Aevyrion POV
The first thing that changed was the sound.
When Aevyrion first sat on his slab of ice, the fortress had been quiet—just the low, constant growl of distant wind and the occasional crack of shifting ice. Eternal Winter breathing. Old, slow, almost bored.
Today there was a rhythm.
He sat a moment longer, counting.
One, two, three—crack.
Pause.
One, two, three—crack.
Like a drummer made of glaciers.
"Ah," he said to the ceiling. "You are learning to march."
The ceiling, being very old ice, did not reply.
Chains rasped as he sat up. The shackles were colder than yesterday. They creaked when he moved, hairline fractures of frost forming and sealing along the metal as if the Winter itself disapproved of the noise.
The tiny window cut high in his cell wall was just big enough for four fingers and bad ideas. He stood, stretched until his spine popped, and hooked his hands on the rough lip, hauling himself up.
Cold bit his palms. It always did. What mattered was that it was a little harder each day.
He pressed an eye to the slit.
The courtyard below had been a mess of scattered dead the first time he saw it: frost wights shuffling through the motions of drill without weapons, without order. Just bodies remembering they had once been soldiers.
Now there were three lines.
They had no armor—only tattered remnants of whatever they'd died in and the pale blue fire in their sockets. But their hands were no longer empty.
At a barked order from an unseen wight-officer, frost surged up around their feet. It crawled up their legs and along their arms, then thickened in their fingers, taking shape.
Spears. Swords. Hooked pikes. All of ice.
Not carved blocks, not decorative sculptures. These blades grew as fast as thought.
"Shields!" the voice shouted.
The front rank slammed their ice spears butt-first into the ground and swept their left arms up. Frost ballooned outward, flattening into slabs as tall as the wights themselves. For a heartbeat the courtyard filled with pale, imperfect rectangles.
Too slow, Aevyrion judged.
"Again."
The weapons dissolved back into powder, hissing against the stone. Frost retreated to the ground, then surged up once more.
Crack.
A hundred blades and shields solidifying at once made that sound—the sound he'd woken to. Like a river freezing mid-fall.
They were faster this time.
He found himself grinning.
War had always loved the North, but for centuries the North had sulked in its corner, nursing its one great wound. Now, watching the wights reach for frost as easily as other men reached for steel, he could feel it: the land finally remembering how to enjoy the fight.
He dropped back down, fingers burning from the cold. His dead lungs pulled in a breath out of habit, and even that habit felt heavier than before. The air tasted sharper. Thicker. Less like weather, more like a spell pushed too far.
On the first day, the stone under him had simply been cold.
On the second, frost had crept up the walls.
On the third, the shackles had started biting bone.
Now even the air in his mouth felt like broken glass.
Someone was turning up the volume.
Brynjar POV
Snow should not sound like this.
Brynjar Kaelros rode at the head of the Frosted Rose Expedition, listening to his horse's hooves crunch on a crust that felt wrong—too hard on top, too soft below. The sky was a flat gray lid. The wind came in steady pulls instead of gusts.
Behind him, the column moved in a narrow line. The ward-poles spaced through it mattered more than the men: slim rods capped with etched crystals, rune-lines running down their sides. In normal cold they barely glowed.
Today, most of them burned white. A few at the edges flickered.
"Outer shell?" Elayne called from behind, not breaking her pace.
The junior ward-mage glanced at her slate. "Stable above, Archmage. Bottom runes feel… thin. Like something's chewing from underneath."
The wards were meant to keep the worst of the cold out, not argue with it rising through the ground. Brynjar filed that under Problems.
He raised his hand. Scouts fanned ahead into the whiteness.
They reached a stand of low, stunted pines soon after. The branches were buried under glass-smooth ice, no drips, no icicles, just weight.
Brynjar swung down, brushed gloves along the base of the sheet. Fine lines showed where the ice had crept up the bark, against wind and slope.
"Frost's climbing," he said. "Not just settling."
Elayne dismounted more carefully. She set her hand near his, not quite touching the ice. The wards around her fingers flared faintly, light sneaking into hairline fractures.
Behind them, one of the ward-poles chimed, a tired little note.
"Bottom runes dipped again," the junior mage said. "The ground feels colder than the air. Like it's pulling on the poles."
"This is what happens when you tie too much power to one curse and keep adding weight," Elayne said. "It slumps into every crack."
"More dead plugged into the same Winter," Brynjar said.
She didn't argue.
Liora stayed in the saddle, eyes closed. When she opened them, her expression was tight.
They moved on.
By midday, the quiet had turned hollow. Sounds bounced back at odd times. A frozen stream reared in jagged spires instead of a flat sheet; ice twisted on itself like it had tried to stand up and failed.
Liora hissed at the sight. "That's what happens when you trace the same ugly pattern too many times," she said. "The hand forgets why it started."
"Slowing is enough," Brynjar replied. "Stopping is a luxury."
Inside the ring, the air bit less. A few steps beyond it, his lungs clenched like he'd inhaled knives.
He climbed the small rise just outside camp and looked north.
In the distance, a low wall of haze marked where the old boundary of Eternal Winter sat on every map he'd ever seen. Between here and there, the ice on rocks and trees all leaned the same wrong way.
Inward.
"We're walking into a mouth," he said quietly.
Bootsteps crunched behind him. Darius joined him, following his gaze, then glancing back at the ward dome.
"Do you trust that bubble?" the paladin asked.
"I trust who wove it," Brynjar said. "The Winter doesn't care. It just keeps settling. We see which runs out first."
A shout from the far side of camp cut off any answer.
They headed down.
Near one picket line, half-buried in snow just inside the ward-ring, a waist-high pile of stones and ice jutted up—a cairn glazed smooth. Not natural, not entirely.
Carved into the glaze were shallow lines: circles, crossing arcs, crude spearhead and shield shapes. The nearest ward-pole hummed slightly off-key.
"We don't build these," Brynjar said.
The junior mage touched ice, then pole. "Same note as the stream," she said. "Same as the sagging wards. Clearer here."
Elayne pressed her palm to the cairn. For a heartbeat, the lines glowed pale—the same color as the map-lines in the war room—then faded.
"You teach enough dead things to grab Winter the same way," she said, "and eventually it starts showing up on its own. Echoes. No one is steering, just repetition where it stacks."
Liora folded her arms. "Resonance," she said. "Ugly resonance."
Brynjar looked north again. The mouth was closed. They hadn't seen the teeth yet.
"Camp holds?" he asked.
"For tonight," Elayne said. "Tomorrow we follow where this is loudest."
"And if that's inside the Land of Eternal Winter?" he asked.
"Then we find out how much of this is just weight," she said. "And how much is someone else's mistake stacked on top."
Later, when the camp settled and ward-poles hummed like a thin, stubborn choir, Brynjar stood at the edge of the dome, feeling the cold scrape along the outside and gnaw at the ground beneath.
Far beyond the maps, in some fortress of ice he had never seen, someone kept adding more dead weight to the same old curse. The Winter didn't think. It didn't hate. It just spread wherever there was room.
The North was getting heavier.
Brynjar flexed his fingers, feeling blood and steel and the faint tingle of ward-light.
"So are we," he said, and stepped back inside.