Chapter Thirty-Two
They say love can save us from anything.
But what of those that have never felt their heart beat to the rhythm of another?
Tabitha Wysteria
Bryn woke to the soft crackle of fire, its sound cutting through the fog of sleep. He could not say how long he had been unconscious. Perhaps a day, perhaps two, but his body carried the heavy certainty of time having slipped past without him.
Outside the small hut, Kage Blackburn knelt by a newly built fire. Bryn watched as the wyverian prince tended to a small rodent skewered over the flames, and he found himself absurdly trying to imagine Kage hunting something so small, so harmless. It did not suit the image he held of him at all.
‘Where were ya?’ Bryn asked, tugging another layer of furs over his shoulders.
Kage did not look back. His dark gaze remained fixed on the fire, as though it might offer him answers if he stared long enough.
‘I had some matters to attend to.’
‘Ya just vanished,’ Bryn pressed, his voice quiet but firm.
‘I’m sorry,’ Kage said after a pause. ‘It won’t happen again.’
Bryn nodded. He believed him without question. There was something about Kage Blackburn, something unspoken and steady, that made doubt feel unnecessary.
‘Where’s ya shadow?’ Bryn asked after a moment, glancing up at the starless sky. He was almost certain the crow had been absent before as well. He could not remember ever seeing Kage travel without it.
Kage stiffened.
‘He is on his own path right now.’
Bryn frowned, his silver brows lifting. Slowly, he moved closer and lowered himself onto the snow beside Kage, the cold biting through his clothes. He pulled some of his own furs across the wyverian’s shoulders without asking.
‘Are ya not cold?’
Kage did not answer at first. He remained still, firelight dancing across his sharp features. Bryn wondered if his words had gone unheard but after a long moment, Kage sighed, the sound weary and unguarded.
‘I’m not feeling quite myself as of late.’
‘What happened to ya?’ Bryn asked softly, as though the question itself might frighten the prince away if spoken too loudly.
Kage was silent for a long moment. The fire popped between them, sparks lifting briefly into the night before dying. At last, he spoke, his jaw tight, the words honed sharp with restraint.
‘I saw your sister,’ he said. ‘In the Underworld.’
Bryn’s body went rigid. Heat surged up his spine, flushing his neck and ears, and suddenly his hands were shaking. He dragged the furs tighter around his shoulders, gripping them hard, as if he might still his trembling through force alone.
‘I don’t understand,’ he murmured, eyes fixed on the flames. He did not dare look at Kage.
‘Your sister is dead,’ Kage said.
The words landed like a blade, but dull and familiar.
Bryn had known this already. He had spoken it aloud himself, had carried it like a stone in his chest for longer than he cared to remember.
And yet hearing it again, days later, from Kage’s mouth, left him strangely hollow.
Confused. Was this cruelty? Or something else entirely?
‘I know me sista is dead,’ Bryn replied, his voice rougher than he intended. ‘Me whole family is dead.’
Except for Eirwen, perhaps, a traitorous thought whispered through him.
The edge in his tone made Kage tilt his head. For the first time, their eyes met—one pair black as the deepest night, the other blue as an open, unforgiving sea.
Before Bryn could say another word, Kage reached for his hand.
The cold shocked him. Not the sharp bite of winter air, but something far worse. Unnatural, bone-deep, like pressing bare skin to ice without fur or glove. Bryn jerked back with a sharp inhale.
‘Why are ya so cold?’ he asked, already moving, tugging the furs tighter around Kage’s shoulders, as if wool and hide might undo whatever wrongness clung to him. The wyverian prince only let out a low chuckle, breath ghosting into the night.
The sound made Bryn still.
‘Because I’m…’
Bryn waited, heart thudding, leaning forward despite himself, desperate for the rest of it. But the words never came. Kage fell silent, and Bryn exhaled, the disappointment settling heavy in his chest.
‘We were always doomed, you and I,’ Kage said instead. His voice sounded empty, scraped hollow by something unseen. ‘From the very beginning.’
Bryn opened his mouth, a dozen questions rising at once, but he never spoke them.
Kage turned fully towards him then, closing the small distance between them. And before Bryn could think, before he could brace himself for whatever truth might follow, Kage leaned in and pressed his mouth to Bryn’s.
The world stilled. The fire crackled. And the cold was suddenly forgotten.
…
Kage had never planned to kiss Bryn Wynter. Though, in truth, he had imagined it from the very first moment he had set eyes on the wolverian prince.
King, he reminded himself bitterly. He is king now.
The instant his lips had met Bryn’s, the weight of existence had lifted.
For one treacherous heartbeat, the Underworld, the curse, the cold threaded through his veins—all of it had vanished.
Hope had flared in his chest, fragile and incandescent: a quiet life carved out at the edge of the world, where two princes could simply be.
Kage with his books and ink-stained fingers; Bryn with snow in his hair and wolves at his heels. A life unobserved. Unjudged.
A fantasy.
Nothing more.
So he had pulled away. Too quickly. Too sharply. He had turned his back before he could see that hope reflected in Bryn’s eyes, hope Kage knew he could never honour, never return. He walked away as if distance alone could undo what had already been done.
He should have known better.
Bryn Wynter did not retreat from what he wanted.
The wolverian king followed him into the small hut, the low ceiling trapping the tension between them.
He said nothing at first, only watched as Kage busied himself with meaningless tasks—shifting furs, straightening items that needed no straightening, hands betraying the nerves his face refused to show.
The silence stretched, thick and suffocating.
