The Winter bodies came first—soldiers frozen mid-strike, mid-terror. Draven didn’t look at those at all, the allies who were caught in the wave of mana he hadn’t accounted for, casualties of the very kingdom they had shown up to fight for.
We walked more quickly then, still looking for any sign of the creature that brought us here. But I froze when we got to the Skaldwings.
Their faces were immortalized in expressions so stark they hollowed out something inside my chest. Some looked fierce even in death, lips curled back in defiance, claws out, wings flared wide as if they’d been fighting the very sky. Others lay shattered across the ground, scattered like broken glass, as though they’d been struck midair and dropped with no mercy at all.
It was as if a single tidal wave of ice had swept over the pass, erasing an entire battle in one impossible breath.
Frost coated everything. Trees. Stone. Even the air felt crystallized, sharp enough to cut my lungs. And there—standing in the middle of the devastation, just before the ancient line where Unseelie lands began—was a structure.
Ornate. Unblemished.
Beautiful in a way that didn’t belong here.
It rose from the snow like a relic of another world, carved pristinely from translucent ice. Every line was elegant, deliberate, untouched by the rough, wind-ravaged shapes around it. Years of frost hadn’t dulled its edges. It gleamed faintly in the pale light, cold and perfect.
It wasn’t until I saw the single crimson-tinged rose set into the center that realization struck me.
This wasn’t just any building. It was a tomb.
“Your parents?” My voice was barely above a whisper, and still it felt too loud for this hallowed space.
I hadn’t thought it possible for the air to grow colder, but a deeper chill settled in at my question. Draven shook his head once, sharply.
“My mother’s,” he corrected shortly. “There was nothing left of my father to bury.”
What would it have been like, forced to fill his imposing shoes at the age of sixteen, if not for the massive display of power that was this battle?
So many times, Draven had told me he ruled the court with an iron fist because he had to. Seeing this memory, I wondered if that was truer than I had allowed before.
I wanted to ask more, but my eyes were drawn back to the corpses of the Skaldwings. Not just them, though. Shadeclaws were frozen with their panther-like claws still flexed for battle, and the massive forms of the Lupines rose above like the broken spires of a fallen kingdom.
The battle had ended in a single instant when Draven had tapped into the ley lines themselves and siphoned power from them. Was that how he had known to siphon my power away?
“All of this was possible… because you used the power of Winter?” My voice was a whisper that cut through the unnatural hush like a blade.
Draven’s features tightened, and I heard his correction in my head.
Not just used.Stole.
I swallowed.That’s why she punished you.
With the monsters, and then…
No wonder he had hated me. I must have felt like yet another punishment to him—the bride who was supposed to be his salvation, arriving just in time to demolish the last fragile thread of his hope.
His mouth tightened. “According to Nevara, the Shard Mother would never stoop to punishment. She says it merely is. The balance of the land was upset when I took from it, and that was the same source of power that kept the frostbeasts in check.”
That was why he needed mana to give back, to restore the order, though I wasn’t sure why the Shard Mother wouldn’t accept her own power back.
I opened my mouth to ask, then closed it just as fast. Because we weren’t alone anymore.
Behind us had sounded the softestcrackof ice, light enough that it might have been a rodent or a stray cat, except that it was too deliberate.Too close.
Frost damn it all.We had been too distracted by the gruesome history of this place and all the demons it unearthed.
Draven spun around at the same time that I did.
I braced myself to face the Korythid, but somehow what I found was worse. It was an entirely different monster from my past, one who wore a far more beautiful face.
