— Kaia's Perspective —
She was Kaia Frost-Fang, last daughter of the Frostfang Clan, born beneath the silver boughs of Thornevale's snow-laced canopy — where the roots of the World Tree kissed the ice, and the wind sang in ancient tongues.
Once a huntress. A guardian. The next in line to bear the blade of her mother before her.
Now she was shackled in the bowels of Blackstone Keep, surrounded by heat, filth, and chains that reeked of ash and blood.
Her cell stank of rust and sweat — the scent of the broken.
She hated it.
Kaia sat motionless, her back straight despite the shackles digging into her wrists. A twin bone-handled knife rested lightly in her lap — smuggled through strip-searches and slave inspections, hidden where only a true Frostfang would dare conceal it.
She turned it slowly between her fingers, letting the firelight catch on the edge.
Carved into its hilt, in the old tongue of her people, were the words:
"Blood in silence. Frost in flame."
A prayer. A promise. Her mother's last gift.
She could still hear Nhal'Tara's voice — proud, commanding, alive — speaking beneath the twilight snow of their sacred grounds:
"This world will chain you, Kaia. But chains are nothing to a blizzard. You are not prey. You are the storm that devours."
Kaia blinked. The memory faded.
Across the corridor, in the next cell, Eighty-Eight stirred.
That was what the guards called him. A number. A mistake.
But Kaia knew better.
She had watched him closely since the desert — since the cage. He moved like a man who had forgotten how to breathe but still fought to stand. There was weight behind his eyes. Old weight. Hollow. Hungry.
And then there was the mark.
She had seen it that night, when his ragged shirt tore during the brawl.
A jagged violet sigil, pulsing faintly with something not of this world.
Not ink. Not a tattoo.
A brand — seared into flesh and soul.
She'd smelled it too.
Not blood. Not magic.
Void.
She hadn't spoken to him since the pit. Not directly. But her eyes never left him. She watched his posture, the twitch of his fingers when no one else looked. The way the shadows bent near his feet.
He was wrong.
But wrong in the way the world whispered about in old forest legends.
The kind of wrong that turns into prophecy.
She closed her eyes, listening to the faint tremor in the air around him. Something had changed. The mark was no longer dormant.
It pulsed now.
He slept restlessly. His back to the wall, shadow flickering unnaturally. It moved too much — as if trying to stretch beyond its form.
Not normal, she thought.
Not of this land.
She opened her eyes again.
She didn't know his name.
He didn't know his name.
But she had given him one in her thoughts.
The Riftborn.
Because she had felt it — that echo when he touched the mark.
Like the world itself was remembering a wound it never truly healed.
If the Void had truly marked him…
Then this cage, these walls, this empire built on chains and fire — none of it would last.
And when the time came to shatter it all, she'd be at his side.
Knives in both hands. Eyes to the wind.
A twin blade of frost wrapped in silence.