The sky hadn't changed.
Same rot, same colour, same way it stretched like a bruise too deep under skin to ever fade. It wasn't just clouded—it was diseased. Sick with something the world forgot how to name. It didn't move. It didn't weep. It just hung there, thick and bloated, like it was waiting for someone to look up and choke on it.
The wind didn't howl when they crossed the ridge into Frostwell's reach. It didn't need to. It just pressed in against their ears, dragging old whispers behind it like ragged cloth. Not words. Just sound shaped by suffering that never made it past the throat.
The dogs—if you could call them that—felt it before he did. They moved slower. Noses low. Shoulders tucked. No growls. No snarls. Just a whimper that slipped out from one of them, soft and broken like it had forgotten how to be anything else. It didn't bark. It didn't even raise its head. It just made this sound and then went silent again.
These weren't animals. Not anymore. If they ever were, whatever bloodline they came from had been twisted by something older and meaner than nature. Their ribs looked like snapped knives jammed under skin stretched too thin to hide the damage. Their eyes had turned milk-white, but not the empty kind—this was the sort of blindness that knew exactly what it was looking at, and just didn't care anymore.
Frostwell didn't announce itself. It didn't rise from the snow like some grand fortress. It sank. Into the ground. Into your bones. Into whatever part of you still wanted to breathe.
The gates didn't open like someone was watching. They creaked. Slow. Rust thick between the hinges, the kind that sounded like bones grinding inside a throat that never learned how to scream properly. No guards stood by the doors. No horns blew. No signs. Nothing.
Because this place didn't warn you.
It welcomed you.
With silence.
The walls were carved from fractured sigilstone—shards pressed together with frost and madness, humming low enough to make your teeth ache. They still pulsed sometimes. Faint little beats of light beneath the cracks. Like whatever lived inside them hadn't figured out it was dead yet.
He looked up once, just once, when they passed through.
The cold hit different after that.
Not sharper. Not stronger. Just… emptier.
Yren said nothing. Not a word. Not a nod. No you're here now or brace yourself or this is where things really begin. She didn't need to speak. The way she walked—shoulders squared, steps careful but not slow—was enough. Frostwell wasn't new to her. She wore it like another scar.
They took his name back in Drav'nar. Scraped it out of him in rituals and whispers and silence shaped like sermons. And that was fine. He could live without a name.
But Frostwell?
Frostwell didn't take something.
It rubbed it out.
Ground it down. One splinter at a time. Not with violence. Not with fear. Just with routine. The kind that crept under your nails and stayed.
The training pit was the first place to press back. Spirals cut into the ice, burned through with sigilmarks no one explained. He stared at them for a while the first day. Tried to follow the lines. Tried to care about what they meant.
But the cold settled into his teeth, and the hunger in his stomach twisted too hard to ignore. And eventually the lines didn't look like anything anymore.
A blade was tossed into his hand. Handle still damp with sweat from whoever had held it last.
The trainer didn't ask his name.
Didn't say his own.
Didn't even point.
He just jerked his chin toward the cage on the far side of the pit.
The door slid open without sound.
What came out didn't walk. It spilled. Shoulders wrong. Limbs too long. Mouth stitched halfway shut with threads that pulsed faint red, like they were feeding on something inside it. Its breath steamed in short bursts, each one wheezing like a prayer cut off halfway through.
Vaern didn't ask what it was.
Didn't wonder if it used to be a person.
Didn't think.
He just moved.
The thing struck first—of course it did—and he didn't dodge fast enough. Its claws skimmed across his thigh, not deep but messy, slicing through cloth and muscle like the blade wanted to taste something warmer. The pain came a second later, dull at first. Then sharp enough to make his eyes blur.
He slipped. Blood mixed with ice under his foot. The trainer didn't move.
"Get up," the man said, voice like two stones grinding together. Not impatient. Not concerned. Just… flat. Like he didn't expect anything except obedience.
So Vaern stood.
He didn't win that fight. Not really. There was no clean strike, no clever maneuver. He lasted. That was it. He made it through while the thing got tired and its strikes got slower and its weight started to shift wrong.
When it collapsed, he didn't feel proud. He just dropped the blade and waited.
The trainer didn't speak. Just dragged the thing back into the cage and locked it up again.
No instruction. No critique. No warning.
He limped away on his own.
