“She’s alive. That’s rare here.”
He started for the door, pausing long enough to glance back. “Try not to freeze the next mortal you speak to. The Court’s getting bored.”
“Kael.”
He turned, one brow raised.
“Keep your distance from her.”
He smiled, wicked and knowing. “If you wanted distance, Brother, you wouldn’t have chosen her chamber beside yours.”
The door closed behind him with a lazy swing, leaving the frost humming in his wake.
Silence pressed close after Kael’s footsteps faded.The frostfire guttered, throwing long shadows over the floor. I didn’t move to feed it. The cold was easier company than truth.
He was right about one thing. The frost had begun to hum again—soft, uncertain, like something searching for its rhythm.It had a pattern now, faint but insistent, beating against the inside of my skull.
I tried to lose myself in reports. Numbers. Patrol routes. Maps of fractures along the Veil’s border. Logic. Order. The things that kept the world still.But every line I wrote slipped toward chaos. Every stroke of the quill curved wrong.
When I looked down, I saw her name written there instead of coordinates.
I stared at it until the ink froze. The frost crawled outward from the page as if the word itself carried warmth the ice wanted to smother. I folded the parchment sharply, tossing it into the frostfire.
It didn’t burn blue.It burned gold.
The light flared across the walls, alive and wrong and blindingly beautiful. And for one breath, the frost didn’t resist it. It drank it in.Then the flames died, leaving behind only the smell of scorched ink and something sweeter, like the echo of summer.
I stood still until the last spark faded.
Somewhere deep in the keep, the frost groaned. Not from strain—but from awakening. A sound older than breath, rising from the foundations themselves.
A knock broke through it.Two measured taps. Too soft to be a guard.
I crossed the room and opened the door.
A courier stood there, eyes downcast, skin pale from the cold. He bowed quickly and held out a scroll sealed in silver wax—the mark of the Frostfather’s direct command.
“His Majesty requests,” the courier said, voice trembling, “that the mortal be presented before the Court.”
I didn’t take the scroll at first. I just stared at the seal, the veins of frost tracing through the wax like cracks in ice.
“Requests,” I repeated. The word tasted wrong.
When I finally broke the seal, the frostlight dimmed—as if even the walls knew what it meant.
Let the mortal stand before Winter. Let their chill break her.
I read it twice. The second time, the letters seemed to shimmer, the ink crawling faintly as if alive.
By the time I looked up, the courier was already gone.
The frostfire had gone cold, the room steeped in shadow.Outside, the wind howled low against the towers, and for an instant, I swore I heard a voice threaded through it—distant, melodic, familiar.
A woman’s voice.
Kaelith.
It was gone before I could be sure I’d heard it at all.
