The sun had barely scraped the dark canopy of the trees when I reached the summit of the hill.
The morning air was thick and freezing, a thin mist crawling over the damp grass that made my lungs burn with every breath. The silence was absolute, broken only by the occasional rustle of dry leaves dragged by the breeze.
Sillys was already there.
She sat cross-legged on a smooth stone in the center of the clearing. Her eyes were closed, her breathing so shallow that her chest barely moved. Her silver spear was driven into the earth beside her. The morning wind played with the strands of her white hair, but she remained in perfect, absolute immobility. She looked like a statue carved from ice.
"You are late," she said, her voice echoing softly without her even opening her eyes.
"The sun hasn't even properly risen," I grumbled, rubbing my goosebump-covered arms beneath the thin fabric of my tunic.
"The storm does not ask for permission to begin, Suki."
She opened her pale eyes. There was no anger, only a deep, unshakeable calm. Rising with fluid elegance, she pointed toward the center of a smaller circle of stones.
"Sit. If you want to survive what is to come, we need to understand how your transformation works, rather than depending on the desperation inside you."
Hesitant, I walked over and crossed my legs on the cold earth. Sillys did not sit. She gripped her spear, crossed her arms over her chest, and stared down at me with analytical eyes.
"Let us start from the foundation," she demanded, her tone almost academic. "Describe the exact moment before the marks appeared. How did it feel? What went through your mind when the Queen was millimeters away from crushing your skull?"
I swallowed hard. The memory of the beast's acidic breath and the sound of my own bones snapping still sent shivers down my spine.
"I... I thought I was going to die," I admitted, lowering my gaze to my hands. "I remembered my father, Silver beating me during training... I remembered every single time I was useless."
Sillys narrowed her eyes. "True, but that cannot be all, can it? What changed? What shattered the seal?"
I clenched my hands into fists.
"My mother," I whispered, remembering her voice. "I remembered what she said about being a goddess in my subconscious, and then... rage took over. I decided I wasn't going to die. I simply stopped accepting defeat and... let everything loose."
Sillys nodded slowly, her eyes gleaming with understanding.
"Desperation was the sledgehammer that broke the glass, Suki. But what leaked out wasn't desperation; it was acceptance," she explained, walking slowly around me. "You let go of the restraints. You stopped trying to control the situation with mortal muscles and let your divine lineage take the helm. That is exactly what we are going to recreate here. But this time, you will do it without needing your ribs pulverized."
I took a deep breath, nodding. It sounded simple in theory.
In practice, the following days proved to be an absolute psychological torture.
On the first day, there were no destructive blasts or strikes. There was only silence and the biting morning wind. My sole task was to breathe, but my mind was a hornet's nest. Every time I closed my eyes, anxiety consumed me, tensing my shoulders, furrowing my brow, and trying to pull the wind through sheer force of thought.
*Smack!*
A sharp pain snapped across my forehead. I opened my eyes with a jolt. Sillys stood a few paces away, lowering her hand after flicking a small pebble right into my face.
"You are trying to grab the storm with your bare hands," she reprimanded. "You are tense. The wind flees from tension. Relax your jaw."
The second day was a physical test, a battle for concentration. Sitting motionless for ten consecutive hours made my tendons scream and my legs tingle until they went completely numb. This was different from ordinary meditation; I had to keep the air around me constantly swirling, which prevented me from slipping into my own limbo.
I gnashed my teeth, sweating coldly, trying to invoke the white light through pure willpower. I wanted to punch a tree. I wanted to run.
"You are squeezing your own body, expecting power to drip from it," Sillys's voice echoed behind me, calm and irritating. "If you keep tensing up, you will only break your own teeth. Lightness does not reside in brute force."
On the third day, dawn brought no light; it brought a white tempest.
The thick dawn mist was crushed by heavy flakes of snow that began to bury the hill. The cursed geography of the Black Forest claimed its toll, and the temperature plummeted abruptly and lethally, hitting twenty degrees below zero before breakfast.
The cold ceased to be a mere discomfort and became a physical presence. Each breath of air I pulled tore at my throat and lungs as if I were inhaling frozen glass dust. I trembled so violently that I could hear the chattering of my own teeth. Frost accumulated on my eyelashes and hair. My lips were completely purple, and my fingers, gripping my own shoulders in a futile, instinctive attempt to retain some warmth, had entirely lost all sensation.