The cot they gave him after wasn't even soft. Just stone. With a rag over it. Not enough to keep out the cold, but enough to remind him he wasn't dead yet.
He pulled his knees to his chest and stared at the wall until his eyes started to sting.
Outside, the sky didn't move. Just hung there, still pulsing with that same bruise-colored light.
He didn't cry. Not because he was strong. Because he didn't feel like he was allowed to. Like the place would hear it and take that from him, too.
The frost didn't thaw. Not even in his joints. It just lived there now—between the bones, beneath the skin, inside the folds of his breath. Cold had stopped being sensation a long time ago. It was memory now. Fossilized in muscle. Etched into marrow.
He didn't dream anymore. Not really. Just fragments. Glimpses. A face without eyes. A door that wouldn't close. A scream he wasn't sure ever actually left someone's throat. They weren't nightmares. Nightmares ended. These didn't. They lingered. Like the ash-stink that clung to his hair, his clothes, his tongue. Smoke from fires that weren't lit to warm.
He didn't ask what the screaming was anymore.
He just waited for it to stop.
That morning, the snow in the training pit wasn't fresh. It had thawed, then frozen again. Dirty slush, half-melted prints, flecks of blood already going black where they'd dried beneath the crust. Something had died there recently. Maybe someone. No one said anything. They never did.
Vaern stretched with the blade in hand. Not in preparation. Out of habit. The cuts on his forearm from yesterday's fight had already crusted, the bruises shifting color under skin like slow-moving storms.
The trainer with the stitched lips watched him. Not directly. Just from the edge of the pit. The way you watch something that doesn't need attention until it starts bleeding.
Today's opponent wasn't caged.
It walked out of the northern barracks. Alone.
Not twisted. Not monstrous. Just… wrong. Thin boy. Maybe seventeen. Pale skin. White eyes. The same sigilbrand burned across his collarbone that Vaern had. Same cloak. Same blade.
No introduction. No command.
The boy charged.
Vaern met him head-on. Blades clanged, not sharp-on-sharp but flat, ugly angles. The other boy was fast. Unclean. Movements bent in strange ways, like his body didn't fully believe in itself. Like something else was piloting him with gloves too thick to feel the strings.
The fight lasted long. Too long. Vaern couldn't find a rhythm. Every time he struck, the boy didn't block. He let the blow land, then struck back harder. Like pain didn't register. Or didn't matter.
When Vaern finally got the edge in—slamming the hilt into the boy's jaw and sweeping his legs with a shoulder twist—he didn't finish him. Didn't stab. Didn't crush the throat.
He backed up.
The boy didn't move. Didn't rise.
Didn't breathe.
A low exhale behind him.
Yren.
She was standing at the pit's edge, cloak pulled close. No smile. No frown. Just… watching.
"Why didn't you kill him?"
He didn't answer right away.
"I don't know if he was alive," he said finally.
She nodded once, slowly. "Good."
They burned the body. Not because it needed to be. But because fire was the closest thing to a ritual they had here. Flames licked up fast. The corpse didn't twitch. Didn't bleed. Something cracked deep in the ribs, and that was the only sound it made.
He watched until it was ash.
Later, in the stone halls, he passed by the shard-faced girl's old room. Still empty. Still cold. He paused. Just for a breath.
Then kept walking.
At dinner—if you could call the moss stew they handed out dinner—someone tried to speak to him.
A boy with a sunken eye and cracked lips leaned close. Voice barely more than air.
"You're the one with the book, right?"
Vaern didn't look at him.
Didn't nod.
Didn't blink.
The boy tried again.
"I saw it. Last week. The spiral. On your arm."
Vaern kept eating.
"You hear it sometimes, don't you?"
He stopped.
The boy smiled, crooked. "I do too."
Vaern stood. Bowl in hand. Still steaming.
He poured it out slowly onto the stone floor between them. Moss bits soaking into the cracks.
Then left.
The boy didn't follow.
That night, he didn't sleep. Not from pain. Not from fear. Just… didn't.
He sat in the corner of the barracks with the cloak around him, blade across his lap. Eyes half-shut, but never fully.
And sometime, just before the sky shifted from black to grey, the Ghost Sigil on his spine pulsed once.
Not warm.
Not angry.
Just… aware.
Frostwell didn't need to break you.
It waited for you to hand the pieces over yourself.
And he was starting to forget which parts he still wanted to keep.