They’d chosen this place for its chill, for the way winter clung to the peaks year-round, for the way the wind howled through the passes like the voices of the dead.
Ravens had always nested here. Even before the Keep. Even before my bloodline learned to speak with them.
The Shadow-Steed passed through the gates without slowing, hooves striking sparks from the black stone courtyard.
Servants scattered from our path, all of them avoiding my gaze. I was used to it.
I had been since I was old enough to understand what these eyes meant, what this gift cost.
I dismounted first and extended a hand to my new bride.
She took it. Her fingers were cold through my glove, far colder than the mountain air allowed. Corpses had more warmth in their flesh.
But she wasn’t a corpse. Corpses didn’t walk. Corpses didn’t speak. Corpses didn’t look at me with those gray-green eyes and say ‘I choose the cold’ like they meant it.
I helped her down from the steed and released her hand. Let the second sight slide over my vision distorting the air.
The world shifted.
Colors drained away, replaced by the spectrum I’d been born seeing: the spectrum of life and death.
My servants glowed gold, their auras bright and warm, flickering with the steady rhythm of beating hearts.
The Shadow-Steed was gray, as all constructs were. It was neither alive nor dead, simply existing.
The ravens circling overhead blazed silver-white, their souls primordial and knowing, touched by the void between worlds.
And my bride.
My bride was nothing.
I stared at the space where her aura should have been and searched for the flicker of gold that marked the living or the pallor that marked the dead.
Found neither. Where other creatures burned with the light of their souls, she was static. Blur. Empty air shaped like a woman.
A hole in the fabric of existence, walking around in a thin dress.
I had never seen anything like it.
Not in all my years as death-speaker. Not in all the corpses I’d touched, the spirits I’d communed with, the creatures of the void I’d bargained with in the dark hours before dawn.
She wasn’t cloaked; I would have sensed the magic. She wasn’t undead, for the unliving had their own signature.
She wasn’t a construct or a golem or any of the hundred artificial things that walked Alia Terra wearing human faces.
She was simply... absent.
A void given form.
I let the second sight fade. Looked at her with the eyes I’d inherited from my father.
I should have lookedbefore I bid. I always looked. But something about the way she’d stood on that platform, still as stone, untouched by the wolf’s threat, had made me reach for the black iron before I’d thought to reach for the sight.
And now she stood in the courtyard with her thin dress whipping in the wind, her pale gold hair tangled from the ride, her skin almost luminous against the stone.
“My lord.”
Morveth’s voice cut through my thoughts. The old priestess descended the Keep’s main steps, her black robes dragging on the stone, her silver hair braided with raven feathers.
