Chapter 32 #2
When the snow settled around us, Everly exhaled, her expression more guarded than before as she steadied herself. The skathryn practically tumbled from her hood, its little wings flailing as though the world refused to stay still for her.
“Well, Batty, it’s your own damned fault for insisting on coming along,” I muttered as the creature staggered in a circle.
I already knew this wouldn’t have been possible without her, but I’d be damned before I let her know and have it go straight to her overinflated little ego.
Everly smirked. “You called her Batty.”
“Such a ridiculous name for a flying rodent…”
The skathryn let out a scandalized squeak and wrapped herself indignantly around Everly’s collar.
I ignored her, mostly, and bent to the snow again.
The tracks were shallower here. Lighter. Purposeful. Like the Korythid had begun masking its movement. Because it was ready to hunt again? Or had it realized we were hunting it?
Either way, a creature its size shouldn’t have been able to disappear, but this one… it was learning.
Jagged gouges faded into subtle puckers of disturbed frost before disappearing entirely. Above us, though, the thick branches of the trees sagged with fresh fractures or clean breaks, high up, far above the reach of any natural predator.
So it had stopped burrowing and taken to the trees.
A cold weight settled beneath my ribs. Was the Shard Mother actively rooting against us now?
I let out a low, humorless laugh as I tracked the creature’s path overhead. Everly followed the lines of movement too. The broken branches, the faint venom-burn scorches curling along the bark. Her breath caught in her throat, her dread skimming across our bond, sharp and metallic.
“I don’t suppose your research has yielded any information about Korythids swapping from tunneling underground to scenic treetop strolls?” I asked dryly.
Everly shot me a flat look. “Yes, right next to the chapter about how to politely decline being eaten alive.”
A corner of my mouth twitched despite myself.
She scanned the ruined canopy again. “But… if something was down there… something it didn’t want to share tunnels with, maybe that would explain the change?”
Worse monsters? Silence sharpened the air between us.
Everly cleared her throat, adjusting course. “Or,” she added, voice purposefully practical, “it could just be… heat? The Wilds have those volcanic vents. If the tunnels got too hot, I’d climb a tree too.”
A beat.
“Probably not gracefully,” she added. “But still.”
I huffed a quiet breath that was almost, but not quite, a laugh.
“There are volcanic veins in this region,” I conceded. “Old ones. Dormant, mostly, but the hot springs aren’t far from here. So, if pressure is shifting beneath the ice, if heat is rising in pockets…”
I scanned the trees again, following the path of broken limbs and venom-blackened bark.
“It would make sense,” I finished. “Even a Korythid wouldn’t risk molten stone.”
My mind flicked back to Soren’s flames, how they’d melted the Korythid’s flesh beneath its armored plates once we’d killed it.
If something hotter still lurked below… it could terrify even a Korythid into the branches.
“And I would take an underground volcano over the other possibility,” I murmured.
“Which is?”
“That something more powerful than a Korythid is moving beneath the ice."
Everly’s eyes widened a fraction. She didn’t joke this time as she considered it.
“How many monsters have you hunted?” she asked, voice quieter now, as though afraid the trees themselves might be listening.
“Hundreds,” I replied. “Thousands.” The numbers blurred together in my mind… faces, claws, fangs, blood. “The number doesn’t matter anymore.”
Her dark brows pulled together. “Why not?”
I straightened, brushing frost from my gloves, eyes sweeping the treeline.
“Because for every one I kill,” I said, “three more rise. And lately… even that feels like an underestimate.”
The wind shifted, carrying a faint rattle of ice-choked branches.
She shivered, but I had a feeling it wasn’t from the cold.
When I held my hand out to her, she took it wordlessly.
We moved through the ice again, following the wandering path of a monster whose movements I could not yet predict.
Not every village had fallen. Some still stood, scarred but intact, their people moving with the brittle efficiency of those who had learned to listen for danger.
They spoke of Tharnoks and Brakhounds, of claws and teeth and night raids that left blood in the snow and wards fraying at the edges.
