FLAME AND ICE
Chapter III — *Reunion at Beacon; Nine Years Later*
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**Location:** The Forest of Solitas — West of Mantle, beyond the walls of Atlas
---
The Forest of Solitas was not a place that appeared on official Atlesian maps.
This was not an oversight. The cartographers of Atlas were thorough people, proud of their precision, and the forest existed well within the range of their surveying instruments. It simply did not appear because someone, at some point in the Kingdom's administrative history, had decided that a forest the size of a small nation to the west of Mantle was more useful as an absence than a presence. Easier to manage a population you cannot find if you first convince yourself there is no place for them to be.
The dark elves had noticed this omission. They found it, in its way, almost useful.
Within the forest, in a hollow between two ridgelines where the tree canopy was thick enough to scatter signal equipment and the mountain stone behind them caught the wind before it could carry sound eastward, the Albanar encampment had existed for nine years. It was not the marble-floored Quarter they had lost in Atlas. It was not the home Berethon and Hyatan had spent two generations building. But it was theirs, and they had made it into something — a community of several hundred, woven through with the particular resilience of people who have been displaced before and know how to rebuild what matters.
The sound of sparring carried through the morning air.
---
At the encampment's western edge, where the ground had been cleared and levelled for training, two figures moved against each other with the focused economy of people who have drilled together long enough to know each other's habits and have stopped pulling their strikes as a courtesy.
Odyn Albanar — seventeen years old and built along the long, lean lines of someone who has not yet finished growing but has already done a great deal of fighting — moved left around a bind and came back with a controlled overhead cut that his opponent deflected at the last moment with a technique he recognised, because it was one he himself had taught.
He stepped back. Lowered his blade.
"Better," he said.
"Better than you," Roy said, which was not accurate but was the appropriate response.
He was sixteen — taller than Odyn had been at his age, with the same dark complexion and the same burning orange eyes, but where Odyn wore his black-blue hair loose to the jaw, Roy's was a striking cerulean-blue shot through with crimson at the tips, and he kept it back with a dark headband finished by a small golden circlet that he wore without apparent self-consciousness. His armor was a deep midnight blue trimmed with crimson accents, and he carried himself with the energy of someone who had inherited his father's natural presence and was still figuring out what to do with it.
His sword — ceremonial in its beauty but entirely functional in its execution — was currently pointing at the middle distance between them while he caught his breath.
Odyn's own blade, *Cinderveil,* rested at his side. The fire-crystal inlaid along the fuller was quiet in the morning light, but it caught the angle of the sun in a way that suggested it was paying attention.
"You dropped your left side on the bind," Odyn said.
"I know." Roy rolled his shoulder. "You still diverted instead of pressing."
"Because you dropped your left side on the bind. It was a trap."
A pause. Roy considered this. "...Hm."
"Try again?"
"Give me thirty seconds."
Odyn waited.
Nine years had changed him in ways that were visible and ways that were not. The visible: he was tall now, and the broadness that came with physical training had settled properly across his shoulders. His dark blue hair — grown long, falling past his shoulders in a way he had stopped cutting when they left Atlas — moved when he turned his head. His orange eyes were sharp in the way of someone accustomed to scanning unfamiliar environments. And his arms carried scars — several of them, faded to silver-grey against his dark skin, distributed in the irregular pattern of someone who has been in situations where blades were not wielded by people who wished them well.
The not-visible: he was quieter than he had been as a child. The warmth had not gone — it surfaced readily, with people he trusted, and sometimes with people he didn't trust yet but had decided to give the benefit of the doubt. But it sat behind something more guarded now. A patience that was also a kind of caution. The posture of someone who has learned that the world outside his people's encampment does not extend the same good faith it expects in return.
He didn't hate humans. He had decided, carefully and not without difficulty, not to go down that path. There was one human in particular who had made that decision easier to maintain, even across nine years of silence.
But he didn't trust them easily. That, he had also decided, was reasonable.
---
To the south of the training ground, in the broader clearing that served as a secondary sparring space, Sarai Albanar moved through a form with the focused expression of someone who knows they are being watched but has decided not to let it affect their footwork.
She was fifteen now, and the small, round-faced child who had asked Weiss Schnee uncomfortable questions in a gazebo had grown into someone recognizably her own person — dark purple hair shot through with crimson highlights falling to her mid-back, her mother's lighter complexion and her father's burning eyes, wearing the Albanar clan's silver-marked armor over a dark blue dress with a ease that suggested she had been fitted for it since childhood. Which she had.
