crimson shield flared—

And shattered.

He vanished in the fall.

Tuaru’s body collapsed where he knelt, now nothing more than a scorched shape in the snow—charred black, cracked and steaming, veins glowing faintly before they, too, dimmed.

His last breath lingered as a whisper in the wind.

“Let her find the flame.”

The world settled into silence, vast and terrible.

Where once a trail clung to the mountain’s edge, there was now only ruin—mangled stone, ice-crushed pines, a gash torn clean down the slope. Snow still drifted in the air like ashes from a distant pyre, and beneath it, nothing stirred. No banners, no steel, no breath. The enemy had been buried—whether slain or shattered beyond pursuit, none could say. But the path behind Telaryn and her band was gone.

For the first time in days, there was no sound of boots in the snow behind them. No shadow dogging their steps. Only the mountain, vast and quiet again, as if it had never woken at all.

---

C7S5 - Aftermath

They did not speak for a long time.

The path ahead was narrow again, and treacherous—yet it felt wider than before. No longer hunted, only hollowed, the survivors climbed in silence until dusk began to settle over the shattered slopes. A sheltered pocket beneath a shelf of stone gave them brief refuge. There, they lit a cautious fire and huddled against the rising wind.

Telaryn sat apart, her face unreadable. She hadn’t spoken since the avalanche. Her hands were still caked in snow.

Halven poured hot water over dried root and herbs, handing the crude tea to Sari with a nod. The steam curled between them as the last light faded from the peaks.

“I didn’t think he’d do it,” Halven said finally, quietly.

Sari accepted the tin cup, fingers trembling despite her stillness. “Nor did I. Not yet. Not that way.”

Halven’s brow furrowed. “What way, then?”

“The old way,” she said, and there was a deep weariness in her voice. “The binding of soul and stone. The pact to give breath to the mountain’s bones. He had been marked for that since before I was born. All mountainbinders know their price. He simply chose when to pay it.”

She sipped the tea. Her eyes were distant, rimmed with salt from dried sweat and snow.

“He spoke to the roots,” she continued. “Said they stirred for the first time in generations. That her blood had woken them.” She glanced toward Telaryn. “I didn’t believe him at first. I do now.”

Halven’s gaze followed hers. “Do you think he died for her?”

“No,” Sari said. “He died for the Queen.”

A beat of silence.

Then, softer: “He died for us.”

They fell quiet again. The fire popped once, sparks leaping toward the stone canopy above. Alisha dozed lightly, wrapped in Ryn’s cloak, while Weylan kept watch at the edge of the hollow, eyes fixed on the darkening trail.

And Telaryn—she did not move.

She sat cross-legged, hands on her knees, eyes closed. Her breathing had slowed.

Halven rose to check on her, but paused. Something in the air had shifted.

A sudden stillness pressed into the hollow. The wind held its breath.

Then Telaryn exhaled sharply—and fell backward into the snow.

Darkness closed over her like a shroud.

She stood not on snow, but on black glass—cracked, rimmed with frost. Above, the sky spun with stormlight and strange constellations, none of them her own.

Before her: a throne of bone. Carved not by hands, but by centuries of pressure and pain. Its arms were antlers. Its legs, femurs. Atop it sat a woman crowned in twisted gold, eyes closed, mouth sewn with threads of shadow.

Her face was Ryn’s.

Around her, chains coiled like serpents—anchoring sword, throne, and soul in one cruel knot. The blade lay across the queen’s lap: long, cruel, flame-barren, humming with hunger.

And still it breathed.

Ashmire.

The name struck her chest like a blade drawn too quickly from its sheath.

Then the woman on the throne opened her eyes. Black, and endless.

"You will not return as you are," she said. Her voice was the sound of falling ice, of promises whispered in a dead tongue.

"You will come to me hollowed, or not at all."

The vision split. Shattered like brittle frost. Telaryn cried out—and the world returned.

Ryn jolted awake, gasping, her breath clouding in the cold. Snow had gathered in her lashes. Alisha leaned toward her in alarm, but she raised a hand.

“I saw her,” she whispered. “I saw myself.”

No one answered.

---

C8S1 - Mouth of the Mountain

They traveled in silence.

The high paths north of the avalanche scar were narrow and bitter, the stone sharp as broken glass beneath thin snow. Breathing came hard—thin air and colder wind—so there were fewer words, fewer moments not wrapped in breath or frostbite or aching bone.

Each day, the wind changed.

Once it carried laughter—Sari’s soft voice, coaxing favor from the wild spirits overhead as she scattered salt and ashes into the gale. Once, it carried memory—Alisha humming an old Talpian lullaby beneath her breath as she walked beside Telaryn, their hands nearly brushing. Once, it carried nothing at all.

Those were the worst days.

They followed no trail, not in any true sense. But they had signs. A jagged cairn toppled long ago, its stones marked with pre-Shattering glyphs. A vision that Telaryn could no longer tell from memory—stone halls pulsing with chained hunger. A weather-beaten map unearthed in Winter’s Edge, now creased and ink-faded, clutched in Halven’s frozen fingers as he led from just behind.

And the stone fragment, still warm on occasion, despite the cold. Veyari script on one side. Something older on the other.

Above them, the pact spirit followed—a ghost-wind Sari had bound into the shape of a falcon made of frost. It never cried. It only circled.

By the fourth day, the clouds turned slate-grey and heavy. Halven’s lantern went out at noon and would not relight. Tuaru’s absence was a silent wound in every step, every glance back to make sure someone was still there.

Then, in the hour between dusk and dark, the mountain changed.

The ridgeline narrowed—twin cliffs rising like fangs—and the valley below dropped out in a long scar of ice and black basalt. They stood at the precipice, staring down into it. The snow did not reach the valley floor. It melted around the stone in strange patterns, coiling like breath or words once spoken.

Sari’s spirit falcon circled once, then broke apart into wind and was gone.

“There,” Telaryn said, voice hushed, but certain.

The mouth of the mountain. And far below, carved not with chisel but force of will and old power, loomed a structure half-swallowed by the dark: a keep of seamless black stone, its gate marked with a symbol that had been scraped clean long ago.

The erased sigil. The place the Veyari had sworn to remember.

The Keep of Ash.

None of them spoke. But every one of them felt it—how the wind here had teeth. How the stones did not echo. How even the sky seemed to lean away.

---

C8S2 - Awaken the Gate

The final descent took them through windless silence. They wound their way down narrow scree paths and across jagged shelves, each step taken with the knowledge that something ancient watched — not with eyes, but with memory.

By dusk, they reached the shadowed plateau before the Keep.

It stretched like a wound across the mountain’s flesh — smooth basalt carved not by weather or chisel but an unseen force. The very snow recoiled from it, gathering only in brittle whorls along the fringes, never quite touching the black stone.

At its heart stood the Keep itself.

A vast wall of seamless dark stretched across the pass, as if the mountain had opened and grown teeth. The gate—if it could be called that—was an arched seam, tall and narrow, with no hinges or handle. Just a faint depression in the shape of a door. At its peak, half-scraped and hollowed, lay the ghost of a sigil: a sunburst worn smooth, its lines eaten by time or by intent.

No entrance revealed itself. No answer stirred. They made camp before it all the same.

A fire was coaxed to life from what little kindling they carried—scraps of dry root, oilcloth, a few shavings from Sari’s kit. It burned low and in a strange pale hue, giving more smoke than heat. No sound broke the hush around them—no birdcall, no crack of settling snow. Even the fire crackled softly, as if afraid to draw too much attention.

They spoke little. Halven unpacked the weatherworn map from his satchel, setting it atop a flat stone to study in the firelight. He traced the markings over and over with ink-stained fingers, comparing them to the shapes of the surrounding cliffs.

“It should be here,” he murmured. “All the signs point to this valley. The fragment matches. The vision… everything.”

“But no path forward,” Sari said, arms folded tight against the cold.

“The door is sealed,” Eris added, staring at the arch. “Maybe for good reason.”

They took turns examining the gate. Halven pressed his hand to the sigil. Nothing. Sari tried speaking words in the mountain tongue, while ash from the fire curled through the air like lazy ghosts. Alisha walked the perimeter once, twice—always circling back to Ryn, saying nothing, her eyes heavy with warning.

Night deepened. The sky was faintly lit above—but strange, distorted. As if it too bent away from the keep’s presence. Even the wind refused to whistle through the pass. It moved high above, in the ridges and the peaks, but down here, before the gate, there was only stillness.

Telaryn sat near the dying fire, watching it hiss and gutter. Her bandaged hand itched beneath the wraps.

Slowly, she stood.

The others turned as she walked to the gate. She didn’t speak. Her footsteps echoed louder than they should have. When she reached the archway, she paused, then lifted her hand—no blade drawn, no wound made.

But the blood came anyway.

A thin line opened across her palm, deliberate and clean, as if invited. Crimson welled and spilled. The wind caught nothing. The snow did not move. But the blood fell anyway, and it struck the stone like rain on parchment. As if gravity was pulling it towards the sigil on the door, a couple of faint drops made their way.

The effect was immediate.

The erased sigil bloomed—not in fire or gold, but red, vivid and pulsing. Her blood sank into the rock, racing along old lines etched too deep to forget. The stone began to vibrate—not in movement, but in tone. A sound throbbed through the Keep, low and terrible, like breath rising from a long-buried throat.

The arch parted.

Not open—not torn—but parted, stone sliding into stone, revealing a passage behind. A tunnel of seamless black, wide enough for three to walk abreast, yet somehow feeling tighter, closer. As if the darkness were pressing in, even as it receded.

The fire behind them died suddenly. No gust quelled it, but as if a strange and strangling cold seeped from within the Keep.

Alisha moved first, rushing to Telaryn’s side, eyes wide. “Are you hurt?” she asked—but the blood was already gone. The wound had sealed.

“I didn’t mean to,” Telaryn said softly.

“But it meant to take,” Halven whispered, staring at the stone. “It recognized something in you.”

No one replied. Even Eris had stepped back, her knuckles white against the shaft of her spear.

Only Telaryn stood unmoving, eyes fixed on the open gate. Her shoulders lifted once—slow, a breath drawn deep—and then stilled.

She turned to the others.

“This is it.”

The Keep of Ash yawned before them. Ancient. Silent. Waiting. And Ryn stepped toward it. Drawn closer by the gaping darkness beyond. Eyes fixed on the yawning abyss, her head tilted slightly as if listening to soft, moaning whispers only she could hear.

---

C8S3 - Into the Darkness

The gate yawned open like a wound torn through the mountainside—jagged, black, and rimmed in frost that steamed against the air as if exhaling from some buried furnace. No light emerged. No sound. Only cold, and something far deeper.

The moment the stone door unsealed, something awoke.

Not movement—there were no footsteps or shifting forms. But shadows stirred along the threshold like spilled ink recoiling from light. They slithered across the carved stone floor, arching upward in tall, finger-like shapes. They didn’t grasp—they reached, in slow, deliberate hunger. As if scenting heat. As if they remembered flesh.

The fear came not as a pang but as a slow tightening in the chest, an instinct older than words. A warning etched into marrow. Even those who had never known battle found their hands drifting toward weapons, then freezing—because what waited inside the Keep was not something that could be struck down.

