Claire cracked her shoulders and placed her leg-spear down in the snow as she sat atop a large frozen rock. Day two of trudging through the snow went by with far less difficulty. She still had no idea where exactly she was going, and the cold was still proving itself an unrelenting source of fatigue, but the soft woolly cloak on her shoulders was keeping her from dropping dead. Despite being something she made on a whim, her scarf had become the star of the show. It freed her lungs from their suffering; her insides were kept warm, and it no longer hurt to breathe. She couldn’t smell as well with her tongue tucked inside of the muffler, but it hardly mattered. Her olfactory senses had always been subpar at best.

Far more detrimental was the need to keep her ears held down. She could still hear, but everything was muffled and she lost the ability to pin the sounds to their sources. The snow wasn’t helping her case. The thick, fluffy powder served as a dampener that only dulled the incoming noise.

The muted world had already pulled her into three unwanted battles, and a fourth was already making its way toward her; another group of bug-monkeys had their eyes trained on her frame from afar. She might have been able to escape the trouble had there been any forest to obscure her, but the next wooded patch was still far, far away.

Sighing reluctantly, she brandished her frozen leg-blade and got to her feet. The borroks were barely a challenge; her thoughts wandered as she dispatched them, focusing primarily on peculiarities concerning the time of day.

Griselda—the moon—never moved. She remained exactly where she was, even as the minutes and hours flew by. But that wasn’t to say that the sky was entirely static. When Claire raised her eyes, after slaying her foes, she found a curtain of clouds formed overhead. A gentle snow descended from their frozen embrace, further cooling the shivering mountain.

And so her journey continued. The slope was gradual throughout her ascent, its pitch stagnant as the borrok patrols she had inattentively ended. So horrifyingly mind-numbing was the experience that the halfbreed’s thoughts ventured adrift. She started with harmless topics, her classes, her skills, and her quest, but despite knowing better, she soon found herself considering the past. She recalled Beatrice and Mariabelle, the maids that attended to all her everyday needs. Their smiling faces were still bright in her mind. Even though she would never see them again.

Allegra was the same. The stupid rabbit was a terrible tutor. Her lectures were so boring that Claire remembered none of them. But she missed her. She missed the way she would squeeze her hand when her mood turned sour. She missed the way she would tell off her father when he stepped too far. And she even missed the way that she would pinch her nose after each cheeky retort. Pleasant memories that warmed her from within.

Log Entry 861
You have been disowned. Your family name has been removed.

Her trance went unbroken until the goddess’s voice rang through her head. The words splashed over her mind like a bucket of cold water. Reading the entry twice, she opened her status, and surely enough, confirmed the claim.

Her last name was gone. Replaced by a sense of emptiness that only served to weigh down her feet. She wanted to say that she didn’t care, that it didn’t matter, that her name was just another meaningless label.

But parting her lips, she found nothing but silence.

A trembling, fragile silence.

The whole world seemed to change as a freezing line rolled down her cheeks.

She could practically hear his words, the brewing storm her only saving grace. Its winds whooshed by, drowning him out as the flurry grew into a blizzard. She almost didn’t mind it at first. The wet slop that plastered itself against her face was oddly calming. It numbed the pain that came with thinking about her past. Until it suddenly didn’t.

Comfort turned to irritation as her internal temperature plummeted. She was miserable. Her clothes were soaked through by the snow. Her teeth chattered, clicking against each other as she trembled like a frightened fawn.

The storm only continued to grow.

The snow poured down so rapidly that she couldn’t so much as see a metre in front of her. In just a few minutes, it went from knee to waist high, but she pressed on, desperately pushing forward in search of some form of shelter.

She was nearly frozen solid by the time she stumbled into a patch of woodland. And even then, the trees barely provided cover; the harsh winds continued to pelt her, biting away at her skin and scales. Her fur shield alone failed to suffice, offering only a single layer of defence against an unending wave of winter.

Recalling a play describing a similar scenario, Claire packed the surrounding trees with snow, filling the places between their branches and stems to form a thick wall. It grew into a dome as she redoubled her efforts, and then a small shelter built with evergreen supports.

But with the insulation came the silencing of the storm. And the quiet that marked his voice’s return.

Louder and louder the whispers grew, until they were finally as clear as the day she heard them.

“Do you understand why you’re here, Claire?” He was right there, right in front of her. Even though he wasn’t. “I always thought that you would amount to something. I’d hoped that you would step up to your responsibilities and that you would come to understand the role that you were meant to play.”

She could smell the smoke of his cigar, the boozy stench of vekratt, and the perfume he used to mask the blood that clung to his fur.

