Epilogue
THE SEER TWINS
The Frost-Crowned elk did not hurry.
Nothing born of prophecy ever did.
Their silver hooves struck the Skal'Varin mountain steps without sound, though the stone was old and would have groaned beneath any other weight.
Frost feathered outward with every placement, glazing the dark rock in thin white veins that melted only after the beasts had already climbed beyond them.
Between their antlers, crowns of ice held things no mortal eye should keep—wars not yet chosen, graves not yet filled, kingdoms still sleeping beneath their own names.
Aerys rode the first with her veiled face lifted toward the Dragonborn’s home above.
Nyra rode behind her, one gloved hand resting against the elk’s neck as though feeling for the pulse of another winter.
Far below, the world had begun again.
The Veil sang.The wound had closed.The thread had remembered itself.
And still the North called.
"The threads are bound," Aerys murmured, speaking the fixed prophecy.
"The tapestry catches fire," Nyra whispered, speaking the lie that was merely a new truth waiting to be born.
At last, the elk crested the final rise.
The narrow stair gave way to a broad terrace of pale stone, jutting out over the stronghold far below.
Beyond it stood the Dragonborn’s home. Storm-weathered granite looked strong enough to withstand any siege.
Ivy climbed the walls in silver-veined coils, softening the hard edges of the stone, and warm lamplight glowed behind timber-framed windows, golden against the mountain cold.
The twins dismounted as one.
Their boots touched the terrace in perfect silence. Only the faint clatter of carved bone at their wrists disturbed the hush as they crossed to the door.
They had been exiled from the Frozen North for seeing futures that could change, but what they carried now was not a choice.
It was a catastrophe. It was a tempest of fractured timelines, a violent, unspoken history that made the crowns of ice between their elks' antlers groan under the weight.
The frozen fate of their homeland was cracking, and they could not stop the avalanche.
But they knew who could.
The girl who had once broken open and let the realm speak through her. The one who gathered fragments instead of fleeing from them. The one thing the North had no right to ask for and had come to claim anyway.
Aerys raised a pale hand toward the heavy timber.
Before her knuckles could strike, the iron latch snapped back. The door swung inward with a slow groan, and Dreadscale stood towering over them. He filled the threshold like a mountain that had finally decided to wake.
Nyra clasped her sister's hand, and their voices blended into a single, haunting chord.
"We have need of the Keeper."