— Kaia's Perspective —
She was Kaia Frostfang, last daughter of the Frostfang Clan — a bloodline born beneath the silver boughs of Thornevale's snow-laced canopy, where the roots of the World Tree kissed the ice, and the wind still sang in the tongues of wolves and gods.
Once, she had been a huntress. A sentinel of the groves. Next in line to bear the boneblade of her mother — Nhal'Tara, the Stormcaller — before the fires came.
Now she was here.
Shackled in the bowels of Blackstone Keep.
A prisoner in a land that smelled of blood and heat and iron too long left to rot.
The cell stank of rust and damp sweat — the reek of despair thick on the stones. It clung to the lungs, made breathing feel like surrender. But Kaia did not bend. Her spine remained straight despite the manacles, her golden eyes half-lidded but ever-watching.
She sat in silence.
In her lap rested a knife — small, unassuming, yet dangerous in the way winter winds cut through flesh.
A twin bone-handled blade, its edge polished with the oil of old prayers. She had smuggled it through strip-searches, inspections, whiphands, and worse. Hidden in a place only a true Frostfang would dare.
She turned it slowly between her fingers now, letting the flickering firelight catch on the carvings along the hilt.
Old words. Her people's tongue.
"Blood in silence. Frost in flame."
Not a motto.
A legacy.
A promise.
Her mother's voice echoed faintly in memory — a whisper from a time when the sky was white and full of falling snow instead of smoke and ash.
"This world will chain you, Kaia. But chains are nothing to a blizzard. You are not prey. You are the storm that devours."
She blinked.
The memory faded like breath on glass.
Across the corridor — in the cell opposite hers — Eighty-Eight stirred.
That was the number they had burned into his flesh. A tally. A reduction. Something to file and forget.
But Kaia… Kaia had watched him.
Since the desert. Since the cage. Since the night his shirt tore and she caught the glimmer of something beneath — a sigil, jagged and faintly violet, hidden beneath blood and sweat and soot. It pulsed softly, like a wound that remembered too much.
She hadn't looked away since.
He moved like a man who had forgotten how to breathe, yet refused to collapse. There was something brittle in him — not weakness, but weight. Like he was carrying too much of something not his.
Something ancient.
She'd seen the way his shadow flickered even when the torches didn't move. The way the dust around him trembled when he gritted his teeth. The way guards hesitated near him — not with pity, but with instinct. Like beasts who knew when a god had entered the den.
She had known fear before.
This wasn't that.
This was something else. Something colder.
Something that whispered in the bones.
The mark wasn't ink. It wasn't a brand made by hands. It called to something. From beyond the world, perhaps. From beneath it.
She had heard the old tales. Prophecies. Forest myths. Spoken low around dying campfires.
Of the Riftborn — not demons, not kings, not gods. But questions wrapped in flesh. Chosen by the wound in the sky. Marked by the end of things.
She did not know his name. He didn't know it either.
But in her mind, she had already named him.
The Riftborn.
Because that's what it felt like — when the mark pulsed. When the ash curled around his boots and didn't scatter. When the shadows leaned a little too far, and reality tilted just slightly out of place.
Like the world remembered something it had tried to forget.
Like a wound… reopening.
She didn't speak to him. Not yet.
Words had weight. And in places like this, they cost too much.
But she watched.
Watched when the guards dragged him back from the slag pits, half-conscious, eyes flickering with something not entirely human.
Watched when his breath shivered in sleep and the mark glowed beneath his collarbone, faint but hungry.
Watched when the stone beneath him cracked — hairline fractures, like frostbite on ancient granite — and the Overseer had gone pale.
He was not normal.
He was not from here.
He was not safe.
But neither was she.
She had been born of frost and taught to listen to the world's breath — and the world was holding it now.
Waiting.
For him.
And so was she.
Not out of faith.
Not even out of hope.
But out of necessity.
Because when he moved — truly moved — she would be there. Knives in both hands. The last of the Frostfangs.
A daughter of blizzard and blood.
And if the Rift was truly calling him… then Kaia would be the one to make sure the world didn't shatter without a fight.