“But I can’t wait any longer.” He heaved a sigh, a heavy, tired sigh. “You’ve already dashed nearly all your hopes for marriage. You rejected both Sir Rydland and Marquess Khazart. I’d pinned my hopes on Durham at some point, but then you had to go and remove his ability to sire a child.”

He took a swig from his glass, downing its contents in one breath before setting it back on his desk with a notable clink.

“And now you’ve even rejected Duke Ryarrd.”

She tried to shake her head clear of the illusion, the scene replaying itself in her mind. But she couldn’t. It didn’t go away, even as she clutched her skull and screamed.

“There are no longer any suitable candidates. I would say that we could look outside the country, but I doubt that would amount to anything beyond an international incident.”

She shook her head from side to side as she clawed at her ears. Her breathing was heavy, laboured, pained. She could feel her heart beating fast in her chest, pounding at a thousand miles a minute and threatening to leap from its cage.

But the words that were supposed to come after his disappointment, the words that were meant to condemn her, were never delivered. They failed to reach her ears. Because she interrupted them. Gritting her teeth, she wheezed the rebuttal she had once failed to voice.

“It’s not my fault.”

After several deep breaths, she pounded a fist into the snow and continued.

“I’m not a pawn.”

She had meant to shriek the words at the top of her lungs, to destroy her shelter with the punch, but she had come up too weak on both accounts. Her voice barely manifested as a whisper, and her fist left only the shallowest print.

Claire hugged her knees to her chest and curled up into a tiny, pointless ball.

She wanted to deny it, but she knew the truth. She was a pawn. She had always been a pawn. He had only made her a ritual mage because he wanted to be able to throw her away. That was just the sort of man her father was. The sort of man he had always been.

“I tried, Father.” She tried to ball her hands into fists, but they were too cold to listen. “I tried to be the daughter you wanted.”

She had learned magic from the Grand Magus and warfare from the Sovereign Spear. For fourteen hours each day, she endured their gruelling lessons. And at first, she had even found some degree of success, at least impressing her tutors enough that they didn’t immediately abandon her.

“But it didn’t work out.”

And yet, he had only proven himself completely indifferent. He had never batted an eyelid at any of her accomplishments. Any compliments he spoke were spoken in public, as a way of promoting her to other members of the nobility. So that he could offer her to them in exchange for their loyalty. In private, he was as expressionless as a doll and bitter as an adulteress exposed on the altar.

“The only thing you ever told me was that I wasn’t good enough. That I was a failure with no future. A tool only to be wed.”

She wanted to confront him. To take him off his pedestal, and to break free of the burdens of her blood. But it was impossible. He was a warlord. And she was nothing, nothing but a worthless splotch of red on an already crimson canvas.

It didn’t matter how hard she worked. Politics was the only field where she had even the slightest bit of relevance. And even then, she played second fiddle. She could bluff, lie, and manipulate, but her facade meant nothing with no power to back it. Her words could only go so far in a court whose arguments were settled with blades.

“All I ever did was try to appease you.” A small sob escaped her as his words wormed their way into her mind. “But you threw me away."

Her name was the only thing she had. The only piece that still tied her to her mother. The last remnant of the love she had hoped he would one day recall.

And it was gone.

Just like everything else she had ever had.

“Why did I even run away?” She whispered the question as she touched a hand to her chest, to the place where the ceremonial dagger had once pierced her heart. “It’s not like I have anything to live for.”

Her eyes still swollen, she dug a hole in the snow and slumped into it face down. She doubted that she would last the night. But she didn’t mind.

It didn’t matter.

The only person that had ever loved her was dead.

And she was too much of a coward to see her.

But maybe, just maybe, if she were lucky enough, it would not be long before they met again.

* * *

Claire didn’t know exactly when she had fallen asleep or why she had awoken, but the storm had settled by the time she did. Her nose was runny and her head was spinning. A piercing headache worked through the back of her mind every time she tried to use it, and her face was still swollen from the previous night.

She looked down at her hands, staring for a few moments before slowly raising them to her face and pressing them into her brow. A tired, choked sniffle escaping the back of her throat, she rose to her feet and tore her temporary shelter apart. She escaped the scene with languid, tired steps, stumbling towards the top of the mountain with her icy leg-spear dragging right behind her.

The incline grew steeper with every step, and the path that she had taken, a straight line up the side of its length, was quickly becoming unviable. Large winged creatures circled the airspace above, and while she didn’t particularly mind the thought of being plucked to death, she did at least prefer a less painful end.