Her sword — a single-handed blade with design elements drawn from the clan's traditional elf-craft rather than the human smithing traditions of Atlas — caught the light as she brought it through the turn-and-descend combination she had been drilling for three weeks.
"Left foot," said Khanna, from where she was leaning against a tree at the clearing's edge.
Sarai corrected without breaking the form.
"Better." Khanna watched another four beats, then: "You're rushing the descend."
"I know."
"Then stop."
Sarai lowered the blade and looked at her cousin with the expression of someone who is exercising patience. "Thank you, Khanna, for that extremely helpful observation."
"Any time."
Khanna Albanar-Branwen was eighteen, and she had developed, in the years since Weiss had known her as a bright-eyed nine-year-old, a quality that was difficult to name precisely. Presence, perhaps — the particular kind that doesn't announce itself but fills whatever space it occupies. She was tall, and her purple-black hair was long today and loose around her shoulders, and she held her hammer — *Ironfall,* a warhammer with dust-channel grooves cut along the striking face — with the easy familiarity of an extension of her arm. Her orange eyes held the same knowing quality they always had, and her sense of humour had matured from incisive into something closer to surgical.
She was, in the practical sense, the group's emotional centre. Odyn was their leader. Lylah was their commander. But Khanna was the one who noticed when someone was struggling before they said so, and who did something about it without making the person feel managed. She had her father's quality — a certain warmth that was also a certain sharpness, combined in the way of things that are better together than apart.
Beside her, Baron Caldern was going through weapon-maintenance with the focus of someone who finds small mechanical tasks useful for thinking. He was fifteen — the youngest of the group — with auburn hair and orange eyes and the pointed dark elf ears, wearing a midnight-purple and black lightweight armor set whose defining feature was the purple scarf tucked inside the collar, visible just at the throat. His twin blades — which converted at the hilts into blaster pistols through a mechanism he had spent two years perfecting and was privately very proud of — were currently spread across a cloth beside him in their component parts.
He looked up from the mechanism he was examining.
"Sarai, you really are rushing the descend."
"I know, Baron."
"I'm just saying—"
"I *know.*"
Hailfire Caldern, standing a few feet to Baron's left with her war mace resting across her shoulders and her shield propped against the same tree Khanna was leaning on, looked between the two of them with the expression of someone who has had the same conversation several hundred times.
"Both of you," she said, "are the reason I have grey hairs."
"You don't have grey hairs," Baron said.
"I will." She looked at her mace. "Eventually."
Hailfire was sixteen, with auburn hair and the steady, grounded manner of someone who had lost something significant — her father, to an illness that the encampment's healers had not been able to turn — and had decided, in the aftermath, to be useful. She wore golden armor with the clan's ogre-head motif at the chestplate's centre, and she fought with her shield raised and her mace precise, in the style of someone who has concluded that the best way to protect the people beside her is to be very difficult to move. She had joined their group six months ago. It felt longer, in the good way.
---
The morning's training came to its natural end in the way of things that have been going on long enough — not stopped, exactly, just arrived at a pause.
It was into this pause that Sybyrh Arkham arrived.
She came through the encampment's outer ring at a measured walk, her emerald-green and gold armor catching the light between the trees, her black hair with its gold highlights pinned back from her face. Sybyrh was the Elven Vanguard's vice-commander, a position she wore with the particular competence of someone who has spent years ensuring that the right things happen without needing to be the loudest person in the room. She had a quality of contained attention — always watching, always calculating, but in the service of her people rather than herself.
She knelt toward them as she arrived at the training ground's edge, one hand briefly at her chest in the formal gesture.
"Forgive me for interrupting your training, my lords and ladies." She straightened. "Their Majesties wish to speak with all six of you."
A beat of silence.
Odyn turned toward her, sword still in hand, and studied her expression. He had learned to read Sybyrh's face over the years — it did not give much, intentionally — and what it gave him now was *significant.* Not urgent-crisis. But significant.
"Thank you, Sybyrh." He looked back to the others, who were already reading the same register and responding — weapons secured, attention sharpened. "Tell our mother and father we're on our way."
"Actually, my lord." A slight hesitation — the only one she allowed herself. "Their Majesties asked that I bring you personally."
That changed the quality of the pause.
The King and Queen of the Albanar did not summon all six of them simultaneously for ordinary business. Six was a number for decisions that reached past the current day.
Khanna pushed off the tree. "Then lead the way."
