Duskfire Glacier I feel the night explode

the wind was a living thing up here—sharp, needled, carrying the bitter breath of gods long gone. it whispered through the glacier’s crown as if to test her resolve, and morwenna, once queen of evenspire and now little more than a ghost in borrowed flesh, met it with a quiet, steady defiance.

her fur, silvered by frost and thin in places where scars still healed, pressed close to her ribs. she moved with the care of one half-made of glass, though her eyes—dark as thaw water—burned with that old, unyielding fire. in her jaw, she carried a sprig of the season’s last herbs: snow yarrow and mountain sage, their pale leaves stiff with cold.

it was said the summit birthed the strongest medicine, tempered by ice and hardship both. she believed this. perhaps because she had become like it—tempered, brittle-edged, alive in the way that only those who had suffered and survived could be.

she paused where the slope broke into white infinity. the world fell away beneath her paws, the horizon endless, merciless, and beautiful. her breath came in slow clouds.

fa’liya, she murmured, her voice fraying at the edges. my little one.

the herbs trembled in her grasp. she thought of her children, their faces half-remembered through the fog of fever and grief. thought of sun eater’s rage, blackfell’s sorrow, gjalla’s voice calling her home.

morwenna bent, laying the herbs upon the ice like an offering.

the wind took them.

AW, she is on the border of the glacier.