The wind drove needles of ice into every gap in Kira’s cloak. She stumbled forward, one arm raised against the blinding white, the other gripping the rope that bound her to Maren and old Torvald behind her. They had walked for hours—or was it days? Time had lost all meaning in the endless white.

“We need to stop!”

The gale all but swallowed Maren’s words, but Kira heard them.

The young scholar had insisted on joining their expedition to the Frostspire Ruins, convinced he could decipher the ancient texts there. Now his enthusiasm had frozen into grim survival. Kira wanted to argue, to press on, but her legs betrayed her. She dropped to her knees, and the others collapsed beside her, huddling together as the storm screamed its fury.

Torvald pressed a small vial that glowed amber into her palm. “Warmth elixir,” he rasped. “Only enough for one. You’re the navigator. You need it more than anyone else.”

Kira tried to refuse, but the old alchemist’s eyes held the stubborn certainty she’d learned never to argue with. She drank, and fire bloomed in her chest, pushing back the creeping numbness.

Through the momentary clarity, she spotted it—a dark shape against the white, perhaps thirty paces ahead. A cave mouth, a ruin, or a trick of the storm. It didn’t matter. She hauled the others upright, wrapped the rope around her fist, and dragged them forward into the unknown. Behind them, the storm swallowed their footprints as though they had never existed.

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