The forest had teeth and an opinion. It bit at noses, snagged greaves, and muttered in firs that learned gossip the hard way—by sheltering the dead. Birches leaned in like pickpockets with advice. Moss made a slick sermon of the road. All of it hissed the same refrain: turn back, little apes; carry your soft bags of blood elsewhere.
They did not. Of course they did not. Humanity's talent for walking into meat-grinders is our only consistent poetry.
They came in a crooked ribbon: the King's blue-and-iron soldiery first, four riders with grease-dark fur at their collars, plate polished by duty instead of pride. Captain Deren Holt rode point with a face like a broken abacus—counting, counting, certain the sum would come up short. Sir Branna Kestrel walked beside him, hair hacked to the jaw in some private penance, gaze the color of discipline. Torvald Grey lugged his grin like a shield. Elian Marsh—baby cheeks, rookie spine—pretended the spear in his hand didn't own him.
Around that rectangle of policy moved the irregulars you hire when order confesses it needs sin. Dame Riona Vale: a siege given legs, armor scabbed and mended, stride that said every road is a battlefield you haven't argued with yet. Kel "Three Knives" Joran: halfling angle, pockets like rabbit warrens, a smirk that sold miracles by the ounce. Lyra Fogstep: half-elf filament, bow at her back, breath tuned to trees. Tamsin Reed: barefoot druid with bone in their braids and the old wilderness still stuck in their voice. And at the center, where meat could shield the mind, Isolde Venn—mage, scholar, a glorious catastrophe incubating under a ruined red coat—eyes bright with the fever of ideas.
The air should have been on spring's payroll. Instead, the temperature had the moral clarity of a tax audit. Fog came first in strings, cobweb-thin between roots, and Lyra's hand went up—two fingers—halt. "Fog," she said softly, to keep the dark from remembering how to be loud. "Wrong kind. It clings." She touched it. It touched back, curious, like a parasite doing interviews before the job. Torvald tried a folksy shrug. Isolde sniffed the cold like a librarian sniffing a forgery. "Stone asleep too long," she murmured. "Doesn't want to be woken." Holt's horse stamped. Orders did their stupid duty. They pushed on and the fog rose to their knees, then their thighs, white milk annoyed by the intrusion of legs.
Deren Holt kept an old letter folded in the lining of his glove. No saint's scrap, no lover's breath; a quartermaster's inventory from a winter his men survived by stealing from its margins. He glanced at it sometimes like a gambler rubbing a chipped token. Not superstition. Arithmetic.
Branna Kestrel's hair—cropped rough—wasn't punishment; it was discipline rendered visible. Her past wore braids; this present wore edges. She checked Riona as a carpenter checks a beam already supporting too much weight. Not distrust. Attention.
Torvald Grey said little because silence made a better joke land. He loved the sound of a tavern at the second hour after sundown, when the false bravado has bled off and truth begins to sneak through the cracks.
Elian—don't lie—Elian was a boy wearing a uniform that fit only in good lighting. He recited the King's litany to keep his hands from shaking. "Serve, stand, stay." He'd learned to grip a spear the way the academy taught: correct, and therefore barely useful.
The fog found all of them equally contemptible.
They walked into survivors the way you step into a nightmare that forgot to put on its mask. A bearded man with hoarfrost in his eyes and nothing left behind them. A woman blue at the lips, knuckles split from holding a shawl as if modesty could stop weather. Knives appeared; shields tilted; training breathed.
"We came from Hrast," the man said, voice rasped down to wire. "You're the word the King sent."
Deren gave him the bureaucrat's absolution: "Yes."
The woman's mouth shook. "We stopped counting days. The fog wraps the sun. People went missing. Doors froze shut—from the inside. The streets… made noises. Then they stopped."
Tamsin gentled their tone until the air forgave it. Anyone else? No. Do not look back. We barely look forward. Kel tried something reckless: hope with a punchline. It landed like a bruise that's grateful to be proof you're still alive.
Riona asked what no one wanted asked. "Where did you leave your dead?"
The man pointed, not with his hand, but with his whole body shifting away from the path. "No graves. Ground fought us. We closed the doors and left bread. We left… their names." The last word was an apology.
Isolde watched frost on the woman's lashes. "Names unburied don't stay put," she said, to herself, to the god, to anyone who had the stomach for truth.