Sari pressed a trembling hand to her chest, her carved talisman rattling against her ribs. Her breath came shallow, and her lips moved in a whisper—not a prayer, but a plea to the wind spirits she pleaded with so often. A slight gust of wind arose around her, protective and instinctively drawing her a few steps back.

“They’re bound,” she murmured, “but not asleep. And not at peace.”

Eris, so steady before, flinched back as a ripple of shadow brushed her boot. Her spear tip lowered out of reflex. The clay markings on her face stood out stark in the pale light, but her expression was bloodless. “They know her. The princess. They want her.”

Halven swallowed and stepped forward, forcing himself to the edge of the stone. His lantern flickered and died in his grip, the flame snuffed not by wind but by presence.

“This place was sealed not to be forgotten,” he said quietly, “but to be feared. They do not want us here!”

He pointed to the faint scarring around the erased sigil. “They carved it away. Scraped clean the Queen’s mark. As if afraid it might… wake something.”

Telaryn stood at the threshold, her back to them, eyes locked on the blackness ahead. The blood from her hand already dried, but the mark still gleamed red in the gloom. Behind her, the shadows quivered in anticipation. They did not attack. They waited.

Alisha stepped forward and grabbed her wrist.

“Please,” she said, voice hoarse. “Don’t go in there. You don’t feel it? Something’s waiting. Something that remembers pain.”

“I feel it,” Telaryn said, her voice like a thread drawn taut. “But I can’t go back.”

Alisha’s breath caught. “Then let me come with you.”

Telaryn looked down at her. “You don’t have to.”

“I know,” Alisha whispered. “But I will.”

She slid her fingers into Telaryn’s, and for a heartbeat, the shadows stilled. Then, as if acknowledging the pact, they drew back, retreating into the dark like smoke dispersing—but the air remained thick with weight, with knowing.

They crossed the threshold together.

The moment their feet left the outer stone, the door began to move. Not with a rush, but with the finality of a tomb.

Halven stepped forward. “Wait—Telaryn! Alisha!”

Ryn turned once, looked back at them. No words. Just a glance heavy with things she would not say.

The shadows, like coiled roots, crept up the inner walls, watching, whispering without tongues. Cold air poured from the depths, sharper than ice—an absence of warmth rather than its opposite. The gate sealed behind the women with a groan of rock-on-rock.

No scream. No crack. Only the long silence of things long buried.

The sigil dimmed, its blood-light fading into black. Then the wind stilled entirely. The mountain breathed no more.

Halven stood frozen. His hand still raised. Beside him, Eris whispered something in the Veyari tongue and traced a ward over her heart. Sari knelt in the snow, eyes closed, face bloodlessly pale, lips moving as if in negotiation—but no spirit answered her now.

Weylan had not spoken at all. He simply stared at the door, fists clenched, jaw trembling—not in fear, but helplessness. Despair had overcome his heart

They did not speak. For what was there to say?

They were four now, left beneath a dark sky gone numb and grey, standing before a sealed gate that led to nowhere known—and Telaryn, their princess, had stepped beyond it. Into dread. Into legacy. Into something ancient.

---

Interlude - The Limits of Discipline

The air was thin as glass. Cold enough to make breath brittle. Cold enough to hide the stink of death, but not the shape of it.

Snow blanketed the slope like a burial shroud, concealing shattered bodies beneath folds of white. Helmets jutted from the drifts like broken bells, spears like skeletal limbs. One had impaled a twisted standard—the Legion’s crescent rising from crimson silk, stiff with ice.

Legate Marcas stood at the perimeter, his boots half-buried, arms folded beneath his dark cloak. His breath misted and vanished. Around him, the surviving scouts moved like ghosts, digging slowly, methodically, in silence.

One turned. A lean man in a scale vest, his face dusted with frost.

“Fifteen confirmed, sir. At least ten more unaccounted for—likely under the ice.”

Marcas nodded once.

“Any survivors?”

The scout hesitated. “Just one.”

Marcas’s gaze flicked toward a shape being dragged from a cedar’s twisted shadow. Two soldiers carried the man between them like a ruined banner. He groaned, barely conscious, legs dangling—one clearly shattered, the other twisted at the thigh.

They laid him in the snow, propped on a folded cloak. His mouth moved before his eyes opened.

“Speak,” Marcas said, kneeling beside him.

The soldier stared at the sky. His pupils were pinpricks. Dried blood flaked from his nostrils, frozen at the corners of his mouth.

“They were ahead,” the man whispered. “Too far to see. We chased by sound… footprints… and then…” His breath hitched. “The slope broke. Snow came down like a wall. Not just snow—stone. The air screamed.”

Marcas studied him, expression flat. “Did they attack you?”

“No. No blades.” The man’s fingers clawed at the ice. “The mountain turned on us. It bled. Like it was angry.”

Behind them, a cry rang out. A soldier had uncovered a pale hand, curled in the snow, the fingers black with frostbite.

Then came the sound of hooves. Not steady. Limping. Wet.

The scout turned, hand going to his sidearm. But he froze.

A horse shambled from the trees. Gaunt. Blood around its flanks. One eye sealed shut with scar tissue. Its rider slumped forward, gripping the reins with hands burned black at the knuckles.

Verrin.

He did not speak as he dismounted. He fell, barely catching himself, robes torn and singed. His left arm hung dead at his side. His hair had been singed off in patches. His skin gleamed like wax—glassy and raw.

Marcas approached, unflinching.

“You live.”

Verrin looked up, his face the color of ash. “Not by much.”

Marcas’s gaze sharpened. “You were swept under.”

“I was buried,” Verrin hissed. “The spirits of the peaks clawed at me. Cold ones. Blind ones. I bound one. Bled into its lungs. It showed me a path.”

His words were slurred, but his eyes—one cloudy, the other red-veined and burning—were focused.

“I drained three,” he added, quieter. “Took just enough. They’ll crawl. Not walk. But they breathe.”

Behind them, a silence fell among the soldiers. No one moved.

Marcas did not blink.

“Did you see where she went?”

Verrin nodded. “Toward a black gate. Hidden in a throat of stone. The wind there doesn’t howl. There’s something old* watching from that valley.”

Marcas stepped back. Looked up toward the ridges, where fresh snow now covered the wound.

“She walks to find a relic,” Verrin said. “It sings in her blood.”

Marcas didn’t respond.

“Not a weapon alone,” Verrin murmured, half-mad with pain. “A covenant. It remembers who she was. What we broke.”

Marcas turned. His eyes were steady. “Can it be stopped?”

Verrin’s grin was a broken thing. “No. But it can be claimed. If you’re quick.”

The Legate paced once through the snow, crunching over shattered armor. He stopped at a shattered helm and knelt, brushing snow away with gloved fingers. The inside was slick with ice and red.

He rose.

“Burn the bodies,” he said. “No graves. I won’t give the spirits names to cling to.”

A scout saluted, but glanced warily at Verrin.

Marcas caught the hesitation. “He returns to the hunt.”

The scout frowned. “He’s half-dead.”

“He knows the shape of what we face,” Marcas said evenly. “And we do not have time to wait for miracles or reinforcements.”

He turned to Verrin, who was still kneeling, his burned hand pressed to the snow as if drawing strength from the cold itself.

“You’ll be on your feet by first light.”

Verrin’s voice rasped low. “I’ll need to drain.”

Marcas nodded. “Take what you need—from the men.”

A stir passed through the nearby soldiers.

“But no deaths,” Marcas added, eyes like granite. “No cripples. I need blades, not corpses. Leave them enough to fight.”

Verrin gave a long, slow smile. “I can be careful.”

“You will be,” Marcas said. His tone cut sharper than frost. “I don’t like using your kind. But I like failure less.”

Verrin rose shakily to his feet, his ruined mantle sloughing like wet parchment around his frame. “We’re not so different, you and I, Legate.”

Marcas’s eyes narrowed. “We are. But I don’t need to like a blade to use it.”

He stepped past Verrin, cloak snapping in the rising wind.

“Bind yourself however you must. Just be ready.”

Verrin’s laugh followed him, dry as old parchment. “I already am.”

Marcas didn’t turn.

“Then you leave at first frost.”

---

C9S1 - Deeper into the Keep

The door had sealed behind them like the closing of a tomb.

A deep, grinding sound echoed for what felt like minutes—stone against stone, slow and final. Then, silence. Not the absence of sound, but the crushing kind, dense and suffocating, as if even the air feared to stir. No wind. No echo. Just breath and heartbeat.

Ryn didn’t move at first.

Alisha stood beside her, pale in the faint glow of their torch. Her hand reached for Ryn’s, not out of affection, but instinct. “It’s too quiet,” she whispered.

The tunnel ahead stretched into shadow—hewn from black stone so smooth it barely reflected the torchlight. The walls were narrow and slightly curved, as though bored into the bones of the mountain by some ancient force. Icy rime clung to the corners, spreading in veins like pale fingers.

Ryn took a step forward. Her boots struck the stone without a sound. She looked back at Alisha.

“We go together,” she said.

They moved deeper.

The passage opened into a broad corridor, impossibly still. The walls here bore alcoves—each one housing a statue carved from the same seamless obsidian as the keep itself. Ancestors, perhaps. Figures in regal robes, hands resting on hilts or scrolls or strange relics. Many were cracked, their faces blurred by age or shattered outright. A few had been decapitated entirely. Not by time, but intent.

Alisha stopped before one. “Someone tried to erase them.”

Ryn said nothing. But her hand hovered near the pommel of her dagger. It wasn’t fear. It was... memory. The air here smelled of stone, ash, and something older—like parchment burned in the middle of writing.

Far above them, faint rumbles echoed through the ceiling. Not thunder. Not wind. Just something shifting, slowly, deep within.

They reached an antechamber. The silence thickened there.

The floor was littered with blackened tiles, and the mural that stretched across the far wall was faded but unmistakable in outline. A crowned figure, tall and stern, stood above a kneeling crowd. In one hand she held a sword of flame—not fire, but something darker, curling like smoke across the blade’s edge. Spirits bowed in chains at her feet. Behind her, a great throne burned—not consumed, but alight with something otherworldly.

Alisha turned away. “This is... wrong.”

Ryn stepped closer. Her hand traced the edge of the mural’s worn surface. The crowned figure’s face was lost—scraped clean. But around the blade, the paint still clung, dark and oily in the firelight.

The sword called to her. It wasn’t sound. It wasn’t even thought. Just a pull in the chest, a thread drawn tighter. Longing.

The corridor beyond twisted again, winding downward. They descended without words, torchlight flickering off frozen steps. At the bottom, they passed through an archway broken at the top—scarred with ancient claw-marks that had gouged the stone deep.

And then they saw it. The throne room. Or what remained of it.

The great hall had collapsed long ago, stone buckled and fractured beneath some titanic force. The walls sloped inward, as if crushed from above, and the far end of the chamber had vanished into a sinkhole of frost and stone. But the throne endured.

It sat atop a jagged rise—carved not from wood or gold, but bone and basalt and strange metal. Its arms curved like antlers, its seat worn smooth by centuries. Chains lay shattered at its base. The air around it shimmered faintly, as though warped by unseen heat—or memory.

Ryn stopped at the threshold.

Her legs felt heavy. Her breath caught in her throat.

Something was watching them. Not from above. Not from the shadows.

From within the stone.

