He wore glasses and looked wildly out of place—more scholar than soldier, as if he’d wandered from a library into a battlefield. He didn’t attack, didn’t intervene. He crept through the chaos with purpose.
I followed him through the drifting snow, my ghostly steps weightless on the earth.
He stopped.
A faint cry echoed from a mound of white.
He dropped to his knees and dug feverishly through the snowbank. Then,a faceemerged.
Freya.
My Freya.
Bloodied, shivering, alive.
She whimpered and reached for the man, and he clutched her close, wrapping her tiny frame in his arms. Without a word, he turned and vanished into the night, away from the burning wreckage of my past.
I stood frozen.
My breath caught.
My knees buckled.
“My Freya…” I choked, the name escaping me like a prayer. “She… she lived.”
A wail tore from the depths of my soul—an anguished cry of disbelief, relief, and a hope I hadn’t dared to feel in years.
All this time, I had thought her dead.
My only evidence was a blood-speckled shoe buried in a snowbank. A child’s shoe. That had been enough to condemn her to memory. And yet… she had survived.
I looked up at the night sky, tears scalding my cheeks, and whispered thanks to the stars above for sparing one of mine, for Freya.
My Freya.
The last heartbeat of my lost family.
She had been taken that fateful night—ripped from our home under the full moon. And now, by some impossible stroke of fate, I knew she was alive.
The man who carried her paused mid-stride, as though sensing me. Slowly, he turned. Our eyes locked.
His gaze sliced through me—cold, calculating, inhumanly still.
He wasn’t just a man.
There was something else in him. Something darker. A mind sharpened by secrets and shadows. My skin prickled. My instincts screamed. But before I could move, he was gone.
The vision dissolved.
I was alone again, standing in the still hush of night as snowflakes drifted lazily to the earth.
But something inside me had changed.
A single ember of hope flared in my chest.Freya was alive.
Who had taken her? Where was she now?
I didn’t have the answers. But I knew what I had to do.
