It’s beautiful. Terrifyingly, impossibly beautiful, in the way that mountains are beautiful—vast and ancient and utterly indifferent to the small creatures that crawl across their slopes.
The Guardian has lived here for seven hundred years. Has watched the sun set on this fortress more than a quarter million times. Has seen generations of humans flicker past like candle flames while he remained, constant as the stone itself.
Tomorrow, I’m going to fight him.
The thought feels absurd. Like an ant declaring war on the boot that’s about to crush it.
But I keep walking, because stopping isn’t an option. Because three girls in Ironhold are sleeping in their own beds tonight, safe from the fate I’m walking toward. Because the math hasn’t changed, even if every step makes the weight of it heavier.
One woman who knows what she’s losing, or three girls who don’t.
I chose this. I keep choosing it, with every step that carries me closer to those beautiful, terrible walls.
I just wish choosing felt less like drowning.
The quarters they give me are nicer than anything in Ironhold.
Carved stone walls polished smooth as glass, veined with the same precious minerals that run through the fortress exterior. A bed with actual linens—soft cotton sheets, a thick wool blanket, pillows stuffed with something that smells faintly of lavender. A bathing chamber with water that runs hot from the mountain’s thermal springs, steam curling toward a ceiling painted with constellations I don’t recognize.
I stand in the middle of the room and feel like an intruder. Like I’m wearing clothes that don’t fit, playing a role I don’t understand.
This is how they house someone who’s about to become property. Comfort them with luxury, soften them with kindness, make them grateful before the cage door closes.
I should refuse the bed. Should sleep on the floor in protest, maintain some scrap of defiance.
Instead, I strip off my travel-worn clothes, sink into the hot water of the bath, and let myself feel, just for a moment, how tired I really am.
Eight years of being strong. Eight years of standing between Ironhold and everything that wanted to hurt it. Eight years of watching everyone lean on me without ever asking if I could bearthe weight, and smiling, and sayingof course I can handle it, and dying slowly from the inside out while my body kept moving through the motions of living.
The hot water soaks into muscles I didn’t realize were clenched. The steam fills my lungs with something that isn’t mountain cold or forge smoke or the copper-salt smell of blood. For a few minutes, I let myself be nothing but a body in warm water, feeling the heat, breathing the steam, existing without fighting.
Then I think about tomorrow, and the peace shatters.
I lie in the darkness for hours, watching shadows move across the painted ceiling.
The bed is soft. Too soft—I keep sinking into it, my body unfamiliar with comfort after years of sleeping on a straw pallet in the room behind the forge. Every time I start to drift off, some part of me jerks awake, convinced I’ve overslept, convinced there’s a threat I should be fighting.
There’s no threat here. Not tonight.
Tomorrow, I’ll walk into an arena and face a creature who’s been killing challengers for seven centuries. I’ll raise my blade against eight feet of bronze muscle and ancient magic, and I’ll try to do something no one has done in living memory.
I’ll try to make him bleed.
And if I succeed—when I succeed, because I have to succeed, because the alternative is dying and leaving Ironhold unprotected—I’ll become his. The blood debt law is absolute. No negotiation, no appeal, no escape. I’ll belong to the Guardianof Stone Court the way his sword belongs to him, the way this fortress belongs to the mountain.
The old woman’s words surface in my mind, gentler now than when she first spoke them:By the time he claims you, you’ll want it. That’s the cruelest part.
I think about what that means. About watching my own resistance crumble, feeling my sense of self erode, becoming something that smiles and simpers and writes letters home about happiness. About looking in a mirror someday and not recognizing the woman looking back.
Is there anything of me that will survive? Any scrap of the warrior, the protector, the woman who chose this fate rather than let it fall on someone else?
I don’t know. The old woman said no omega had ever maintained herself through the transformation. Said the magic was too thorough, the biology too overwhelming.
But no one had ever wounded the Guardian before, either. And tomorrow, I’m going to try.
Maybe I can be the first at both.
Or maybe I’m just telling myself stories to make the drowning easier.
