The skathryn shifted on Everly’s shoulder, claws pricking through leather as she turned her head toward the east. She clicked once, low and insistent, wings tightening as if the decision had already been made.
I hesitated for only a moment. East had never been a direction I favored… not when every ghost of my past lay at the end of our eastern borders.
But the skathryn insisted, and I had learned over the past few days that ignoring her rarely ended well. So east we went.
We broke the icewalk at the next village. Even as the world blurred into frost and motion, Batty remained rigid atop Everly’s shoulder, her attention fixed on something beyond my sight. Near the end of the walk, she stilled abruptly and gave a sharp, cutting sound until I freed us from the icewalk.
When the world reformed around us, the devastation stole the breath from even my lungs. The village had been torn open from below, the ground split wide as if something enormous had passed beneath it and forced its way upward.
Nearly half the houses lay tilted toward a yawning fissure, their foundations sheared away. Frost-blackened beams sagged beneath collapsed roofs, and doors hung loose and hollow, framing nothing but shadow.
Everly stepped through the ruin with careful, deliberate attention. Her gaze traced the hooked gouges lining the soil.
“There were monsters in the Wilds, too” she murmured, her voice turning thin and almost brittle. “Things that hunted us. But this… Draven, nothing I saw there compares to this.”
She stared at a half-collapsed cottage, its roof caved inward, frost-blackened claw marks slashing down the walls. And for an instant, barely a breath, I saw her flinch. A flash of rememberedterror sparked behind her eyes, raw and sharp. She wasn’t seeing this village.
She had the same haunted expression now as she always did when she was thinking of her sister’s estate. When she could still hear the screams of the Wretches and smell the rot of the Tharnok’s breath.
She hadn’t seen this kind of horror in the Wilds because this kind of horror didn’t exist there. And it hadn’t always existed in Winter either…
That was my fault. But I hadn’t found a way to tell her that yet.
I pressed a hand against a shattered doorframe. The wood being splintered outward showed that something had burst from the inside, tearing through everything that stood between it and its prey.
“As long as there have been Seelie, and Unseelie, there have been monsters.” I said. “But yes, they are worse now, in Winter, at least.”
Everly searched my expression for several long moments before asking her next question. “Worse since when?”
I crouched and brushed my gloved fingers across the jagged claw mark frozen into the snow. The ice responded with a low, mournful hum. An old resonance, like a memory stirring in its sleep.
Ice had the ability to remember things the living try to forget.
It kept a tight hold on whatever sins and tragedies had been pressed into its depths. Trapping them beneath layers of cold like secrets waiting to be discovered. Touch it long enough, and it will whisper them back to you.
Closing my eyes, I called to the ice, listening as the distant echo of screams drifted up from the ground. I could see the ground split open beneath frightened feet that were too slow,too stunned to run. I watched as a Korythid erupted from the floorboards in a storm of claws and venom.
“Did something change after the battle?” Everly pressed gently, her voice calling me back to the present.
I pulled my hand away from the snow.
“Was there a moment you can remember where things changed?” she continued. “Something that made them different? Anything that might help us understand them, or help us figure out how to stop them or track?—”
She stopped when she saw my face.
Something inside me cinched tight, locking into place with the slow, inevitable shift of a glacier grinding to a halt.
Because yes. Something had changed. And I had been the faultline where that change cracked open.
Me and the shards-forsaken Frostgrave Battlefield.
I didn’t answer. Couldn’t. Not with the field that haunted my nights now looming like a shadow just beyond the horizon.
A villager staggered into view before she could try again. He bowed so fast he nearly toppled over, his gaze flicking between us with a dizzying blend of awe and terror.
“Your Majesties,” he rasped. His eyes caught on Everly, widening with a fragile sort of hope. “You came.”
Everly stepped toward him, voice steady despite the devastation around us. “We’re tracking the beast that attacked your village. Do you have somewhere safe to go?”
