Chapter 13 #2
It was the first moment since my capture that I stopped seeing Ashenveil as a place of monsters.
They didn’t burn their dead because they were cruel.
They burned them because they refused to let anyone own what came after.
Because grief, here, was not a resource.
It was a right. A last mercy they guarded with teeth and steel and blood if they had to.
And standing there, watching Tamsyn unravel while Valen held the line without touching her, it hit me like a blade between the ribs: Icespire hadn’t just stolen bodies.
It had stolen endings. It had taken the last sacred thing a person was owed and turned it into a wall, a weapon, a border fed by names no one was allowed to say out loud.
I thought of the dungeon. The man on his knees.
The cold on my hands. And I realized Ashenveil wasn’t fighting to conquer anyone.
They were fighting so no one could ever make their dead serve a crown again.
Valen’s hand lingered at my back longer than it needed to.
I hated how quickly my body accepted the steadiness of his hand. And I hated even more that part of me wondered what would happen if he ever let go.
Something in my chest tightened.
Not pain. Pressure.
It spread beneath my sternum like a foreign hand pressing outward, cold and deliberate, a sensation that made my breath stutter halfway in.
The crowd was still murmuring, the ritual winding down in reverent quiet, but the sound felt distant now, muffled, as if I were sinking underwater.
My fingers began to tremble at my sides.
I clenched them hard enough to hurt, grounding myself in sensation, in the scrape of my nails against my skin.
The body was gone. Reduced to ash. Released, according to Ashenveil’s creed.
And still the cold stirred.
I swayed.
Before I could take a full step back, arms wrapped around me from behind, firm and unyielding.
Valen caught me against his chest, one hand locking around my waist, the other bracing my hip as if he had anticipated the collapse before I had.
Heat radiated from him in waves, startling in its immediacy.
My palms pressed into his armor by instinct, fingers curling as I fought for breath.
“Easy,” he murmured near my ear.
The word was quiet, almost gentle, and it undid something in me.
My knees threatened again, but he held me upright without effort, his grip steady, controlled, seemingly aware of every inch of space between us. I felt him inhale slowly, deeply, as though he were centering himself, and the sensation sent a shiver through me that had nothing to do with cold.
“You’re shaking,” he said.
I let out a laugh that sounded like it got dragged out of me by force. Thin. Ugly. “You just burned a body in front of me,” I said, staring at my own hands like they belonged to someone braver. “I think I’ve earned the right to be a little unstable.”
But something was still wrong.
Not in the way the pyre was wrong, or the grief on those terraces was wrong..
This was deeper. Stranger. Like my skin didn’t fit the bones underneath it anymore.
Heat pressed into me and, instead of sinking into my muscles, it made my cryomancy stir restlessly, like it was offended by the very air.
Cold licked up my spine without permission.
Frost wanted to form at my fingertips, desperate to answer a threat that wasn’t there, to defend me from a world that wasn’t even touching me.
My lungs seized, and for a second I swore I could feel ice trying to bloom beneath my ribs, trying to crawl out of my body as if it didn’t know where it belonged.
This was my first Ashenveil funeral.
I told myself it was only flame. Only ritual. Only another custom I didn’t understand.
But my body did not believe me.
In Icespire, death had been quiet. Frozen.
Preserved. Aeliana had walked among the crypts like she belonged there, speaking the rites in a voice that never shook.
I used to stand half a step behind her, watching her hands move with practiced reverence, watching her face go still in a way that made even grief look disciplined.
I had never thought the memory of it could return like this.
Not as sadness.
As… pressure.
Like something inside me recognized the ritual happening in front of my eyes and leaned forward to answer it.
I swallowed hard and stared at the pyre, willing myself to stay present, to stay in my own skin.
And then the cold surged.
“Elara,” he murmured, low enough that no one else would hear. “What’s wrong?”
I tried to answer, but my mouth didn’t form the words correctly. My jaw felt heavy. My lips felt wrong.
“I… don’t feel right,” I managed, and the sound startled me. It came out blurred, almost slurred, like my tongue couldn’t keep up with my thoughts. “Maybe I… used too much last night.”
Valen’s hand hovered near my elbow, not touching yet, but ready. His gaze flicked over my face like he was searching for cracks.
“No,” he said quietly. “Look at me.”
I tried.
The pyre’s flames wavered in my vision, and behind them I saw ice. Thick. White. Endless. The crypts. The dead sleeping in their frozen rooms.
Aeliana’s voice used to fill those corridors.
The thought hit me so hard my lungs forgot their rhythm. Valen’s fingers closed around my arm then, firm and steady, grounding me before my knees could betray me. “Breathe,” he ordered softly. Not harsh. Controlled. “Deep. In.”
I inhaled and tasted ash. The cold in my chest tightened.
“Out,” he said. “Again.”
I tried to obey. I tried to stay inside my own skin. But the cold was rising higher now, creeping up my throat, building behind my eyes like glass.
“What is wrong with me?” I whispered, panic slipping through the words. “Valen, I don’t?—”
His grip tightened. “Stay with me.”
The sentence was too intimate to be a command. Too urgent to be anything else.
The pyre crackled.
And the cold inside me answered, eager and starving. A thin sheen of frost webbed across my knuckles. Not enough for anyone else to see. Enough for me.
Valen saw it anyway. His jaw tightened. His grip became iron.
I blinked, once, twice, and suddenly the tears on my lashes felt like crystals. My breath came out in a thin white stream.
My knees softened.
Valen’s arm locked around my waist before I could fall, pulling me hard against his side, shielding me from the watching crowd like he could hide what was happening by sheer will.
The cold surged one final time, swallowing the last of my balance.
The pyre’s flames flared in my vision.
Then everything went distant.
The fire.
The crowd.
The mountain.
Valen’s voice became an echo, as if I was already sinking.
His hand tightened around me.
“Stay with me,” he said, and it was the last thing I heard clearly.
The world went dark without warning, like a door slamming shut from the inside.
And I fell into it.