Chapter 8
I sliced the wax with the edge of my boot knife.
The parchment inside was thin, stiffened with saltpeter. Glenn’s handwriting was unmistakable: sharp, autocratic, penned with ink brewed from soot and bear bile.
*The rogue heads for the ice shelf of Frostfall,* the mandate read. *His scouts shepherd refugees and whelps into the lower caverns. Do not attempt extraction. The Council has determined the stolen relic cannot risk falling into Western hands.*
I read the following lines twice, my breath turning to frost against the biting gale.
*Deploy the brimstone flasks at the canyon throat. Fire the pitch trenches. Bring the glacial roof down upon their heads. Burn the entire basin, every cave, every throat, until nothing breathes. The Inquisitor Legion marches behind you to salt the ashes. If you cannot take the box, let it melt with the heretic.*
A scorched-earth decree.
Frostfall was no mere mountain gorge; it was an ancient sanctuary of the old clans, a labyrinth of glacial hollows where outcasts, toothless elders, and motherless runts hid from imperial inquisitors and seasonal purges. Glenn knew they were shelter-bound there. He was ordering me to incinerate three hundred living souls simply to ensure Lucian never drew another breath.
*Rend them all,* Glenn’s voice hissed from yesterday’s memory in the darkened chapel. *Leave their bones to bleach on the stones.*
I stared at the crumpled vellum, the wind whipping loose strands of hair across my eyelashes.
Every scrap of imperial discipline drilled into my marrow over nineteen winters commanded obedience. An assassin was an arrow released from a string; the shaft did not question the archer’s quarry. If the High Elder willed the mountain to burn, the mountain fell to fire.
Yet when I closed my eyes against the freezing squall, I did not see the glorious solar sigil of the empire.
I saw the wounded rogue scout, his fractured shoulder freshly bandaged with clean linen, leaning against the soot wall of the gorge with tears shining in his beast-gold eyes, calling me *Princess*.
I saw Dennis, an elder Beta massive enough to split an ox, hurling his boarding axe into the gravel and opening empty palms because he feared the unnatural heat burning in my chest would tear my heart in two.
And I felt the phantom press of a scarred, calloused thumb tracing the dead hollow of my throat.
*Aeloria.*
The erased name tolled behind my breastbone like an iron bell, heavy with the weight of a heritage I had never claimed.
After Lucian had vaulted over the megalith ring into the blizzard, the shockwave of that name and the searing agony in my collarbone had driven me to my knees in the soot. By the time the violent tremor in my limbs subsided, the rogue rearguard had swept out of the mist—disciplined and silent, securing the heavy chest and hauling it northward into the glacial passes. They had refused to strike me down while I was helpless; they had merely retreated, leaving a deliberate trail of silver vapor and heavy wolf-prints through the basalt crags to ensure I followed.
I had pursued them because retrieving the stolen artifact was my imperial mandate. But now, holding Glenn’s orders in my fist, the truth tasted like ash.
"No," I whispered.
The mechanical raven cocked its brass skull, gears clicking in a frantic cadence as it waited for my confirmation rune.
I brought my heavy combat boot down upon its spine.
The construct shattered into brass cogs, sheared springs, and oil-stained feathers, grinding into the black scree. I unclipped the iron flask of brimstone-pitch from my tactical harness and tossed it over the rim of the precipice. It tumbled through three hundred feet of empty air, shattering harmlessly against the frozen rocks below, its volatile pitch hissing uselessly against the snow.
I would not burn the gorge.
If Lucian was a butcher, I would take his life face to face, blade to blade. And if Glenn was a liar...
I left the thought unfinished. I cinched my leather bracers, checked the quiver of steel quarrels at my spine, and descended into the freezing blue throat of Frostfall alone.
***
The transition from the volcanic soot of the Ash Valleys to the ice of Frostfall was like stepping from a charnel house into an ancient crypt.
The temperature plunged forty degrees in the span of a mile. The crumbling basalt gave way to soaring cliffs of pale cerulean ice, sheer and smooth as polished glass. The wind ceased its howling, reduced to an eerie flute-like sigh through the hanging icicles above, weaving a sorrowful chord that set every nerve ending on edge.
With every yard I climbed down into the basin, the heat beneath my collarbone burned hotter.
It was no longer a dull ache. It was a rhythmic, commanding summons that thrummed in absolute unison with the silver vapor trail Lucian’s passage had carved into the stillness.
The scent hung heavy in the freezing air—that impossible, forbidden ghost of crushed mountain cedar and lightning striking granite. It pooled in the glacial hollows, sinking through the pores of my skin, settling on my tongue like frost and raw iron.
My body was coming undone.
Every law of the packs dictated that a wolf could only perceive the fated mate bond once both reached their eighteenth winter, crossing into full adult maturity. For eighteen years, my body had been a mute, unfeeling stone, completely deaf to the Moon Goddess. But now, at nineteen, standing in the wake of an Alpha whose scent had finally breached my senses, the sudden, violent awakening was tearing my sanity apart.
My skin was hypersensitive; every brush of my woolen collar against the dead seam at my throat felt like a live wire. My throat was parched, my breathing shallow and ragged. In the sub-zero chill of the canyon floor, sweat beaded along the back of my neck, cooling instantly against my skin.
I was hunting him, yet my own traitorous flesh was crying out for him to turn and close the distance.
*Focus,* I snarled internally, driving the blunt studs of my gauntlets into the flesh of my ribs until the sharp sting cleared my vision. *You are Diana. You are Glenn’s shadow. You do not yield.*
I emerged from the narrow defile into the Great Hall of the Glacier.
The cavern was vast enough to swallow the imperial cathedral whole. The ceiling rose fifty yards above, an unbroken vault of translucent blue ice through which the eclipsed moon cast an eerie, bruised-violet glow. Colossal pillars of ice supported the mountain’s weight, rising from a frozen subterranean lake that formed the cavern floor.
At the far end of the ice floor, standing before a crystalline wall of frost, a single figure stood waiting.
He had posted no sentries at the mouth of the cavern. He had laid no tripwires. The refugees and his vanguard were nowhere in sight, ushered safely into the deeper subterranean warrens beneath the glacier.
Lucian stood alone in the open ice.
The stolen reliquary rested on an ancient stone plinth at his feet, stripped completely of its canvas wrapping.
For the first time, I saw the empire's sacred relic laid bare.
