Chapter 5 #4
My friend stayed against that wall for long moments, and I watched him slowly slide down it until he was sitting on the floor, knees drawn up, head in his hands.
The other servants walked around him, not cruel but careful, knowing that acknowledging his breakdown would only make things worse for everyone.
The window flickered, the image dissolving back into the Frost Veil's frozen landscape, but the damage was done. Guilt clawed at my throat with talons made of ice and self-loathing.
Here I was, wrapped in impossible luxury, transformed into something powerful and protected, claiming to suffer from isolation while wearing dresses that cost more than Tam would see in a lifetime.
I'd been given magic, immortality, a dragon lord who called me precious and meant it.
And what had I done with these gifts? Hidden.
Waited. Followed rules while my best friend faced Caelus's retribution for my escape.
The seven-day wait until the Pact suddenly felt like an insult. Seven days of safety while Tam endured seven days of hell. The power building in my transformed body meant nothing if I couldn't use it to help the one person who'd helped me survive.
I pressed my forehead against the window, and frost spread from the contact in fractal patterns that looked like screaming.
"I'm sorry," I whispered to the friend who couldn't hear me, to the boy who'd snuck me extra bread and terrible jokes and the kind of friendship that survived servitude. "I'm so sorry."
The responsive magic around me shivered, picking up my distress.
Books fell from their shelves, their pages turning to chapters about guilt, about debt, about the weight of survivor's shame.
The rose sculpture on the mantle turned black, its petals falling one by one to shatter on the floor with sounds like breaking promises.
Four more days until the Pact. Four more days until I had the full power of a dragon's mate, until even Caelus would have to recognize me as beyond his reach. Four more days of Tam suffering for the crime of being my friend.
I wanted to scream, to rage, to tear through these beautiful chambers until something finally broke instead of reshaping itself to my desires. But I didn't. I stood at that window, watching the alien landscape of my new home, and let the guilt eat me hollow from the inside.
Because that, at least, was real.
The guilt crystallized into something harder and sharper than the ice surrounding me—rebellion.
I couldn't save Tam from here, but I could stop being the fragile thing everyone seemed determined to protect.
I was transformed now, immortal, carrying enough ice magic in my veins to freeze a small lake.
The idea that I needed constant supervision suddenly felt like the worst kind of insult.
My feet carried me to the moonlight doors before I'd fully decided to act.
They stood closed as they'd been for three days, elegant panels of frosted crystal that caught the light and threw it back in rainbow spirals.
But now, with my enhanced vision, I could see what I'd missed before—threads of magic woven through the crystal like silver wire, forming patterns that spelled out Sereis's will in the Old Tongue.
Stay. Protect. Contain.
The words pulsed with his power, with the absolute authority of a dragon lord in his own domain.
They should have been unbreakable, especially to someone only three days into their transformation.
But as I pressed my palm against the cold surface, I felt something else—gaps in the weaving where his distraction had left the magic incomplete.
He'd been so focused on the approaching traders, on preparing his defense, that the wards were more suggestion than command.
I reached for the power inside me, that well of ice magic that had replaced my human blood.
It responded eagerly, almost too eagerly, flooding through my arm and into the door with enough force to make the crystal sing.
The wards resisted at first, Sereis's will pushing back against mine.
But I thought of Tam, of his hands shaking behind his back, and pushed harder.
The magic felt like extending a limb I hadn't known I possessed.
Not my human hands but something else, something that existed in the spaces between solid and liquid, in the quantum foam where ice crystals formed.
I found the weakest point in the ward—a place where two commands intersected imperfectly—and drove my will through it like an ice pick through soft snow.
The wards shattered with a sound like wind chimes falling from a great height. Musical, almost beautiful, but unmistakably the sound of something breaking. The doors swung open silently, revealing the corridor beyond with its impossible geometry and shifting perspectives.
I should have felt guilty. Should have hesitated. Instead, I felt powerful for the first time since my transformation. Not just physically changed but capable of changing things myself.
The journey to the lower levels pulled me like gravity.
I didn't consciously decide which walls to pass through or which dimensional folds to follow—my new instincts guided me toward something that sang to the ice in my blood.
The palace grew stranger the deeper I went.
The walls shifted from worked crystal to raw ice, from deliberate architecture to something more organic, as if the structure had grown rather than been built.
The scent reached me first—ozone and ancient earth, like the moment before lightning strikes permafrost. It carried promises of power, of magic so pure it predated names and categories. My transformed body responded to it the way flowers turned toward sun, inevitable and unconscious.
The stairway that appeared wasn't made of steps but of frozen waterfalls, each cascade caught mid-motion and turned solid.
I descended by instinct, my feet finding purchase on surfaces that should have been too smooth to climb.
The temperature dropped with each level, but the cold felt like coming home rather than danger.
