In the armory adjoining my quarters, I found my blade—lean, pale steel forged from river-ice and moonfire. I drew it halfway from its sheath, letting the sound of metal against frost echo through the chamber. The rhythm helped. I had done this since childhood whenever temper threatened to breach its boundaries. Measured movements. Counted breaths. Focus.
The blade steamed faintly in the cold. I traced its edge with a gloved thumb until the pulse under my skin slowed to match the frostlight’s beat. When it finally steadied, I sheathed the sword again. The calm that followed was thin and brittle, but it held.
Until the thought ofhersurfaced.
The mortal in the gardens, defiance glittering in her eyes. The warmth that clung to her words even as they cut. I forced the memory aside, but it remained like heat trapped beneath glass.
By the time I reached my chambers, the calm I’d carved from discipline was already thinning.
Frostlight trembled along the ceiling beams, dimmer than usual. The palace reacted to mood; I should have mastered mine by now. Instead, the air felt close, heavy, touched by a warmth that shouldn’t exist this deep in Winter.
I stripped off my gloves, one finger at a time, setting them precisely on the table beside the mirror. Control lived in repetition—movement without thought. When precision failed,everything else followed.
The mirror waited, tall and rimmed in runes that reflected memory, not image. Once it had shown my victories: battles won, treaties sealed, Kael’s first oath beside mine. Now it caught only fragments—ghosted shapes of things I refused to name.
I reached for the small bowl of frost dust on the shelf and scattered a handful across the glass. It hissed and bloomed into thin spirals of white smoke that should have revealed discipline, lineage, purpose. Instead, the shapes twisted and re-formed into her.
Katria Vale, standing amid the frozen gardens. Bare-handed. Laughing at my restraint as if she could see through it.
I clenched my jaw. “This is illusion,” I said aloud. “My mind, not my mirror.”
The frostlight ignored me. Her outline brightened, hair moving with a wind that didn’t exist. She turned—smiling faintly, as though hearing me—and repeated words she’d said hours ago:You look past me, like you’re afraid to see what’s actually there.
I should have dispelled it. A single touch of magic would have erased the image. But my hand wouldn’t move. The pulse in my wrist answered the pulse in the frostlight, the two rhythms syncing until the whole room throbbed with it.
“You are nothing,” I whispered, unsure if I meant her reflection or my own loss of control.
The air snapped colder, and the frostlight guttered. The image flickered and repeated itself, that same curve of her mouth, the same defiance. Something in me cracked with it.
I slammed my palm against the glass.
Frost spider-webbed across the surface, white veins racing outward. A sound like distant thunder rolled through the room, then silence. The mirror didn’t shatter—it refused to. It simply held the crack, glowingfaintly at its center where my hand had struck. Heat prickled beneath the glove; when I lifted it, a thin trace of frost clung to my skin, shaped like the impression of smaller fingers.
I took one step back, then another, until my shoulders met the wall. The urge to draw my sword flared—reflex, not need—but I didn’t. Violence would only make the mirror remember more.
Instead, I crossed to the window and opened it. The air bit hard enough to hurt, blessedly clean. I stayed there until the tremor in my hand subsided.
This was what control had become: a ritual of exhaustion.
Still, I couldn’t look away from the reflection on the far wall. Through the fractured glass, light bent around her image until it looked almost alive. Her eyes—only frostlight—watched me back.
“I am not afraid of you,” I said, though the room’s silence made it sound like a confession.
The crack in the mirror glowed once, answering.
The mirror began to hum.
Not a sound, a low vibration. The frost along its frame lifted like breath on glass. I should have summoned a ward, called a guard,done something. But I only stood there, watching the crack widen a fraction, silver light leaking through like the first line of dawn.
The air smelled faintly of wild honey and smoke. That scent did not belong to Winter.
Then a voice spoke, calm and ageless, neither male nor female. “You call her danger to hide your own.”
The words slid through the room without echo.
“Show yourself,” I said. My breath steamed.
Light gathered within the mirror, coalescing into the outline of a figure robed in starlight—taller than any fae, faceless, constantly shifting betweenforms. When it spoke again, the glass rippled around the sound. “The frost trembles because of you, Frostbound Heir.”