The white hell was killing me by inches.
"Uncross your arms and lift your chin," Sillys's voice cut through the howling blizzard, cold and unyielding as steel.
She was a few meters away, seated on her meditation stone. The snow piled softly over her shoulders and white hair, but she wore no heavy cloaks or animal pelts—only the same thin linen tunic. Her breath emerged in small, perfectly rhythmic and peaceful puffs of vapor. She seemed untouched by the absolute ice, as if the queen herself were part of the storm.
"I... I can't feel... my legs," I stammered, my voice failing miserably, my eyes watering from the biting wind. "Sillys... I'm going to freeze..."
"Then expel the cold, Suki," she replied, implacable, without even opening her pale eyes to look at me. "Cold is merely nature occupying empty space. If you are freezing to death, it is because you are still acting like mortal flesh, pathetically resisting the environment. I will not light a fire for you. Stop fighting the temperature. Return to the posture. Now."
I swallowed the desperation and the humiliating urge to beg for warmth. With a monumental effort, I forced my rigid, numb arms back down to my lap, closing my eyes as I fought to survive the extreme temperature.
*Stop fighting it,* the memory of my mother's voice floated into my mind, mixing with Sillys's ruthless commands. *Let go of the restraints.*
I stopped grinding my teeth. I let my shoulders drop. Instead of wasting the little energy I had left blocking the absurd cold, I simply opened my mental defenses and let the twenty-degrees-below-zero wind pass freely through my body. I accepted the storm and the stillness.
I released the trembling air from my lungs in a long, slow sigh.
For a single, brief millisecond, the back of my right hand flashed.
I snapped my eyes open, inhaling the freezing air all at once. The biting sting of the cold returned almost immediately, but I hardly cared, staring open-mouthed at my own wind-reddened hand, feeling the lingering echo of that warmth.
A few meters away, Sillys opened her pale eyes. The thick layer of snow resting on her shoulders slid off as she minimally shifted her posture, and an imperceptible smirk broke the impassive mask of ice on her face.
"A spark," she murmured, her voice cutting through the implacable howl of the wind. "You finally stopped trying to be a stone in the middle of the tempest and started acting like the air. Now, we need to turn that spark into a wildfire capable of melting this winter."
And it was on the fifth day, with the hill buried under nearly half a meter of fresh snow, that the true storm arrived to test what I had built.
I was on my knees, my body covered by a thin layer of frost, pulling the frigid air into my lungs and feeling the wind whistle at the nape of my neck. Then, the crisp sound of snow being crushed by heavy boots shattered my meditation.
I opened my eyes.
"Enough playing ice statue," a voice laced with malice purred.
Laura was standing at the edge of the clearing. Her pale brown skin stood out against the blizzard, but her smile was a jagged rip of predatory, serrated teeth. Her eyes, two spheres of a sickly crimson, gleamed through the white mist. With a chilling metallic *shkit*, long silver claws slid out from her knuckles.
"If you only wake up when death knocks on your door, how about we simulate Momma Taranpus, hm?"
Laura flexed her knees, the muscles in her thighs tensing like springs beneath her dark trousers. The blizzard around her swirled, and then, she simply ceased to exist at that spot.
Pure, lethal physical speed.
My survival instinct screamed before my brain could even process the image. I threw my weight to the left at the exact moment the air where my neck had been was sliced.
I felt the tear before the pain. Three diagonal lines ripped across my right shoulder. Hot blood splurted, hitting the immaculate snow with a soft hiss and staining the white a vibrant red.
I groaned, rolling through the powdery snow and reaching out to pull my black wooden spear into my hand with the wind.
"Too slow!" Her maniacal laughter plummeted from above.
Laura dropped from the gray sky like a meteor. I raised the shaft of my spear at the last instant, locking my arms. The impact was heavy, a seismic shockwave that blew all the snow around us away in a perfect ring, exposing the frozen black earth beneath. My boots sank into the bedrock. Her claws ground against the enchanted wood inches from my eyes, spitting orange sparks into the cold air.
The muscles in Laura's neck bulged, her dark veins pulsing as she forced her weight against me with brutal strength.