Alisha moved closer. “We shouldn’t be here.”

“I know,” Ryn said.

But she did not step back. She stepped forward instead.

---

C9S2 - Exploring the Keep

The torch burned low.

Their breath fogged and hung in the still air as they moved cautiously through the shattered throne room, boots crunching over powdered stone and brittle remnants of what may once have been bone. Fatigue pressed down on them, heavier than weariness alone. It was the kind of exhaustion that coiled behind the eyes and wrapped around the ribs, like hands that weren’t quite there.

Ryn paused at the base of the dais. The throne loomed above, silent and empty, its angles not built for comfort but dominance. Star-metal gleamed in its frame, catching the faint light in ways that defied simple reflection—glints like eyes that never blinked.

But the sword was not there.

No blade lay across the throne. No relic sealed in honor or fear. Only the hush of dust and memory.

“We’re missing something,” Ryn murmured. “This isn’t where it ends.”

Alisha knelt beside one of the collapsed pillars. Her fingers brushed across grooves in the stone—symbols like constellations, etched in an impossible script that flickered faintly in the torchlight and then died again.

“This place was buried on purpose,” she said. “Cursed, maybe. There are... presences. I can feel them watching.”

They both could.

Shadows crept along the walls in unnatural rhythms. The flicker of torchlight elongated them into limbs and teeth, shapes that reached too far for too long. Sometimes, just at the edge of hearing, they caught whispers in a tongue too old for memory—sibilant, scraping voices like wind through hollow bone. And once, a sound like chains being drawn slowly across stone.

The spirits here weren’t guardians. They were jailers. Something—or someone—had bound them to deter trespass, to choke the air from lungs and courage from hearts.

They lit a second torch and pressed deeper into the side chambers. The architecture changed the further they went—less like a fortress, more like a sanctum. The Keep had been carved, not built. Every corridor curved with the contours of the mountain, every wall fitted with precision that had not crumbled even after a thousand years of ice and silence.

The rooms beyond the throne chamber were stranger still.

One chamber—hexagonal, with mirrored walls—contained the remains of a mechanism that once pulsed with luminous lines etched through crystal conduits. Some had burst, the glass fused with molten runes. Others remained eerily pristine, save for the absence of light. At its center stood a pedestal with a hollow where something circular might once have rested—perhaps a lens, perhaps a core.

Alisha stared at it. “Like a sun that never rose.”

“The Tul-Dar,” Ryn said, voice low. “They brought fire from the stars. But the Veil... it cut them off. Nothing shines here now.”

Another chamber held rusted racks of instruments—articulated arms of brass and obsidian, delicately jointed and long dormant. A few still twitched faintly when touched, powered by ghosts of charge. Between them stood a table of pale green stone, veins shot through it like frozen lightning. Alisha touched one of the metallic arms and pulled her hand back.

It had burned cold.

A library followed—its shelves collapsed, scrolls turned to brittle ash or torn parchment. But beneath one shelf, buried in the stone, Ryn unearthed a sliver of crystal the size of a dagger’s hilt. It hummed faintly in her grip—warmer than it had any right to be. She tucked it into her cloak without a word.

Room by room, the picture grew clearer. This place had been more than a keep.

It had been a temple. A throne not just of rule, but of rite.

Eventually, they returned to the throne room, hollow-eyed and dust-covered. They could go no further that night. Every breath was effort. Sleep pulled at their limbs like drowning hands.

They laid their cloaks out beside the dais. The stone beneath them was hard, but dry. Alisha leaned against Ryn’s side, shivering not from cold, but from something deeper.

“This place hates the living,” she whispered.

Ryn did not reply. Her eyes were on the throne, its seat vacant, yet charged with presence. Somewhere beneath it—beneath this place—was the answer. She felt it, pulsing in her marrow.

The blade had been taken—or hidden.

And only the dead remembered how to find it.

That night, she dreamed of a stairwell spiraling down and down into the black, lit by torches that never burned and walls that bled ash. She heard her name spoken not in sound, but in intention. Saw the throne again—this time occupied. A woman with her face and not-her-face sat upon it, eyes closed, a blade across her lap, drinking in shadow.

When Ryn woke, her hand throbbed with pain. She looked down to see a fresh cut on her palm. Blood welled and trickled across her fingers.

She hadn’t touched anything in her sleep. The wound had made itself.

---

C9S3 - Blood and Broken Sigil

The torch had guttered in its sconce, casting the throne room in an amber dimness when they woke.

Ryn rose slowly, stiff-limbed and chilled through despite her cloak. Her body ached in places she didn’t remember straining—an old fatigue, heavy in the bones. It was morning, technically, though the sky beyond the narrow stone slits had changed little: still gray, still mute.

Alisha sat against the far wall, knees to her chest, staring into nothing. Her eyes were rimmed red, the shadow of tears clinging beneath them. She looked hollowed out.

“They wouldn’t stop,” she whispered as Ryn approached. “Not words, not visions. Just… emotions. Fear. Rage. Regret. All tangled together.”

Ryn knelt beside her, but said nothing. There was no comfort to offer that wouldn’t feel like a lie. Whatever lived in this place—spirit, memory, curse—it wanted them to remember, or to despair. Maybe both.

“I saw my mother,” Alisha said, voice thinner now. “But not her, not really. Just... pieces. Twisting. Blaming. As if I’d failed her by coming here.”

Ryn reached out and took her hand. The touch grounded them both for a moment. Then she stood.

“We’re close,” she said, more to herself than anyone. “It’s here, I can feel it.”

She turned to the throne again. It loomed as ever—cold, silent, unyielding. But something in the night’s vision still echoed behind her eyes. The throne was not the ending. It was the lid.

They searched methodically, trying not to be too hopeful. The room was massive—twin staircases curved to mezzanines above, and multiple pillars created alcoves where other doors might have once led. Most were blocked by collapsed stone or fused shut.

But something beneath the throne drew Ryn’s attention.

It was Alisha who noticed the faint break in the dais—a seam, almost too fine to detect, circling the stone like a shallow moat. And behind the throne, half-hidden in shadow, was a strange, socketed arch—an ancient mechanism fused to the stone, blackened with age, but once finely wrought in a fashion that mirrored the other broken wonders of the Keep.

It looked like it had been built to receive power. Not from stars, as the Tul-Dar once drew, but from something more intimate.

Blood.

They stared at it, uncertain.

Ryn drew the crystal sliver she’d taken from the library chamber, thinking it might match—but it didn’t fit. She tried touching the arch itself. Nothing.

Then she turned her hand.

The cut was still there—fresher now, as if reopened in her sleep. She extended her palm over the mechanism. One drop. Then another.

The moment her blood struck the socket, the Keep answered.

A grinding sound echoed up through the stone floor. Dust spilled from between seams that hadn’t moved in a thousand years. The dais vibrated underfoot—softly at first, then with a groaning intensity as ancient gears shuddered awake. The circle of stone split down the middle and slowly slid apart, revealing a spiral descent carved of black steps, sloping down into the mountain’s heart.

A rush of cold air spilled upward—not just chill, but wrong, like breath held too long in the lungs of a corpse.

Ryn looked back once at Alisha, whose face had gone pale again, then descended the first step.

The others would not see her again for hours.

And below, something waited. Chained. Watching. Hungry. They could feel it preying on them.

---

C10S1 - Descent

The stairs spiraled inward like a stone wound, coiling down through the gut of the mountain. There were no torches set into the walls, no sconces, no signs of any passage before them. Only the cold, and the slick sheen of frost clinging to each basalt step.

Ryn’s hand drifted along the wall for balance. It felt… porous, as if the stone breathed. Her fingers came away damp, though nothing dripped.

Alisha said nothing behind her. Her footfalls were light, reluctant. Ryn could feel the tension in her closeness—the ache of someone following not out of trust, but love, and fear.

The stairwell narrowed. The torch in Ryn’s hand flickered low, its flame no longer warm. Just light, and even that dimmed with every step. The shadows here weren’t cast—they pressed in, like ash-clouds around a coal.

She should have turned back. Instead, she kept moving.

The air grew heavier the deeper they went. Not just cold—it pressed into the lungs, thick with a taste like iron and old breath. The kind of air you found in tombs, or in vaults that had not been opened since time forgot its own name.

And yet something waited. She felt it in her bones. Not danger. Not even malice. Just inevitability. As if her whole blood had been spiraling toward this place long before she was born.

Then, without fanfare, the stairs ended. They stepped into a cavernous vault—silent, unmoving, dustless. The floor was stone, black-veined and cracked in a perfect starburst pattern beneath their feet. Above them, the ceiling arched like a cathedral, carved with sigils that shimmered faintly when the torch passed near.

Some of them moved. Not fully, not consciously. Just enough for Ryn to feel her name almost take shape in the runes as she passed.

Far across the chamber stood a throne. But not the one above. This was a second seat—a hidden mirror—lower, older, more terrible. Its back curled upward in sharp ribs, fashioned from some dark alloy and set into bone. At its center, half-collapsed from age, sat a figure still crowned.

Her face was a ruin of time—cheekbones sunken, teeth exposed in a frozen snarl. Skin stretched taut like wax over bone. Her robes were blackened to rot, fused with the stone.

And through her chest, piercing her spine and anchoring her to the throne, was a sword.

Long. Black. Bound in rusted chains of iron, silver, and bone. Its blade curved slightly—its edge chipped like volcanic glass, its hilt inlaid with symbols that burned with a dull, internal light.

Ashmire.

Ryn staggered, catching herself on the wall.

The torch hissed out.

And in that instant of extinguished light, she heard the voice—not in her ears, but behind her teeth, as if it had always been lodged there, waiting:

You came late, blood-child. But I did not forget.

---

C10S2 - The Whispering Blade

Ryn stepped forward.

She couldn’t have said why. The air pulled at her lungs, each breath like inhaling smoke—but she moved as if tethered to a thread that ran straight from her ribs to the thing before her. Alisha called her name—soft, almost breaking—but it came from very far away.

The chamber bent as she walked, distances distorting. The walls shuddered subtly, not with movement, but with anticipation.

Then she stood before the throne.

The corpse on it wore a crown of broken antlers. Not forged, but grown—perhaps once a wreath of some living thing, petrified now into jagged splinters. Her arms lay slack across stone, fingers outstretched in final protest.

And Ashmire pierced her clean through.

It was longer than any sword Ryn had ever seen—nearly her height. The hilt was wrapped in something dark and frayed, almost like old silk, but damp to the touch. The guard was minimal, sharp and curved down like a claw. And the blade—gods, the blade—it curved subtly along its length, wider than a knight’s broadsword but forged for nothing but cutting.

It was not a weapon to parry with.

It was not a weapon to carry in defense.

This was a blade meant to end things.

She could see now how it had been driven into the Queen’s chest—not stabbed in a moment of battle, but placed there, slowly, ritually, until her spirit could not leave. The chains coiled around the metal like vines dried in agony—iron links etched with warding runes, strips of bone sewn with thread, silver bands scorched black at their edges.

The metal of the blade shimmered faintly in the dark. Not polished, but still catching what little light remained—like something forged beneath stars no longer in the sky.

Ryn’s hand reached out.

Not touching.

Not yet.

Just close.

A breath.

The whisper returned—no longer behind her teeth, but between her eyes, layered in voices.

