1
Alaric
The arena hums like a live wire. Even before I step onto the ice, I feel it in my bones—the vibration of thousands of voices echoing through Frost Haven’s stadium. Cold air burns in my lungs, sharp and clean, laced with the metallic tang of fresh-cut ice. The boards glisten under the harsh white lights, and the logos of sponsors painted across the rink look almost garish against the frozen canvas.
This is their house. The Wolves’ den. And tonight, it feels like the whole city has come out to watch us bleed.
I roll my shoulders, then hop the board on our first shift. The whistle shrieks; muscle memory takes over. Blades bite, edges hold. Step, push, glide. Every stride is clean, economical. No wasted energy. The roar of the crowd blurs into background noise. The only sounds that matter are the scrape of my skates,the slap of sticks, the thud of the puck ricocheting off the end boards.
We open conservatively. Coach wants our D-pairings staggered to shadow their top line. Kyle taps the butt of his stick against my shin pad—Ready?—and I nod, dropping into the rhythm of our gap.
Frost Haven flies.
The Wolves’ captain, Phoenix Locke, reads the game like a conductor, drawing his wings in and fanning them out, changing tempo without warning. He threads a no-look pass to Leander Cameron—the rookie, the scandal, the kid who should’ve been broken by last season’s media circus. Instead, he’s skating like the narrative never touched him: feet light, edges whisper-sharp, hands soft enough to cradle glass.
Not on my watch.
I angle my stick low, blade flat like a lid. The puck slides toward me off Cameron’s toe drag, and I meet it with a sharp snap, lifting it just enough to kill the lane. Control. Always control.
I pivot, body already mapping the next pass, scanning for Kyle on the weak side. He calls for it, and I feather a bank off the wall right onto his tape.
Clean exit. Crowd booing. Music to my fucking ears.
We push neutral, test their forecheck. Wolves run a 2-1-2 with sneaky back pressure, and it bites if you get cute. I don’t. I regroup to F3, slide into the seam. The puck swings D-to-D across our blue, back to me, and I step up to neutral with my head on a swivel.
That’s when he appears.
Magnus Flint. My foil. My enemy.
He doesn’t skate so much as hunt. All forward lean and hungry blue eyes, an animal in the exact habitat he was built for. Dark hair damp with sweat, cheeks flushed, a grin that suggests rules don’t apply to him and never have. Wolves’ fans call him “The Flame,” and for once the marketing department didn’t oversell. He’s fire personified—reckless, gorgeous, impossible to hold.
I hate that I notice.
He angles into my lane like it has his name on it, stick flicking at my blade. “Careful, Ice Prince,” he says, the words threading perfectly through whistle and roar, pitched so only I can hear. “Stiff tonight.”
I ignore him. Or I try. The puck rolls a fraction; I smooth it with a soft touch and flip it deep, forcing him to pivot. Our forecheck goes to work. We dump, they recover, and the first shift ends with nothing on the board except a quick reminder: he’s there.
Change. Water. Coach barks matchups, taps a whiteboard. My chest rises and falls in a neat four-count. Reset. I can do this. I can clear him.
The rivalry began long before the league. We were kids in the same junior showcase the summer I turned eighteen—me in a new pair of spotless skates, shoulders squared under my father’s name, him in beat-to-hell wheels and a swagger that saidwatch me.The clip lives on YouTube: I poke-check him clean in the neutral zone, he takes my next shift personally, trucks me in the corner, and we both pop up smiling like idiots. The comments started then: ICE vs. FLAME. Cute, at first. The media ate it up.
My silver hair, rich-boy attitude and spotless record vs his dark, grungy determination. Our teams fed it. The first time we met in the league, we made it real—offsetting roughing minors, a chirp war that turned into four-on-four chaos, a photo of us nose-to-nose that ran on every hockey account for a week.
Fans pitted us against each other; we finished the job.
First period mid-mark. Their second line tries to cycle our rookies; I pinch down the wall at the perfect beat, put a shoulder in, and pry the puck free. I keep it simple—rim weak side, Kyle snaps a bomb from the top. Their goalie gobbles it, but I like the sound it makes thudding into his logo. A little message: we’re here.
Faceoff in their end. Our center wins it back clean; I drag laterally along the blue, walking the line to open a lane. A forward commits too hard; the shooting lane yawns. I take theice, slide the puck past a flailing shin pad, and let a low wrister go looking for a tip. It ticks off our winger’s blade and pings iron. The arena inhales; my heartbeat stutters with the red light that never comes.
Next shift, they come with pace. Locke drags two of ours to the left flank, then spins the puck through three sticks to Cameron on the back post. I see it too late to get body, but I get stick—tap just enough to mess with his release. The shot goes high into the netting. He grins anyway, cheeky, all rookie confidence, and taps my shin pad on the way to the dot. I pretend not to feel the heat of it.
TV timeout. The storm of a game always pauses hardest during media breaks; all that energy has nowhere to go. I rest on my stick, staring at the condensation ghosting across my visor, and let the noise of Frost Haven roll around me. Their fans chant Locke’s name. Our section roars back. Somewhere in the din, I hear a chant ofICE PRINCE SUCKSand it almost makes me smile. The nicknames started as a loving nickname by my female fans, but Magnus sharpened it into knives.
Play resumes. Magnus jumps back out with their top unit and cheats my hip in neutral, daring me to bite. I don’t. I keep the gap, angle him to the boards, absorb the first bump, and ride him past the dot.
He laughs, a short breath against my ear through the cage. “Missed you, pretty boy.”
I answer with a clean stick lift, a small win that feels bigger than it should. He still gets the puck deep. He always does.
