Title: Chapter 84 – The Spear that Walks Beside Winter
From the moment they left the barbarian camp, Reina walked one step behind his shadow.
Snow stretched in every direction—a mute ocean of white, broken only by the dark jut of stone and the bent backs of starving trees. Their branches reached toward the sky like fingers that had forgotten what warmth felt like.
Kel walked ahead, his long coat drawing a quiet line through the wind. The hem brushed the snow, tracing a path that felt too fragile for the weight it carried. His hair, dark and uncooperative, slipped from its tie and danced across his cheek whenever the wind rose, hiding his eyes more often than not.
It bothered her.
Not because she couldn't see his face.
Because she wanted to.
Landon followed at his usual position—half a step to the right and behind, a silent wall of leather and muscle. Sera, pale as the frost itself, moved at the flank—like a shard of winter walking on its own.
Reina took the left.
Four points around a future none of them could see.
They crossed ice-hard earth. Fought beasts. Bleeding suns rose and sank behind stone teeth. The days blurred into white and exhaustion, but what she remembered most was not the monsters.
It was how he kept walking.
Kel would cough into his sleeve, shoulders folding for a few seconds, breath hitching as if the air itself had turned to glass in his lungs. Then his back straightened again. His pace never broke long enough to feel like a retreat.
He never once said he was in pain.
He didn't need to.
It was written into the arch of his neck. The way his hands lingered near his ribs when he thought no one noticed. The faint tremor that sometimes visited his fingers when he believed them hidden in his sleeves.
She noticed.
Reina always noticed.
Her spear rested comfortably in her hand, its weight familiar, grounding. She tuned herself to tracks in the snow, shadows between trees, the subtle changes in Sera's breathing when she prepared to enter combat. But her attention always returned, inevitably, stubbornly—
to Kel.
To the way he talked to the barbarians at the feast. To the cold poem he'd thrown at winter like a dare. To the half-smiles he made as if he didn't deserve anything warmer.
She had chosen him.
Once on the dueling ground of Rosenfeld, once when he stepped out from behind his cursed title, and then again… in the snow, following him into a land that did not want them.
Every day since then felt like reaffirming that choice.
When the mountain rose before them, swallowing the sky, Reina understood that they had stepped past any road ordinary people ever took.
The rock face loomed, black and scarred, veins of ice running like cracks in old bone. Wind screamed along its edges, rage diluted into sound. Beside her, Sera whispered of a cave that swallowed paths, eyes half-distant as she felt for stories in the stone.
They scattered to search.
Reina's cloak whipped behind her as she trod the left flank, spear angled against her shoulder. Snow tried to hide the mountain's secrets, but it could not fully bury shadow. She brushed her hand along the rock, fingers reading its surface the way she'd learned to read the weight of a spear in her palm.
When Sera's voice rang out—"Here!"—Reina's body moved before thought.
She found Kel already standing before the cave, the dark opening like a jaw that had forgotten how to close. His expression was calm, but there was a certain stillness in him she had learned to recognize: the quiet before he did something that might kill him.
She had never learned to like that stillness.
But she had learned to walk with it.
Inside the mountain, the world narrowed.
Light from the orb in her hand pushed the dark back only enough to show them where to place their feet—and sometimes even that felt like a courtesy, not a guarantee. The walls pressed close, damp stone glistening like the ribs of something that had once been alive.
Kel walked near Sera at the front, his profile lit in pale yellow arcs—sharp jaw, tired eyes, lips pressed into a line that refused to tremble. As the thrum of the mountain grew louder, she saw his hand curl slowly into a fist over his chest.
He said he could feel something.
Reina wanted, in a moment of selfishness, to reach out and drag him backward.
Instead, she did what she had always done.
She shifted closer, close enough that if he fell, she could catch him before the stone did.
The trial in the mist came like the opening of an eye.
One heartbeat, there was stone beneath her boots.
The next, there was nothing except grey.
Mist wrapped around her ankles, cool and dense, refusing to let sound travel properly. She could no longer see Kel, nor Landon, nor Sera.
Only her.
And the past.
A courtyard appeared—her courtyard. Fire. Screams. Blood on stone. Familiar faces twisted by rage and fear. Accusations hurled with eyes that had once smiled at her.
Coward. Traitor. Survivor.
