Chapter 13 · free to read
The Regent held the gate. The storm held everything else. The town, caught between them, burned its own furniture and waited for morning.
By the second watch the townsfolk had stopped screaming and started stacking wood. A line that holds is the fastest cure for terror there is.
He had won in four movements and never once been touched. That was the frightening part. Since the glacier, the cold was no longer something he carried. It was something that carried him.
He had been the empire's blade, the assassin at the gate, the brother who came to kill. He climbed the tower because he was the coldest thing in the valley and he knew what that was worth.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.