---
The encampment in full was not large by the standards of the world its inhabitants had come from, but it was dense with life. The path from the training ground to the cavern at the encampment's heart took them through the main community space — cookfire rings, storage structures, the healer's station with its careful inventory of medicines — and as they passed, they received the small acknowledgements of people who know each other well enough to have done away with formality: nods, raised hands, a few smiles from the younger children who had grown up here and knew no other home.
Odyn returned them all.
Whatever doubts he carried about the wider world — about humans, about the future, about the distance between where his people were and where they deserved to be — he did not carry them here. Here, he was simply one of them. The chieftain's son, yes, and the weight of what that meant was present, but it sat on him the way his sword did: not as a burden but as a responsibility he had chosen to understand.
"Lord Odyn." Hailfire fell into step beside him, her voice low enough for courtesy. "What do you think they want?"
He turned it over. "I don't know exactly."
"Something important, though," Baron said, from his other side.
"Something important," he agreed.
"Important enough for all six of us," Roy added, from behind.
"Clearly."
"So very *much* speculation," Khanna said, "from people who are about to find out."
"Finding out doesn't prevent us from thinking about it beforehand," Sarai said reasonably.
"No, but thinking about it beforehand usually just means you spend five minutes arriving at the wrong conclusion and then feeling silly." A pause. "Ask me how I know."
No one asked her. They had all been there when she learned it.
---
The cavern that served as the court of the Albanar-in-exile had been made into something by the people who lived within it.
The natural rock had been smoothed where it mattered and left raw where it added to the quality of the space. Wooden beams had been driven into the stone at careful angles, reinforcing the ceiling in a way that the encampment's structural engineers were justly proud of. The floor had been laid with fitted cobblestone — an engineering achievement that had taken three months and a great deal of argument about the gradient — and the walls bore the flags of the Albanar clan: the silver compass rose on deep blue, the gold border, the stitching that had been done by hand during the first winter. At the cavern's rear, where the stone opened to a natural window in the mountain face, winter light poured in and pooled on the floor in a way that gave the space a particular, unlikely grace.
The thrones were wood. They had been built by Berethon's own hands during the first year, with Hyatan directing the design with the quiet insistence of someone who understands that symbols matter even when — especially when — the circumstances are difficult. The pelts of animals hunted from the surrounding forest were draped across them. They were not the thrones of a noble district in Atlas. They were the thrones of a people in exile, built by the people themselves from what was available.
They meant something because of that, not in spite of it.
Soldiers in elven armor lined the walls as the group of six entered, standing at attention. Others bore the clan standard. The formal register of the setting settled over Odyn's group as they crossed the threshold — they had grown up with the forms, and the forms meant something to them, and so they performed them without self-consciousness: weapons appropriately positioned, pace measured, heads inclined as they came to kneel before the thrones.
Sybyrh knelt beside them.
On the thrones, Berethon and Hyatan sat.
Nine years had not diminished them. If anything, the decade had clarified them — stripped away the diplomatic polish of the Atlas years and revealed what had always been underneath: two people of genuine strength and genuine purpose, carrying something heavy with the steadiness of those who have decided that putting it down is not an option. Berethon's cerulean hair was worn shorter now, his expression harder at the edges in the way of someone who has learned not to assume good faith from people who have not earned it. Hyatan's lavender hair was braided back, and her eyes held a careful intelligence that had always been there but was more visible now that the social pleasantries of Atlas's noble district no longer required her to soften it.
Lylah stood at Hyatan's right.
"Rise," Berethon said.
They rose.
He let a moment pass — not for ceremony, but because he was assembling the right words. He had always been a man who assembled before he spoke, and the quality was one Odyn had inherited.
"You know that we did not call you here to reminisce," Hyatan began, her voice carrying the particular register of a queen who is also a mother and is choosing not to let the two things interfere with each other. "The situation has shifted. Our enemy has begun to move."
Lylah's expression did not change. But her right hand moved — a small, unconscious adjustment to the position of her sword's grip — and that told Odyn what it meant.
Khanna drew a breath. "General — you don't mean—"
"The Grimm concentrations, yes," Lylah said. "But not only that. There is a force moving alongside them that is not Grimm in origin. You've heard the name in the intelligence reports." She did not phrase it as a question.
"Thanatos," Roy said quietly.
Lylah inclined her head.
