Chapter 13
ELARA
Idreamed of Aeliana again.
Not the way I remembered her in the crypts, sharp-tongued and alive, laughing too loudly in a place built for silence.
In the dream, she was younger. Barefoot.
Hair unbraided and falling in pale waves down her back.
She stood at the mouth of the oldest corridor, where the ice grew so thick it swallowed torchlight, and she looked at me like she had been waiting.
“You’re late,” she said.
Her voice echoed wrong, as if the stone was repeating it a second too slow.
“I couldn’t find you,” I whispered. My breath came out white.
Aeliana smiled, but it did not reach her eyes. “You always find me,” she said softly. “You just never like what it costs.”
I tried to step closer, but the floor beneath me turned slick, glass-smooth, and the crypt tilted like a ship at sea. Somewhere far away, fire roared. Somewhere even farther, something screamed.
Aeliana lifted a hand.
Not waving. Not warning.
Offering.
“Take it,” she said, and the air trembled with the words.
I reached.
And woke.
Stone greeted me first. Then iron. Then the quiet certainty that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
The cell was narrow, carved straight from the mountain’s bones instead of built into them. The walls were rough beneath my fingertips when I pushed myself upright, grit catching under my nails.
My head swam. My mouth tasted like ash. My body ached in that deep, boneless way that came after you held yourself together too long.
All night, I had kept my hands on Tamsyn’s.
All night, I had held the cold steady until the black flame starved and retreated. Until her sobs turned hoarse. Until her shaking slowed. Until she finally slumped forward, quiet and wrecked, as if the world had emptied her out.
I remembered the weight of her grief more than the weight of her body.
I remembered the way my frost had wrapped around my hands like a second skin, precise and deliberate, as though it knew exactly what it was meant to do.
I remembered how calm I had felt.
That part made my stomach twist.
I flexed my fingers slowly, bracing for pain. For frost. For anything.
Nothing came.
No edge of cold beneath my skin. No familiar hum beneath my skin. Just warmth, ordinary and wrong, and the faint tremor of exhaustion running through my hands.
The air in the cell was hot but not cruel. It smelled of ash and mineral damp, the scent of stone that had been heated and cooled and heated again.
The door opened without ceremony, and Valen stood in the doorway, his presence warping the space in subtle, unsettling ways. The cell felt smaller with him there. Older.
“Is Tamsyn okay?”
“She is preparing for her husband’s funeral.”
His gaze went to my hands first.
Then my face.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
The question caught me off guard. Not because it was kind. Because it was unnecessary. He didn’t owe me concern, and he wasn’t the sort of man who wasted words he didn’t mean.
I let out a short, humorless laugh. “Do you care? My cryomancy is evil unless you need it, hmm?”
His eyes flicked, something dark passing through them before he masked it. He stepped fully inside the cell, until heat pressed against my skin hard enough to sting. The cold that always hovered just beneath my skin recoiled instinctively.
“Come with me,” he said.
“Where?” I asked, wary and unwillingly drawn in.
“To the funeral.”
“I don’t think that is appropriate. No one wants an Iceborn at their funeral,” I challenged.
“An Iceborn saved a grieving wife last night.”
A part of me wanted to refuse on instinct alone. Because I knew what ice meant to them. Because I could already feel the stares, the blame, the superstition waiting to gather around my shadow.
All night, I had held Tamsyn’s hands and felt grief burning through her like poison. I had sealed it in frost, contained it the way Icespire contained the dead, and I still wasn’t sure if that was mercy or cruelty. I only knew it had worked. I only knew she was alive.
And now Valen was looking at me like he expected me to step into a room full of mourning and not shatter.
Like he trusted my restraint more than I did.
I didn’t belong in their grief.
I didn’t belong anywhere near their sacred fire.
And yet the moment he said it, I felt that strange, quiet steadiness rise in me again. The same calm from last night. The same sense of being guided.
As if someone behind my eyes knew exactly where I was being taken.
He turned, already expecting me to follow.
And I did.
The guards were visibly uneasy as we walked through Ashenveil. They did not flank me so much as orbit, keeping a careful distance, their attention fixed on my hands, my breath, the space I occupied.
No Cryomancer had ever been brought to a pyre.
