But I stepped back. The cold rushed in to reclaim the space, searing in its purity. Water slid down the pillar like tears.
“I warned you about warmth,” I said quietly.
“And yet you keep bringing it.”
“Because I forget what it costs.”
I turned before I could betray myself further. Each step away restored the frost and took something else with it.
When I reached the end of the corridor, I didn’t look back.“Sleep, mortal,” I’d said softly—because if I stayed another heartbeat, I wouldn’t be able to leave.
The memory dissolved slowly, like snow reluctant to melt.For a while I couldn’t tell if the heat on my skin was from that night or from the pulse still echoing beneath my gloves.
The corridor had grown brighter. Not warm—Winter never yielded—but alive. Thin seams of light spidered through the frost, pulsing to the rhythm of my heartbeat. Each breath I took made the runes along the walls flicker, faint threads of silver weaving and unweaving in time with me.
I pressed a palm against the stone. It answered. Frostlight raced outward in a ring, then flared back, like the Hold itself exhaled.
“Stop,” I whispered.
The light dimmed, hesitant, almost obedient. Perhaps it was a trick.
For centuries, I’d believed the Court’s magic immutable—a current that flowed around me, neverfromme. Now it bent with every pulse in my veins, responding not to command but to emotion. To her.
I drew my hand back. The glow followed the motion, tendrils of frost forming delicate whorls that mimicked the shape of my breath. A low humrose from the walls—a sound too low for mortal ears, the sound of the Hold remembering itself.
Rather than fear, I felt something dangerously close to wonder.
Fenrir stirred on the other side of the door, nails scraping once against the stone. The hound sensed it too—the shift, the imbalance, the faint tremor running through the foundations.
This was how realms died: not with storms but with a heartbeat out of rhythm.
I shut my eyes and tried to summon distance—the discipline that had always saved me. Breathe. Contain. Silence. But every time I steadied the air, her image slipped between the cracks—the feel of her mouth, the sound of my name on her tongue, a tongue I had tasted. The warmth that had melted a lifetime of cold.
A faint crack split the floor at my feet. Light spilled through it, pale and pulsing. I crouched, tracing it with one finger. The moment my skin met the edge, the line branched like lightning, racing down the corridor. Frost patterns burst open across the walls—intricate and uncontrolled.
Magic reacting to emotion. My father would call it contamination. I called it proof.
“Stop,” I said again, louder this time.
The light shuddered once and retreated, dimming to a dull gleam. But the echo stayed, humming in the marrow of the Hold. The castle had learned something new tonight, and I doubted it would forget.
I rose, bracing a hand against the wall until the tremor in my arm subsided. Somewhere deep in the ice, I could hear the faint groan of shifting pressure, like mountains settling. The magic of Winter was restless now. It knew the taste of warmth, and it wanted more.
That didn’t bode well.
I looked toward the door that separated me from her. Through the frost I could almost sense her breathing—slow, steady, human. The thought steadied me and destroyed me all at once.
I was supposed to be her warden. Instead, I’d become her guardian.
I pressed my forehead to the cold wall, letting the chill bite until it cleared my vision. For the first time in centuries, I envied the ice: its stillness, its certainty, its inability to feel.
A faint whisper rippled through the corridor—not sound, exactly, but meaning.The Veil stirs.
I straightened. The frostlight along the ceiling flared once, then steadied. The voice had been the Hold itself—or maybe the Dreamstone far below, echoing through the ice. Either way, it was warning me. The Veil between realms was shifting again, and somehow, impossibly, it pulsed in time with my heart.
How did she find the Dreamstone? We’d spent months searching for it, and it had been beneath our Skadar Hold all along? How did none of us sense it? Yet she—a human—had. And not only that … I didn’t think she realized it, but that glow beneath her skin, where the stone had touched her, proved one thing: it had bonded with her.
I’d thought I could guard her. Now I understood the truth: I couldn’t even guard the world from what I felt.
