Chapter Summary:
As Dima and the Emberguard venture into the haunted northern passes guided by the former loyalist Cairn, Echo receives an encoded message claiming to be from a long-dead spy—someone once close to her family—who says they are inside the Frostbound stronghold. The journey ahead turns colder, darker, and more treacherous as trust is tested and old ghosts return with chilling truths.
Chapter 95: Whispers from the Ice
The wind in the Northern Reaches did not howl — it screamed.
It tore through the narrow pass like a living thing, slicing past cloaks and seeping into bones, daring even the Emberguard's flame to falter.
But the fire held.
Barely.
Dima pushed forward at the head of the line, her eyes narrowed against the snow-blind air. Cairn, hooded and pale, walked just behind her, his shoulders hunched, his hands clenched tightly to his sleeves.
"We're close," he muttered, nodding toward a looming ridge. "They watch from there. They always watch."
"And yet they let us pass?"
"They like to lure people in," he said, glancing over his shoulder. "No one walks out unless they want you to."
Back in the Citadel, Echo sat in the dim glow of her study, staring at a flickering flame-sphere.
Kael stood across from her, jaw tight.
"This is impossible," he said.
"It's her code," Echo replied. "The sequence, the phrasing, even the cipher glyph. No one else knew it."
"Alara's been dead for three years."
"I saw her fall, Kael. I buried her body."
"And now she's inside the Frostbound stronghold?" he asked, voice low. "Sending us messages through a cold flame channel?"
Echo whispered, "Or someone wants us to think she is."
Three years ago, Alara Vayne was Echo's most trusted spy — and the one person left who remembered her mother not as a queen or figurehead, but as a friend.
She was captured during the final revolt against Veylor's regime.
Tortured. Killed.
So they thought.
The message Echo had just received was short — no more than six lines — but it felt like a scream from a grave:
"The frost does not only freeze — it feeds.
The boy you've taken knows less than he believes.
But there's a gate in the north. Old. Hidden.
Guarded by one who knows your name.
He wears your father's ring.
I am still alive."
"What if it's true?" Echo whispered to herself, watching the flames shift across her ceiling.
Kael stood silent beside her.
"She warned about Cairn. Said he's not a spy but also not fully ignorant."
"She also mentioned a ring," Kael said. "Your father's?"
Echo nodded slowly. "He lost it during the Ember Summit Massacre. It was unique. Black flame-carved obsidian with an emberstone core."
"Only someone close would know that."
"Exactly."
Dima's team made camp just before dusk, sheltered beneath an overhang of jagged stone, its walls flecked with ancient scorch marks.
"This was one of ours once," whispered one of the scouts. "You can see the ember carvings."
"Abandoned since Veylor's purge," Dima said. "He hated anything pre-dating his rule."
Cairn stood at the edge of the group, arms crossed, eyes distant.
Dima walked to him.
"You cold?"
"No. Just… remembering."
"About the Frostbound?"
He hesitated. "About a voice I heard, before I ran. A woman. Speaking our names before we said them. She looked at me like… like she knew who I would become. Like she was waiting."
Dima felt a shiver crawl down her spine. "Did she wear anything strange?"
Cairn nodded. "Black and silver robes. One glove. A scar across her temple."
Dima stiffened. "That matches Echo's report on Alara Vayne."
"Who?"
Dima didn't answer.
Instead, she lit a private emberflare — a direct link to the Citadel.
Back at the Citadel, the flare arrived within minutes.
Echo read Dima's report silently.
"She's real," Echo breathed.
"Or she's bait," Kael said again, his voice harder this time.
"Even if she is — we need to know why someone would go to this length."
"And if it's not a trap?"
"Then someone is alive inside the Frostbound," she said. "And they're trying to help us from within."
The next morning, Dima's team reached the edge of the Frost Hollow — a frozen crater said to have once been the site of a celestial firefall, now a graveyard of shattered embers and glassy ice.
No birds. No tracks.
No wind.
Just silence.
And then — a voice.
"You shouldn't have come here."
The Emberguard spun, blades and flame drawn.
A figure emerged from the ice — tall, hooded, and wearing black and silver. Her face was shadowed, but her voice was unmistakable.
"Cairn," she said softly.
He froze.
Dima stepped between them. "You—who are you?"
"Tell your Queen I remember her mother's lullaby," the woman said. "And her promise to the flame."
She pulled something from her robes — a black ring threaded on a red cord.
She tossed it toward Dima, who caught it with a shaky hand.
Then — in a blink — the woman vanished into the ice.
No sound.
No trace.
That night, Dima lit another flare.
The message was clear.
The ring was real.
And someone was watching — not just from the frost.
But from the past.