Snow fell like ash.
The wind no longer screamed as it had during the night of her birth. Now, it whispered—soft, deliberate, like voices buried beneath centuries of silence. Each gust seemed to carry a memory, a forgotten cry, or a warning that had lost its speaker. Ais crouched low on the edge of a broken cliff, her cloak blending into the snowy landscape as if she were born from it. Her breath misted before her face, vanishing in seconds. She didn't move, not even when the branch beneath her foot creaked dangerously.
Below her, the campfire of a small caravan flickered in the growing dusk, casting golden shadows across the ivory blanket of snow.
She counted four travelers—merchants, judging by the laden carts and the poorly positioned guard half-dozing near a barrel. Too relaxed. Too loud. One of them sang an old drinking song, the kind crooned in taverns where ale numbed the mind and loosened tongues. They were unaware of the world watching them from above.
Ais wasn't there to steal. Nor to kill. Not tonight.
She listened.
One word. One name. That was all she needed.
"...said the Queen's daughter lived," one of them muttered, barely audible over the wind. "Said she walked the frost with a sword of light and a heart of stone."
"Ghost stories," scoffed another. "If she lived, Draegwyn would've hunted her down by now. No one escapes that long. Not even a cursed brat."
The third spat into the snow. "I heard she walks with wolves. Saw a man last moon, frozen where he stood. No wound. Just... ice."
Ais turned away.
No truth here. Only stories.
She moved like shadow along the ridge, vanishing behind wind-slick rocks and dead trees crusted in rime. Her steps were nearly silent, leaving faint prints in the powdery white snow. She descended slowly, not toward the camp, but deeper into the woods—where the snow hung heavier, and the trees grew so thick that light barely touched the ground. Here, the forest grew ancient, twisted with age and wrapped in a silence older than memory.
Here, the silence was different.
Older.
She paused near a stone pillar wrapped in frost. A ruin—one of the Old Kingdom's bones, long buried beneath the sprawl of newer empires. Its carvings were almost unreadable, worn by time and forgotten magic. She touched it gently.
Whispers stirred.
Not true sound, but the echo of memory.
A battlefield. A woman screaming. A king dying. Fire curling at the edge of frost. The clash of forces—destiny more than war.
Ais pulled her hand back sharply.
Even now, her power responded too easily.
She knelt and closed her eyes. Her breath slowed. Her body relaxed. She reached inward, to the storm she'd carried since birth. She didn't try to command it—not today. Today, she simply listened.
A memory rose—not hers, but her mother's voice:
"You are both storm and stillness, Ais. You are born to shake the world, yes. But also to hear its quiet truths."
The snow began to fall harder.
When she opened her eyes, the ruin stood silent once more.
But the trail was not.
Tracks. Human. Fresh. Headed east.
Ais followed.
She didn't yet know what she sought. A name. A face. A truth buried beneath layers of blood and betrayal. But the frost whispered to her—and it never lied.
The Burnt Village
The village of Breldan sat like a scar across the white fields—half-burned, half-buried. Smoke curled from broken homes. No guards. No lights. Only echoes of what once was. The charred remains of wooden fences creaked in the wind, and the silence pressed thick, disturbed only by the soft crunch of Ais's boots.
Ais entered without sound.
Corpses. Old, frozen in twisted shapes of fear and agony. She moved past them with a soldier's precision. This was not a massacre—it was a message. The burns were precise. Runic symbols scorched into the earth. Magic had been used here.
Dark magic.
Not destruction—extraction.
Ais knelt beside a child's toy, half-melted. Her fingers hovered above it. A flicker of energy clung to the wood—faint, violet-hued. The air shimmered with residual cruelty.
Blood sorcery.
Her lips thinned.
Whoever had done this wasn't hunting treasure.
They were hunting bloodlines.
And they were close.
She rose, her gaze sharpening toward the dark forest beyond the village. Someone watched. She felt it—like cold wind on bare skin. Her instincts whispered of danger, but not the kind solved with steel or fire.
Not beast. Not man.
Something else.
And it knew her name.
She didn't run. She walked, slow and steady, toward the trees that had once swallowed her past and now beckoned her toward the future. Behind her, Breldan's ruins whispered no more.
Ahead, the frost sang a new song.