The mountain winds howled like wolves as I returned with the day's burden—three bundles of splintered oak and two cuts on my palm from the blade I used to hack through the frostbitten limbs. The sky hung low, bruised and gray, and the scent of snow rode the air like a warning. Winter was coming early this year.
I trudged up the narrow slope toward the old stone house we had called home for as long as I could remember—General Merek Crane's fortress of discipline, carved into the bones of the north ridge. Smoke curled from the chimney, thin and steady. That meant Mother was still alive. Still breathing.
I dropped the wood just outside the door and knelt to sort through it, fingers numb as I chose the driest pieces for the fire. My breath fogged before me. I was about to light the kindling and prepare her evening medicine—birch root steeped in snowmelt and foxwood bark, a concoction I'd boiled every day for seventeen years.
That's when I heard the iron-clad footsteps.
Heavy. Decisive. Measured in the way all soldiers walked when they had nothing to fear and nothing left to prove.
General Crane.
"Inside. Now." His voice cracked across the air like a whip.
I didn't ask questions. One didn't question the general—not even I, the girl he raised with bruises and blunt truths. I wiped the blood from my knuckles onto my cloak and followed him in.
The hearth crackled low in the main room. Mother lay motionless on the cot near the fire, her chest rising and falling like the slow breath of winter trees. I paused, watching her fragile form, the pale linen wrapped around her wrists like funeral cloth. Her face was unchanged—untouched by age or awareness. Still as beautiful as the stories claimed, still unmoved by the world she once helped shape.
And still silent.
Always silent.
Crane moved to the center table and unfastened a wax-sealed scroll from his belt. He didn't hand it to me. He placed it down, eyes fixed on mine.
"It's from your father."
My stomach coiled.
I stepped forward and broke the seal without ceremony. The royal crest of Delrya—an eagle strangling a serpent—was etched in blood-colored ink. Regal. Proud. Violent.
The words within were short. Sharp. Unfeeling.
You are summoned to return to the capital at once.
You will lead the King's second Army to subdue the province of Sevila.
Your success will determine Delrya's dominion over Talaria.
Do not fail.
No signature. Not even a name. Just the weight of my bloodline sealing my fate.
The letter slipped from my hands to the floor.
"He wants me to die," I said quietly.
Crane neither confirmed nor denied it. His silence was enough.
This wasn't a command—it was a death sentence. Sevila was one of the sub-kingdoms under Talaria's rule, a proud territory with warriors hardened by decades of mountain conflict. They wouldn't surrender easily. And the king knew that.
King Dematricus of Delrya—my father—was playing a dangerous game. And I was the piece he'd already discarded once.
If I succeeded, he would claim victory over Talaria and tighten his grip over the western kingdoms. If I died—well, he and Talaria's king would drink to the gods and call it a loss worth laughing over.
My existence had never mattered to him. Not in life. Not in legacy.
He would rather I be remembered as a forgotten failure than a living threat.
I turned to look at Mother. Her face was so peaceful it almost hurt to see.
She had once been the glory of the realm. Adirah, Daughter of Aidles. The sun itself was said to rise with more joy when she smiled. Songs were written about her golden voice, her laughter that made even soldiers weep.
When she married my father, the kingdom rejoiced for seven days and seven nights. The skies were clear.The harvest doubled. The people declared her the bringer of fortune and my father was crowned King of the West not long after. Every war he waged ended in victory. Every border he pushed became his. And the kingdom of Delrya stood unchallenged.
They called her Adura of the Order —a Queen whose very presence brought balance to the realm.
And then I was born.
It happened on a stormless night, under a cloudless sky. And yet the world split open.
The midwives gasped. The servants fell to their knees in silence. The air grew cold, and even the fire dimmed as if to retreat.
I was not what they expected.
I was not what the kingdom prayed for.
I had no colored irises—my eyes were pure white, moon-pale and pupil-less. A mirror to the void. My hair was silver-white from the start, not blond nor light, but the true shade of bone and frost. My skin was cold, unnaturally pale.
The omens declared me a harbinger of ruin. A taboo.
A cursed child.
And worst of all—my mother, my radiant mother—slipped into unconsciousness the moment I entered the world. She never opened her eyes again. Never spoke another word.
The healers called it divine punishment. The priests whispered that I had stolen her spirit in birth. That the gods had been angered.
Tradition dictated that I be sacrificed.
Slaughtered.
My blood was to be poured over the high stones of the temple and offered to the gods to wash away the blight I had brought.
But my father did not kill me.
Not for love of me—but for love of her.
He could not bear to let her only child be slaughtered, not when she lay so still, so silent.
So he chose a quieter fate.
He banished us.
That very night, he ordered General Crane—his most loyal and brutal warhound—to take me and my mother far from the capital, to bury us in the frozen reaches of the north. The midwives and servants who had witnessed my birth were executed, their silence guaranteed by death.
That was how my story began.
Not with a crown.
Not with celebration.
But with exile and execution.
And since then—since the day I was wrapped in blood and shame and sent into the snow—no Delyran had spoken my name aloud. No song had been written. No monument built.
They erased me.
They buried me.
They thought I would rot in silence.
But I did not.
I was not raised as a princess.
I was not raised as a ghost.
I was raised as a weapon.
And now, seventeen years later, the king calls me back.
Not as a daughter.
Not as an heir.
But as a blade to be thrown at the throat of his enemy.
He wants me to fight a war for a kingdom that never wanted me.
He wants me to die to prove a point.
I reached down, picked up the scroll, and turned to General Crane.
"When do we ride?"
His gray eyes narrowed, hard with approval.
"Dawn."
I nodded once.
Then turned to my mother. I knelt beside her and took her hand. Cold. Delicate. Still warm enough to remind me of the woman she had been.
I pressed my forehead to her knuckles and whispered:
"I will return . Or I would tear down the heavens while trying."
She did not stir.
She never did.
But for the first time, I thought I felt her fingers tighten—ever so slightly—around mine.