Snow clung to Hiral's cloak like a second skin as he slipped through Eldara's gates. The city's outer wards were a labyrinth of shadow and ice—perfect cover in the chaos of deep winter.
Merchants huddled in doorways, their breath steaming in the bitter air. Guards slouched against walls, hands buried in fur, too intent on keeping their own blood warm to look closely at a lone traveler.
The palace loomed ahead, its towers etched in frost, banners hanging stiff as hammered steel. Hiral's boots left no sound in the courtyard's drifted snow—until the brazen cry of trumpets split the air.
From the main gate, they came: armored riders in silver and crimson, plumes snapping, the crest of Ro burning on their shields like drops of blood in the snow.
Hiral's gut tightened. Not Alexis.
Worse—Crown loyalists. Men who would follow the King of Ro's ambitions to the last drop of blood, and spill it here without hesitation.
No time to linger.
He veered into the shadow of a colonnade, slipping through half-forgotten service corridors until a figure emerged from a side passage—a thin, sharp-eyed man in the muted livery of the palace staff.
"This way," the chamber steward murmured, voice pitched low.
Hiral followed without hesitation, ducking through a hidden panel behind a tapestry, the stale cold of the secret stair wrapping around him. The stone passage spiraled upward, each turn pulling him closer to the decision that could anchor—or burn—the fragile peace he'd fought to keep.
The King's private chamber smelled faintly of cedar and lamp oil. Eldara's monarch rose from his chair, his eyes tired but alert.
They wasted no time with formalities.
Hiral laid out the plan in measured words—supply convoys from the Eastern Alliance routed through neutral ports, grain for Eldara's starving populace, and a staged drawdown of troops to rob Ro of any pretext for war.
The King listened in silence, his fingers tapping once against the armrest.
At last, he nodded, slow and grave.
"It could work. And it spares my people from the sword."
Relief flickered in Hiral's chest—brief, fragile. He opened his mouth to seal the accord—
The chamber doors slammed wide.
"My lord—!" A young voice cut off as the third prince strode in, eyes blazing, catching just enough of the words to twist them into treachery.
"You," the boy spat, his hand on the hilt. "Eastern snake!"
Steel hissed free.
"Stop!" the King barked, but his shout carried beyond the room.
Boots thundered in the corridor.
A heartbeat later, Ro's knights burst through the doorway, their blades drawn, eyes already fixed on Hiral.
The frost on their cloaks melted into dark stains where the heat of their intent bled through.
"Eastern spy!" one snarled.
Hiral shifted his stance, keeping himself between them and the King.
"Get your men out of here before they ruin everything," he said, low and hard.
The knight commander's expression didn't waver—it sharpened.
"If the King dies here, we blame you. Ro gains Eldara without question."
Blades moved. Not toward Hiral—toward the King and the prince.
"Go!" Hiral snapped to the steward, who lunged forward, shoving the monarch and his son toward the hidden panel.
Steel rang in the confined space. Ro's men pressed hard, forcing Hiral back against the wall.
Snowmelt dripped from his hair and steamed on his collar, forgotten in the heat of the clash.
He prayed—not to any god, but to the stubborn thread of hope still left in him—that the hidden way would hold, that the King and his heir would reach safety before the next heartbeat determined the fate of a continent.
Hiral stepped into the swing of a blade, his own steel answering with a voice that sang of war in the narrow room.
The clash rang sharp in the confined room—steel on steel, boot steps skidding across polished stone slick with melting snow.
Hiral's blade moved in controlled arcs, each strike deliberate, each turn designed to deflect, to disable without ending a life.
Every knight left breathing was one less body Ro could claim as the spark for war.
He fought like a man threading a needle in the dark—precise, tense, utterly focused.
But then—
A muffled shout from beyond the hidden panel.
Urgent.
Desperate.
The voices were not just calling—they were struggling. Fighting.
A hollow drop opened in his chest. The careful rhythm of his strikes broke like glass.
His blade turned merciless. A riposte opened one knight's throat, hot spray striking the wall in a dark fan.
Another lunged—too slow—Hiral's sword sank between his ribs, the man's eyes wide with the shock of dying before he could finish his breath.
Faces twisted in disbelief, the impossible speed of their deaths dawning too late.
In heartbeats, the chamber was still.
Only the faint hiss of blood dripping from his blade onto cold stone dared to speak.
Hiral yanked the panel wide and plunged into the narrow passage. Damp stone pressed in on both sides, the torchlight a jittering ghost ahead.
