(POV: Aretia Exemplar)
The warmth of silk and the scent of beeswax were the first embers childhood nostalgia always rekindled within my chest.
In those distant days at Exemplar Manor, I pushed the arched wooden door open with my small fingertips, lingering upon the threshold in hesitant wonder.
"Mama... Mama."
My mother sat upon the rocking chair beside the wide window, morning sunlight spilling over her long silk gown. She cradled the infant Vanitas against her chest, rocking him with tender vigilance so as not to disturb his slumber. Her warm voice drifted through the room's stillness like spun threads of raw silk, singing that ancient lullaby Trojan mothers had passed down through generations:
"Sleep, my little one, for the wolf lurks without...
Yet our fires burn bright, and the swords of your ancestors guard the door...
Sleep, that you may rise above the waves on the morrow."
She ceased her singing when she noticed me. I slipped toward her, catching the hem of her draped gown, raising my small eyes to her in childish pleading:
"Will... will you play with me? The Princess and the Knight?"
A wide smile graced my mother's face, her features bathed in a serene laugh that dissolved the morning's strict formality. She rose gently, entrusting Vanitas to the maid waiting within the room's shadows, then knelt until her gaze met mine, pressing her warm palms over my trembling hands.
"Come, my child," she whispered, her eyes shining with pure tenderness. "Let us go to the Princess's castle."
A sharp slap of biting frost tore through the haze of memory in my head.
The savage howl of the wind tore into my face like shards of shattered glass, and before me stretched silent, white knolls swallowing the horizon into a vast expanse of ice and oblivion. The tears that had scalded my cheeks hours ago had hardened into frozen rinds along the rims of my eyelids, gluing my lashes together and pricking my eyeballs with every blink.
I turned toward Justitia beside me.
She walked with mechanical inertia, her body swaying like a snapped reed, her lips steeped in a dull cyanosis. Her feet sank into the snow, dragging out of it devoid of clear intent, her eyes hollow of all luster—as if the soul had receded, leaving behind nothing more than the wooden frame of a doll driven by shock.
"Justitia..." I called to her, my voice emerging rasping, swallowed by the glacial hiss. "Hold on just a little longer... a cave, or a tree we can shelter under..."
She did not turn. She stared straight ahead into the blanketing white, the dragging scrape of her boots through the snow the only cord tethering her to existence.
"Justitia..." I tried to shatter this lethal silence before the frost froze whatever was left of our minds. "Do you remember... the game of the Princess and the Knight?"
Heavy seconds passed, during which my twin sister seemed like an effigy carved of ice, before her shivering lips parted in a broken, frightened whisper:
"Otos... he always played it with us."
"And Mama..." I answered, pressing my numb fingers against her arm to beg a sliver of warmth from the past. "She played it with us too."
Justitia fell silent. The cold sank back into our bones, and we resumed dragging our bodies step by heavy step through the dense drift.
Suddenly, a dark silhouette broke through the blinding white.
"A tree!" I rasped through dry, cracked lips.
It was a solitary pine, withered and gray, standing with defiant endurance within a rocky recess that partially broke the wind. I lunged toward it with whatever resolve remained in my legs, collapsing at its twisted trunk.
I clamped my stiffened fingers around the brittle branches, wrenching them free. The coarse wood scraped the skin of my palms, drawing blood from my fingertips without a prick of pain through the dense numbness. I gathered small twigs and desiccated tinder, shaping a rounded pile in the sheltered corner of the rock.
I selected a straight, hard branch and a flat piece of wood. Ripping a sturdy cord from the hem of my shredded alchemical coat, I looped it around the branch to fashion a bow drill. I wedged the spindle's tip into the carved notch of the hearth board, capped it with a smooth bearing stone, then gripped the bow and began driving it back and forth in rapid strokes.
Relentless friction. Back and forth.
The tendons in my injured shoulder burned, a pulse thudding against my collarbone with every stroke. The wood groaned, the smoke lagged, and my frigid breath billowed in ragged plumes of steam over the tinder, wave after wave without pause.
Justitia stood amidst the wind's sweep, staring at my frantic labor with stagnant pupils from which all light had drained like frozen glaze.
"Enough, Aretia..." Her voice came faint, stripped of all will. "This is useless."
"It is not useless!" I retorted through chattering teeth, accelerating the friction until the bearing stone nearly slipped from my frozen grip. "I will keep going until it catches."
"And why keep going?!"
Justitia's voice tore apart suddenly. She collapsed onto her knees into the snow, burying her face in shivering palms as sobs strangled her throat.
"We are doomed in this wasteland! There is no escape, no salvation! I... I want this agony to end! Let me die here... perhaps I can reach Mama... perhaps I will find Otos and find rest!"