They sent the survivors back down the road with a horse between them, three extra blankets, and Branna's waterskin. Deren told them to keep singing something, anything, to prove they were still arranged in human time. He did not say that sometimes singing only makes the wolves come closer. He did not need to.
When the trees fell away, the world should have opened; instead, it erased itself. Ten steps of road, then blank. Isolde tasted the air like a chemist who hates poetry and finds it anyway. "Chill sinks here. The fog… settles. Like smoke in a tavern that fired the chimney sweep."
Riona answered with war stories that left teeth marks. Kel lied about a vault job and a smoke bomb thick enough to make a man doubt he still owned hands. Then they collided with iron and learned the gate of Hrast had died ugly: steel sheared and twisted into taffy; rebar javelins driven into stone; the keystone cracked in a web that went deeper than architecture. The cold beyond the arch wasn't weather; it was a doctrine. Breath turned from steam to smoke. Armor cracked as if the metal were trying to pronounce the word brittle.
Deren split them like a surgeon making the right incision: Branna and Torvald with Elian to sweep the outer ring, Riona with Holt and the meddlers to find the tavern—because towns bury their last hope under ale. Sensible plan. Sensible plans taste best when they fail.
They tracked the outer ring by absence: no dog prints, no child's mischief in snow, no ash from hearth to roof. The silence had workman's hands.
Elian tried the first door and yelped; the iron handle burned his palm with cold so clean it felt like heat. Branna wrapped the handle with a strip from her cloak, levered. The door opened an inch and stuck, glued by a seam of ice the thickness of a knife blade.
"Windows," Torvald said. He lifted an elbow and shouldered through one. Inside, a parlor had become a diagram of frost: each surface furred, each object haloed. A bowl of apples had cracked their own skins with quiet despair. The hearth had been scrubbed to stone by cold fingers.
"Hear that?" Elian whispered.
The sound was the wrong size for the room: a slow, wet sucking, then a brittle crackle. Branna followed it to a pantry. The shelves were empty. On the floor lay the residue of something that had only briefly been flesh. Not blood; the color was wrong, the texture crystalline, as if life had tried to freeze and had forgotten how to be liquid again.
"Back out," Branna said. "Mark the door."
They moved. At the far edge of the market they found a shrine: a dozen votive bowls, each filled with ice too clear to be water, each holding a small coin and a frozen moth. Piety turned into an experiment.
Elian's lips moved silently. He wasn't praying; he was counting. The academy had taught him that counts mattered. Branna did not correct him. Sometimes the ritual is not belief; it's ballast.
The Frosted Mug waited on the square with gallows humor painted on its sign. Inside, the fog huddled like gossip; frost had written cursive across every surface. Isolde's pupils went wide the way altars do when they remember their gods. "This place remembers," she said. "It's holding its last hours like breath."
"Listen beneath the boards," Tamsin said. They dropped their gaze through planks and stone, listening past the sigh of drained casks for the small noises that justify existence: fur, heartbeat, stubborn breath. "Something in the cellar." Deren asked if it lived. "Depends what you demand from a word." The door was furred with ice. Isolde wrapped a torch in Old Speech until the flame warmed by meaning rather than temperature—the Pauper's Summer, the Not Freezing To Death Like An Idiot charm—and the frost wept itself into retreat.
Down they went. Winter had eaten that cellar from the inside out. And there: eggs, big as chests, opalescent, veined with slow, sullen blue. Dragonspawn. Optimism where optimism had no business. "Dragons don't choose tavern basements," Isolde said dryly. "Unless someone rewrote the contract between sense and circumstance." Tamsin let the charmed warmth kiss an egg and it answered with the ghost of a spine, a proto-tail flick. Then the building moved like a heretic jerking on the rope.
The concussion was ungentle. Barrels crashed. Stone complained. Everyone went sideways. An egg teetered on the lip of a broken cask, fell. It did not crack; it exploded into knives and sorrow. The thing inside had never been allowed a chance at horror; it froze mid-trying. Elian screamed from upstairs; the world answered by dropping its roof. Deren's hand closed on the rookie's vambrace—too late. A beam's theology intervened. In the dark that followed, the only honesty came from the torch's warm radius and the dirt in their teeth. "Alive," Kel announced bitterly, "and offended." They clawed toward breath and found a ribbon of snow through a seam, fresh cold like an insult. "Side wall," Lyra coughed. "Cooper's shop." They dug. Riona went first, because that is what she is for. They spilled into a room waist-deep in broken hoops and cruel white. Outside, the street had been rearranged by a god with a grudge: roofs folded, walls sulking, the tavern a memory being sanded smooth by the blizzard.