The word sat in the cavern's air for a moment. Thanatos: a name that appeared in the oldest records of the dark elf clan archives, in the accounts of conflicts that predated the Kingdom of Atlas, in the careful warnings passed from generation to generation by the clan's scholars — a name that meant, roughly translated from the ancient elven: *the devourer that wears the face of order.* It referred to something old. Something that had been contained, or had chosen dormancy, or had been waiting.
Apparently, the waiting was over.
"Which brings us," Hyatan said, "to the matter of what must be done." She looked at her son, and something in her expression softened in the way of a woman making a distinction between her role and her heart. Then it settled back. "We cannot act without intelligence. We cannot gather intelligence from inside the encampment. And we cannot send soldiers — not yet, not without more information than we currently have." She paused. "But we can send students."
The silence that followed was the specific silence of six young people arriving at a conclusion simultaneously and choosing to let the person with the authority confirm it before responding.
"Beacon Academy," Berethon said. "In the Kingdom of Vale."
Hyatan's gaze moved across all of them — unhurried, taking stock. "Its Headmaster is an old friend. One of the few humans whose word we trust without qualification. The school's location, its student body, and its proximity to certain areas of Grimm activity makes it, at this moment, the most useful place we can put six capable people who are young enough to pass as new applicants."
"You are capable," Berethon added. "All of you. But you are not yet experienced in the way the coming conflict will require. Combat styles outside our own. Alliance-building across lines that we have had reason, these past nine years, to treat as walls." A pause. "The world will face this threat together or not at all. That means we must learn how to stand beside people we have reason not to trust, and do it well enough that they become worth trusting."
Odyn said nothing. He was looking at the floor just in front of the thrones, processing the shape of what he was being told.
*Beacon.* Vale. The continent of Sanus. Students from every Kingdom.
And Weiss — who, as far as he knew, was seventeen years old and had wanted to attend Beacon since before she could properly explain why, who had written to him in a letter he still had that she was *going to change things,* who was — if he had done the mathematics correctly, which he had, because he had done it several times — almost certainly going to be there.
He kept that thought very still.
This was not the moment for it.
"Sybyrh," Hyatan said, turning to the vice-commander. "You will enter the Academy as a member of faculty. Combat instruction, to begin. Your cover identity has been prepared."
Sybyrh placed her hand at her chest. "As you command, Your Grace."
"And Lylah." Hyatan looked at her sister. Something passed between them — sibling-knowledge, the shorthand of people who have known each other since childhood. "You will take responsibility for security at the school. Officially, a new external security consultant — Ozpin has already agreed to the arrangement. Unofficially, you are there to ensure that if any of this goes badly, the people in that building are protected."
Lylah opened her mouth. The objection was visible on her face — *I am the commander of the elven armies, you cannot just send me to babysit students, there are matters here that require my attention—*
"Raptaryn, Valvahdern, and Caliburn are capable of maintaining operations in your absence," Hyatan said, before any of it could be spoken. Then, quieter: "And it has been nine years, Lylah. When did you last spend a week in the same place as your daughter?"
Lylah looked at Khanna.
Khanna was looking at the floor with the expression of someone who has learned not to intervene in conversations between her mother and her aunt.
"...If it is your wish," Lylah said finally, and her voice had changed, in the small way of someone who has stopped arguing and started feeling something. "Then I accept."
Berethon rose. The formal register of the audience lifted slightly.
"Go and prepare. We will contact Ozpin directly. He will be expecting you." He looked at his children — Odyn, Roy, Sarai — with the expression of a father who is sending his family into something he cannot entirely control, and has decided that the alternative is worse. "Be careful. Be useful. And if the opportunity presents itself to build something worth having with the people you meet there—" He glanced at Hyatan. "—take it."
"Even if they're human?" Roy asked. Not challenging — genuinely asking.
"*Especially* if they're human," Berethon replied. "Because that is harder, and anything worth doing is harder than the alternative."
---
Odyn was packing his bag when he found the letter.
He had known it was there. He had known exactly where it was — in the outer pocket, folded once, tucked against the side seam where it wouldn't crease further. He had put it there himself, two years ago, when he last took it out to read it and then put it back because he wasn't sure what to do with the feeling it left behind.
He took it out now.
The handwriting was Weiss's — he would have known it in any circumstance, but it was especially hers in the particular way she bore down on the pen when she was writing something she meant, the slight slant of the letters when she was choosing her words carefully.
