The High Pass was not merely a path; it was a physical manifestation of isolation. Beyond the Monastery of the Hollowed, the ground leveled out into a vast, wind-scoured table of white that seemed to stretch into eternity. There were no landmarks here, no trees to break the horizon, only the jagged black peaks of the far range that looked like the teeth of a buried beast. The sky was a pale, anemic blue that felt as though it were being drained of its color by the sheer reflecting power of the snow.
Severin marched ahead, his silhouette a sharp, dark line against the blinding white. He didn't look back. He didn't check to see if Aelindra was keeping pace, or if the thin air was forcing her to stop every few yards to clutch her chest. The warmth that had defined their night in the cave, the shared breath and the silent understanding, was gone, replaced by a rigid, vibrating silence. Every time his boots struck the snow, a faint puff of crystalline dust rose, shimmering like crushed glass in the pale sun.
Aelindra followed in his wake, her breath hitching in the razor-thin air. Her chest felt hollow, as if the Keeper had reached inside and scooped out more than just a name. She reached into her tunic, her fingers brushing the dark glass shard. It was cold, impossibly cold, but it was the only thing that felt real. It was a weight that reminded her she was still there, even as the landscape tried to blur her out of existence.
"Severin, stop," she called out. Her voice was thin, snatched away by a wind that had finally begun to howl across the flats, carrying with it the scent of ancient ice.
He didn't stop. If anything, his pace quickened, his strides long and purposeful.
"Severin!"
She ran a few steps, her boots sinking deep into the frozen crust, her lungs burning with the effort. She reached out and grabbed his cloak, her fingers numbing instantly through her gloves. He spun around with a violence that made her flinch, and the look in his eyes was like a physical blow. The amber she had come to rely on was there, but it was submerged under a layer of soot-black shadow. The veins in his neck were standing out, pulsing with the erratic, frantic rhythm of the Crownfire.
"Don't touch me," he hissed. It wasn't a request; it was an instinctive, jagged reaction, like a wounded animal baring its teeth at the only hand that had ever fed it.
Aelindra recoiled, her hands trembling. "You can't just walk into the dark alone. You don't even know where we're going."
"I know it's where the lies end," Severin said, his voice dropping to a dangerous whisper that felt like a blade at her throat. He stepped toward her, looming over her, his shadow swallowing her small frame against the white light. "Do you have any idea what it feels like? To look back at your childhood and see a wall of fog? To realize your own blood was scrubbed from your mind like a stain on a floor? My father... the Council... they looked me in the eye every day knowing there was another. Knowing I was a replacement."
"I gave you the name so you would know the truth," Aelindra argued, her own anger beginning to flare through her bone-deep exhaustion. "I traded a piece of my father's soul to give you back your brother! I am losing myself to pay for your history, Severin!"
"You didn't give him back!" Severin roared, the sound echoing across the empty plain like a crack in the world "You just gave me the ghost! You gave me the weight of a man I can't remember loving, but whom I apparently failed! If he was the first-born, if he was the one meant for the fire, then what am I, Aelindra? A backup? A spare part kept in the dark until the real King was broken?"
He turned away, slamming his fist into his thigh with a sound of leather on bone. The Crownfire flared briefly, a violent burst of heat that melted the snow around his feet into a circle of black, steaming slush.
Aelindra watched him, her heart breaking. She saw the Prince not as a warrior or a target, but as a boy who had just realized his entire life was a script written by men in silver masks. She stepped into the melted circle, the heat of his anger radiating off the ground and warming her frozen shins.
"You are the one who is here," she said softly, her voice steady despite the wind. "You are the one who survived. Valerius is a name in a jar, but you are the man who held me on the ledge. That wasn't a script, Severin. That was you."
Severin's shoulders slumped, the tension bleeding out of him for a heartbeat. The fire dimmed, leaving him shivering in the sudden, brutal return of the mountain's chill. He looked at her, and for a fleeting second, the wall of ice between them cracked, revealing the terrified man beneath.
"I can feel him now," Severin whispered, his gaze drifting toward the north. "Since you said the name, it's like a bell ringing in the base of my skull. A constant, low thrum. It's pulling me. He's there, Aelindra. And he's... he's cold. So very cold. It's a cold that fire can't touch."
Aelindra reached out, hesitating before resting her hand on his arm. This time, he didn't pull away, but he didn't lean in either. He felt like a statue carved from the peak itself.
"We find him," she promised, though the words felt heavy in her mouth. "And we find out why they did this."
They continued their march as the sun began to dip toward the horizon, turning the white world into a sea of bruised purple and gold. The High Pass was beginning to narrow again, the flat plateau giving way to a series of ice-choked ravines that looked like the entrance to a labyrinth of glass. The walls of these ravines were translucent, shimmering with a faint, inner light that made Aelindra feel as though she were walking through the throat of some gargantuan beast.
As the light faded, the "Silent Ground" began to lose its peace. The stillness became predatory.
