A Shade of Dragon 2(42)

And I would be forced to watch, wearing some crown made of ice and this damned ermine mantle.

I wished I could throw it off my shoulders, but it was too late for second thoughts now. I’d already come this far, and I’d been lucky to not be intercepted. In fact—no night had ever passed wherein Lethe had not come to see me. He would go to my room at some point… and it wouldn’t be long. He would come out looking for me.

Beyond the door, the icy, black-sky world of The Hearthlands sprawled, howling with wind. Speckled in the distance were a few dim silhouettes, shaped like squares. Homes. I wondered if they had been abandoned, or if they were filled with ice people. Might a helpful fire dragon be hiding somewhere in this city? Sparse, monochromatic, and bleak, the landscape was intimidating. I sucked in a breath and forged out into the tundra, hugging the astrolabe to my torso.





Nell





Have you ever been so cold it began to burn?

As I pushed through the snow, my fingers and toes were the first to go numb, and then they began to burn. With each passing second, my steps became slower.

My spirits had been unreasonably high when I’d been inside the city walls. I had figured that I would find someone, or even find a gate, on my own, and it would be fine. Someone would take care of me. But, alas, no one called my name. No doors opened. No windows unshuttered. The world seemed bare and empty save the light created by the moon on the snow. The snowflakes tumbling down were the only elements to assure me that I had not wandered into a landscape painting.

It only got worse outside of the city walls. From that point forth, there were rolling hills of white and nothing else, save the snowfall standing out in relief against the pure black sky.

That was when my digits began to burn. My face began to burn. Even the tip of my nose began to burn. My lips. My eyelids. And I couldn’t be sure if it was the exhaustion, or if the snow was really falling in thicker and thicker chunks.

The sky slowly turned less black, and then gray, and then white…

When the sun rose again, I would have no way of knowing it. All the hours were the same in a blizzard.

I shivered and forged on, still hugging the glowing astrolabe to my torso for what meager warmth it provided.

In the distance, a cluster of skeletal trees whipped in the wind.

How far had I come?

I could feel my heart beating in my palms, and in my lips, and in my ears, like the rushing of a river. It seemed as if my pulse was receding bit by bit from my veins. My body was shutting down. Soon I would slip off to sleep in the snow.

In fact, that sounded nice.

Just kind of… let it take me.

After all, I still had so far to go.

And I was so tired…

My knees locked and graciously let me descend into the drifts of snow.

It was so much easier to join the snow, so much easier than fighting it. It wasn’t even that cold. Not anymore. It was a relief to succumb.

As I rolled across the ground, I felt more than heard a crunch.

What was that? I wondered. My eyes didn’t open. They felt too stiff and thick with ice. How long had I been walking now?

Had my face gone numb, or had the snow finally relented?

I hugged the disc to my midsection, feeling how its spines and notches probed at my frozen flesh.

Theon fluttered through my thoughts, dim and distant. I wondered if he was even still alive.

If he wasn’t, maybe we would be reunited soon.





Theon





It was the first dawn since my return to The Hearthlands that my bones and muscles hadn’t ached. They weren’t nearly as stiff as they normally were. While I had found it necessary to do intensive stretching first thing in the morning just to move, this morning, I managed to stretch without groaning in pain.

Except from my memories of Michelle’s third or fourth failed attempt to seduce me, anyway.

It wasn’t that there was truly anything wrong with her. Ruthless? Yes. Manipulative? Without a doubt. But she was still a human being. I’d seen her as an innocent child through the window of her memories while I had been gazing into her soul that night on the beach in Beggar’s Hole. She hadn’t been ruthless then; she’d been six. All she had wanted was love and attention. It was the ruthlessness and the manipulation which allowed her to experience the love and attention she still craved as an adult woman. I could understand it. I couldn’t blame her, not when I’d come from a doting mother and an invested father, who had given many responsibilities and high praises.

Poor Michelle.

She really didn’t belong here.

In her own world, she had more power, more leverage. She would have been happier there—and I’d been forced by a mentally unstable oracle to bring her along due to a questionable prophecy regarding our future together.