You bleed and are not broken.
You fear and still come closer.
You fall, and rise again. Every time you do, you become more like me.

Her knees buckled. The voices crowded in. Not just words now—images. Swords rising through ash, bodies collapsing in black snow, a throne built of the slain. Her own hands, red to the wrist.

Alisha’s voice broke through, distant, pleading.

“Don’t.”

Ryn didn’t turn. Couldn’t.

“Please. You don’t have to.”

There was pain in her voice. And something else—love, raw and shaking.

“I saw what it does,” Alisha said, stepping closer. “That thing... it wants you. Whatever it is, it’s still feeding on her. And if you take it—”

Her fingers hovered just above the hilt. The metal hummed—not aloud, but inside her bones.

You are already broken, the voice said again, not cruel, not warm. Just true.
I offer you shape.

---

C10S3 - Moment of Choice

Alisha’s voice cut through the silence—not sharp, but trembling with something deeper than fear. Grief.

“This isn’t what we came for.”

Ryn didn’t look away from the blade, though the words struck something deep. Her hand hovered inches above the hilt. Blood still welled slowly from her palm, unbidden, like the Keep itself had called it forth.

“We were meant to find a symbol,” Alisha said, stepping closer, boots scraping against frost-slick stone. “A sword. A sign that the old blood still had strength. That Talpis wasn’t dead.”

Her breath hitched, and Ryn heard the strain behind her voice.

“This isn’t that. This is something else.”

The torches flickered again—long shadows slithering along the wall, drawn toward the blade as if it exhaled hunger.

Alisha’s hands were open at her sides, empty. “This thing isn’t a relic of hope, Ryn. It’s a warning. Look at it—bound in chains, plunged into your ancestor’s corpse like it’s the only thing keeping her from rising again. We came looking for firelight in the dark and found a sealed pyre.”

The runes on the blade pulsed faintly, like an echo of breath in some buried lung.

“We should leave,” Alisha said, softer now, almost pleading. “We should seal this place behind us and find another way. You said yourself—you’re not ready to be queen. You don’t have to become this.”

Ryn's voice, when it came, was distant. “She’s still here.”

Alisha stopped.

“What?”

“Her spirit. The Nameless Queen. I can feel her in the metal. The voice I heard before—it’s her. Part of her. Maybe all of her.” Ryn’s eyes flicked to the corpse, still pinned to the throne. “Or maybe... she is the blade.”

Alisha stepped back.

“This is madness.”

But Ryn finally looked at her now—and there was no madness in her face. Only clarity. A terrible kind.

“She wasn’t just a queen. She was power. They feared her, even after they killed her. That’s why they built this place like a tomb and a prison.”

She turned back to the sword, the glow of the sigils catching in her irises like coals.

“I was born into a dead kingdom. I wore a crown of ash. But this…” Her fingers tightened, just shy of the hilt. “This is not ash. This is fire that waits.”

Alisha took a shaky breath. “And what if it burns you?”

Ryn smiled faintly, though there was no joy in it.

“Then I will burn brighter than any of them ever dared.”

And she closed her hand around the hilt.

---

C10S4 - Drawing Ashmire

The moment her fingers closed fully around the hilt, the world seemed to exhale.

Dust lifted from the crypt floor, dancing upward like threads of memory unwinding. The torchlight dimmed—but not into darkness. Instead, the shadows became deeper, thicker, pregnant with movement. The runes on the blade flared—a cold, searing white that wasn’t light but revelation, slicing through the chamber like truth unwelcome.

The corpse of the Nameless Queen shuddered.

Ashmire groaned in its bonds.

Chains of iron and bone quivered and snapped, not all at once, but one by one—each breaking with a scream. Not metal, not magic—will. The old seals cracked as if the stone wept to release them. The corpse gave no final breath, no last twitch. It simply yielded, as if the blade no longer required permission.

With a sound like bone grinding against thunder, Telaryn drew Ashmire from the ruined breast of her ancestor.

The crypt went silent.

Then the world convulsed.

Ashmire pulsed in her hands—too large, too heavy, yet weightless. Like holding a heartbeat made of steel. Her arm spasmed, not in pain, but in recognition. Veins lit beneath her skin—first red, then silver, then black. Her eyes rolled, and for a moment, Alisha’s scream was distant, muffled, wrong, as though heard underwater.

The throne cracked behind her, falling into ash.

And the corpse—the Nameless Queen—collapsed into herself and was gone. Not vanished. Not dust. Drawn in.

Telaryn’s knees hit the floor. Ashmire remained upright in her grip, humming now with whispers layered over whispers, a thousand voices singing a name none of them could remember but all of them obeyed.

The air became liquid.

Walls bent. Murals slithered like painted things waking up. The crypt tilted sideways—then upward—then inside-out, though Telaryn did not fall. She drifted. Light became ash became wind became thought.

The Queen’s voice came then—not in words, but in memory.

You are already broken.
I offer you shape.
You are already burned.
I offer you fire.
You are already mine.
I was always you.

Alisha was calling her name. Reaching. Crying. But Telaryn didn’t hear her anymore.

Because she was standing beneath a black sun, on a throne of bone and blood, with an army of ash rising from a thousand fallen kingdoms—and her name was not her own.

And the blade in her hand laughed with her voice.

---

Interlude - Raw Power

The wind here had changed.

Where once it screamed with indifference, it now whispered with purpose—dragging snow in listless spirals across the cliffside trail. The soldiers moved slowly, hunched beneath white-washed cloaks, their steps muffled by old frost and new fear.

At the front walked Verrin, his gait half-limping, half-sliding. His skin had not fully healed—stretched too tightly across reknit bone and sinew. His breath steamed like smoke through cracked lips, and he said nothing. But his eyes burned.

They reached the edge of the high ridge as twilight bled into full dark.

From there, the valley opened below—its bottom choked in ice and shadow, the far side a wound of black stone. Half-buried and silent, the Keep of Ash loomed like the carcass of a beast too ancient to name. A thin plume of smoke curled upward from a campfire near its gate—faint and distant. A handful of tents. Shapes that moved. Watching. Waiting.

One of the soldiers crouched and murmured, “Looks like they’ve stopped for the night.”

“They shouldn’t have,” Verrin rasped.

And then it came.

A pulse.

Not of sound—but of something else. The stone beneath their boots vibrated with sudden, aching stillness. Snow slid off ledges without wind. The air grew heavy—pressed down like an unseen hand. A few soldiers stumbled, looking wildly around. One swore he heard singing. Another dropped his weapon.

Verrin fell to one knee, his fingers curling into the frostbitten earth.

He felt it—not just in his skin, but in the marrow of the mountain.

A gate had opened.
A bond unsealed.
The blade had been drawn.

He turned, teeth bared in what might have been awe—or horror.

“Make ready,” he said hoarsely. “We descend at first light.”

One of the sergeants hesitated. “Do we wait for command? The Legate hasn’t—”

“There is no more waiting,” Verrin said. His voice carried now, sharp and iron-laced. “What just woke beneath us will not sleep again.”

He stood slowly. Blood ran from his nostrils. He wiped it with the back of a trembling hand, smiled crookedly, and looked to the black ridge below.

“She’s found it. Whatever it is.”

The soldiers exchanged nervous glances.

Verrin closed his eyes.

“We're already too late. But perhaps not entirely.”

Then the wind rose, howling through the teeth of the peaks, and whatever they would face below had already begun to shape the world in its image.

---

C11S1 - The Price

The blade had already been drawn.
Ashmire throbbed in her grasp like a second heartbeat—too large for her hand, too alive for a dead thing. It sang without sound, low and deep, like a wind moving through old bones. Where her fingers touched the leather-wrapped hilt, her skin split open and bled—not from violence, but as if the blade was drinking.

The crypt around her warped.

The walls of basalt pulsed. Torches shuddered. A distant sound echoed—a scraping, like antlers dragged across stone.

Then, the darkness swallowed everything.

She stood beneath a black sun.

No warmth. No sky. Just a churning disc of cold fire, its corona flaring outward like cinders fleeing a forge too ancient to name. The world beneath her feet was ash and ruin. The mountains were gone—melted, sundered, or simply forgotten. The horizon burned sideways.

The throne rose before her—built of stone, sinew, and splinters of shattered stars. And seated upon it was the Queen.

She was no longer a corpse. No longer the mummified husk she had once been. She burned now with the memory of flesh. Her skin was pale gold fissured with black veins of flame. Her hair, a shroud of smoke. Her crown had fused to her skull. Her voice did not echo—it branded.

“You are the price,” the Queen said. “But not enough.”

Telaryn opened her mouth to speak—but no words came. Her throat was full of ashes. Her blood felt thick with heat.

“The blade remembers,” said the Queen, rising. “But memory is not strength. Blood is.”

She stepped down from the throne. With each footfall, the ground trembled.

“Would you carry my will?” the Queen whispered. “Then you must bind it. One soul. One bond. One offering.”

Ryn staggered back—but the blade kept her upright. It pulled her forward, tethered her to this place, to this voice, to this terrible promise.

“Not just any blood,” the Queen said, touching Telaryn’s face with burning fingers. “Yours. Reflected. Known. Given meaning. That is the law.”

Reality snapped back like a noose.

Telaryn reeled, collapsing to her knees beside the altar in the crypt, Ashmire clattering to the stone floor, singing as it hit. Her chest heaved. Her mouth was dry.

Alisha was there. Pale, trembling.

Ryn saw her through a veil—not with her eyes, but with something deeper. Her companion glowed faintly in the dim light, as if the blade itself recognized her.

Alisha took a hesitant step forward. “Ryn… something’s wrong. You’re shaking.”

Telaryn blinked. Her lips parted.

“The blade,” she rasped. “It… it asked.”

Alisha went still. “What do you mean, asked?”

Ryn’s hands trembled. “It needs something. It—it needs…”

She didn’t finish.

Ashmire pulsed again. A warm current, rising from the blade, crawling into her chest like longing turned liquid. Her eyes blurred. She saw again..

Alisha’s face, in another time, kneeling in the camp with her head bowed as Telaryn grieved.
Alisha’s hand in hers, back in Winter’s Edge.
Alisha’s blood, not yet spilled, but already known.

“One bond,” said the Queen again, voice inside her now.
“Let her be the bridge. Let her be the door.”

“I thought—” Alisha stepped closer, her voice cracking. “I thought we were searching for something that could help people. That could bring Talpis back.”

Telaryn looked up.

Alisha’s eyes were full of tears. “Not this,” she whispered. “Ryn… not this.”

And Telaryn, with Ashmire vibrating beside her, could not answer.

Because in the pit of her heart, something whispered: You already knew.

It was not the kind of blade made for salvation.
It was a blade made to cut away what was weak.
To remake.
To reshape.
To feed.

And the price… was her.

Or someone who mattered to her.

The blood would bind.

The blade had waited a thousand years.

And now, it was hungry.

---

C11S2 - The Killing

The blade lay between them—Ashmire, dark as night with no stars. Still humming. Still alive.

Alisha backed away from it like it was poison, her breath catching, arms outstretched as if shielding Telaryn from the thing already in her hand.

“This isn’t you,” she said. Her voice cracked like a frozen branch. “This—this is her. Whatever’s inside that sword, whatever you saw down there… it’s not your path. You don’t need to carry this.”