The motion of the bow halted in my hands.
I cast the wood into the snow and whipped around toward her. My jaw clamped so tightly my teeth nearly cracked. I lunged until I dropped to my knees before her, seizing her shoulders in both hands and shaking her slackened frame fiercely.
"Mama did not burn back there so our lives would end here as frozen corpses beneath the snow!"
I cried out with all the breath left in my chest, the echo rebounding against the silent stones:
"We will live! I will live, and you will live with me! This is a blood oath between us!"
My voice fractured, my throat constricted by a burning lump as I tightened my grip on her shoulders:
"Our father is Motus Exemplar! The blood of Exemplar flows through this neck, and Otos did not give his soul at the gate so we could surrender to the frost of the valley! And Mama... Mama burned herself to ashes to buy us this morning!"
I wiped away a hot tear that tracked through the mud caked upon my cheek, and pressed on, sharp fury jutting through the fissures of despair:
"Do you wish to throw all of that into the snow? I will not permit you!"
Justitia stared into my face. Her burning tears thawed the crusts of ice clinging to her pale cheeks, and the trembling of her lips began to subside. She looked at the pile of dry tinder, then dragged herself forward on her knees, crawling slowly toward me. Extending shivering fingers, she began gathering the scattered twigs, stacking them haphazardly atop the pile.
"That is too much," I said, wiping my nose with the sleeve of my coat.
Her hand froze in midair, her gaze turning to me.
"If you heap the wood like that, you will choke the draft," I explained, my tone softening. "Kindling needs vents to breathe, or the ember dies before it is born."
Justitia studied me for a heartbeat, then slowly drew back the excess twigs, laying them aside. "And how did you know this?"
I reset the spindle into the wooden notch, gripping the bow once more. "I read a manuscript on the nature of fire and the alchemy of wilderness combustion."
A faint, broken smile touched her pale lips: "As always... clever."
I returned to the work.
A heavy silence enveloped the clearing, pierced only by the rhythmic scrape of wood on wood and the wind's wail beyond the crag. Justitia knelt watching without motion, her eyes following the bow's oscillation to and fro.
The muscles of my arms screamed with agony, the skin of my palms torn until a thin, viscous thread of blood seeped into the spindle's grain. Cold sweat broke across my forehead, swiftly glazed by the morning gale into a rough white crust, yet I did not slacken my pace for a fraction of an instant; driving downward with all my weight, thrusting the bow in a fevered cadence.
Suddenly... a faint wisp of gray smoke coiled upward, carrying the sharp scent of burning pine.
Then... a glowing coal flashed, tumbling into the nest of tinder.
I cast the bow aside, bending low until my lips brushed the brittle nest. I blew gently, a cautious, warm breath shielding the newborn ember from the raging wind; the orange glow broadened, flames seized upon the dry fibers, and a pristine, fragile blaze flared to life, dancing among the twigs.
I froze where I was, cupping my hands around the flame like a rampart against the gusts.
Justitia's eyes widened, the breath locking in her throat as she stared at the orange shimmer in paralyzed disbelief:
"You... you lit it..."
I lowered my gaze to my bloody palms, then lifted them to the tiny flame beginning to dispel the air's bite between our faces, murmuring in a faint, trembling whisper:
"...I did it."
At that instant, Justitia's pupils dilated and she lunged forward, crying out in a hysterical burst of ecstatic frenzy that shattered the valley's desolation:
"You did it! You did it!"
Jolted from my stupor, a roaring sob tore from my throat, mingling with laughter:
"I did it!"
Justitia threw her entire weight against me, and we tumbled away from the rock's cleft, crashing together into the snow two arm's lengths from the newborn flame—clinging to one another with convulsed arms, weeping and laughing in ragged gasps, our eyes fixed upon the fire feeding steadily upon the pine twigs.
Then... my strength unraveled all at once.
My fingers spasmed against Justitia's gown, my knees giving way beneath me. A sharp sob ripped from my throat, choking off my breath, and my head dropped into the hollow of her neck like a stone stripped of weight. I broke into disjointed weeping, hot tears scalding the fabric of her coat; a childish crying that silenced all logic.
My fingers clawed into the wool of her dress, my long frame convulsing with violent, rhythmic tremors I had no power to check.
Justitia locked her arms around me with uncharacteristic strength; she drew me tight against her chest, rested her chin atop the crown of my head, and caressed my wet hair with her swollen palm, just as our mother had done during the fevered nights of long ago.
The small orange fire flickered within the rock's cradle, frail against the endless expanse of white, yet enough to melt the crusts of frost clinging to our eyelashes.
"We will live..." Justitia whispered into my ear, her voice calm, steady, warmed by her rhythmic breath.
"We will not let her fire die, Aretia... We will live... for her."