When I finally emerged into the Deep Ice Gardens, I understood why Sereis had forbidden them.
This wasn't a garden in any sense humans would recognize.
It was a cavern, vast enough that the ceiling vanished into darkness my enhanced vision couldn't penetrate.
But growing from floor and walls and even hanging from invisible points in the air were trees made entirely of ice.
Not sculptures—living things, somehow, their crystalline branches moving in breezes I couldn't feel, their frozen leaves chiming against each other in harmonies that made my bones ache.
They glowed from within, each tree lit by a different color of trapped light. Deep purple here, electric blue there, a gold so pure it hurt to look at directly. The light shifted constantly, the trees breathing it in and out in patterns that might have been communication or might have been dreams.
The magic here wasn't contained or controlled.
It was wild in the truest sense, older than the Frost Veil itself, older than Sereis, older than the concept of dragons having human forms. It pressed against my mind like too many voices speaking at once, each one offering secrets I wasn't equipped to understand.
But I was mesmerized. How could I not be?
I moved deeper into the garden, drawn by a massive tree at its heart whose light cycled through every color I could see and several I couldn't, creating new hues at the edges of perception.
The path toward it looked solid—black ice polished to mirror perfection, reflecting the tree lights in dizzying patterns. I stepped onto it without thinking, my mind too full of wonder to register danger.
The ice shattered instantly.
Not cracked, not broke—shattered, like it had been waiting centuries for something foolish enough to trust its surface. I plummeted through, the false floor giving way to nothingness, to a crevasse that yawned beneath the gardens like the world's hungry mouth.
My hand shot out by instinct, catching the edge as my body swung out over the abyss.
The impact nearly tore my shoulder from its socket—transformed or not, I still had joints that could suffer.
My fingers found purchase on the ice edge, but it was already beginning to crack under my weight, spreading in spider web patterns that promised another fall any second.
Below me was nothing. Not darkness—nothing.
An absence so complete my mind couldn't process it, kept trying to fill it with something, anything, rather than accept the void that existed beneath the gardens.
This wasn't a crevasse. It was a wound in reality itself, the place where the wild magic had torn through dimensions in its birth.
Wind howled and ripped at me, pulling so hard that it tore at my clothes, leaving them in shreds around me. I felt so exposed, in so much danger, the my heart pounded with adrenaline.
My enhanced strength meant nothing here. I could pull myself up if I had something stable to pull against, but the ice edge was failing, chunks breaking away with sounds like glass tears. My other hand scrabbled for purchase and found only smooth surface, nothing to grip, nothing to save me.
"Help," I whispered, then louder, "Help!" But who would hear me? I'd broken through wards meant to keep me safe, descended to forbidden levels, walked into a trap any child would have seen. This was my fault, my arrogance, my—
"Mira."
Sereis stood at the edge of the false floor, looking down at me with an expression I'd never seen on his face before.
Terror.
Pure, absolute terror that made him look younger somehow, vulnerable in a way three thousand years of existence hadn't prepared him for. His eyes were wide, the silver-white irises reflecting the garden's wild light, and his hands trembled where they clenched at his sides.
For one heartbeat, we stared at each other—him frozen by the sight of me dangling over nothing, me shocked by the raw fear on his face.
Then the terror transformed into something far more frightening.
Fury.
Not the hot rage of fire dragons or the crackling anger of storm lords.
This was the cold fury of absolute winter, the kind that froze blood in veins and turned breath to ice in lungs.
The temperature in the gardens dropped twenty degrees instantly, and every ice tree chimed a warning as their inner light dimmed.
The garden's wild magic, which had been pressing against my mind moments before, retreated like tide before tsunami. Even the void beneath me seemed to recoil from the presence now radiating from Sereis.
He hadn't moved, hadn't reached for me, hadn't done anything but stand there as his fury transformed the very air into something that could kill with a breath.
Frost spread from where he stood in fractals that moved like living things, reaching for me across the broken ice with intent that looked almost sentient.
"Don't," he said, and the word carried enough command to stop my heart for a beat. "Move."
I couldn't have moved if I wanted to. His fury had frozen me more effectively than any ice, locked every muscle in place with the absolute certainty that I had crossed a line there would be no coming back from.
I'd seen him afraid. I'd seen him lose control.
And now I would see what happened when a dragon's protective instincts collided with their rage at being disobeyed.
The ice beneath my fingers cracked further, and I couldn't even flinch.
Then, he closed his eyes and frost coalesced into an icy staircase under me. My heart pounded as I met his gaze. I tried to cover my near-nakedness, but felt like even if my clothes hadn’t been destroyed, I’d still be totally exposed.
“Come,” he said. “Climb the stair.”
I didn’t know what was more scary, the void beneath me, or the disappointment in Daddy’s eyes.