Telaryn said nothing. She stood over the altar now, holding Ashmire once more. It had risen to her hand the moment she touched it again, as if it belonged there. As if it had never belonged to anyone else.

Her fingers bled. But the blood didn’t fall—it sank into the hilt like ink into cloth.

The Queen's voice coiled behind her thoughts. No more begging. No more waiting. Power is never taken by the willing. You know what you are.

Alisha stepped closer, her eyes wide with something between horror and grief.

“I’ll destroy it,” she whispered. “If you won’t. I swear it. Even if it kills me.”

Ryn flinched. The pulse from Ashmire sharpened—fear, yes, but desire, too. A thrill that stole her breath.

Alisha reached for her.

That was the moment.

One breath. One flicker of doubt.

And Ashmire moved.

There was no battle cry. No spell. No clean arc of a hero’s sword. There was only a lurch—like her hand was pulled, like her heart beat too hard and spilled over into the blade.

A single stroke.

Blood, warm and thick, spilled onto the stone floor.

Alisha gasped—not in pain, not at first. Just… surprise. As if something sacred had cracked inside her. She touched her belly where the blade had passed, then looked at Telaryn. Eyes wide. Betrayed. Understanding.

“Ryn,” she whispered, barely sound. “Why?”

Telaryn was already falling to her knees, the blade slipping from her grip, but not far. It hovered. Hungered. Thrummed.

Tears streamed down her cheeks.

“I didn’t—” she began. But the words tasted wrong.

Had she moved? Had she chosen?

Or had the blade simply known?

Alisha sank beside the altar. Her breath came short now, her hands slick with blood that would not stop flowing. The stone beneath her soaked it greedily. So did Ashmire.

Telaryn cradled her, sobbing. Alisha’s eyes never left hers.

“I wanted to save you,” Alisha said, and then her voice was gone.

For a heartbeat, the crypt was silent.

Then the air shattered.

Ashmire screamed—not aloud, but in the soul, a sound like mountains breaking and chains snapping. It rose into the stone, through the keep, into the peaks beyond.

The blade lifted itself.

Its runes ignited, one by one, crimson and white-hot.

The chains that bound it blackened, then cracked—like the last bones of a long-dead oath. The seal broke.

Ashmire awakened.

It floated to Telaryn’s hand—not heavy now, not burning. Perfect. Ready.

And as she stood, her wounds knit shut. Her breath steadied.

Her eyes turned dark—blood-red at the edges, deepening toward black.

She stood taller than she had before. Straighter. Stronger.

But something else had shifted. Something essential. Not broken. Not shattered.

Forged.

Behind her, Alisha’s body was still. Pale. Her blood cooling on the stone.

Telaryn didn’t look back.

She could feel the Queen’s smile in the hollows of her thoughts.

"Now," the voice whispered, honeyed and sharp.
"Now you belong to something greater."

And Ryn? She didn’t answer.

She only turned toward the stairs.

Ashmire in hand. Alone.

---

C11S3 - The Power

Ashmire pulsed like a second heart in her grip—slow, powerful, ancient. The hilt was warm now, alive with something that moved beneath the metal like sinew, like breath. Her fingers curled tighter around it without thought, as if the sword were drawing her deeper into itself.

Then came the change.

She staggered back, gasping, as heat surged through her arm—not like fire, but like molten stone pouring through her veins. The wound on her ribs, half-forgotten through pain and exhaustion, suddenly clenched. Flesh knit with a sound like twisting leather. She looked down. Where there had been gashes, bruises, blackened frostbite—there was now smooth, untouched skin. Only a faint red shimmer marked where the damage had been.

She touched her face—her fingers tingled, her breath steady. The weight of exhaustion had vanished. The hunger. Even the grief felt… distant. Walled behind something smooth and cold.

Her eyes adjusted faster now. Every surface in the crypt seemed sharp-edged and precise. The silver filigree around the runes glinted. The carved bone in the Nameless Queen’s throne gleamed like wet ivory. And the shadows—those reaching, groping, whispering things—had stilled.

They weren’t gone.

They were waiting.

She straightened, spine clicking into place like armor being fastened. Her breath steamed once, then not at all. The torchlight did not flicker near her.

Then the visions struck.

Not like dreams, but like knives.

She blinked—and the world shattered.

Ash raining from a sky without sun.
Mountains melting into glass.
Cities torn open like carcasses beneath fireless flame—buildings crumbling in reverse, screams rising too late to be useful.
A woman on a throne of bone and black starmetal, wearing a crown that bled—dripping scarlet that coiled midair like threads of fate.
Armies prostrating, then screaming.
A newborn, held aloft, swallowed by the sword's shadow.
The Veil, stretched too thin, cracking like old ice as something vast and unseen pressed against it from beyond.

And always—the Queen.
Her face both hers and not hers.
Her lips not moving, but her voice curling into Telaryn’s skull like smoke.

“They burned the memory of me to keep their world whole.”
“You carry what they tried to forget.”
“You are my breath. My blade. My waking.”

Telaryn opened her mouth—but no sound emerged. The scream had no path.

Only pressure.
A hollow ringing in her ears.
A tremble through the bones of the crypt.

She collapsed to one knee—more reflex than choice. The floor cracked beneath her, hair fanned around her shoulders like black flame.

The shadows bent toward her again. But not in hunger.

In reverence.

The blood on the altar had dried, but her blade still gleamed, wet and eager.

Ashmire throbbed again. With every pulse, her heartbeat aligned to its rhythm.

In.
Out.

A steady, dreadful clarity filled her. As if someone had drawn a curtain inside her mind and shown her what had always been waiting behind it.

Her wounds were gone.
Her fear had cooled.
Her name still hung in her mind—but not alone.

She stood.

Not trembling. Not unsure. The weight of what she had done did not crush her—it forged her. In her hand, Ashmire no longer pulsed like a second heart. It was her heart, her breath, the axis of her becoming. Her eyes, ringed in red, no longer searched for answers—they carried them. Cold. Certain.

The throne no longer looked empty. It looked expectant. She turned from it. Not away—past it.

Ashmire whispered in her mind, but the voice was no longer a foreign presence. It was her own, returned deeper. Sharpened. She could feel the blade’s hunger, and it no longer frightened her. It promised power. Dominion. The right to shape the world instead of be shaped by it. The Nameless Queen had ruled in fireless flame—Telaryn would do more. She would rise, and nothing would burn unless she chose it.

Her cloak swept behind her as she climbed the broken steps.

Above, the crypt ceiling groaned, snow falling like dust through the cracks.

She did not look back at Alisha's body. The price had been paid. The world would answer.

And Telaryn of Talpis, blade in hand, eyes lit with the blood of an ancient queen, stepped boldly ahead—no longer seeking hope, but carrying judgment.

---

C12S1 - She Returns

The wind cut like razors through the stone valley, keening as it danced down from the black ridge above. Snow churned with ash in the air—remnants of their camp scattered by the storm that came before the soldiers.

They came without horns or warning, shadows between the crags—dozens, maybe more. Steel glinting dull in the gray light. And behind them, cloaked in silence, came the thing that made the wind go still.

Verrin.

He looked half-dead, if that. Wrapped in layered robes too fine for these heights, limping but not faltering, skin like cracked clay. His eyes gleamed red—not with fire, but with hunger. The kind that fed on life.

Eris was the first to move. She darted toward the left flank, a blur of spear and instinct. Halven shouted something—orders, maybe. Sari raised her arms and howled a word that made the storm lurch backward. Lightning cracked sideways. The first soldier to step through the mist caught it in the throat.

Then came the charge.

Steel clashed. Cries echoed. Weylan loosed arrow after arrow, breath ragged, blood on his face. Sari’s voice rose in rhythm with the wind, but her eyes were wide—terrified.

Weylan’s blade slipped from his bloodied hand as he crawled behind the outcropping, lungs burning. The air stank of iron and ozone, of death and snow. Screams echoed up the slope—human and not. A Veyari horn had sounded only moments ago, then gone silent. The high pass was becoming a grave.

“Hold the line!” Sari’s voice cracked through the wind, her staff raised against the storm of blood and flame surging up toward them. She had called down a curtain of ice and gale to slow their pursuers, but it was unraveling fast. Spirits were tearing through the air—half-formed things bound in blood, shrieking with every wound spilled.

Weylan rose to his knees, half-frozen, his bow cracked, fingers raw. Across the field of churned snow, Eris was dragging Halven toward a rock wall, his leg clearly broken. His pouch of maps was stained red. She looked back once, and their eyes met.

This was not a fight. This was an end.

Then came the laughter—dry and bitter, echoing through the peaks like bone clattering against stone.

He drew a dagger across the back of his own soldier’s neck. The man convulsed, screamed—his life bleeding upward into Verrin’s outstretched palm. With a guttural word, he bound it to a waiting specter. It grew teeth.

The wind tore at the broken ridge as Weylan stumbled back behind the boulder, arrows skittering past his ears like furious wasps. The Veyari warrior Eris lay bleeding behind him, clutching her leg and muttering a prayer through gritted teeth. Sari had vanished into the white squall with her staff of winds, and Halven—

He didn’t think about Halven.

Weylan peeked over the rock. Down the slope, Verrin advanced, black-cloaked and laughing, his hands slick with blood—some of it his own, most not. Around him, the corpses of two of his own soldiers steamed in the cold, their wrists slit open, throats flayed. The spirits he had bound were grotesque mockeries—hovering red phantoms wrapped in marrow chains, trailing echoes of their deaths in a haze of whispers and rot.

He looked as if he’d crawled through death and made it wear his skin—his cloak torn, armor ragged, one arm still blackened from some prior burn. Yet his eyes gleamed with manic clarity. Around him, his soldiers advanced with brutal calm—blades already wet, faces grim.

“Poor little rebels,” Verrin mocked. “Scattered. Starving. Still hoping for miracles.”

Sari hurled a shard of ice, but a red sigil flared in the air and turned it to steam before it struck.

Verrin smiled.

“Run if you like!” Verrin called. “The mountain gives no refuge, not from what’s already inside you!”

Weylan gripped his short blade, hopeless. The rebel fighters were scattered or dying. The slope was theirs now.

And then, the wind shifted.

It didn’t whistle. It stopped. Dead. Cold. Silence fell like a hammer.

From the entrance of the Keep—its gate still half-shrouded in shadow—someone stepped forward.

Telaryn.

But not the Telaryn they had known.

She wore no crown, no armor. Only a long cloak, black as night-wind, its edges trailing like smoke across the snow. Her skin was pale as hoarfrost. Her eyes—dark garnet, almost black—shone with something wild and endless.

And in her hand, Ashmire sang.

It did not shine. It devoured. A long, curved blade forged to end kings and feast on souls, veined like obsidian with veins of red-gold fire, pulsing in rhythm with something far older than any heartbeat.

Weylan blinked. The snow beneath her hissed as she walked. Melted. Evaporated. The air curled around her like a held breath.

Verrin turned. His voice twisted into a grin. “Ah,” he murmured. “The girl-queen comes at last.”

He raised his palm and tore it open across his belt of bone-carved runes. Spirits screamed loose—red and writhing, hungry. His men faltered at the sound. One staggered—then dropped as Verrin seized his blood with a flick of his fingers, draining life into a growing specter that moaned like a weeping wound.