Torvald lay in a gorgeous halo of frozen blood. Or what used to be Torvald. Something had eaten him by geometry: flesh missing in scallops, dents in the cuirass like a fist that had opinions. Kel's quips died a modest death. Lyra's eyes tracked a smear of clean frost drawing away from the corpse. The back door blew inward. Cold roared in with the smell of rot tutored by ice. Torvald walked in behind it, jaw loose, fingers grown to jagged frost. Deren started to say a name and corrected himself to the truth. Riona moved like a verdict; steel scored ice; fractures webbed; something black and slow steamed where the Warming charm held a boundary. Kel slid to the room's hungry angle. Isolde's hands found shapes that only malcontents and wizards enjoy. The thing that used to be a man had to be put down twice: once for the corpse, once for the insult. The second death took.
Pause, then: the sound a house makes when the storm remembers it. They stumbled back into a square that had decided to do weather as performance art. The fog stopped pretending; now it fell as hard pellets that committed to the bit. In four breaths the town became a white wall with teeth. Sound died between mouths and ears. Ice grew on Riona's armor with the industry of bureaucracy. Isolde stabbed a direction; Riona bullied them back into the Mug's carcass, because shelter is a verb. They were halfway down when the world finished collapsing. After the dust: a plan you do not call a plan because you need it to behave. Dig. Crawl. Window. Out. Street again. Another house. Another indignity. The day learned a new way to fail.
Branna found Elian by his voice, that thin wire of sound that refuses to die until the knife is already in. He'd tried to reroute through the second floor to find them—academy habit, never go back the way you came; it might be waiting. He'd been right. The floor was wrong.
"Down," Branna barked. The word did nothing. The building decided itself.
Deren's hand reached a heartbeat after hers, but narratives have favorite victims. The beam fell. That's the fact. The embellishment is bones.
Elian's last noise was surprise.
Branna swore any prayer she owned into the splintered air and promised herself later, not now. Later for the boy's name. Later for the letter to his mother in a script too neat for grief. Now for the living.
Then the city remembered its tyrant. The blizzard heaved, and something vast uncoiled under it. First a line of vertebrae, tombstones marching up from drifts. Then wing-membranes torn to dignified shreds. At last a skull, flesh tatters on bone, and a witchlight burning in the sockets with the bad manners of eternity. Once upon a time, a white dragon; now a corpse on loan to a will that didn't respect majesty. The exhalation it loosed was not cold; it was hunger weaponized. Heat was stolen from stone, from breath, from thought. Holt took that breath square in the chest as if names are printed on catastrophe. He froze mid-step, the defiant syllable in his mouth preserved for an art exhibit, then came apart into glittering commentary.
"Saints," Kel whispered from his hole in the world. "We are catastrophically outmatched."
"Not yet," Isolde said, laughing the way you laugh when you've decided to sell your life at retail. "Riona. Hit the damned thing."
Here is what no priest tells you: there is moral heat, and it can be worn like armor. Isolde whispered the language the world used before accountants edited it, and wings of light scalloped out of nothing—feathers like slivers of radiance. Every word she spoke cost her a piece of herself; the dust of it spiraled around Riona and soaked into steel. The Ember Crown sigil woke up and remembered its job. Riona's sword grew a second edge you couldn't forge—verdict. She went forward like a one-woman indictment. Steel bit dead bone. Light erupted and skittered along fractures. The dragon made a noise that would have been a roar if roars weren't for animals. It swatted and spun her; armor screamed. "Again," Isolde rasped. "Break its script. Break mine." Kel's vial drew a graceless arc and burst; the green flame licked necromancy like a taxman. Tamsin spoke to snow until it learned how to be hands. For one terrible beat, the beast was bound.
Then Isolde made a choice I refuse to praise and will never stop respecting.
