“I’m furious.” She doesn’t deny it. “You could have died.”
“So could you.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
She opens her mouth. Closes it. Her expression shifts through emotions I can’t quite track.
“I don’t know.” The admission costs her. I see it in the way her shoulders tighten, the way her gaze drops. “I don’t know how it’s different. But it is.”
The silence stretches between us. The waystation’s failing wards hum weakly. The dead hounds cool on the frost-covered floor. My blood stains the stone where I fell.
And all I can think about is the feel of her magic merging with mine. The way it fit—like it recognized something in me and didn’t recoil.
“Rest with me.”
The words escape before I can stop them. Not a command—an offering. The closest thing to vulnerability I can manage.
Zephyra looks at me. Whatever she sees in my face makes her pause—the anger doesn’t disappear, but it shifts. Transforms into a tiredness that matches my own.
“Fine.” She settles against the wall beside me. Close. Closer than necessary. Her shoulder presses against my uninjured side, and the contact sends heat racing through my blood. “But if you start bleeding again, I’m not helping. You can suffer alone.”
“Understood.”
We sit there in the damaged waystation, surrounded by dead hunters and failing magic and the distant pressure of divine attention. Her breathing evens out beside me. Not sleep—she’s too wound up for that—but rest. Recovery.
Outside, the ley-roads continue their corrupt pulse. Blue light flickers through the gaps in the waystation walls, casting shifting shadows across the frost-covered floor. The dead hounds are already beginning to break down, their divine animation fading, their wrong-jointed bodies collapsing into ordinary ice.
The wound throbs with each heartbeat, my dragon working slowly to repair what remains damaged.
Zephyra’s head tips slightly, resting against my shoulder. Unconscious movement, probably. Exhaustion pulling her toward the nearest source of stability.
I don’t move. Don’t shift her away. Don’t remind her of the distance we should be keeping.
I let her rest against me and fight the urge to wrap my body around hers until nothing can reach her without going through me first.
NINE
ZEPHYRA
We found it three hours after leaving the waystation, following directions I pieced together from corrupted ley-road markers and half-remembered maps. The trek was silent, focused—both of us still processing what happened in that cramped shelter. The way my head had rested against his shoulder. The way he hadn’t moved me.
The way neither of us mentioned it.
The opening descends at a steep angle, carved from living rock and coated in preservation ice that gleams with an inner luminescence different from the punitive frost elsewhere. My Auric Veil reads the magic immediately, sorting the differences between this ice and the Arbiter’s ice that blankets the rest of the realm.
This ice wasn’t created to punish. It was created to protect.
“Wait here.” Tyr moves ahead of me before I can respond, his body blocking the entrance as he scans the darkness below. The fading daylight barely penetrates beyond the first few steps, swallowed by the crystalline surfaces lining the walls.
I don’t argue. The wound in his side has closed—dragon healing compensating for the damage the Crown Houndsinflicted—but he moves with a stiffness that tells me the internal repairs aren’t complete. He needs rest, not reconnaissance.
He’s not going to get it. Neither of us will, until we understand what we’re facing.
We need answers before it strikes again.
Tyr descends into the darkness without waiting for my assessment. I follow, one hand trailing along the ice-coated wall for balance. The steps are slick, worn smooth by time and magic, and the temperature drops with each stride.