*Activate!* I screamed mentally, panic clawing up my throat. *Activate damn it!*
But the power wouldn't come. My hands shook, my heart hammered against my ribs like a caged bird. The pain in my shoulder burned, and the air left my mouth in ragged plumes of vapor. I was using mortal strength to resist a monster.
Laura noticed my desperation. Her smile widened. She twisted her hips in mid-air and drove her boot straight into the center of my chest.
I was launched backward like a ragdoll, crashing through the curtain of snow and colliding violently against the thick trunk of a frozen oak tree. The bark of the tree shattered into thousands of splinters of ice and wood against my back. I fell to my knees, spitting a dark clot of blood into the snow.
"Are you going to die here again?!" she taunted, her voice distorted by bloodlust.
She lunged forward in a low-flying leap, like a wolf upon a wounded sheep, her right arm pulled back, claws aiming precisely at the center of my heart. It was an execution strike. She wasn't going to stop. If I didn't change, she would kill me right there. Terror tried to strangle my lungs.
I closed my eyes.
I stopped contracting the muscles in my chest. I stopped trying to retreat or raise my spear. I stopped resisting the pain burning in my shoulder and the cold numbing my fingers. I relinquished control and simply let the blizzard pass through me.
I let the air out of my lungs.
The world slowed down to a near crawl. I felt the microscopic shift in air pressure as Laura's silver blades sliced mere centimeters away from my sternum.
And then, the storm recognized me.
Space imploded and then detonated. A shockwave of compressed white air swept across the hill from my axis; the surrounding snow flew and was instantly vaporized into mist. I was lifted from the ground, and gravity ceased to exist for me. Lines of pure, incandescent white light tore across my skin from my face to my arms, throbbing like the heart of a cold star.
The detonation hit Laura mid-air, launching her backward, spinning violently. The assassin drove her claws and boots into the frozen earth, tearing four deep trenches into the rock to brake her own body. She stopped ten meters away, shrouded by the ice dust suspended in the air.
When she raised her face, her hair was disheveled by the gale emanating from me. The sadistic smile she wore had stretched from ear to ear, her crimson eyes dilated in pure combative ecstasy.
"Now we're talking..." she hissed, her voice trembling with predatory excitement. "Let's play for real."
The hill ceased to be a training ground. It became the epicenter of a natural disaster.
We lunged simultaneously, tearing a vacuum tunnel through the blizzard. When my spear and Laura's silver claws collided in the center of the clearing, the deafening clash silenced the very howl of the wind. Laura did not yield a single inch. With an animalistic growl, she spun her body in mid-air, using the ricochet off my spear to unleash a lethal arc of silver aimed at my neck.
But I was no longer there.
Her claws sliced through nothing but a residual image made of condensed air. I reappeared three meters above her, stepping onto an invisible platform of atmospheric pressure. I spun the spear and plummeted. Laura raised her arms crossed in an 'X', blocking the black shaft. The force of my descent shattered the rock beneath her boots, opening a crater in the hardened soil.
We became two indistinguishable blurs—one of crimson, the other of light.
Laura advanced and ricocheted off the scenery. With a dull thud, her boots struck the side of a frozen pine tree meters above the ground, shattering the thick bark into thousands of icy splinters. She used the trunk as a springboard, completely ignoring gravity, and vanished into the white curtain of the blizzard.
A hundredth of a second later, the sharp sound of slicing air came straight from my blind spot. She plummeted almost upside down, silver claws descending like a guillotine toward the base of my neck. My brain didn't even have time to process the danger or send an evasion command to my muscles.
It wasn't necessary. The storm thought for me.
Before her blade could even graze my skin, the minute displacement of air behind me made the hairs on my neck stand up. Instantly, the wind beneath my boots exploded autonomously. An invisible, violent current pulled my body to the left, sliding me through space at an unreal speed without me needing to flex a single tendon to run.
Laura's claws tore through nothing but the cold vacuum and my residual image, sinking up to her wrists into the bedrock where I had been standing a fraction of a second before. The vacuum of the collision pulled my coat violently, and I used that exact pressure to spin around her. The whole world seemed to be pushing me. There was no more weight. There was no more friction. The wind grabbed my ankles, my back, my shoulders, dragging me through her strikes like a living current.
