Three days.
We hiked that damn glacier for three days before reaching the elven border. Each day was the same, and the view never changed. Ice, ice, and more ice. My eyes burned from the unending white.
Other than the pulse-rattling climb up the vertical ice face in the wee hours after leaving the cave, it’d been a relatively flat journey. Boring, but flat.
I kept waiting for a kingdom to grow on the horizon—for the barren plateau to give way to some sort of path or city or even just a tree in the distance. So I was justifiably confused when the two elves stopped in the middle of what, to me, looked like the exact same stretch of crystalline white we’d been walking through for three days.
“What are we waiting for?” I asked, kicking at the snow. A puff of it rose up, caught in the wind, and blew back in my face. Freyja smirked, but didn’t move her gaze from whatever it was in the distance.
“For the sun to reach the highest point in the sky,” Gunnar replied patiently. “Then the kingdom will be revealed.”
It sounded made-up.
My eyes found the sun: blanched and weak, barely yellow, in this colorless wasteland.
“Here.” He knelt in a fresh layer of powder from the storm that’d been raging the night before—that had kept me up until the crack of dawn, turning my hair into icicles.
With gloved hands, he shoveled the snow aside until he reached the bottom: a layer of glistening, grayish-green stone. He ran his fingers along a deep groove.
I tipped my head. “So that’s what’s underneath.”
Still squatting, he kicked his chin in the other direction. “There’s the citadel, over there.”
Heart leaping in my chest, I peered into the horizon.
Nothing.
“Wow, I can’t believe it,” I deadpanned. “More ice and snow.” I wanted to cry, my legs ached so badly. I’m pretty sure I had frostbite in unspeakable places. And I vowed to never eat another peanut butter-flavored protein bar again. “Am I missing something here?”
More eye rolls. More smirks.
Spindrifts danced over the frozen tundra, shrouding the world in whorls of bluish white.
Unlike the frigid air of the blizzards we’d endured, this settled over my skin and clothes in a soft layer, bringing with it the smell of damp soil after a storm. After a numbing few days in the cold, I’d forgotten that sensation even existed.
I breathed it in, iciness stinging my nostrils.
Wind gusted around me as I stepped over the parted snow, whispers threading through my hair, tossing the few unbound strands across my face. The second my boots hit the ground, all I could see was light. I blinked against it—the sun bouncing off the glacier, I figured.
I shielded my brows and squinted up towards…mountains.
My jaw dropped.
Not just mountains—sleek, spiraled roofs. Sparkling blue towers. Curtain walls. Battlements. Arrow slits.
In the blink of an eye, an entire structure seemed to have magically carved itself out of the ice in front of the snowy peaks. The castle.
I rubbed my eyes with my palms, just to be sure I wasn’t seeing things.
Nope, the fortress was still there, even with the spots now dotting my vision.
“You coming, angel?” Freyja tossed over her shoulder, already paces away. Gunnar was a speck in the distance.
Borrowed crampons crunching in the snow, I raced to catch up, still not used to the footwear.
Beneath all the layers, heat broke out across my skin.
After multiple days of nonstop wind and rain, it felt weird to be sweating. Even weirder to feel something other than mind-numbing boredom and pangs of hunger: stirs of excitement. I slipped off my backpack and tugged off my sweater, tying it around my waist.