The funeral grounds were carved directly into the mountainside, open to the sky in a wide, spiraling descent of black stone terraces.
Each level was worn smooth by centuries of bare feet and ritual kneeling, the rock worn smooth by centuries of bare feet and ritual kneeling, shaped by presence, not abandonment.
At the center stood a raised dais, its surface darkened by countless burnings, the stone fractured and re-fused so many times it looked almost alive.
The body lay there already, wrapped in layers of ashcloth and pale linen, bound not tightly but deliberately, as if restraint mattered even in death.
People stared openly at me.
Their expressions were not hard with hatred. They did not flinch or whisper or shout. They simply watched, faces set in something older than anger. This was not personal. It was cultural. Absolute.
To them, I was not a woman.
I was a contradiction.
Preservation instead of release. Stillness instead of cleansing. The idea that death could be paused, held, and repurposed.
I kept my chin level and my hands folded neatly at my sides, forcing my body to look calm even as my pulse kicked hard beneath my ribs.
Then I saw her.
Tamsyn stood near the pyre, wrapped in dark cloth, her hair braided back from her face like someone had tried to make her presentable for grief. Her eyes were swollen, her mouth set too carefully, as if one wrong breath would split her open again.
She looked at me.
Really looked.
For one suspended moment, the noise of the crowd fell away, and all I could hear was my own breathing and the low roar of flame.
Tamsyn lifted her chin, spine locking straight like she was bracing for a blow. Then, after a heartbeat that felt longer than it should have, she gave me a single, small nod.
No words. No gratitude loud enough to invite judgment. Just an acknowledgment passed between two women who had met in the ugliest hour and survived it together.
I nodded back before I could stop myself, and the ceremony began without announcement.
Silence fell first. Complete. Intentional.
A priest stepped forward, their robes dark and heavy, the hem scorched and repaired so many times it told its own history. Ash was scattered. Offerings laid. Oils poured in measured lines along the wood beneath.
Flame as mercy.
Fire as truth.
The sky darkened as if in answer.
I felt it before I saw it, a shift in pressure that shortened my breath and pulled my skin tight.
A dragon descended.
Not in fury, not in spectacle, but in a slow, reverent spiral, wings cutting through the air with a sound that settled deep in my bones. The creature’s shadow swept over the terraces, over the crowd, over me.
I swayed without meaning to.
Valen’s hand came to my back instantly, firm, possessive in a way he did not acknowledge, fingers spreading as if he were grounding me rather than restraining me.
“Watch,” he murmured, close enough that his breath brushed my ear.
The dragon exhaled.
Fire poured downward in a controlled torrent, brilliant and blinding, the heat so intense it stole the air from my lungs. The pyre caught instantly, flame racing along the oils, climbing, consuming. The linen blackened, curled, vanished. The smell was final and undeniable.
The crowd did not cheer.
They breathed.
A collective exhale, relief rippling outward as the fire did what it was meant to do. As something finished.
My knees weakened.
Something inside me recoiled, not from the flames, but from the finality of it. From the way the fire erased any possibility of return.
A strange, unwanted urge twisted through my chest, a whisper of instinct I didn’t understand, a pull toward preservation, toward stillness.
Valen felt it.
His hand tightened slightly at my back, not enough to hurt, but enough to anchor. “This,” he said softly, his voice threading through the roar of flame, “is release.”
I swallowed. “It looks like destruction.”
“To you,” he said. “Because you were raised among the frozen.”
I turned to him, my pulse racing. “Perhaps death isn’t meant to be merciful. Maybe it’s just… inevitable.”
“Do you know what it means,” he asked quietly, “to trap a soul in its last moment? To bind it to flesh that cannot rot, cannot return, cannot move on?”
The fire crackled. The dragon lifted, circling once overhead.
“In frost,” Valen continued, “death does not end. It repeats. Over and over. Grief without decay. Fear without release. An echo that stains the land itself.”
Something in his voice tightened, just briefly.
“That is what I intend to end.”
I stared at him, shaken by the conviction, by the intimacy of the confession.
His gaze lifted toward the sky, toward the creature still circling above the smoke. “I did not choose this path because it was gentle. I chose it because it was necessary.”
I didn’t respond, mostly because I didn’t know what to say.