The northern road was bones and mud.
Kairito walked. The horse the guard gave him had thrown a shoe three miles back, so he'd thrown the horse. Let it find its way home. He didn't need the company.
The cold started at his ankles. Crept up. By the time he reached the old watchtower, his breath fogged thick enough to taste. Iron. Ozone. Something dead and cooking in its own rot.
The princess was still behind him.
He'd known for the last hour. She was bad at silence. Kept stepping on the wrong twigs, breathing too loud in the spaces between wind gusts. Her sandals, the second pair, made a wet sound in the half-frozen mud.
He stopped. Didn't turn.
"You'll die out here."
No answer.
He pulled his collar up. The mana in his chest was a furnace now, burning against the cold. He could feel it pushing out, melting frost in a five-foot radius. A waste. But the cold made his fingers stiff, and stiff fingers got people killed.
"I said,"
"I heard you."
She came up beside him. The blue dress was gone. Wool now. Gray. Practical. Her face was red from the wind, and her hair was coming loose from whatever pins she'd started with.
"I'm not going back."
"Your father will send knights."
"My father will send someone." She looked at the tower. At the stain in the air above it, a heat shimmer in winter, something bending light where light shouldn't bend. "Is that it?"
Kairito didn't answer. He was watching the ground.
Tracks. Not hooves. Not boots. Something that dragged. Three parallel grooves, like fingers, but too wide. Too deep. They led from the tower toward the tree line and then doubled back.
Fresh.
"Stay behind me."
"I didn't come all this way to,"
He snapped.
The sound split the air. For a second, nothing happened. Then the tower groaned. Stone shifted. The stain above it pulsed.
From the trees, something answered.
It came out slow. Too big for a man, too small for a troll. Gray skin that hung loose, like clothes on a skeleton. No eyes, just sockets with something wet and black moving in them. Its hands dragged the ground. Three fingers each. Long. The nails were gone. Rotted off.
The princess made a sound. Small. He ignored it.
The thing stopped twenty feet away. Opened its mouth. No tongue. Just a throat that went down into nothing, and from that nothing came a sound like rocks in a tumbler.
"You're the one," Kairito said. "The one who cracked the seal."
It tilted its head. Waiting.
He could end it now. A flick. The mana in his chest was a star, and this thing was kindling. He'd done it before. Wiped things off the map without blinking.
But the seal,
"What happens if I close it?" he asked.
The thing's head tilted the other way. Then it spoke. The voice came from the throat, from the nothing, and it was wet and dry at the same time.
"You don't close what was never shut."
The princess grabbed his arm. Her fingers were cold. Digging in.
Kairito looked at her hand. Then at the thing. Then at the tower, where the air was bending light into colors that shouldn't exist.
"How many of you are through?"
No answer.
He sighed. Pulled his arm free.
"Okay," he said. "New plan."
He walked toward the tower.
Behind him, the princess said his name. Once. Then again, sharper.
He didn't look back.
The thing in the road watched him go. Its mouth was still open. The sound it made now was quieter. Almost happy.
When he reached the tower, the air was thick enough to chew. His mana flared, not his choice. The hole was hungry. He could feel it tugging at him, at the heat in his chest, at the infinite well that never ran dry.
He put his hand on the stone.
Cold. Hot. Both at once. The colors in the air spiraled. Somewhere, something laughed.
The princess screamed behind him.
He didn't turn around.