*Odyn,*
*Thank you for your words. It means more than I can properly say, and I am sorry this response has taken me so long — I wrote it three times before I wrote this version, which is less embarrassing to admit than it might sound.*
*I hope you're wrong about my father. I do. I want to believe it — and I think some part of me does believe it, or is trying to. But I also know you well enough to know that you don't say things like that without a reason, and I know my father well enough to know that the look on his face when your family was here was not just... grumpiness.*
*I miss you more than seems reasonable. I know it's only been a little while but I keep expecting you to call me princess in that tone you use when you think I'm being too proper, and you're not here to do it, so instead I just feel the absence of it, which is not very satisfying.*
*We both have things we have to do. I know that. But when we have a moment free of them — just one — I want to sit on a hill somewhere and talk the way we did, and not think about any of the rest of it for a little while.*
*Take care of yourself, my prince. I mean it.*
*Your fiancée,*
*Weiss Schnee*
He folded it. Set it carefully back in the pocket.
Pressed his hand flat against the outside of the bag for a moment — just a moment — the way you press your hand to something you want to carry with you without dropping it.
*Wait for me, princess.*
He picked up the bag and went to join the others.
---
Lylah conducted the roll call with the thoroughness of a military commander who does not regard head-counts as optional, even for groups of eight.
Sybyrh ran through the names — Baron, Hailfire, Khanna, Roy, Sarai, Odyn — and received six responses in ascending order of formality, from Khanna's grinning two-finger salute to Roy's crisp *present and accounted for.* Odyn simply said *here* in the tone of a man who is already thinking about the next part.
Then they formed the circle.
The chant of elven travel-magic was not loud. It was the opposite of loud — a sound that seemed to move through the air rather than across it, felt more than heard, in the language that the dark elves' scholars called the *First Tongue* and that the Albanar clan had maintained through every displacement and every exile as the one thing that could not be taken from them. The runic light came up around the circle's edge: white-gold, geometric, the patterns of it cycling through configurations that corresponded to destination and distance and the collective will of eight people agreeing, without speaking, on where they were going.
The forest floor dropped away beneath them.
The canopy blurred and then broke, and there was open sky — the pale Atlas sky, winter-grey above the treeline — and then they were moving, and the speed of elven flight-magic was not the speed of wings but of *intention,* of somewhere you have decided to be pulling you toward itself.
Solitas fell away behind them. The ocean opened below. Somewhere on the other side of the continent of Sanus, Beacon Academy waited on its cliff.
Odyn looked ahead.
---
*Six weeks later.*
---
They came down at a careful distance from the docks at the edge of the crowd — a landing site chosen for its clear sight lines and the reasonable certainty of not being observed mid-descent. The world of Vale's coastline was warmer than Solitas, even in the shoulder of the season, and the air smelled of salt and something green beneath it that had no equivalent in the alpine cold of the forest.
Sybyrh and Lylah separated from the group with practiced efficiency: Sybyrh to her faculty contact point, Lylah to the security arrangements Ozpin had established for her arrival. Before she went, Lylah caught Khanna in a hug that lasted a long moment — mother and daughter, not commander and soldier, the armour beside the point for once — and ran her hand through her daughter's hair with the expression of someone who has missed being able to do that.
"Take care, Mom," Khanna said, into the hug.
"You too, my little firecracker." She pulled back, and looked at her daughter's face, and seemed to be memorizing it. "All of you — take care of each other."
Then she was gone, and they were six.
---
The docks were crowded with the particular energy of young people arriving at a threshold — excited, nervous, posturing in the way of those who are not yet sure what they're supposed to be, performing versions of themselves that were slightly larger than necessary. The dark elves moved through it with the careful navigation of people who have spent nine years understanding how to be present in a space without drawing more attention than necessary.
They were halfway along the dock when Odyn became aware of a voice nearby — two voices, actually, in the register of a conversation that was ongoing and not intended for an audience.
He glanced left.
Two girls.
The shorter one was young — Ruby, he would learn — with close-cut black hair carrying crimson highlights and eyes the particular silver that the elven scholars called *Argent-Born:* a rare trait, associated in the dark elf traditions with specific Semblance affinities that he filed away for later consideration. She wore a red-and-black colour scheme with consistent intent, including a hooded cape and a rose motif at both the hood and the belt, and she had the compact, alert energy of someone who is paying attention to everything without appearing to.
The taller one was her sister — Yang, by the conversation — with long blond hair and eyes that were currently lilac but which had, in the corner of his attention, briefly flickered to something else and then back in the moment he looked at her. An orange scarf, a brown jacket, the easy confidence of someone who had decided, early, that she took up a certain amount of space and was comfortable with that.