She gripped her spear so tightly her knuckles ached. It would have been so simple to defend herself with excuses. To say, I was young. I was weak. I had no choice.
She didn't.
"I ran," she said instead, voice rough. "I chose to live while the others died."
The memory of her aunt spat at her.
Reina held its gaze.
"I cannot change that," she whispered. "I can only decide whether I will run again."
She thought of Kel—standing at that barbarian feast, reciting poetry to spit back in winter's face. Standing before his father. Standing on the arena floor with bones shaking and still daring to win.
She thought of his back, thin, unsteady, walking ahead of them through the snow.
"I won't run," she said.
The courtyard shattered.
The mist softened.
And when she walked forward again, heart no lighter but no longer chained, she did so with her spear lowered to her side—not as a weapon against ghosts.
As a promise.
Meeting in the center of the mist with the others felt like waking from different dreams into the same dawn.
Kel's eyes were sharper, as if he had peeled something rotten out of his own reflection. Landon's gaze was clearer, heavy without being unsure. Sera's spine seemed straighter, as though the weight she bore had shifted deeper into purpose instead of mere punishment.
Reina didn't speak.
She didn't need to.
She looked at each of them and saw the truth written into their faces: We broke, and we are still here.
Then the wall of the chamber rippled ahead and revealed a shimmer of impossible water.
Scarder Lake.
The lake itself was a contradiction.
It reflected nothing.
Not the cavern ceiling, not their silhouettes, not the pale shimmer of light clinging to the mist. It lay flat, colorless, its surface too still to be natural. Like glass laid on the world by an indifferent god.
Reina felt something crawl up her spine.
Fear?
Awe?
Both.
Sera walked to the edge like someone approaching an altar. Her fingers curving, shoulders stiff, eyes wide with the fragile, wild hope of someone who had spent too long braced for early death.
When Kel caught her wrist, Reina's heart jolted once in her chest.
His voice was quiet when he stopped her.
"Do you think this kind of lake is free for all?"
It was such a Kel question.
He could be standing four steps from salvation and still ask who had the right to claim it.
She watched him talk to Sera—calm, firm, almost gentle. He saw the lake not just as a cure, but as a place of rules, balances, boundaries that must be respected. She realized, in that moment, that despite everything, he did not believe he was entitled to anything.
Not even life.
Which made it all the more unbearable, and beautiful, that he asked for it anyway.
When the guardian rose, a woman-shape woven from mist and pale enormity, Reina's fingers tensed around her spearshaft until her knuckles whitened. Every instinct screamed kneel. Every part of her training said bow lower.
She did neither.
She watched Kel.
He stood before the lake and admitted he had a death curse. Admitted he did not know how he got it. Admitted that he did not want to die as a worthless cursed boy.
He said "worthless" so simply, as if he had swallowed the word and carved it into his bones long ago.
Reina wanted—for a wild, irrational moment—to step forward and contradict him, even in front of a being woven from the lake's breath.
She didn't.
But something burned, low and fierce, behind her calm eyes.
The guardian listened. Sera spoke next, voice threaded with the quiet, sharp desperation of someone who had accepted death so many times that asking to live felt like treason.
Then the guardian turned to Reina.
"Don't you have anything to save?"
Reina's throat tightened.
She didn't have a curse.
She had scars.
She didn't ask to erase them. She asked merely, in the privacy of her heart, for strength to walk beside the boy who fought his own destiny with nothing but breath and will.
She told the truth.
And the lake accepted it.
She stepped into the water with Sera, mist covering them like veils. The first touch of the lake was like being read from the inside out. It seeped into old wounds on her back, into the tightness in her shoulders. Pain that had been with her so long it had become part of her posture began to loosen.
Her scars did not vanish.
They simply… stopped screaming.
Sera trembled, curse unraveling inside her, life-force no longer being eaten. Reina heard the girl's ragged inhale, saw the tears that barely surfaced before being dragged away by water.
Reina turned her face away and said nothing.
Some things were too sacred to witness fully.
When they emerged, bodies warmed and hollowed of long-carried poisons, she saw Kel on the other side, stepping out of the water like someone wearing his own skin correctly for the first time.
He touched his chest—tentative, unsure.
Then he smiled.
Not that careful, half-twisted thing she'd grown used to.
Something looser.
Softer.
She felt something in her chest unclench.
