“It would make sense,” I finished. “Even a Korythid wouldn’t risk molten stone.”
My mind flicked back to Soren’s flames, how they’d melted the Korythid’s flesh beneath its armored plates once we’d killed it.
If something hotter still lurked below… it could terrify even a Korythid into the branches.
“And I would take an underground volcano over the other possibility,” I murmured.
“Which is?”
“That something more powerful than a Korythid is moving beneath the ice."
Everly’s eyes widened a fraction. She didn’t joke this time as she considered it.
“How many monsters have you hunted?” she asked, voice quieter now, as though afraid the trees themselves might be listening.
“Hundreds,” I replied. “Thousands.” The numbers blurred together in my mind… faces, claws, fangs, blood. “The number doesn’t matter anymore.”
Her dark brows pulled together. “Why not?”
I straightened, brushing frost from my gloves, eyes sweeping the treeline.
“Because for every one I kill,” I said, “three more rise. And lately… even that feels like an underestimate.”
The wind shifted, carrying a faint rattle of ice-choked branches.
She shivered, but I had a feeling it wasn’t from the cold.
When I held my hand out to her, she took it wordlessly.
We moved through the ice again, following the wandering path of a monster whose movements I could not yet predict.
Not every village had fallen. Some still stood, scarred but intact, their people moving with the brittle efficiency of those who had learned to listen for danger. They spoke of Tharnoks and Brakhounds, of claws and teeth and night raids that leftblood in the snow and wards fraying at the edges. But each account faltered in the same way.
There was always something else.
A sound too deep to belong to any known beast. The ground shuddering beneath their feet. A shape glimpsed far beyond the treeline, so vast it distorted the frostlight before slipping from sight. Some swore they had felt it moving beneath the earth, a presence that did not hunt so much as pass through.
We icewalked from village to village, following those fractured reports and the silence that followed them.
The wind grew harsher the further east we went. Thinner, too. Sharper. And the air tasted like old storms and older grief. Whether it was the altitude, my mana, or the memories stirring at the back of my mind, I didn’t know. I never could tell when it came to this place.
A vast white basin stretched across the horizon, its uneven terrain fractured like shattered glass. Ice mounds swelled and dipped in unnatural patterns. Half-buried armor glinted like fallen stars. Shattered blades protruded from the snow, forever mid-swing.
A graveyard of Seelie and Unseelie soldiers.
The Frost Grave Pass.
My stomach twisted. The breath hitched in my lungs.
Of course this was where the trail led us. Right back to the beginning.
Right where the ground had split under the weight of an impossible choice. Where I had taken more power than any fae should ever wield, and where something old and terrible had awoken in answer.
Despite myself, and needing to find the Korythids for Nevara’s sake, I couldn’t help but hope we had lost the trail somewhere along the way. That perhaps the skathryn wasn’t as equipped at tracking the monsters as Everly said. That they wereanywhere other than this cursed field where my mother had taken her final breath.
Everly drew a shaky breath. “Draven… this is?—”
“Yes.” The word scraped out of me.