Laura laughed—a hysterical, wild sound. Her claws slashed horizontally toward me, fast enough to set the air ablaze. I tilted my body by pure reflex, feeling the metal pass so close to my face that a few strands of my hair were torn away along with drops of blood.
I smiled right back at her. The compressed air exploded beneath my foot.
*BOOOOM.*
My body disappeared in a white flash and reappeared above her. The black spear fell like a lightning bolt, enveloped by violent spirals of wind. Laura raised her claws. The shockwave shook the entire forest; the metallic ring was so absurd that the surrounding tree trunks simply cracked down the middle. The pressure wave crushed the snow against the ground and blasted open another crater around us.
She skidded backward, smiling. I did too.
Heavy breathing. Burning lungs. Hot blood trickling down my jaw.
Laura charged again. Her feet barely touched the ground before her next leap. Trees exploded behind her body like casualties of a missile. I saw only red flashes of her eyes cutting through the white tempest.
"YES!" she cackled. "DON'T DIE YET!"
The wind around me went mad right along with me. The white marks glowing across my skin pulsed violently. The snow began to rise from the ground instead of falling. Rocks trembled around us. Craters appeared across the mountain, one after the other. Smaller trees were uprooted from the soil before the thunderous sound could even reach them. The gray sky broke into gigantic spirals of white wind as we collided dozens of times per second.
Freedom. That was what I felt.
Until, in the middle of an aerial dodge, I felt something cease to exist within me. The wind vanished. The marks on my body disappeared all at once.
Then gravity hit me like an execution.
*BOOOOOOM.*
My back exploded against the bottom of the crater. It was such a sudden drop that I couldn't even adjust myself for the fall. I lay discarded at the bottom of the pit, staring at the snow falling slowly through the smoke while my chest desperately gasped for oxygen.
Laura landed on the rim of the crater. Hot vapor rose from her skin into the freezing cold, and small drops of blood trickled down her retracted claws. She looked down at me.
"Three whole minutes..." she panted, running a hand through her damp hair.
*I still have a lot to improve in this transformation,* I thought.
The sun had barely begun to lick the open wounds on the horizon when Arthur ascended the hill.
I could still taste iron in my mouth and feel the rhythmic throbbing of the bruises left by Laura. The morning air, which should have been refreshing, suddenly turned dense as Arthur's heavy military boot crushed the damp grass at the top of the hill. He did not bring Laura's frantic sadism; he brought the oppressive silence of an avalanche.
"You are tense," Arthur stated. It wasn't a question. "Your breathing is short and your shoulders are stiff."
I rose slowly, ignoring the rhythmic throb of the bruises on my ribs. Just by looking at Arthur, I knew exactly what he wanted to do at that moment. Sustaining his gaze, I spoke.
"If this is what you want right now, there is no one who can stop us."
"Laura breaks things because she likes the sound they make when they part," he said, stopping ten paces from me. His hands remained loose at his sides. "I break things only when they are in my way. It is a fundamental difference in efficiency."
I swallowed hard. There was no arrogance on his face, only a clinical, cold reading of reality.
"Yesterday..." I began, forcing my voice not to waver, "the white marks appeared when I was absolutely certain I was going to die. I think I've finally learned how to activate it."
Arthur tilted his head slightly. "Not that it makes any difference between our strengths."
I clenched my fists, frustration bubbling beneath my skin. The dust around Arthur's boots began to float. A faint green aura began to accumulate at the tips of his fingers, distorting space like heat exuding from hot asphalt.
"Show me, Suki, if this transformation is truly all that." His voice was a monotonous baritone that vibrated in my bones. His green eyes did not blink. "Fight me, without interference."
I closed my eyes.
A gust of cold air erupted from the ground, causing the damp grass to whip violently around me. The white marks did not rip through my skin in a spasm of pain this time; they flourished. The geometric patterns lit up my arms, climbing up my neck and contouring my face, pulsing to the measured rhythm of a contained hurricane. When I opened my eyes, there was no more color or pupil, only the milky white of the storm.
Gravity released its claws from me. I felt every current of air, every grain of dust hovering in the clearing.