Clenching her fists, she began wandering, moving up and around the mountain with a greater focus on the latter. Marching alongside the slope quickly proved untenably obnoxious. Large swaths of ice were hidden beneath the snow, and while the scales on her soles made it more difficult to slip and fall, not every part of her foot was covered. She would still collapse when her skin made contact with the frozen water.

Eventually, she happened to cross a distinct trail, a road made of downtrodden snow, compacted to the point where her footprints no longer registered. It led beneath the ice, where a tunnel merged with a larger underground road that seemed to gradually slope up toward the summit. It was suspicious. Someone or something had clearly put a lot of time into building the underpass, and heading within would likely lead to a violent encounter. So she decided to follow it to its furthest end.

Claire peeled back her hood and raised her ears as she stepped inside, but she wasn’t able to glean any information. The only pair of feet she heard were her own. Waiting for the echoes to fade left her alone with the sound of silence, nothing but the mocking voices that had tied a knot in her chest.

The next few hours were a blur. She passed by a number of similar-looking entrances and exits before her ears finally caught the echoes of a distant city. It was too far to be seen, but she could hear all sorts of different voices bouncing off the tunnel’s walls. They were accompanied by the clinking of metal, the crackling of flames, and the squeaking of wheels. There was even a large bell thrown into the mix, which rang exactly seven times before falling silent again.

Each step she took came with an increase in the soundscape’s intensity. And with it, a rise in the ambient temperature. It slowly got warmer and warmer, with the air heating up so much that she tore off her scarf and used it to fan her face.

It was only the halfbreed that felt the effects. The ice that made up the tunnel’s interior was completely unaffected. She could tell that the warmth was rising up from underneath her, but she could also feel the cold through the soles of her feet. Her toes were still every bit as sad and frozen as they had been since she first set foot on the icy mountain.

Covering a bit more distance, with her scarf and glove stuffed in her bag and her wintery cloak tied around her waist, she found the tunnel shifting from blue to red. A faint orange glow stretched through the area in front of her, and following it led the vector mage to find herself in poor company. A set of footsteps came from up ahead. She thought they were heading towards her at first, but a twitch of her ears confirmed the opposite. They were headed in the same direction, likely because they had entered the underpass through another channel.

One set of feet clearly belonged to a group of borroks. They were both the furthest and the quietest, nearly undetectable because of the light weight of their relatively small frames.

Behind them were four pairs of hooves. The much larger centaurs were easier to track, with their feet audibly crunching the snow. Their armour was even louder. The metal plates clinked against each other with every movement. The centaurs that she had seen in the midst of her raven-bound detour.

Alongside the four-legged pair was a third individual with much heavier steps. They reminded her of the watcher’s, but she couldn’t be sure—the one she fought had its feet muted by the snow.

Another few paces and a small drop later, the halfbreed found herself staring at the tunnel’s far end. It was difficult to make out the details from so far away, but the underground road appeared to open into some sort of settlement. Surely enough, the centaurs were also present. Their hands were tied. They were being escorted by a group of borroks and a larger creature that somewhat resembled a watcher.

Stepping forward as silently as she could, she found a massive bridge built over a stream of lava. The burning hot liquid somehow flowed through an icy tunnel without cooling off or melting the pipes. The entire mechanism grabbed her attention, but she shook her head and turned her eyes towards its guardian. 

Identical to the creature leading the centaurian prisoners, it was a hulking one-eyed, one-horned beast with an abdomen and six segmented legs sprouting from its back. Its hands were missing, replaced by scythe-like hooks resembling those of a mantis. The sharpened carapace was only one of many features that differed from those of the watcher’s. Its head sported a pair of cat-like ears that were so large they extended past its shoulders, while its rear featured an equally feline tail. It almost looked like a sort of borrok, perhaps a watcher-borrok hybrid, or maybe even a worthless halfbreed like herself.

Its interactions with the normal-looking borroks served to further the theory of their relation. A toll in the form of a small token was taken from each individual, after which the bridge’s guardian stepped aside and allowed them to pass. The same thing happened when it was approached by the individual of its own species. It accepted payment and let it through. Once everyone but the halfbreed was gone, the mutant borrok placed its earnings inside a wooden chest at the foot of the bridge and returned to its previous position.

Claire tried examining the environment for any alternative exits, or ways to cross the lava stream without alerting the guard. But it wasn’t possible. She couldn’t climb the icy walls, and the glowing red river was too wide for her to leap it.

She suspected the creature would let her pass if she disguised herself and presented it with a token. But the opposite was just as true. It could very well reject her without reason. Just like her father.

Laughing derisively at the thought, she brandished her leg-spear and advanced down the path.

The halfbreed had made up her mind.

The only way forward was through.