Still, Telaryn said nothing.

She raised Ashmire.

The blade throbbed. It drank the silence. It pulled the light from the snow, the warmth from the world.

Then she moved.

She didn’t run—she appeared, her steps impossibly swift, cloak snapping, blade arcing in a perfect crescent. The first man she met barely gasped before Ashmire bit deep. Blood spattered the air, but it never hit the ground—it vanished into the blade. He crumpled, turning to ash even as he fell, wind catching his remains like burnt paper.

Telaryn shuddered with the rush. Her breath caught—not from effort, but rapture. Ashmire whispered against her skin—its praise, its hunger, its joy. She felt the life it stole, the power it gave, and she wanted more.

Another came at her. She turned the strike—not with parry, but precision—slicing cleanly across the neck. Blood sprayed. She inhaled like it was perfume. Her cuts grew sharper. Her movements, balletic. Beautiful and terrible.

Halven stared, barely able to lift his bow. Weylan had fallen to his knees. Sari stood frozen, hands raised in half-formed invocation. None dared move.

Verrin snarled. He drove his knife into a third soldier’s throat, soaking the runes with fresh life. From the glyphs he summoned a deeper binding—an ancient thing with too many mouths, forming in the air like rot condensing into flesh.

But it was too late.

Telaryn was already upon him.

Ashmire speared through his side, whispering with delight. Verrin’s expression twisted—not in pain, but recognition.

“You—” he choked, “You use it like—”

She twisted the blade.

His words died in his throat. Blood flooded out—and vanished.

Ashmire pulsed once, and Verrin’s form crumbled—not dead in the way men die, but undone. Unmade. His flesh broke into dust and drifted apart, hollowed by a hunger older than war. Only the stench of blood and ruin remained.

The spirits that had followed him screamed—and shattered. Their bindings melted like wax in sunlight. The storm that had choked the pass broke in an instant.

And the wind returned.

Telaryn stood still.

Hair wild. Eyes unreadable. Ashmire thrumming softly in her grasp.

She did not look to her allies.

She looked down the slope—past them, through them. Toward nothing.

Her chest rose slowly with each breath. Her mouth was slightly open, as if still tasting the kill.

Weylan watched her.

It was not awe he felt. Nor horror. Something colder. Closer.

It was the feeling of the first crack in ice before you fall through. It was devotion born not from love, but inevitability.

Something was becoming.

As the wind died and the last ashes settled, Telaryn stood amid the ruin—her hair tousled by battle, streaked now with strands of bone-white, as if the blade had marked her not only in soul, but in flesh.

---

C12S2 - Aftermath

The storm had passed. The corpses did not remain long.

Where Ashmire had struck, there were no bodies to burn—only ragged outlines scorched into the snow, dark stains that steamed and then blew away. The few slain by blade or arrow were laid in a rough cairn, stones stacked hastily with what strength remained.

They gathered at the foot of the Keep's shadow, the shattered remains of Verrin's force strewn across the slope behind them. Blood stained their sleeves, their cheeks, their breath. But they lived.

Eris sat on a broken pillar, her arm wrapped in linen soaked with melted snow and balm-ash paste. She had not taken her eyes off Telaryn once. When she finally spoke, it was with a reverence that sounded like fear.

“She walks with the shadow of the Queen,” Eris murmured, her voice low. “The Nameless One has returned through her.”

Sari knelt nearby, her storm-gray eyes searching the bruises on Weylan’s chest as she stitched a shallow gash. Her movements were deft, practiced. But her gaze, too, flickered often to Telaryn—who stood apart from them all, gazing at the blood-fed blade resting now against her shoulder like a slumbering wolf.

“The spirits are no longer afraid of her,” Sari said. “They listen. Even the wind holds its breath.”

“She isn’t just like her,” Eris added. “She is her.”

Halven sat farther off, scribbling with a trembling hand into a battered field book. His glasses were cracked, and dried blood caked one temple, but he hadn’t stopped writing since the battle ended. Maps, fragments of names, hastily scrawled spirit signs—trying to make sense of what they had seen.

“She’s not what I thought we needed,” he said, voice dry and low. “Not a queen to inspire songs or gather councils. But...” He looked toward Telaryn. “She may be the only one the Empire will fear.”

Telaryn said nothing. She was wiping Ashmire clean with a strip of cloth that sizzled and blackened in her hands.

Weylan limped toward her, his tunic torn, one arm in a sling. He stopped a few paces away, unsure whether to kneel or bow or simply speak. When she turned to him, her eyes still dark with the blade’s hunger, he did not flinch.

“My lady,” he said, voice hoarse but clear. “Let me serve you. As squire. As sword-arm. As whatever you need.”

She studied him for a long moment, and something in her gaze softened—just barely.

“Then serve,” she said. “And don’t falter.”

He nodded, fierce and proud and breathless. “I won’t.”

She turned from him then, cloak shifting like smoke. A streak of bone-white now marbled her dark hair, curling above her temple like a frostbite scar kissed by the stars.

No one said anything more. Not about the dead. Not about what they had become. The wind rose again, cool and sharp, and the Keep loomed behind them—silent, sealed.

But Telaryn stood taller than she had before. And none among them could look away.

---

C12S3 - Alishas Gone

They made camp beneath the high arches of the entry hall, just beyond the blackened gate. The space, once carved with ancestral purpose, had become their hearth for the night. The shattered murals above whispered broken stories, and the floor—obsidian cracked by time—reflected the firelight in jagged, uncertain lines.

They dared not leave the Keep again that day.

The air was warmer here than the mountain pass, but no less heavy. Every breath seemed borrowed. The walls remembered.

Halven was the first to speak once silence had settled, the fire snapping softly between them.

“Where is Alisha?” he asked. Not a demand, not even suspicion—just quiet, pained confusion.

Weylan flinched. Eris looked down. Sari said nothing at all.

Telaryn sat apart from them, Ashmire resting across her lap like a sleeping beast. The firelight danced in her darkened eyes. She didn’t look up.

“She’s gone,” she said, voice like wind through dead leaves.

Halven pressed further, gently. “Gone how?”

Telaryn’s hand drifted over the blade’s spine. She spoke slowly, carefully, as if the words were forming themselves without her will.

“She gave me what I needed,” she said. “The bond demanded blood. Not just any blood. A life entwined with mine. That... that was the price.”

Halven closed his eyes. “So she’s dead.”

Telaryn nodded. “Yes.”

Silence again. And then—

“She’s part of me now.”

That caught them all. Even Sari looked up, frowning.

Telaryn didn’t smile, but something in her eyes glittered. Not grief. Not quite.

“She flows in my veins,” she whispered. “The Queen lives in the blade. Alisha lives in me. That moment, when the bond was sealed—” She shuddered, visibly, the kind of shiver that came not from cold but from something deeper, more intimate. “I felt her. All of her. Her warmth. Her fear. Her love.”

Her voice dipped, reverent.

“And when the blade drank... it was ecstasy. Terror. Beauty. I regret it,” she added softly, “but I would do it again.”

Weylan shifted uncomfortably. “You... you saw her? When you struck?”

Telaryn’s gaze moved to the edge of the firelight, to the deep shadows that clung like curtains in the cracks of the Keep’s stone. Her voice turned distant.

“She’s still here,” she murmured. “Sometimes I hear her. I see her. She stands just beyond the flame. She doesn’t speak. But she watches.”

She turned her head slightly, as if to glance at something just behind her. A flicker of movement stirred in the dark—illusory, perhaps. A trick of the torch. But even the others felt it, the prickling sense of presence.

Sari reached for her talisman. Eris made the sign against cursed sight. Halven only stared.

Telaryn didn’t notice. Or didn’t care.

“She loved me,” she said. “And now... she guards me.”

Halven rose to his feet, shoulders sagging. “Get some rest,” he said. “We move at dawn.”

No one argued.

Telaryn remained awake long after the others drifted into uneasy sleep. Her eyes never left the shadowed arch where the firelight failed to reach.

And somewhere, very faintly, the stone groaned—like breath through a dying flute. A sound almost like a woman’s sigh.

---

C12S4 - Now what

The fire had burned low, casting long shadows across the shattered stone. Sleep did not come easily to any of them—not after what they’d seen, not after what they’d lost.

It was Eris who spoke first, her voice low and certain.

“We’ve seen enough.”

Sari, seated beside her with one leg folded beneath her and her talisman swaying from her neck, nodded slowly. “She is the Queen Returned.”

Telaryn looked up from the blade resting across her lap, her gaze sharp—but unreadable. Halven tensed, but said nothing.

Weylan stared between the Veyari women, wide-eyed. “What do you mean, Queen?”

“Not a throne-bound monarch,” Eris said. “Not a title of court and decree. She bears the mark of the Nameless Queen—blood for blood, power for pain. Her coming was carved into the oldest stone of our people.”

Sari’s eyes glittered with a deeper knowing. “The blade awakens only for the heir. And the heir returns only when the world is wounded deeply enough to call her back.”

Halven frowned, thoughtful. “You believe this was always meant to happen?”

“Not fate,” said Sari. “Pattern. A wound repeats unless it is cut out.”

Telaryn stirred slightly. “And you would follow me?”

Eris stood, her short spear resting against one shoulder. “We already do.”

“You gave death,” Sari added, “but also deliverance. That spirit binder… he would have broken us. What you did saved us.”

Halven hesitated. “But at what cost?”

Sari met his eyes. “Ask your spirits. Ours are mountain-buried and wind-bound. They do not ask for kindness. Only purpose.”

There was silence again, but it no longer felt uncertain.

Weylan moved closer to Telaryn’s side. “Whatever this is, you’re our best chance now.”

Telaryn’s expression didn’t change, but something behind her eyes shifted—acceptance or the hardening of conviction. Perhaps both.

“You said the Queen was sealed away,” she asked Eris quietly. “Is that what I broke?”

“No,” Eris replied. “What you broke was the waiting.”

Sari leaned forward, her voice nearly a whisper. “Now comes the reckoning.”

The fire cracked, throwing up a small shower of sparks. Telaryn looked into it, as if trying to read the future in flame and ash.

“We march at dawn,” she said. No one disagreed.

---

C13S1 - Return to village

The wind that came ahead of them was wrong.

It rolled down the mountain pass like breath from something vast and waiting, a chill not of temperature, but of omen. When Telaryn stepped into the shrine village once more, the air seemed to hold its breath.

She no longer looked like the girl who had arrived weeks before. Her cloak was streaked with blood—none of it hers—and her hair, once dark as coal, now bore streaks of ghost-white. Ashmire was slung over her back in a rough leather harness, but it might as well have been stitched into her spine. The blade pulsed faintly, as though still feeding.

The villagers watched in silence. Men with spears lowered their heads, not in deference—but wariness. Women whispered prayers without sound. Children peeked from behind painted doors, eyes wide with the instinctive fear of something no longer human.

Halven followed behind her, his face hollow with exhaustion and wonder. Sari walked at Telaryn’s side, silent and unreadable, her hand never far from the pouch of talismans at her belt. Weylan carried the banner they had taken up at the start of the journey, now bloodstained but upright.

They passed beneath the stone arch where vines once grew, where the Nameless Queen’s name had once been carved and then chiseled away. In the clearing where spirits had once gathered to listen, the council of elders waited.