"Carry me," she'd told Riona—both hands, most of the spine, or the magic would shake her to pieces. Riona did. Isolde poured herself out. Those ragged wings detonated into incandescent grit and sank into her knight: skin, bone, blade, will. Riona saw, for the time it takes a life to change its mind, the town laid out as gameboard, her people as fragile tokens, the dragon as a corrupt piece that shouldn't exist. She roared—a sound with ancestors. The blade came down two-handed into the chest, where a heart might still be sulking. Light didn't explode; it drilled, a spike finding the knot that knits unlife to meat. It did not debate. It unmade. The witchlight snuffed. The carcass hung upright one more heartbeat out of habit, then collapsed, a cathedral forgetting it wasn't a factory, snow rolling outward in a white tidal slap that knocked them all flat. When Riona reached for the weight on her back, her fingers found only cut straps and air that remembered warmth. No body. No ash. Just the invoice of what it cost.
After. There is always an after, cheap and cruel.
Tamsin crawled with a bundled egg in their arms—warmer now, shell crazed with the polite cracks that mean hatching later and trouble sooner. Kel flopped beside Riona and demanded credit he hadn't earned; Lyra mocked him until her laugh shattered into a sob and she was too honest to hide it. Branna stepped out of a survival she had muscled into existence, hair furred with rime, the last banner of the King's order still standing. "What," she asked, knuckles white around the question, "do we tell the King?"
Riona looked up into the low, sullen sky where Isolde had burned, eyes tracking nothing with reverence. "The truth," she said. Town gone. Men died hard. A dragon forgot its job; we reminded it.
"And the egg?" Tamsin whispered, fingers smoothing the shell like a mother negotiating with a colicky god.
"That," Riona answered—human again, which is to say complicated—"we do not mention. Kings are allergic to prophecy." The wind shifted. Snow gentled. Somewhere, a door banged mundanely in an ordinary draft, and the awful silence admitted that someday, in some other chapter, it would learn to be a voice again.
You want the moral? Don't pretend. There isn't one. There's a ledger.
In it are names: Deren Holt, who shattered instead of dying, because the day needed a spectacle; Elian, whose eyes were still learning the trick of courage when the roof decided to teach him physics; Torvald, who had the insult of dying twice. There's a town that got erased so the universe could make a point about cold. There's a paladin, a druid, a ranger, a liar with knives, and a wizard who chose to stop being strictly human because she believed a blade can be taught ethics. There is, finally, an egg tucked against a beating heart and hidden beneath a cloak because hope is a crime you commit quietly.
The night before the gate—this matters, because choices are fossils that only look like rocks until you polish them—Riona, Branna, and Isolde argued in low voices over a mean fire that chewed damp wood with bad teeth.
"Orders," Branna said, laying the word like a card you know will lose but must play. "We reconnoiter, we extract survivors, we burn nothing without sanction."
"Sanction?" Isolde laughed into her collar. "Whittle me a writ that stops winter. Teach me the correct salutation for an empty town."
Riona turned the spit. The meat was stringy and tasted faintly of moss. "We don't torch anything that might still be a home," she said. "But if this cold is a doctrine, we argue with it. With flame, steel, oath. Your pick."
Branna looked at the sky as if a superior might tumble out of it and take this decision away. No luck. The stars were on someone else's payroll.
Kel snored like a small, menacing kettle. Lyra counted owls and wind shifts. Tamsin sat apart, hands pressed to the earth. Later they would admit—for once—that they were asking the ground to keep the egg warm if they had to leave it buried in the snow. The ground gave no guarantee. Earth is notoriously cagey with contracts.
After Torvald's twice-death, Kel insisted—he framed it as "asked politely with daggers"—on a sweep of Tanner's Row. He claimed his reasons were tactical; everyone knew he wanted to steal from something that wasn't using its coin.
The last house wore a door with seven locks. Six hung open. The seventh had a key buried in the ice of the keyhole, the metal swollen by cold as if trying to escape back into ore. Inside: bales of leather frozen into black stone. A journal near the hearth with entries that devolved from tidy to jagged to blank punctures. "Cold inside the cupboard." "Something watching through the floor." "Don't open the—"
"The what?" Kel asked, half joke, half prayer.
Lyra followed the drafts. Found a trapdoor that had been nailed and then frozen shut. Found a second draft, higher: a hole in the chimney where something had tried to crawl toward sky and failed.
