Chapter One
WINTER ROSE FROM NOWHERE AND EVERYWHERE.
A scream of wind.
A blast of cold—
Power tore out of me—viciously cruel and dangerously strong, ripping across the burning mountains, hurling icicles, smiting snow, delivering extinction to everything it touched.
Lucien’s hell didn’t stand a chance as ice clawed over flaming rock, frost surged over rivers of magma, and the entire night shocked white as winter stole everything—ending the lives of a million fires with a single exhale.
For one fragile heartbeat, I felt monstrously powerful.
I balanced the scales of destruction Lucien had unleashed and proved I was his perfect opposite, but...that fleeting triumph crumbled instantly, replaced by a grief so deep, it felt as if my soul was carved out with a rusty spoon.
Grief.
Bone-breaking, soul-tearing grief because he’d left me.
Left me!
“Don’t you dare do this!” Flinging myself on Lucien’s corpse by my knees, I balled my hands and struck him.
“Wake up!” I punched him over and over, wanting to tear apart that despicable piece of metal in his chest. Each strike cracked something deeper inside me.
Every blow was a plea, a prayer, a curse. “Wake up! Come back. Wake up!”
Without him, I wasn’t capable of holding back the ice.
Without him, I would die.
I could feel it rising, building, snarling. A raging apocalypse...a catastrophe that would plummet the world into an icy coffin.
“You don’t get to leave me!” I struck him again. “You’re not allowed, do you hear me? I forbid it. I need you.” I slapped his cheek, sending his head snapping to the side. “Open your damn eyes! Don’t you dare do this. I won’t let you do this. You can’t!”
He couldn’t abandon me.
He couldn’t just suddenly unexist.
I hated him.
Hated that I couldn’t find him, save him, keep him.
And the longer he was gone...the longer his heart didn’t beat...the worse my power became. It didn’t just open its eyes, it stretched and yawned and prepared for war.
Was this what Lucien had felt when he’d succumbed to his fire’s wrath? This level of agony as it built and built and built?
“Lucien!”
He was my balance.
The only force keeping my body from utterly destroying itself.
“Please, Luxin!”
He didn’t respond to either name.
Didn’t open his eyes or blend his blood with mine so we could reverse this awful nightmare.
He just...left me.
Wrath and horror and heartbreak splintered my frozen bones as the world continued to smoke and shatter.
The icy power no longer wanted to share my body. It wanted all of it. All of me.
With a howl of arctic rage, it crested and swallowed me.
I screamed as my heart became a glacier. My veins solidified, my blood crystallised, and my organs became lumps of frosty glass.
I gagged. I cried. I tried to fight—
Another blizzard tore free, tearing toward the stars and ricocheting outward with a storm of icy knives. Silver blood sprayed from my lips. I coughed and choked, quaking beneath pain. I coughed again, raining Lucien in sterling droplets as he lay dead and smoking on the ground.
I folded forward as ice webbed outward beneath my knees, blanketing the earth. I moaned in despair as every tree became a twinkling statue—every burning rock and bramble nothing more than a snow-covered relic.
I screamed again as the ice kept building, building, carving through my veins and tearing through my flesh. Jagged lightning bolts carved their way through my skin, matching the shards tearing through the sky.
I jerked as the power evolved and twisted. I could smell death again. I tasted all the lives that’d ended and knew where every bone rested. The world was littered with mementos and pieces of those who were loved and lost. I felt them decaying. I knew why they’d died and how long they’d been gone.
And the ice fed on those remnants.
It hunted down the whispers of their memories and drank on the tiny echoes of their energy, feeding me, hurting me, driving me closer and closer toward the very death so many had already suffered.
My body contorted as another scream tore through my throat. It became all-consuming, blinding, shoving me into a grave already lined thick with snow.
My broken bones turned to dust beneath the pressure.
I collapsed over Lucien, planting both hands over his metal-encased heart as the fire chose that moment to cremate him. Flames erupted in his hair with their mocking little flickers.
“No...” I clawed at his chest. “Don’t. Please don’t leave me. Stay!”
But that godawful gift inside me already knew. He was gone. I could sense his death. I could tell his spirit had fled, leaving a body empty of his soul.
A body that started disintegrating.
A tremor quaked over his chest as his shredded skin turned powdery with soot.
The fire in him reached critical, burning through whatever was left. With nothing to fuel it—with no more life to sustain it—the flames turned on the very vessel that’d housed them, destroying him from the inside out.
A fleck of ash peeled from his shoulder, drifting upward and spinning silently into the night.
Another followed...and another.
They danced on the wind with cruel mockery, stealing him right before me.
My throat closed. A sob tore free.