It was Elder Yorai who stepped forward to meet her—tall, gaunt, and iron-voiced. His beard was braided with bones too small to be animal. His eyes were cold and ancient, like something carved from the spine of the world.

“You return,” Yorai said. “But not as you were.”

Telaryn nodded once. “Ashmire is awake.”

She stepped forward, her voice rising like a blade unsheathed. “The Empire will fall. Talpis will rise. I have taken the blade of the Queen and awakened its power. I am her heir by blood, by sacrifice, and by spirit. I call on the Veyari to stand beside me.”

A hush spread like oil across snow.

The elders did not move. The warriors did not kneel. Even the wind seemed to hesitate.

Yorai tilted his head. “And if we do not?”

Her eyes glittered. “Then I will carve my path through your doubts.”

That drew a hiss from one of the watchers, a hand tightening on a spear shaft. But Yorai held up a single hand.

“Ashmire is a blade, yes,” he said slowly. “But the Queen of old was not only blade. She was will. She was pact. She was spirit and storm and stone.”

A murmur rippled through the gathered Veyari.

Yorai stepped closer, eyes narrowing beneath the deep creases of his weatherworn face. “You wear her shadow,” he said, voice loud enough to carry over the gathered crowd. “But we do not follow shadows. If you claim her name, you must walk her path. You must bind the world as she once did.”

Telaryn met his gaze. Her voice was quiet, but it carried. “What must be done?”

Another elder stirred, but Yorai raised his hand, silencing them. Then he struck his carved rootwood staff into the frozen earth, snow crackling at the point of impact. “You came to us with blood on your hands and fire in your wake. You say the blade is awake. That she lives in you. But who witnessed the waking? Who saw the pact formed? None but your companions, none born of stone or sky. Tuaru gave his life on your word alone. We do not cast our future into such fog.”

A murmur rolled through the villagers like a rising wind. Some nodded. Others looked away.

“You dare speak of Tuaru like that?” Weylan snapped, stepping forward.

Yorai did not even glance at him. “I speak of the cost. He was one of our last true binders, a man who knew the pulse of the mountain. His death demands clarity, not blind reverence.”

He turned back to Telaryn. “If you are the Queen returned—not just her hand, but her soul—then your spirit must command the old forces. So did she bind the breath of winter and the bones of the mountain. So must you.”

He paused, letting the silence stretch like a blade between them.

“You will climb the sacred height of Mournpeak,” Yorai said. “You will stand where she stood. You will call to the spirits of air and of stone. And you will bind them—or you will be scattered by them. Only then will we follow.”

The crowd did not cheer. They did not jeer either. They only listened—still, breath held.

Sari’s lips parted. “Mournpeak…” she breathed, her eyes fixed on the horizon beyond the ridgeline. The highest point in the Mourning Peaks. Home to old spirits. Hostile ones.

Halven’s voice was low, bitter. “That’s a death sentence.”

But Telaryn’s expression never changed. Her red-rimmed eyes reflected the firelight like coals fed fresh blood.

“Then I’ll walk,” she said.

She didn’t look back.

---

C13S2 - Atop the mountai

The climb left blood in her boots.

Mournpeak, the sacred height, rose not like a mountain but like the carcass of a god—its flanks jagged with obsidian ribs, its ridges gnawed by endless winter. The breath of the summit stank of ozone and old ash, and as Telaryn neared the crest, the world grew quiet—not with peace, but with the terrible hush before something ancient opens its eyes.

Ashmire pulsed faintly against her spine. It thirsted, even here. Especially here.

The summit was a bowl of broken stone, ringed by leaning cairns that whispered in no wind. The snow did not fall, but circled, as if drawn into some slow, inevitable vortex. In the center of the bowl, an old sigil had been carved into the rock long ago and since worn smooth by countless storms—but some faint gleam of silver still clung to the runes, as though even time had not dared erase them entirely.

Telaryn stepped into the circle.

“I am Telaryn,” she said. Her voice echoed—once, then vanished as if devoured. “Queen’s blood in me. Doomblade at my hand. I call you.”

The air grew heavy.

Then came the wind.

Not a gust. Not a howl. A presence.

The storm descended like a living thing—its core a churning gyre of snow and sleet and thunder. It moved not with grace, but with intent, forming the shape of an impossible bird with wings a league wide, its feathers razors of frozen air. No eyes, but the sense of being watched by something that had once torn mountains down just to feel the tremor in its bones.

The wind spirit landed, and the mountain shuddered.

Opposite it, the earth cracked. Stone peeled open like flesh. From the cleft crawled something older. The mountain spirit was not shaped like a man or beast, but a mass of jagged shale, its limbs wide as walls, its chest a furnace of molten gold. Its breath hissed steam and crushed ice beneath it with each step. Moss grew and died across its surface in seconds. Lichen bloomed and blackened in time with its pulse.

It looked at her—and she felt her bones remembering being part of the earth.

Still, she stood tall. “I have come,” she said. “I bear the blade of your binder. The Queen who was.”

Ashmire pulsed in her hand, its edge weeping red light.

The wind spirit shrieked. A thousand voices at once—scorn, amusement, threat. It circled upward, talons of air dragging sparks from the cairns. The mountain spirit growled, a sound like two continents grinding together.

Their contempt was unspoken. But palpable.

They remembered the Queen.

And they did not kneel.

Telaryn gritted her teeth. She raised Ashmire, and for a moment the blade hissed like quenched metal, trying to wake the memory of domination etched into its blackened steel.

But the spirits had changed.

They were not the slaves of the old Queen anymore.

They surged.

The wind struck first, hurling her against the cairn wall. She hit hard, breath fleeing her lungs like smoke from a dying fire. Then the ground buckled beneath her—one great stone hand rising to crush her. She rolled, scrambled, Ashmire slicing sparks from the stone—but the spirits did not relent.

The storm cut her coat open in a dozen places. The cold bit deeper. Her blood felt slow, sluggish, doubtful.

Ashmire trembled.

Not with power. With hunger.

The whispers returned. Words not her own. Feed me. Prove me.

Telaryn staggered to her feet, raised the blade again—

—and the storm collapsed atop her.

Darkness. Wind. Screaming silence. The vision of herself drowning in sky, swallowed by clouds full of ash and teeth. A throne of stone sinking beneath waves of granite. A voice. Her voice? No. The Queen’s.

"You are not ready."

She fell.

The stone met her with indifference.

There, atop the sacred peak, where gods once bled and legends were forged, Telaryn of Talpis collapsed at the feet of powers she could not yet command.

The spirits watched.

And waited.

---

C13S3 - The Debate

The storm clawed at the longhouse like something alive. Wind howled through the eaves, dragging snow through the cracks. The fire sputtered low in the hearth—thin, flickering, its light the only warmth left in the room.

Four of them sat huddled around it, their shadows long and wavering across the rough-hewn walls.

Halven hunched forward, elbows on his knees, gaze fixed on the embers as if they might tell him a better future. He hadn’t spoken in some time, and when he finally did, his voice was low, hoarse.

“She’s not ready.”

Eris leaned back against the wall, arms crossed, one boot propped up beside the fire. Her face was carved in calm lines, but her fingers tapped against her arm, betraying an edge of tension.

“She has Ashmire,” she said. “She woke it. That counts for something.”

“It counts for fire,” Halven muttered. “It doesn’t count for wind. Or mountain. Or the kind of strength that doesn’t come from a blade.”

Sari stood, pacing. Her brow was drawn, and her hands worked at each other nervously—twisting a thread of leather around her wrist, then letting it slip. Her storm talismans jingled softly with each step.

“She shouldn’t have gone up there alone,” she said, half to herself. “The rites... they’re not just trials of power. They’re language. Spirit has to know you before it listens. The winds don’t bow to strangers.”

“She’s not a stranger,” came a young voice from the back.

They all turned. Weylan, younger than any of them, sat cross-legged on the floor with a half-mended piece of leather armor in his lap. His expression was calm, sure—not naïve, but solid.

“She’s Telaryn of Talpis. She crossed the Mourning Peaks. She survived the Keep. She killed a blood sorcerer with her own hands. If anyone can do this, she can.”

Halven’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t understand what’s up there, boy.”

“I understand enough,” Weylan replied, meeting his gaze. “She’s more than we thought. And I saw the look on your face when she stepped out of the Keep. You believed it then.”

Halven looked away. “Belief isn’t armor.”

Eris tilted her head toward Sari. “You’ve been quiet. Too quiet.”

Sari stopped pacing. “I’ve seen trials like this end in death. Not because the challenger was unworthy, but because they didn’t know how to speak to what they were facing. The spirits aren’t enemies—they’re forces. Old ones. Raw ones. You don’t just swing a sword at the wind.”

Halven’s mouth tightened. “Then she’s already dead.”

“No.” Sari looked to the door. “Not if I go.”

They stared at her.

“There’s an older law,” she continued, “from before our exile. When the first queens of the heights bound the sky to their will, they did not stand alone. They were guided. Aided. The rite demands strength, not solitude.”

Eris frowned. “You’d risk yourself?”

“She doesn’t speak the old tongue. She doesn’t know the binding ash, or the names the mountain remembers. But I do.”

Halven rose, slowly. “And the cost?”

Sari met his gaze. “High. But not as high as what happens if we lose her.”

Weylan stood too. “Then go. And bring her back.”

Sari turned, reaching for her pack, her satchel of storm salt and powdered obsidian, her charms of twisted bone and crystal. Her fingers shook as she tied her cloak, but her eyes were steady now.

“She is the Queen,” she said. “Even if the mountain doesn’t know it yet.”

Then, without another word, she stepped into the white roar beyond the door.

The wind swallowed her whole.

---

C13S4 - Bargain with the Storm

The storm was not made for mortals.

Each step scraped Sari's lungs raw. The slope was pure ice and crumbling stone, the wind slicing open the world with a shriek that never ended. Her breath froze on her lips; her fingers cracked inside her gloves. Still, she climbed. She climbed until her knees bled and her legs numbed and her voice vanished into the gale.

At last, the wind broke.

It didn’t stop—it withdrew.

Sari stumbled into the eye of the storm, a hollow ring of silence atop the jagged summit of Mournpeak. The snow no longer fell, but hovered—crystals suspended midair, unmoving, watching.

And in the center: Telaryn.

She lay half-buried in frost, one hand curled around Ashmire’s hilt, the other clawed against the stone as if trying to hold on to the world. Frost webbed across her lips. Her skin had gone pale blue, veins inked darker than blood. She was barely breathing.

Sari collapsed to her knees beside her.

“No,” she whispered. “Ryn—no, not like this.”

A whisper answered her. Then a second. Then more.

Shapes emerged—not from the storm, but of it. The first was formless, until it wasn’t: a shifting presence of shrieking gusts and spiraling frost, like a falcon of shattered ice. The second rose from the ground, slow and terrible—a living column of stone with a crown of basalt shards and arms thick as tree trunks. A third emerged last: invisible but felt, a pressure like the silence before a cliff falls, a cold so absolute it made the soul ache.

The spirits of air, stone, and ice.

Sari bowed. “I ask—no. I beg—your mercy. Your aid.”

They did not speak in words. But she felt them.

Why?