At last, Kage exhaled, the sound weary, and turned to face him.
‘Where is me wolf?’ Bryn asked.
The question struck Kage like ice to the spine. He hadn’t been expecting it, hadn’t known what he had been expecting, only that it wasn’t this.
‘I… I misplaced him,’ Kage said, the words faltering as they left his mouth.
He almost flinched at the sound of his own uncertainty; it was not something he was accustomed to.
The truth sat heavier on his tongue. Freya had cut him down and dragged him into death, and Bryn’s wolf…
Bryn’s wolf had vanished into the chaos.
Kage could only hope foolishly and desperately that the creature had survived, that fate had been kinder to him than it had been to so many others.
‘Like yer crow?’
Kage opened his mouth, then closed it again.
The ache was immediate, sharp. Spirox had been his shadow-crow, his constant since birth.
A shadow bound to wyverian royalty, gifted at the moment of their first breath.
A guide. A companion. One day, shadows returned to death, escorting the very souls they had once guarded.
‘I was attacked,’ Kage said quietly. ‘When I woke, your wolf was gone.’ It was close enough to the truth to pass. ‘I’m sorry.’
Bryn studied him for a moment, then nodded.
‘It is okay, Kage. He’ll find his way back to me.’
Kage frowned. ‘How can you be so sure?’
Bryn shrugged, the movement small, careless and painful. He hissed softly as his healing wounds protested, though even that pain seemed reluctant to linger. ‘I can’t,’ he admitted. ‘But hope is da last thing I can afford to lose now.’
Kage looked at him then, really looked at him, and felt something twist painfully in his chest.
Kage wanted to tell him not to hope. Hope, he knew, was a treacherous thing, sharp-edged and cruel. It was hope that drove men to madness, that hollowed them out when reality finally came calling. It shattered far more than it ever saved.
But standing there, with the wolverian king before him—lost, grieving, stripped bare in ways far deeper than flesh—Kage found that he wanted to hope too.
‘Then let us hope together,’ he said softly, stepping closer until no space remained between them.
The furs slipped away, and Kage’s long, pale fingers traced Bryn’s arms, reverent and slow, as though memorising him.
He let his gaze linger, taking in the lean strength of Bryn’s body, the quiet power etched into muscle and bone.
Want stirred, fierce and aching. He wanted to touch every inch of him, to map him with his hands and his mouth, to carve this moment into memory.
He should not hope. He knew that.
And yet, when everything else had already been taken, when the world had left them both with nothing but ruin and ash, hope felt like the only rebellion left.
Or perhaps he was simply being a fool.
Bryn leaned in first, brushing his mouth against Kage’s in a kiss so gentle it barely dared exist, as though he were waiting to be pushed away. When they parted, they remained close, breathing the same cold air, the tips of Kage’s fingers hovering just above Bryn’s snow-pale skin.
Tell him the truth, a voice whispered inside Kage’s mind. Tell him you are dead.
Kage went still.
Was it wrong not to tell him? Of course it was. The truth changed everything. He was no longer truly alive—only a soul bound by curse, walking among the living by night and the dead by day.
And Bryn Wynter deserved to know.
Kage stepped back, forcing down the great, aching knot lodged in his throat. His black wyverian heart splintered further at the sight of Bryn’s expression crumbling before him. Every instinct screamed for him to reach out, to smooth away that hurt, to take it back into himself.
But he did not.
‘We shouldn’t,’ he whispered, retreating again, until the hut itself refused him any more distance. ‘It is wrong.’
Bryn’s blue eyes flared, widening for a heartbeat before sharpening into something colder, harder. In that instant, Kage realised how his words might land, how easily they could be misunderstood. But surely Bryn knew. Surely he understood that Kage did not mean them. Not two men, not love.
He meant something else entirely.
Bryn straightened, his shoulders squaring as he reached for the fallen furs and wrapped them tightly around himself, armour once more drawn into place. He nodded, sharp and decisive, as if sealing something away.
‘I need to find me brotha Eirwen,’ Bryn said, his voice forged of iron now. ‘And I need to confront Caldwell. I need to drag him off da throne.’
‘Your throne,’ Kage said, his chest tightening painfully at the steel in Bryn’s stare. He had put that there. Even in death, Kage seemed incapable of leaving others unscarred.
‘No.’ Bryn shook his head. ‘I don’t want it. It will go to Eirwen.’
Kage’s expression remained carefully still, but a faint crease appeared between his brows. It was the only sign that Bryn’s words had struck deeper than he cared to admit.
‘But you are the rightful heir.’
Bryn stepped out of the hut, the cold swallowing him instantly. He paused only once, turning back just enough for Kage to catch the curve of his mouth as he let out a hollow chuckle.
‘I am nothing anymore, Kage Blackburn,’ he said.
His knuckles blanched white where he clutched another bundle of furs, gripping them as though they were the only thing keeping him upright.
‘Without me family, I am nothing. Without Wren…’ He did not finish.
The words fell away, unfinished and unspoken, swallowed by the frost. Bryn turned from him then and walked on, his figure gradually dissolving into the vast white that stretched endlessly ahead.
Kage watched as the wolverian king vanished with quiet ease, as if the snow itself had learnt how to claim its own. It was astonishing how someone could disappear so completely, leaving behind nothing but footprints already filling in.
‘You are not nothing,’ Kage whispered into the falling snow, his voice barely more than breath. ‘You are everything.’
Then he stepped out into the wild, surrendering himself to the cold and the silence, and followed the footsteps in the snow.