Winter keeps accounts.
It was sworn in winter because winter remembered.
They gathered where the wind broke against old stone, a ring of iron-veined rock older than banners, older than titles. Snow crept inward and stopped at the edge, as if it had learned the boundary long ago and chosen not to cross it. No sigils marked the place. No colors flew. Names were enough. Blood was already too much.
The man who would be First of the line stood bare-handed at the center of the ring. Frost filmed the ground beneath his boots. He did not shiver. That was not courage. It was attention. Every breath was measured. Every word would be counted.
Behind him waited his kin.
A brother with his jaw set too tight, anger held like a blade kept half-drawn. A sister with one hand hovering near a knife she would never use here. Further back, a child watched with the unthinking patience of youth, more curious than afraid, not yet old enough to understand why he had been told to stay behind the stones.
The old spirit watched from the treeline.
It did not wear a face. Faces were lies things told themselves. This one pressed instead—weight in the air, a narrowing of breath, the sense that the world had leaned closer to listen. Frost creaked along the rocks as if answering it.
"You know the price," the spirit said.
"I do," the man replied.
"You bind your blood."
"Yes."
"You cut a path forever."
"Yes."
"You will lose victories you could take."
"Yes."
The wind stilled. Even the mountains seemed to wait.
"Speak."
The man drew a shallow cut across his palm. Blood welled and steamed faintly in the cold. He did not rush to close the wound. Pain clarified. He waited until the ring was quiet, until even his brother's breathing slowed.
"I swear," he said, voice level, "that no child of my blood will raise blade against their own. Not for crown. Not for vengeance. Not for fear."
Snow shifted at the edge of the stone.
"Let my strength fail before that line is crossed," he continued. "Let my house break before it feeds on itself."
The brother flinched despite himself. The sister closed her eyes. Somewhere behind them, the child laughed, chasing drifting snow with numb fingers, unaware of what had just been taken from him.
The spirit did not answer at once.
"And when your enemy hides behind kin?" it asked.
"Then we find another way," the man said.
"And when there is no other way?"
"Then we lose."
The spirit pressed closer. Frost cracked beneath a weight that was not quite weight.
"And when mercy costs you the war?"
The man was silent for a long moment. He looked back once—at his blood, at the child who would inherit a world shaped by this choice.
"Then we lose," he said. "And live with it."
Silence followed. Not absence, but accounting.
Frost climbed his wrist, creeping over skin and bone, cold without pain, pain without injury. It measured pulse and resolve alike. The man did not pull away.
"Done," the spirit said at last. "This oath will hurt the breaker most. Their blood less. Their people least. Kept, it will steady what you hold. Broken—"
"I know," the man said.
The frost withdrew. The pressure lifted. Wind rushed back into the ring all at once, sharp and loud, as if it had been held away by force.
Someone exhaled too hard. Someone else laughed, brittle with relief.
The man bound his palm with a strip of cloth and turned to his family.
"We go home," he said. "We teach our children the cost of easy victories."
They left the ring and did not look back.
Far off, winter shifted its weight.
And learned the name it would answer to.