He ran.
The shouts grew fainter. Then—replaced by a sound that hollowed him to the marrow.
A loud thud.
He burst into the hidden antechamber.
The steward was locked in a desperate struggle with a figure swathed in black, their blades sparking in the dim.
Beyond them—
The King of Eldara and the third prince staggered, hands pressed to their sides, blood spilling through their fingers in deep, unstoppable waves.
"No!" Hiral's roar tore from him, raw and useless against time.
He drove into the assassin, smashing him against the wall, his sword piercing through muscle and bone, pinning the man's arm.
He then slammed him down onto the flagstones, the cold stone greedily drinking the assassin's blood as it spread.
The dying man's lips curved in a smile, teeth red. Mocking.
"The minister… from your own court… sends his regards."
The words struck harder than any blade.
The Empire's court…
I should've known…
Hiral forced himself to take a long, deep breath.
The steward's frantic voice called for aid, but it was a plea already swallowed by silence.
The King's legs buckled, his back sliding against the wall until the stone cradled his failing body.
The prince's breathing was shallow, his eyes unfocused, lashes trembling with each ragged gasp.
Hiral could only kneel, the sword in his hand dripping with blood that belonged to both enemy and ally.
The cold of the floor seeped through his knees, but it could not numb him from the truth.
The war had never been about Ro alone. Nor Eldara.
It was a pyre built by many hands—and now, the torch had been dropped.
The King's gaze met his, faint recognition flickering before dimming into shadow.
A crown lost without a cry.
Hiral bowed his head, tasting bitterness like ash at the back of his throat, the copper sting of blood thick in the air.
"I wasn't enough," he whispered—too quiet for the dying to hear, but loud enough for the stones to remember.
"I wasn't enough to stop it."
****
Outside the hidden chamber, chaos bloomed like rot beneath a polished veneer.
Servants shouted, guards scrambled, messengers tore through the corridors with pale, frantic faces.
Word traveled fast in palaces—faster still when it bore the weight of a king's death.
Hiral stood in the shadow of the corridor, the blood still drying on his hands, listening to the fragile scaffolding of peace splinter.
He could feel the moment turning—irrevocable, like an arrow loosed.
The steward he'd once called ally looked to him, grief and rage warring in his eyes. "What now?" the man rasped.
Hiral knew the truth would serve no one.
If Eldara learned that the blade came from within his own court, they would condemn his empire outright.
Ro would then wield that outrage, claim Eldara's blood was on foreign hands, and vengeance would come as surely as winter.
Either way, war would bloom.
But if the killing were pinned on Ro… Eldara's rage would fall outward, not inward. They would unite with his empire for survival, if only out of shared hatred.
That unity—temporary, bitter—could still bring food, medicine, and soldiers to endure the coming frost.
The promise he'd made to Eldara's king, to see his people through the winter, would not die entirely with the man.
It was not the just choice. It was not the honorable choice. But in the hard arithmetic of survival, it was the choice that left something to salvage.
The decision tasted of ash even as he formed it. "It was Ro," Hiral said quietly, the lie settling like a brand on his tongue. "It must be Ro."
The steward hesitated only a moment before nodding—already reshaping the tale for the ears of ministers and soldiers alike.
Disguise was easy; the palace was too consumed by grief to notice one more pale-faced attendant slipping into the current of activity.
Under the guise of the steward's apprentice, Hiral took the reins no one else could grasp—stilling the worst of the panic, issuing orders in the steward's name, seeing to the bodies himself.
The funeral came before the body's warmth had fully left.
Torches ringed the great hall, their glow too soft for such a hard moment.
The draped coffins stood at the center, flanked by guards whose spears didn't tremble though their eyes shone.
Beyond the walls, the first toll of the mourning bell rolled through the capital—low, sonorous, a single deep note that seemed to press against Hiral's ribs.
Another strike.
And another.
By the fourth toll, he could no longer tell if it was the bell or his heartbeat.
And then—through the high arches of the gate—the muffled thud of hooves against packed snow.
The wind carried the jingle of harness, the ragged breathing of a horse driven hard. The bells tolled again, and Hiral's head turned despite himself.
Through the drifting snow, Alexis emerged—cloak heavy with frost, eyes sharp with urgency. The sight pierced clean through him.
The bells struck once more, and this time Hiral felt the sound in his teeth, in his bones, in his chest where something fragile seemed to crack.