“To save her,” she said, voice breaking. “She is the Queen Returned. The one who bears Ashmire. If she dies, all is lost.”

The wind howled around her.

Why should we save the one who draws the blood-blade?

“She will restore balance. She will bring down the invaders. Return the land to its roots. Isn’t that what you want?”

Stone rumbled beneath her, unimpressed.

Balance was broken by her kind long ago.

“She is not them!” Sari pleaded. “She was born of the lowlands, but the mountains remember her. She is your heir! She climbed to meet you—”

She fell.

That silenced her.

The wind tore at her clothes now, testing her weakness. The stone leaned forward, shedding dust like ancient bones. Ice pressed close to her heart, chilling every word before she could say it.

She tried again.

“Then take me,” she gasped. “I offer my life for hers. I offer my body, my soul—my service—”

We do not want death.
We want return.

Sari blinked. “What do you mean?”

The stone stirred.

A place stolen. Taken from mountain. Hollowed by fire and iron. Winter’s Edge.

The wind coiled tighter.
Restore it. Erase it. Let ice and stone and root reclaim what was ours.

Sari hesitated. Her thoughts flashed to the refugees, the warmth of its halls, the lives saved there…

And then to Telaryn, barely breathing.

She bowed her head, heart breaking, frost on her lashes.

“I swear it. I swear it by blood and breath. Winter’s Edge will fall. The stone will return.”

The pact sealed.

The air cracked like thunder, and the wind dove into Ashmire like a serpent made of snow and scream. The stone pressed its weight into the blade’s spine, warping the metal with veins of ancient silver. Ice webbed the crossguard, bleeding frost into the grip.

Sari reeled, nearly falling—blood streaming from her nose and ears.

But Telaryn gasped.

Her fingers clutched the blade. Her eyes opened, shining with crimson fire.

And the wind whispered, this time in awe.

Queen.

---

C13S5 - Conquest of Spirits

The wind faltered.

Not silence—but a pause. A gasp, caught between worlds.

Telaryn stirred.

Where frost had bitten deep, blood now pulsed again. Where her skin had blistered blue, a flush crept back in—like coals under ash. Ashmire’s blade throbbed in her grip, its surface no longer metal alone, but streaked with lines of frozen light and molten silver. It exhaled heat and frost both. The mountain rumbled.

Sari knelt beside her, hand outstretched, lips parted—but stilled.

Because what rose from the stone was no longer just Telaryn.

Her hair had streaked white, blood curled like ribbons beneath her eyes. Her breath steamed out in perfect spirals. Her eyes—gods above, those eyes—were fixed on the storm not as a victim, but as a force returning home.

A queen.

“They test me,” Telaryn murmured, her voice layered now—hers, and not hers. “But I did not climb for mercy.”

The air spirit shrieked from above—its falcon-form breaking into shards of whirling frost and slicing wind. The mountain spirit rose fully now, a titan of broken stone and churning roots. Its eyes glowed with mountain fire, unmoved.

Telaryn stepped forward. Not hesitating. Not praying.

Commanding.

Ashmire lifted, and the blade seemed to stretch—too long, too alive. It pulsed not just with hunger, but ecstasy. When it met the frost-born falcon, the storm split open. Wind and ice turned inward, funneled through the steel, howling as it vanished into her grip.

Telaryn moaned—not in pain, but something near to rapture.

The mountain spirit charged, one colossal arm raised. Ashmire met it not in defense, but with a cleave born of fury and fate. The blade howled. Stone cracked. The spirit shuddered as its arm broke at the joint—then crumbled, falling to its knees.

“Submit,” Telaryn whispered.

And it did.

The stone bent to her. The air no longer fought. Snow whirled around her in reverent circles, as if drawn to her. Not even a queen. Something older.

Sari watched in silence, chest heaving, heart racing.

This was not the girl who had kissed Alisha in the cold or wept for Tuaru in the ash.

This was a queen carved in myth, a creature made of resolve and ruin. Conqueror of stone and sky. And Sari felt her breath catch in her throat—not with fear, but with something achingly close to awe.

Ryn turned, faintly smiling. Blood-mist clung to her lips like a mark of blessing. Her gaze met Sari’s, and for a moment, the storm faded away entirely.

“I told them I would not die,” she said softly. “Not here.”

Sari couldn’t speak. Her legs moved before her thoughts caught up, falling in beside her—not behind her. Her pulse throbbed with heat and reverence and something too dangerous to name.

Wind coiled around Telaryn’s shoulders.

Stone trembled beneath her steps.

And Sari followed—not as friend, not as guide—but as something more dangerous still:

A believer.

---

C13S6 - Reckogning

They descended the mountain as dawn broke pale across the Mourning Peaks.

Snow crunched beneath their steps, soft and slow. The wind curled around Telaryn like a living thing—blood-scented, restless. At her heels, the earth no longer trembled in defiance but in deference. The trail behind them was streaked with melted ice and ash.

Sari walked just behind her, lips parted as if to speak but saying nothing. Her eyes never left Telaryn's back.

At the village's edge, the Veyari had gathered. Cloaked in furs, silent, they watched as the pair emerged from the mist—one cloaked in stormlight and power, the other marked with frostbite and strain. All eyes fell upon Ashmire, which trailed dark mist from its edge, red and silver runes faintly aglow.

No words were spoken.

Until Yorai stepped forward.

The elder's staff struck the stone with a sound too loud, too sharp. “You return, blade-bearer,” he said, “but do not mistake storm for sanctity.”

The wind faltered.

“You claim the spirits,” he growled. “But I feel them now. Twisted. Bleeding. Wrong.”

He turned to the crowd, arms outstretched. “She has not tamed them. She has corrupted them. What walked that peak was not a Queen, but a blight. Look at her!”

He gestured at her eyes—dark now, nearly black with threads of red at the edges. Her skin shone faintly with something beneath it, veins mapped in silver like ancient roots.

“Would you let the blood of our ancestors bend to that?”

The crowd wavered—fearful, uncertain.

Telaryn did not speak.

She stepped forward.

The wind hissed. Yorai raised his staff in warning.

“Do not—!”

Ashmire whispered.

A flash of silver and shadow. A single breathless lunge.

The elder’s words caught in his throat—because his throat was no longer whole. Blood burst like steam from his neck, red mist curling into the blade before his body even struck the stone.

He didn’t scream.

There was no time.

Ashmire drank.

Telaryn exhaled, the sound low—pleasure, perhaps, or something darker. Her shoulders relaxed. Her wounds, minor and buried beneath furs, sealed. Her breath steadied. Color flushed into her cheeks.

She tilted her head, eyes closed, savoring it.

The vitality. The price.

When her eyes opened again, they gleamed like garnets set in obsidian.

“I made no vow to spare liars,” she said. Her voice was calm. Measured. “He challenged the Queen. Let the mountain judge if he was right.”

No one moved.

Not Halven. Not Eris. Not Weylan, whose eyes shone like those of a boy who had seen a goddess descend.

The Veyari knelt—first in silence, then all at once. A low chant started. Not loud. Not fervent.

Just inevitable.

Sari stood still, heart pounding. Watching.

Not afraid.

Entranced.

---

C13S7 - The Banner Rises

The flakes of ash left behind the elders body still steamed on the snow-choked stones when the first horn blew.

It rose low and distant—from the heights above the shrine, echoing along the ice-ribbed cliffs like a spirit’s cry. Then another answered, nearer this time. And then a third, brassy and defiant, from the frozen watchtower that overlooked the valley.

It was not the mourning call.

It was the call to assemble.

From hidden paths and snow-worn barracks, from the roots of the mountain and the old blood-holds of the Veyari, they came—hundreds strong. Cloaked in shadow-fur and ice-threaded linen, war paint already on their faces, spirit-marks gleaming faintly in the lowlight like veins of silver through flesh. Hunters. Shamans. Spirit-bound warriors and fire-haired youths not yet blooded. They arrived without fanfare, but each step on the ice was a declaration. Each stare, a vow.

They came for her.

Telaryn stood atop the shrine dais, framed by the cragged spires and the flickering torches set into the bones of ancient antlers. Ashmire was strapped across her back, wrapped in dark leather and seals of bone that hummed quietly in the air, as though the blade itself breathed. The wind curled tight around her legs, and where her shadow fell, the frost pulled back.

The blood-scented wind, ever circling her since the mountaintop, had become her veil.

Beside her, Sari stood straight and still, hair tied back with storm-kissed cords. The mark of her pact burned faintly beneath the skin of her neck, pulsing like a second heartbeat. Her gaze never left Telaryn—not now with awe, but with a reverence shaded by something deeper. Desire. Devotion. The Queen she had waited for was no myth now. She stood before her.

Halven lingered near the rear of the gathering, hands buried in his coat. He watched not with adoration, but with wary clarity. His breath misted in the air, his expression unreadable. Whatever his doubts, they were buried now beneath the weight of something undeniable. This woman—this blade-witch, this spirit-bound warlord—would change the world. Whether for ruin or rebirth, he could not yet say.

Eris stood not far from the front, kneeling as an elder spirit-weaver smeared a red sigil across her brow. It marked her as a shield-bearer of the new Queen. She did not flinch at the heat. She bore it like memory.

Weylan—young, earnest, burning—had already taken a knee at Telaryn’s side. His cloak bore her glyph, stitched hastily from dyed thread and cord. When she turned her head, ever so slightly, he looked up at her not as a commander, but as something holy. Her squire. Her swordarm to come. His eyes never wavered.

Then came the banner.

It rose slowly from a pole of carved bone and ancient cedar, hoisted by two shrine warriors whose faces were painted with black tears. A reworked relic, torn and reforged—blood-red silk on black field, stitched with the sigil that had once struck terror across empires: the flame without fire. The blade that drank light. The mark of the Queen Reborn.

It snapped once in the wind—and the mountains went still.

No voice broke the silence.

Only knees bending—hundreds at once. The sound like snow breaking from the boughs of ancient trees.

Telaryn stepped forward into the silence, letting the wind curl around her like a coronation robe. Her hair, once dark, was streaked white now—not with age, but with marking. The blade had changed her. And more would follow.

When she spoke, her voice cut the air like a knife drawn from frost.

“No more hiding in hollows. No more kneeling to distant kings and foreign blades. The blood of Talpis still lives—and it walks with me.”

A gust howled around her, not cold, but warm with breath and iron.

“I am Telaryn of the Flame. Heir of the storm. Wielder of the blood-bound blade. The Queen does not return by fate. She is forged.”

She drew Ashmire half from its sheath.

It gleamed like a shard of darkness. It drank the torchlight.

A moment of utter stillness.

And then, like the mountains themselves exhaled—

A cry rose from the crowd. Wild, primal, triumphant.

Swords struck shields. Spears thudded into snow. A war-drum pounded from the high ridges, and the flamecatchers ignited—lines of oil and powdered salt tracing the cliff faces in searing glyphs that spelled Return and Blood Oath in the old tongue. Fire danced up the stone like a second sunrise.

Below, warriors knelt before elders to take the war mark. Veyari warpriests whispered to spirits, drawing sigils in flame and powder, marking flesh with pact-runes and oaths. Even children helped, carrying iron-bladed arrows and jugs of mountain ink from tent to tent.

Above, the Queen watched.

The mountain no longer hid her.

It rose with her.