Chapter 29 Katria #2
My hand moved before I thought. I wasn’t reaching for power, or curiosity, or even sense—just … to understand. To prove to myself that this, too, was real.
The moment my fingers brushed the surface, the light erupted.
The chamber came alive. Frost shattered off the walls, exploding into shards that hung suspended in the air like stars.
Runes appeared in the stone, thousands of them, glowing with color—not blue like the rest of the castle, but white-gold and silver, like sunlight breaking through a storm.
The sound was deafening yet wordless, a vibration that filled the air and every bone in my body.
Fenrir howled.
Then, just as suddenly as it began, the light folded inward—slamming into the shard, through my hand, into me.
For an instant, I saw everything. Mountains buried under glaciers. Rivers frozen mid-flow. A sky split by crimson light. And in its center, a woman’s voice—not speaking but humming. The same lullaby my mother used to sing.
When I came back to myself, the room was quiet again. But the frost had changed. It wasn’t dull anymore. It gleamed like glass after lightning.
Footsteps echoed down the hall. More than one set.
I turned, chest heaving. Kaelith stood in the doorway, sword drawn, a dozen guards behind him. His eyes took in the room, the shattered frost, the light still fading from my skin.
“What did you do?” he demanded.
“I—I don’t know.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I touched it. That’s all.”
He strode forward, stopping only when the glow around my hand flared again. His expression faltered—anger giving way to something like disbelief. “It shouldn’t answer you,” he murmured.
“Answer me?”
“That’s not possible.”
He looked as if he wanted to reach for me but didn’t dare. His voice softened. “The Dreamstone hasn’t stirred in centuries. Its magic anchors the Veil. Without it, the realms collapse.”
“And now?”
He looked at me—really looked—and I saw it then: the fear. Not for himself. For me.
“Now,” he said quietly, “the Court will think you’re the reason it woke.” He exhaled a ragged breath. “How did you find it, Katria?”
My breath halted in my throat at my name on his lips. This was the first time he’d used it—or called me anything but “mortal.”
“I—I’m not sure. The passageway … called to me.”
Kaelith’s jaw clenched as his eyes bored into me. “The Frostfather will not like it.”
He was right.
The Frostfather didn’t enter the room so much as consume it.The temperature plummeted before I saw him, frost curling up the walls in jagged veins. Guards dropped to one knee, heads bowed. Kaelith stayed standing.
I wanted to do the same, but my legs refused to bend.
The Frostfather’s gaze found me immediately. His eyes were colorless—not white, not gray, but void, as if someone had scraped the light out of them. A crown of fractured ice hung crooked on his brow, and with every breath, mist poured from between his teeth.
“What is this?” he hissed. His voice splintered the air; every word sounded wrong, out of tune, like a chord played on broken glass.
Kaelith stepped forward. “A disturbance in the underhalls. I contained it.”
The king’s stare slid past him, fixing on me. “You caused this.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Silence.” The command cut through me like a blade. Even the frostlight dimmed.
“She touched the Dreamstone,” Kaelith said, before I could speak again. “It answered her.”
The Frostfather’s expression twisted, somewhere between awe and fury. “Impossible.”
“I saw it myself,” Kaelith continued. “The chamber was dormant. When she entered—”
The king’s voice cracked like thunder. “She’s a blight. A flaw in the Veil. Seal her before it spreads.”
I flinched. Seal me? Like a crack in the wall?
Kaelith moved instantly, placing himself between us. The guards hesitated, confused by his defiance.
“With respect,” he said, and his voice—sounding calm, low, lethal—made the frost tremble, “if she awakened it, she might also calm it. Killing her risks severing the link.”
“She’s mortal. Mortals unmake what they touch.”
“Not this one.”
That last line landed like a confession. The silence that followed was unbearable. The Frostfather’s mouth twitched, his breath forming strange, half-shaped sigils that evaporated before they meant anything.
“You forget your place, my son.”
Kaelith didn’t move. “My place is at the Veil’s edge, guarding what remains of our realm. If the Dreamstone stirs, it’s my duty to learn why—not destroy the only lead we have.”
The word destroy echoed too long, bouncing off the walls in a dozen fractured tones before dying.
The Frostfather’s expression went slack, eerie. “Duty,” he repeated, as if tasting it. “You speak of duty while the mortal stains the ice with her heat.”
Something inside the king cracked; I could hear it in his breathing. He looked not at me now, but through me—and whatever he saw there terrified him.