Arthur simply took a step forward, and the world seemed to shrink. The atmospheric pressure itself gave way under the weight of that movement.
*Here he comes.*
The first punch was a displacement of mass so violent that the air snapped, breaking the sound barrier. His fist drove forward like the warhead of a missile, obliterating space, but I was no longer anchored. Instead of trying to dodge using muscles, I let the very displacement of air generated by Arthur's attack push me. My feet lost contact with the ground. The punch shattered the space where my head had been a millisecond ago, but I had already slipped past the side of his arm, light as smoke, spinning in the air propelled by the very destructive force of the strike. The shockwave at my back stripped the bark off a nearby oak with a sharp crack.
Arthur spun his body with mechanical precision, his heel plunging into the earth and kicking up a geyser of stones. He followed through with a side kick designed to break my spine in half. I used the current of wind swirling around me to pull myself down, sliding beneath Arthur's leg like water flowing over a stone. The vacuum of the passing blow raised the hairs on my arm, and the sound of ripping air buzzed in my ears.
Each of Arthur's charges exploded the soil, creating half-meter craters and throwing curtains of dust into the air. He attacked by creating vacuum zones with pure kinetic force, and I used those very zones to move. When his left fist descended in a vertical hammer strike, I stepped onto the invisible shockwave before the blow even hit the ground, leaping backward and hovering for long seconds before landing silently on my tiptoes.
There was no fury in my movements.
Arthur stopped. The aura trembled slightly on the knuckles of his dirt-stained fingers. The clearing around him looked as though it had been bombarded, but his breathing remained perfectly controlled. For the first time, a small furrow of interest appeared between his brows, and the deep green of his eyes gleamed with a new calculation.
"You still do not seem to use this transformation for pure attack," he murmured, more to himself than to me. "Just dodging and defending won't win you a fight."
"I don't intend to actually fight you, but just being able to dodge your attacks brings me relief."
For three hundred seconds, the clearing was a vortex. Every punch and kick was a death sentence that encountered only the void. I did not feel the burning lactic acid in my muscles or the crushing anchor of exhaustion; instead, my veins buzzed with a cold, electric current. The white, ethereal flow kept me in a state of untouchable suspension. I surfed along the margins of the destruction he created.
Until the storm reached its limit.
There was no sudden warning or pain, just a whisper of depletion. The geometric lines on my arms blinked, the milky white flickering like a lightbulb about to burn out. The thick friction of the air suddenly scraped against my face again. The glow receded from my fingertips, shrinking and sinking back beneath my pores like dying embers in ice, until the last spark dived into my skin.
And then, gravity remembered my existence.
The transition hit like a shockwave, snapping the invisible cords of wind keeping me upright. My hands slammed into the ground while my lungs expanded in brutal spasms, sucking in oxygen in desperate, loud gasps. But my bones were intact. I didn't have a single scratch.
I counted that as a victory over Arthur.
At the edge of the ruined clearing, Sillys uncrossed her arms. She had been watching everything, since it was she who had ordered Laura and Arthur to fight. A rare, sharp smile cut across her face amidst the settling dust.
"Now we're talking. Exactly five minutes," she said, her voice rising above the hum of the dying wind. "Now you understand the difference between surviving and dominating."
Arthur remained motionless. His green eyes didn't blink, scanning the clearing and then silently archiving every detail of my perfect evasion, reading the landscape like a general reads the map of a war that has just shifted directions.
And that was how time passed, like the wind.
The vibrant green of the hills around the village gradually withered, turning into packed earth and thick clouds of dust under the uninterrupted weight of thousands of boots. We stopped counting time by the cycles of the moon or the rising of the sun; the days came to be measured by the shrill ring of smithing hammers beating iron and the harsh shouts of command echoing through the valley.
The air ceased to carry the freshness of the mountains, smelling instead of old sweat, wet leather, and freshly polished steel. The expectation of retaliation was no longer an abstract idea floating through the village; it was a real static electricity that made the hairs on your arms stand up with every breeze.
From my isolated training plateau, I watched the metamorphosis below. Sillys did not allow grief to take root. She took the traumatized warriors, fractured by recent losses, and smashed them on a smithy of discipline until they became a perfectly synchronized wall of blades.