But each account faltered in the same way.
There was always something else.
A sound too deep to belong to any known beast. The ground shuddering beneath their feet.
A shape glimpsed far beyond the treeline, so vast it distorted the frostlight before slipping from sight.
Some swore they had felt it moving beneath the earth, a presence that did not hunt so much as pass through.
We icewalked from village to village, following those fractured reports and the silence that followed them.
The wind grew harsher the further east we went. Thinner, too. Sharper. And the air tasted like old storms and older grief. Whether it was the altitude, my mana, or the memories stirring at the back of my mind, I didn’t know. I never could tell when it came to this place.
A vast white basin stretched across the horizon, its uneven terrain fractured like shattered glass. Ice mounds swelled and dipped in unnatural patterns. Half-buried armor glinted like fallen stars. Shattered blades protruded from the snow, forever mid-swing.
A graveyard of Seelie and Unseelie soldiers.
The Frost Grave Pass.
My stomach twisted. The breath hitched in my lungs.
Of course this was where the trail led us. Right back to the beginning.
Right where the ground had split under the weight of an impossible choice. Where I had taken more power than any fae should ever wield, and where something old and terrible had awoken in answer.
Despite myself, and needing to find the Korythids for Nevara’s sake, I couldn’t help but hope we had lost the trail somewhere along the way.
That perhaps the skathryn wasn’t as equipped at tracking the monsters as Everly said.
That they were anywhere other than this cursed field where my mother had taken her final breath.
Everly drew a shaky breath. “Draven… this is—”
“Yes.” The word scraped out of me.
I stepped forward, boots crunching through ancient ice and old blood. The air grew heavier, gnashing out with hungry teeth.
Shattered helms watched us from beneath the snow.
Frost-burnt bodies lay sealed within crystalline tombs, eternally captured mid-fall, mid-strike, mid-scream.
Exactly as I had left them.
I froze in my tracks, memories assaulting me. The sky blackening as Skaldwings poured over the pass in numbers we had never before faced.
Heard the ripple of surprise run through our ranks when other shifters joined them. United, disciplined. Wrong.
Felt the first crack of unease settle into my chest as I counted bodies that should not have been there. Lines that stretched too far. Shadeclaws. Lupines. Thornharts. Unseelie dominions that should never have joined together.
I saw my father step forward, ice forming at his command, the opening volley ripping through the Unseelie front ranks, clean and devastating.
Then a brief, foolish surge of certainty. The sense that Winter had already won.
Until the Unseelie returned his attack with weapons made of rowanwood, crafted with poison and crystals, tipped in unrelenting cold-iron.
I heard the first scream when a soldier’s mana failed him entirely, smelled iron and frost as cold-iron blades cut through shields that should have been unbreakable.
I tried to move.
Saw ironfrost rise in my path as Eryx stepped in front of me.
“I have my orders, Your Highness.” His expression was unyielding. Remorseful all the same. Understanding in a way I refused to comprehend.
The spear glanced off my father’s arm, hardly a wound at all, yet he fell anyway.
I never saw him die. Eryx blocked my view as Skaldwings descended, but I felt it in the way the land shuddered.
I wanted to break free of the memory, but I blinked and saw my mother turn toward me. Felt her shield snap into place around my position as hers failed.
Felt her mana burn out protecting me instead of herself. Eryx was too busy defending me to shield her from view that time, so I watched as the sword pierced into her skin, saw her blood run crimson across the ice, her crown tumbling into the pristine snow.
And when the power of Winter surged into me, ancient and unfathomable, I knew what I was supposed to do. Give back to the land. Balance. Reassure. Trust in the Shard Mother and Winter itself to save us.
But both of my parents were dead in Winter’s embrace.
I saw the Skaldwings descending again, and I made a choice. It was taboo, forbidden, something even the most power-hungry of my ancestors never would have dared to do for fear of risking Winter’s fury. But Winter had never been so close to the brink of ruin.
So, I dug into the river of power running rampant underneath the land… And instead of giving back, I took.