He said, later, in a voice quiet enough for her to almost pretend she hadn't heard:
"I can breathe."
Reina turned away quickly then.
For absolutely no reason at all.
Her fingers were just cold. That was all.
She thought that would be the end.
Curses lifted.
Bodies mended.
Leave before the lake reconsidered its generosity.
Sera said as much. Landon agreed.
Then Kel did what Kel always did.
He turned back.
Reina had walked three steps toward the exit tunnel when she heard his voice again.
"Guardian of Scarder Lake," he called. "I request your presence."
She stopped.
Turned.
Mist gathered once more above the water, familiar and awe-inspiring. When the guardian asked what else he had to say, Reina expected a final, desperate favor, a selfish wish slipped in at the edge of a miracle.
What he asked instead…
"How long have you guarded this lake?"
It took her a moment to understand the shape of that question.
He wasn't asking for himself.
He was asking for her.
The guardian's answer was ancient.
Since the beginning.
Since the first reflected sky.
"So," Kel said gently, "you've been lonely since the beginning."
The word dropped into the air like a stone into still water.
Reina watched mist around the guardian shudder, ever so slightly.
Kel spoke of being caged in his room, trapped by his curse. Of knowing what it meant to see the world only through a window, never with his own feet on its soil.
Reina knew that room.
Not the walls.
The feeling.
She had been trapped differently. By betrayal. By the weight of failure. By the knowledge that she had lived when others had not.
She understood Kel in that moment more clearly than she had in all the miles of snow.
He was not just bargaining for power.
He was… offering a way out to someone with no door.
He told the guardian she did not need to leave the lake.
That she could see the world through his eyes.
Reina's breath caught.
It was, she realized, the sort of thing only someone who had wanted freedom without being able to move would think to offer.
When he asked her to become his contracted partner, the guardian's reaction was fury. Mist cracked. Her presence bore down like a storm. Reina's hand went to her spear automatically.
But Kel didn't retreat.
His voice did not tremble.
"I offer you a mutual contract," he said. "Full freedom. The right to refuse me."
Full freedom… Reaina thought. Even bound.
When the guardian demanded proof, he swore on his own life. Swore that if he ever tried to force her, the contract would break—and he would pay the price.
Sera murmured disbelief under her breath.
Landon's jaw clenched.
Reina simply stared.
She had seen nobles swear casually on "honor" and "lineage" like those words were spare coins. She had never seen someone tie their own life as a safeguard for someone else's freedom.
They took the oaths together—Kel's human voice steady, the guardian's vast tone layered with the lake itself.
Mist wrapped around his hand, coiling and binding.
Reina felt the air shift, as if a new current had carved itself into the world.
Contract.
Not of domination.
Of permission.
Of trust.
When it was over, Kel looked tired—but not in the way he used to. It was not the exhaustion of fighting his own body. It was the fatigue that followed doing something irreversible, something sharp-edged and right.
"Do you always walk this easily along death's edge?" Sera asked him.
Kel smiled faintly.
"I don't know any other road."
Reina believed him.
Now, as they left the lake behind, passing through mist toward the mouth of the cave, Reina watched his back again.
The line of his shoulders.
The way his head tilted that fraction of a degree, like he was listening to something none of them could hear.
He stopped once and glanced back toward the lake.
His eyes unfocused—for a heartbeat, distant.
She did not know he was asking for the guardian's name.
She only saw his expression soften, almost imperceptibly.
Sera noticed, arms folding under her cloak, eyes narrowing slightly as if guessing at a silent conversation. Landon shifted but did not ask.
Reina simply walked.
Beside Kel.
Beside a boy who had torn up his own death script, bargained with an ancient lake, and walked out of winter holding someone else's loneliness in his chest along with his own.
When they stepped out of the cave, snow greeted them again.
Cold, clean, indifferent.
The world did not know a cursed heir had become something else. It did not care that an immortal guardian now shared her sight with a human boy. It did not need to.
Reina knew.
That was enough.
She tightened her grip on her spear, felt the familiar weight settle in her palm, and matched her pace to his.
I ran once, she thought.
Her eyes lingered on Kel's profile—wind-touched, shadowed, alive.
I will not run anymore.
If winter wanted to swallow his path now, it would have to pass through her first.
And this time, she did not walk behind him out of duty.
She walked beside him—
because that was simply where her spear belonged.