“Get her out of my sight,” he snarled. “If she breathes the same air as my Court again before I command it, I’ll bury you both beneath the frost.”
Kaelith bowed his head just enough to pass for obedience. “As you wish, Father.”
He turned to me, his expression unreadable, voice low enough that only I could hear. “Don’t speak. Don’t look back.”
I didn’t. But I felt it—the weight of the Frostfather’s madness pressing against my spine as we left the chamber, the faint sound of cracking ice following us like laughter.
When we reached the corridor, Kaelith’s composure fractured. Frostlight pulsed weakly down his wrist, dimming as he exhaled.
“He would have killed you,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“Then why didn’t you let him?”
His gaze lifted to mine. “Because, Katria…” He stopped himself, shaking his head. “Because the Court needs you alive.”
But his voice betrayed him. It wasn’t the Court he meant.
Kaelith didn’t speak as we climbed.
The corridors curved endlessly upward, carved through the spine of the Hold, the frostlight shifting from cold blue to a pale silver sheen.
His silence was worse than anger; it had weight.
Even Fenrir’s claws made no sound, as though the hound understood that one wrong step might break whatever fragile peace held him together.
When we reached the upper level, Kaelith stopped before a narrow door inlaid with mirrored glass. It was the room next to mine. He pressed his gloved palm to it, and the surface shimmered before melting open.
I stepped inside and forgot how to breathe.
The chamber was nothing like the rest of Winter. The walls glowed faintly, as if remembering light from somewhere far away. A small fire—no larger than a candle’s flame—burned in a glass sphere beside the hearth. It shouldn’t have existed here at all.
“This is your room?” I asked, still dazed.
He closed the door behind us. “No one enters it but me.”
I turned slowly. “Then why bring me here?”
He hesitated long enough for the question to sting. “Because my father won’t look for you where he knows you don’t belong.”
That wasn’t an answer, not really. But I didn’t press him. He moved toward the hearth, pulling off his gloves. The frostlight along his wrist dimmed to nothing, revealing the faint scars that ran from the base of his palm to his forearm—like something had tried to carve him hollow once and failed.
I should have looked away. I didn’t.
“You shouldn’t have touched it,” he said finally.
“You think I meant to wake the Dreamstone?”
“I think…” He paused, voice roughening. “I think it meant to wake you.”
My pulse tripped. “That makes no sense.”
“Neither does this.” He gestured toward the wall, where the frost was still shifting in faint, unfamiliar patterns. “You’ve changed the Hold. I can feel it.”
“I didn’t try to—”
“I know,” he interrupted, quieter now. “That’s what frightens me.”
He raked a hand through his dark hair then turned away. The gesture was pure control—an effort to ground himself. His breath clouded in the air, uneven.
I stepped closer before I could second-guess it. “What happens now?”
He didn’t look at me. “My father will demand proof that you can be contained. The Court will whisper that you’re cursed. The only way to survive that is to give them something else to talk about.”
“Like what?”
His gaze found mine then, sharp and steady. “Like the Frostbound Heir defying his king.”
My throat went dry. “That will make them turn on you.”
“They already have.”
I didn’t understand the look he gave me next—half fury, half exhaustion, all restraint. He took a step forward. I should have moved back, but then the space between us vanished, leaving only the heat of his breath and the hum of something dangerous in the air.
“Why did the humans send you?” he rasped, the question more rhetorical than one demanding an answer. “You shouldn’t make me choose.”
“Choose what?”
His jaw flexed. “Between the realm and—” He cut himself off, exhaling sharply. “You don’t understand what you’ve done.”
“So tell me.” I lifted my chin. “All you people do is talk in circles.”
He almost laughed, but it broke somewhere in the middle. “You’ve made Winter remember it has a heartbeat.”
The words sank into me like a brand. He reached up then—slowly, as if fighting himself—until his fingers brushed the side of my face. Even through the chill of his skin, I felt the tremor in his hand.
“You should rest,” he said finally, pulling back. “Stay here tonight. No one will disturb you.”
“What about you?”
His eyes lingered on me for a moment too long. “I’ll be outside. Guarding the door.”
It wasn’t a request. It was a sentence—for both of us.
When he left, the door sealed silently behind him. I sank onto the edge of the bed, the room still pulsing faintly with warmth that didn’t belong here. Fenrir rested his head on my knee, eyes reflecting the frostlight.
I ran my fingers over the faint glow still clinging to my skin and whispered, “What are you?”
The stone beneath the floor answered with a single, soft pulse. Almost like a heartbeat. Perhaps Kaelith was right.