“No...”
The entire side of his face fractured, flitting away like charred embers, catching the polar breeze whipping around us.
“Lucien!”
My fingernails clawed into him as his body unmade itself—returning to dust like all the bones beneath us.
His arms began to fade, glowing sparks lifting free and dancing aimlessly around my head. His legs followed—dissolving into drifting particles of light and cinders.
“Stop it!” I hurled myself over him, trying to anchor all his pieces. “Stop it. Please stop it! You can’t die. You can’t!”
He didn’t obey me.
His body continued to unravel.
Piece by piece.
Fleck by fleck.
Every ashy fragment rising like a tiny sun.
I pressed my hands over his metal-trapped heart. “Stay. Stay with me. D-Don’t leave me—”
His torso hollowed beneath my palms.
My breath hitched as his face slowly vanished, breaking apart with shimmering shards...disappearing as if he’d been nothing more than a dream.
“NO!”
Lunging, I clutched what remained of him, catching flecks of swirling ash. They escaped through my fingers with mocking wisps of smoke.
His chest broke apart with a cloud of soot, revealing a charred heart as the vitalsync core fell to the ground, no longer supported by flesh or bone—
—his body exploded with a burst of light.
“No!” Glowing filaments swirled, trapping me in a cyclone as I scrambled after him, crawling, grasping.
“Come back! Lucien!”
The blizzard snatched him away.
Launching to my feet, I roared into the storm. “Give him back!”
The snow howled. The world froze.
And I couldn’t do it anymore.
I couldn’t be alone anymore.
Lost anymore.
Afraid anymore.
I’d told him I would chase him. And I would. Through death and nightmares—to the ends of the universe if necessary.
He’s mine.
Raw power detonated.
Fear and grief and horror and love.
So, so much love.
The sharpest, wickedest power in existence.
With a screech, I flung myself wide open.
Take me instead!
Give him back and you can do whatever you want with me!
The storm paused.
The world glittered in its web of frost.
And...the ice replied.
With a howl, it reversed direction and barrelled through me.
It accepted my bargain and roared.
Pain I’d never felt before tore me wide open. Every droplet of crystallised blood. Every frigid vein. Everything ruptured. I shattered into shimmering pieces as winter wove with love and time wrenched to a halt.
Fate bent.
Destiny rewrote itself as I pulled power from all those who’d perished before and defied death itself.
Murderous cold fogged with catastrophic waves. The sky rained silver. Lightning bolts cracked through suffocating snow.
And I didn’t care.
“Come back.” Tears fractured down my cheeks, half ice, half salt. “You have to come back.”
The cold deepened, feeding off my emotions, growing stronger and stronger.
The mountains cracked as ice ploughed through stone. Trees broke in half as arctic wind scythed through them. The river froze solid as the entire valley descended into a tomb of eternal winter.
And in the midst of calamity, I sank into time itself.
I felt every string holding existence together. Ancient history and extinct civilisations. Future advancements and upcoming tragedies. I held every moment that ever was or ever would be, and all it took was a simple choice to cut.
To cut the strings of time and cease life itself.
The knowledge I could tamper with the very existence of this world overwhelmed me.
I choked as my body began to break.
My skin iced over. My hair bled white.
But I couldn’t stop myself.
I called upon every forgotten, dead creature within these mountains to hunt Lucien’s soul and bring him back. Snow hung suspended like glittering stars as I closed my fist around reality and refused to let it keep ticking without him.
There was only this. This space between moments. A rewrite of everything that ever was.
I tried to reverse time the same way I’d somehow stepped through it when racing to find Lucien earlier in the night.
I pictured a different reality where we’d gone to the mountain together.
Where he’d never triggered this unsurvivable ascension.
Where all those prisoners stayed alive and Whisper never ran off—
But...I wasn’t strong enough.
I stumbled and coughed up blood, fighting with the enormity of trying to force the galaxy to bow to me.
And I paid for it with my own disintegration.
My arms began to dissolve.
My hair turned into crystals.
The human shell I’d inhabited for a mere twenty-two years unmade itself, just like Lucien’s had.
I only had seconds.
A single moment to make a choice.
I reached with my heart. I clung with my soul. And I felt him.
Felt his heat, his aura, his spirit.
And I did the only thing I could.
I reversed the meagre moments of his death. The only moments that truly mattered.
With every ounce of love and desperation, I reached across the veil and yanked him home. Ash reversed into flesh. Embers became bone. The empty space where his heart should’ve been began to beat again, weak and struggling, but real.
I lasted long enough to witness his chest rise with breath.
To feel him living—
And then dropped to my knees in the snow and collapsed.