I stepped forward, boots crunching through ancient ice and old blood. The air grew heavier, gnashing out with hungry teeth.
Shattered helms watched us from beneath the snow.
Frost-burnt bodies lay sealed within crystalline tombs, eternally captured mid-fall, mid-strike, mid-scream.
Exactly as I had left them.
I froze in my tracks, memories assaulting me. The sky blackening as Skaldwings poured over the pass in numbers we had never before faced.
Heard the ripple of surprise run through our ranks when other shifters joined them. United, disciplined.Wrong.
Felt the first crack of unease settle into my chest as I counted bodies that should not have been there. Lines that stretched too far. Shadeclaws. Lupines. Thornharts. Unseelie dominions that should never have joined together.
I saw my father step forward, ice forming at his command, the opening volley ripping through the Unseelie front ranks, clean and devastating.
Then a brief, foolish surge of certainty. The sense that Winter had already won.
Until the Unseelie returned his attack with weapons made of rowanwood, crafted with poison and crystals, tipped in unrelenting cold-iron.
I heard the first scream when a soldier’s mana failed him entirely, smelled iron and frost as cold-iron blades cut through shields that should have been unbreakable.
I tried to move.
Saw ironfrost rise in my path as Eryx stepped in front of me.
“I have my orders, Your Highness.” His expression was unyielding. Remorseful all the same. Understanding in a way I refused to comprehend.
The spear glanced off my father’s arm, hardly a wound at all, yet he fell anyway.
I never saw him die. Eryx blocked my view as Skaldwings descended, but I felt it in the way the land shuddered.
I wanted to break free of the memory, but I blinked and saw my mother turn toward me. Felt her shield snap into place around my position as hers failed.
Felt her mana burn out protecting me instead of herself. Eryx was too busy defending me to shield her from view that time, so I watched as the sword pierced into her skin, saw her blood run crimson across the ice, her crown tumbling into the pristine snow.
And when the power of Winter surged into me, ancient and unfathomable, I knew what I was supposed to do. Give back to the land. Balance. Reassure. Trust in the Shard Mother and Winter itself to save us.
But both of my parents were dead in Winter’s embrace.
I saw the Skaldwings descending again, and I made a choice. It was taboo, forbidden, something even the most power-hungry of my ancestors never would have dared to do for fear of risking Winter’s fury. But Winter had never been so close to the brink of ruin.
So, I dug into the river of power running rampant underneath the land… And instead of giving back, Itook.
Chapter 33
Everly
Iwas trapped in Draven’s memories as surely as he was, reeling from all the things I had suspected but had never truly understood.
The violent wave of ice that had poured out of him in every direction without restraint, spiralling out of his control. Eryx’s ironfrost shield rising just in time to save the soldiers closest—but not the rest of them. Not the village that was far too close to the battlefield, or the endless line of Unseelie that marched from the other side.
I stared at the corpses that still stood like frozen sentries in a battle that had long been lost.
On some level, I had known that from Draven’s vivid dream-memories, but it wasn’t always easy to know how much of those were true and how much were warped by nightmares.
But this… his memories, this place, it was worse than a nightmare.
The Frost Grave Pass unfolded before me like a graveyard carved from the bones of winter itself. Wordlessly, I walked as if in a trance, my boots crunching through layers of brittle snowthat felt too loud in a place that had already swallowed all its screams.