Aelindra heard it first, a sound like glass grinding on glass, a rhythmic, skittering noise that seemed to come from every direction at once. It was coming from the very walls of the ravine. She stopped, her hand flying to the shard in her tunic.
"Severin."
He stopped, his hand already on his sword, his eyes darting to the shifting reflections in the ice. "I hear it. Something is moving in the refraction."
From the shadows of the ice-walls, things began to emerge. They were the same translucent, shifting horrors that had harried them before, but here, in the heart of the ice, they were almost invisible. They were made of frozen vapor and shadow, their forms blurring as they moved. They had no faces, only hollow depressions where eyes should be, and they moved with a silent, fluid grace.
Severin drew his blade, but the steel looked dull in the twilight. "Aelindra, get behind me. And don't use your light. If you flare, you'll just give them a target."
"I can't just stand here while they circle us!"
"OBEY!" Severin roared.
The Command was so powerful it physically forced Aelindra to her knees. It was like a giant's hand slamming into her shoulders. Her muscles locked, her breath hitching in her throat as her body betrayed her. It wasn't just a shout; it was the authority of the Crownfire, raw and unfiltered, stripping her of her agency. She watched, trapped in her own skin, as Severin lunged at the nearest creature.
His sword passed through the creature's chest, but there was no resistance. It was like cutting through a cloud. The thing hissed, a sound like steam escaping a pipe, and lashed out with a claw made of hardened frost. It caught Severin across the chest, shearing through his heavy cloak and leaving a trail of white hoarfrost on his skin that seemed to drain the color from his face instantly.
He let out a cry of pain, his movement faltering as the frost began to spread.
Aelindra struggled against the Command. It was a mental cage, a golden lattice that held her limbs in place. Her mind screamed for her to move, to heal the frostbite spreading across Severin's ribs, but his will was a physical weight on her spine. She watched in horror as the creatures closed in, their translucent bodies flickering with a sickly violet light that matched the resonance of the mountain.
Severin tried to ignite his hand, but the fire sputtered and died. The cold of these things was anathema to the Crownfire; they were designed to extinguish the very thing he was.
I have to break it, Aelindra thought, her teeth grinding together until her jaw ached. I am the Anchor. I am the one who holds the line.
She reached into the dark well within her. She didn't look for the memories of her mother or her home. She looked for the "waste", the cold, oily sensation of the name Valerius that she had just bought. She took that coldness, that foreign piece of Severin's own history, and she pushed it outward, using it as a wedge to crack the golden lattice of his Command.
The Command snapped with a sound only she could hear, like a string breaking on a lute.
Aelindra lunged forward, not toward the creatures, but toward Severin. She grabbed his hand, her fingers interlocked with his, her skin burning where it touched the hoarfrost.
"Together!" she screamed, her voice cracking the silence of the ravine.
She didn't try to bridge his fire this time. She tried to anchor it. She took the chaotic, flickering energy of the Crownfire and forced it into a single, needle-thin point of focus. She became the lens through which his power was filtered, and he became the sun.
A beam of pure, white radiance erupted from their joined hands. It wasn't a flare; it was a lance of concentrated light. It pierced through the first creature, and the thing didn't just dissipate, it shattered like a mirror, falling into a thousand harmless shards of ice. The others recoiled, their shadow-forms flickering as the light burned away their edges.
Severin gasped, his weight leaning heavily on her as the light faded. He looked at her, his eyes wide with a mixture of awe and genuine terror.
"You broke the Command," he whispered, his voice trembling. "No one... no one breaks the Command."
"I'm an Anchor, Severin," she panted, her vision swimming as the world began to tilt. "I decide what stays and what goes. I am not your servant."
The remaining creatures dissolved back into the shadows of the ravine, sensing a power they weren't prepared to harvest yet. But the victory felt hollow. Aelindra felt a sharp, stabbing pain in the back of her mind, a sensation of something being erased in real-time. She tried to remember the color of the flowers that grew outside her window in the spring.
They were red. No, they were white.
They were gone.
She slumped into the snow, the dark glass shard falling from her tunic. It landed in the white crust, looking like a hole in the fabric of the world.
Severin knelt beside her, his hand trembling as he reached for the shard. He didn't pick it up. He looked at Aelindra, the shadow in his eyes deepening as he realized the cost she was paying to keep him alive.
"The Herald is coming, Aelindra," he said, his voice flat and heavy. "And now he knows exactly who is carrying the light. He knows you can break the blood-will."
He looked toward the north, where a single, dark tower rose like a needle against the stars, silhouetted by a moon that looked as cold as the Seekers. The Shadow-Hold.
"We have to move," he said, helping her up. "Before the ice closes in."
Aelindra nodded, her mind a blur of lost colors. She let him guide her, her hand lingering in his. They were two broken halves of a kingdom, walking into a storm that didn't care about their names or the things they had forgotten.