"First row, spears high!" her commanding voice tore through the morning mist with the force of thunder. "Second row, frontal wind! Shield wall, advance!"
And they advanced. The unified thud of thousands of feet striking the ground made my own clearing vibrate. They followed her with a blind, almost feverish faith, because she wasn't just an untouchable figure on the platform; she was in the mud with them, bleeding with them.
But as the army took shape and the days slipped through our fingers, a cold, heavy knot began to coil in my stomach. With every new evasion technique I mastered, with every extra minute I managed to keep the white marks active during the calculated beatings from Arthur, Laura, and Sillys, the phantom of Elfhing grew in my mind. The original mission loomed over me like a guillotine ready to drop.
*Is it enough?* I asked myself constantly, sitting in the grass with ragged breath and trembling hands after training. *When the gates of the white marble palace fall... what will I be able to do against whatever is inside?*
Anxiety began to devour my sleep. My nights turned into morbid simulations, catastrophic scenarios where my speed and my marks weren't fast enough to prevent the death of those beside me. Many of those sleepless nights I spent leaning against the doorframe of the barracks window, my chest tight, staring at the empty dirt field under the pale light of the moon. And it was never entirely empty. Sillys was there, alone. I watched her twirl the wind spear in a silent, furious ballet, the blade ripping through the darkness with such violence that it left luminous tracks on the retina.
She knew what was coming. And I felt it, straight to the bone, that the blood we had spilled so far would be nothing compared to the banquet the palace would demand.
And it was with those thoughts that we arrived at the Night Before the March.
The wind that swept through the village that night brought the unmistakable scent of the end of the countdown.
The four of us were gathered around a small campfire at the edge of the village, away from the houses of the troops. We wore no heavy leather or metal armor, held no titles or military ranks, dressed only in light, dark fabric clothing that hid our recent bruises. The bitter herbal tea prepared by the elders steamed in our mugs, but the silence between us was so dense it felt as though it carried gravitational weight.
Laura was the first to break the stillness, swirling the dark, hot liquid in her ceramic mug in a hypnotic motion.
"Are you guys feeling it too?" she murmured, her voice stripped of its usual irony. Her crimson eyes reflected the dancing flames with a feverish glow. "That tight knot in the stomach. As if something colossal, ugly, and inevitable is about to crash down on our heads."
On the other side of the fire, the flames cast harsh, angular shadows across Arthur's stoic face.
"It's coming," Arthur replied, his perilously serene baritone scraping the silence of the night. He didn't look at any of us; his gaze was locked on the embers methodically consuming the wood. "But that isn't fear. It's certainty."
The sentence carried a double meaning so obscure that an involuntary shiver ran down my spine. The shadow he cast on the ground appeared distorted, larger than normal, as if swallowing the scarce light around him.
Sillys, sitting beside me, ignored the bizarre tension radiating from him. She looked up, her neck extended, staring at the starry sky stretching infinitely beyond the sharp canopies of the Black Forest.
"Elfhing Castle..." she sighed, her voice bathed in an ancient melancholy, but immediately sharpened by a pure, distilled hatred. "I was born under that marble roof, and tomorrow... I will return there. No longer as a daughter, but as an enemy." She lowered her chin slowly, turning her face to us. "But I will not return alone."
The pale eyes of the goddess met mine through the smoke.
Laura gave that sadistic side-smile, showing the tips of her canines, the tension morphing into her habitual thirst for chaos. Arthur remained in absolute silence, his posture locked, inscrutable.
I lifted my chin. The fear and anxiety that had consumed me for weeks were still there, tingling at the base of my skull, but I pushed them down. I took a deep breath, letting the freezing air, scented with soot, fill my stabilized lungs. For a brief second, obeying a simple trigger of peaceful will, the white, luminous marks of my heritage climbed up my arms, glowing vivid and pulsing under the moonlight.
"Then let's go," I said, my voice surprisingly steady, feeling a small, stale breeze play between my open fingers. "Let's finish what we came to do."
The exact second the last word left my lips, an unnatural, violent gust of wind pierced with ice crystals swept through the clearing. The campfire didn't just flicker; it was brutally extinguished, the embers, smoke, and heat swallowed by the suddenly black and freezing air, leaving us plunged into the abyss of absolute darkness.
The time for preparation was over.