They left. Not cowardice. Timing. Victory sometimes looks like you knew which argument not to start.
You heard the bones pop when Tamsin went down into hare-shape, ran as a white comma across a page that was trying to be blank. The thing under the snow—call it dragon, call it engine—paused like a great thought reconsidering itself. Then the street erupted and flung Tamsin back among their friends and this chapter's excuses.
In the flailing that followed, Tamsin's hand clutched the egg and their mouth said words older than the shape of their face: a lullaby from a forest with fewer axes. I won't write the tune here. The egg steadied. That's enough.
"Mad," Branna said, admiration salted with fury.
"Only on even-numbered days," Tamsin said through teeth that wanted to chatter. "This is an even day."
You want to know what Deren thought, in that slice between breath and breaking? Nothing majestic. The man glanced at the street, at the angle of Riona's shoulders, at the empty window where Elian had been—a ledger of impossible variables—and chose to take the blast because someone had to. Not a hero. An accountant of violence.
When the cold took him, it left a statue that looked very like duty. When he shattered, it made a sound like coins. I don't expect you to forgive the metaphor. I don't.
Isolde called it Not Freezing To Death Like An Idiot when she wanted to irritate her teachers from beyond their graves. She called the winged thing nothing at all because names grant leverage and the light has lawyers too. She spoke the grammar of ought, worded like chisels, and burned the footnotes into Riona, letter by insistence-ridden letter.
Spellcasters are liars who write truthful books. The truth is not elegant: every word cost her. The dust that spiraled wasn't metaphor. It was her. You want to ask if she knew the price? Of course she knew the price. Of course she paid it.
And you—reader, witness, vulture—will want a receipt. You won't get one. There are stories where power returns at the end with flowers and an apology. This isn't that parish.
Riona drove the blade once, twice, three times at the joints that architects hide behind flourish. Knees are cowards. Ankles betray. The dragon's claw met her shield and rang it like a bell that woke saints and drunks. Kel's green flame—brewed from jail-broken alchemical notes and a priest's stolen incense—ate where it licked. Lyra's arrow missed the eye but pinned a strip of membrane to the brick, which mattered for exactly the length of time it took the wind to tear it free.
Branna anchored a flank that refused to admit it was a flank. She did not make speeches. She kept anyone from dying stupid within spear's reach. Heroism is often a matter of saying "no" to entropy with your whole body.
They gathered the living. There were fewer than a story wants. A woman with three teeth and a face that had done time in laughter, now out on parole. A child who had not cried since the fog came and began again when she touched the egg's warm shell and heard the sound it made, a damp crackle like a match prevaricating. Two men whose hands remembered brick-laying better than holding sorrow. Branna lined them up, counted, named, wrote: who you are, who loved you, who might come looking.
Kel made inventories of small sins: a ring into a pocket, a saint's medallion into another, then reversing the theft, palm slipping the trinket back onto a widow's palm. He narrated the thefts to himself under his breath to prove he still possessed a tongue that could do more than plead.
Lyra mapped the town and discovered it had already been mapped by cold: streets laid into a new, straight logic, corners squared into something arithmetic. She burned her own lines into a scrap of parchment with the torch's guttering coal and refused the new map because it was beautiful and wrong.
Tamsin argued with weather until weather conceded enough to let one roof hold for the night. They stacked bodies in rows that didn't make a pattern and covered faces that did. They told the air the names. They lied to the air about the names never being forgotten.
Riona stood in snow that had chosen, maddeningly, to be soft again. She felt the absence between shoulder-blades where a weight had been, not heavy but absolute. The straps that had held Isolde's body to hers dangled like the ends of a sentence cut mid-clause. She looked at the egg. She looked at the ruined gate. She looked at Branna. She looked at the sky. The sky did not look back. Gods are notorious for bad manners at funerals.
"What do we tell the King?" Branna asked. Bureaucracy requires raw material. Facts. Blame. Proposals.
"The truth," Riona said, and meant it with the ferocity of a confession.
"And the egg?" Tamsin asked, because druids refuse to leave a living question unwatered.
"We do not mention." Riona felt the words fit into place like a key turned in a lock. "Kings are allergic to prophecy."
Kel's mouth twitched. "Kings break out in hives from far less."