He was about to look away — this was not the time to insert themselves into a stranger's conversation — when Roy was already walking over.
Odyn exhaled through his nose.
Roy was, in the specific ways that mattered, exactly like their father in the sense of having decided that the best way to deal with an unfamiliar situation was to walk toward it with his hand out. It was a quality Odyn admired and found occasionally exhausting.
He followed.
---
The conversation that followed had the slightly surreal quality of first meetings that happen too fast to be managed properly — names exchanged, questions asked, the small negotiations of people establishing whether they are safe to be curious around each other.
Ruby Rose introduced herself with the earnest directness of someone who has not yet learned to be guarded about it, and asked questions with the same quality. Yang introduced herself with rather more energy and fixed her lilac eyes on Baron with a look that made the fifteen-year-old take a half-step back.
"Especially you, handsome~"
Hailfire closed her eyes for a moment. "Yang, please — don't tease my brother too much."
"Right, right! Sorry." She did not look particularly sorry.
Baron was doing something with his expression that suggested he was attempting to look unbothered and had arrived at baffled instead. "It's — nice to meet you too?" he managed.
Khanna was watching the entire exchange with the focused interest of a person cataloguing information for later use.
Ruby, mercifully, was asking Sarai something about the clan insignia on her breastplate, which Sarai answered with the enthusiasm she brought to anything she was allowed to explain properly. Roy had found a comfortable conversational footing with Yang about the mechanics of his twin blades, which she was examining with genuine interest.
Odyn stood slightly to the side of all of it and listened.
*This is what the King said,* he thought. *This is what alliance-building looks like before it knows what it is yet. Two girls who know nothing about us, treating us like people, because it hasn't occurred to them not to.*
He wasn't sure what to do with the feeling it produced. He had spent nine years calibrating himself to a world that required wariness. He was aware, in an abstract and mostly intellectual way, that not all humans were the same. He had written letters to Weiss Schnee for years — had kept her letters in the outer pocket of his bag for two years because putting them somewhere harder to reach felt like a concession he wasn't willing to make — and she was, in every material respect, the evidence against the case for blanket distrust.
But knowing something abstractly and feeling it were different operations, and he was still negotiating the distance between them.
Then Ruby Rose looked at him.
Not in the way Yang had looked at Baron — that was something else entirely — but in the direct, guileless way of someone who is simply looking at the person in front of them and seeing a person.
"So you're Odyn," she said. "Just Odyn, no 'lord' or anything?"
"Just Odyn," he confirmed.
She nodded, apparently satisfied. "Okay. I'm just Ruby." A pause. "Is this your first time in Vale?"
"Yes."
"Mine too, kind of. I mean — I've been to Signal, which is in Vale, but Beacon is different." She looked up toward the cliff in the distance, where the school's towers were just visible above the treeline. "It feels bigger. Like things are going to happen here."
He followed her gaze.
*Things are going to happen here.*
He thought about his mother's words in the cavern. He thought about the name *Thanatos* sitting in the cold air. He thought about a letter in the outer pocket of his bag.
"Yes," he said. "I think they are."
---
The announcement of the bullhead's arrival cut across the dock in the particular way of things that end conversations mid-thought — an abrupt, mechanical sound that rendered further discussion academic. Around them, the crowd began to move toward the boarding ramp with the organized momentum of a herd that has agreed on a direction.
"We can continue on the way," Roy said, already orienting toward the ramp.
The group moved together — the six dark elves and the two Xiao Long sisters — in the easy companionship of people who have been talking to each other long enough to have accepted the proximity as natural. Odyn moved with them, bag over one shoulder, Cinderveil at his back.
He looked ahead. The bullhead's engines were warming. The cliff of Beacon was visible above the distant treeline, the school's structures arranged against the Vale sky with the particular kind of authority that very old institutions carry — not the clean modern authority of Atlas's Academy, but something older and more weathered and somehow more certain of itself for it.
He thought: *somewhere in that building, or on the way to it, or perhaps already inside it — there is a girl with silver hair and blue eyes and nine years of letters in a locked box, who does not know I am here.*
He thought: *that is about to change.*
He said nothing, because some thoughts are too large for a dock at boarding time, and because there was a bullhead to catch.
He stepped aboard.
The ramp lifted. The engines rose to full. The cliff of Beacon drew closer.
---
**— To Be Continued —**
*Next Time: Chapter 3.2 — The Fall of a Snowflake; Weiss and the Ice Queen Incident
---