Lyra made a mark on the map that was not a map: a small circle in a place no one would think to look. "If we live long enough to have a later," she said, "we will dig."
Branna watched the egg and, just for a heartbeat, the edge of her mouth softened. Then she remembered how to be iron. "We leave at dawn."
"Dawn is a rumor," Tamsin said.
"Then at whichever light arrives pretending to be dawn," Branna replied.
That night, Riona found Elian's pack under a fallen beam and set it in front of Branna without ceremony. Inside: neat socks, a sketch of the capital from a childish angle as if it were kind, a stub of soap, a folding knife with no edge to speak of, and a letter half written. "Mother, it is cold but the men say—" There are words you do not read aloud. Branna added a sheet of her own, the script upright and viciously tidy. She wrote: "He stood where he should have. He obeyed when obeying mattered. He died quick." Lies are sometimes the only syntax grief learns quickly.
You can pretend weather is impersonal. It will encourage the lie. But this was a creed and had been taught to think in straight lines. The town had resisted with curves—doors ajar, windows cracked, human improvisation. The doctrine hated the curves and ironed them.
Isolde would have had footnotes. Riona had steel. Tamsin had the stubbornness of sap. Lyra had a pocket full of stolen botany and the memory of a hill in summer. Kel had a contract with the universe that stated, simply, that he would not be bored. Branna had duty. Deren had arithmetic and a shattering worthy of a bell.
They did not sleep. They made the village sleep for them.
Kel wired shutters with trip-lines of string and cow-bells stolen from dead cows that did not resent the irony. Lyra sighted three alleyways that admitted the wrong kind of wind and stacked furniture into barricades that would give a hungry storm something to chew before it bit flesh. Tamsin shaped snow into walls—packed, smoothed, glazed—little fortresses against a doctrine that liked flatness.
Branna went house to house, tapping hilts against good wood, saying the King's name because some people still needed a word to put their fear into. She did not tell them about the egg. She did not tell them about the dragon. She told them to drink water. She made them show their hands so she could see if the nails had gone the wrong color.
Riona stood last watch with a sword that buzzed faintly with borrowed ethics. The blade had a temper now, and so did she. She spoke into the dark with the voice you use when you expect neither answer nor forgiveness.
"Tomorrow," she said.
The dark believed her. The god with the die, finally bored, rolled for another town and found a different tragedy. Some mercy is only the absence of attention.
Deren Holt: inventory-keeper of lives, devoured by a breath that believed in subtraction.
Elian Marsh: student of correct grips, caught under a beam because physics hates sincerity.
Torvald Grey: a grin advertised as armor, used as a puppet and then not used at all.
Branna Kestrel: a spear with a conscience that kept receipts.
Lyra Fogstep: wind-listener, weather's skeptic, mapmaker who refused the new geometry.
Tamsin Reed: translator between egg and doctrine. Amateur of mercy. Professional of stubborn.
Kel Joran: thief of seconds, vendor of jokes, clerk of the devil's filings when needed.
Riona Vale: siege in the shape of a woman, patron saint of "again."
Isolde Venn: scholar of the grammar of ought. There are altars. There are ashes. Sometimes they are the same shape.
The town of Hrast: a list of meals that refused to become a menu. A place where a door still banged mundanely on a hinge that deserved a better day.
The egg: a rumor of heat. A future misdemeanor. A promise wrapped in treason.
They left at what passed for dawn. Branna carried the list of living and the letter for Elian's mother. Kel carried three rings he insisted belonged to him now and the mocking conscience that told him to give one back at the last minute, which he did, loudly. Lyra carried a map that would not agree to be true until someone survived long enough to trace it again. Tamsin carried a bundle that looked like a blanket and felt like a conspiracy. Riona carried the absence of a weight and the buzzing of a sword that had learned how to judge.
Behind them, the town settled into a silence that was no longer hostile. It was the silence of a thing that has been broken and set, waiting for the bones to knit wrong and right at once.
Ahead, a road. On it, in the far distance, a small cart and two figures wrapped too tight to be healthy and singing a song with neither tune nor sense. Survivors conducted back into the human chorus by orders and accident.
Above, the sky practiced blue as if it remembered how. The god rolled its die and it said nothing, because sometimes the result is for later.
Cold things walked. Warm things did too.
The dice kept rolling.