The snow didn't fall so much as it assaulted the mountain—flurries hurled sideways like angry ghosts, chewing on the bone-white slopes.
Somewhere along a narrow pass, a black carriage groaned its way forward, thick iron wheels carving through slush. It wasn't pulled by horses—too delicate for this sort of work—but by a single dire wolf the size of a small shed. Mangy, scarred, and apparently too stubborn to freeze to death, the beast heaved against the harness like it owed someone a favor.
Inside the carriage, warmth bloomed from a runestone lantern dangling from the ceiling, humming faintly. Six teenagers huddled together, all wrapped in varying states of patched wool and stiff leather. They looked like a catalogue of half-starved dreams—scarred, wide-eyed, and loud.
A red-haired boy with a crooked nose spoke like he was already famous. "I heard someone in the last batch awakened a Flamebound talent. He was flown straight to Solara. Got a gold ring and everything."
"Flamebound?" scoffed a girl in a patched green cloak, picking frost from her lashes. "I'd settle for Stonecall. At least then I could work the mines and not get sent back." Her fingers were missing a nail or two—not recent losses either.
A smaller boy, pale, with lips so chapped they looked split in four places, stared out the frost-ringed window. "My sister said they give you real beds down there. Ones with sheets." His voice was almost reverent, like sheets were a holy artifact.
Each of them had their reasons for being hopeful, which is always a mistake in the north.
They were heading to a small, barely-there facility near the peak of Mount Eira—one of several such places dotted along the empire's edge. Up here, in the Frostline Provinces, children didn't get chosen; they got tested. The process was called Verminy, which sounded elegant but translated loosely to "unveiling" in Old Varn—though in practice, it was more like: let's see what kind of freak you are.
If you were lucky, you awakened something useful. A Talent. A Gift. A Blessing. A whiff of divine mana alignment that might mean you weren't just another mouth for the snow to silence.
If you were really lucky, you got taken down south, to the Central Empire, where everything was warm, and clean, and terrifyingly structured. Most didn't.
Still, every year, on the month of High Sleep—the time when the cold was deepest and the body most desperate—the children of the north were sent up the mountains, one carriage at a time, chasing a dream their parents never got to reach. They called it the Last Climb. Nobody liked the name.
It was too accurate.
But inside the carriage, under their breath, they still whispered it.
"Maybe I'll get picked."
"Maybe this is it."
"Maybe this year is different."
Spoiler: it wasn't. But hope is cheap, and the Empire knew it
Someone might ask, if they had time for questions and a poor sense of self-preservation, why the Frostline Provinces—still technically part of the Empire—were treated like some kind of half-forgotten prison ward. Why the roads weren't paved. Why the people had to earn the right to leave. Why Verminy felt more like a ritual sacrifice than a rite of passage.
The answer was simple. And also not.
This place—these bitter peaks, the dying villages clinging to mountainsides, the wind that never stopped screaming—was the homeland of Asher Norvind.
The God Slayer.
A name that still made the High Priests flinch when whispered.
A mortal who—by all accounts—had a reason. A good one, allegedly. Not that it mattered anymore.
The gods were dead, and Asher had killed them.
How he did it still remains a mystery.
Every pantheon. Every divine. Even the minor ones who had only ever blessed harvests and warmed hearths.
He tore the sky apart. Left the world without prayer.
And when the gods fell, their power didn't vanish. It bled—downward. Into the soil. Into storms. Into blood. Into people. The Empire had no choice but to adapt. Divine power became mortal currency. Magic as the world had never seen before burst into being. And with it, chaos.
But chaos has rules. One of them? Don't trust anything with the name Norvind attached to it.
Which brings us back to the carriage.
Near the rear, beside the door—because some people prefer to stay close to an exit—sat a young man bundled in furs that had clearly seen better decades.
He wore a low hood that shadowed his face and a half-mask fashioned from some beast's jawbone. The cold hadn't roughed him up—the world had. His hands were wrapped in old bandages, yellowed and stiff.
He sat quiet, hunched albeit loosly, frostbitten and in silence. But if the others had really looked—really looked—they might have noticed the snow white hair, a color too stark and too pristine to be natural, peeking from beneath his hood.
Or the eyes—deep ocean blue, not like sea glass or stormy waves, but like something you might drown in if you stared too long.
His name was Aether Norvind.
And Aether, of course, was here for Verminy too—technically. Officially. Realistically? He was on the run.
See, a prophecy—because there's always a prophecy—had been delivered to the Emperor. Not by some ragged old crone in a cave, but by the Global Ruling Council themselves. The highest arcane authority left standing. A group of terrifyingly educated, absolutely joyless people who only spoke when they had to, and never joked.
They had spoken.
"One who bears the blood of the God Slayer shall build a throne of ash and ice upon the world. And he shall sit. And all shall bow—even the gods themselves shall smile beyond their graves. And he shall usher in a new era… one of the Ashen Throne."
Chilling stuff.
Also confusing. The gods were dead, which, by definition, should have disqualified them from bowing to anyone, much less smiling at the descendant of their killer. But prophecies aren't known for clarity—they're known for doom.
And the last part?
Ushering in a new era. That sounded suspiciously like the polite phrasing for an "apocalypse."
So the Empire—wise and deeply paranoid—had reacted the way empires do: with steel and fire. They sent the Knights of the White Order to wipe out every last trace of House Norvind. Quietly. Swiftly. Without trial or pause.
Which made Aether's presence in this humble, creaking carriage more than strange.
It made it dangerous.
But no one knew. Not yet.
To them, he was just another hopeful soul chasing a better life in the center of the Empire.
But in truth?
He was the echo of something ancient.
And prophecy, like blood, always finds a way to spill.
"So, what's your name?"
A voice cut through the muffled groan of the blizzard outside—soft, curious, and entirely too bright for a day like this.
Aether didn't move. Not at first. He'd gotten good at pretending to be stone. People rarely talked to statues.
But the girl wasn't deterred. She leaned forward, her knees brushing the fur-lined bench, trying to get a better look beneath his hood. She had freckles, a burn mark just beneath her left eye that hadn't quite healed right, and the kind of smile you only see on people who haven't learned yet how cruel the world can be.
"I mean, you've been sitting there all quiet since we left Cradlepass. You've got to be someone interesting. Everyone here's got a story, right?" she asked, eyes wide with something that looked a lot like hope. "What's your dream? What talent do you wanna awaken?"
Aether turned his head slightly. Just enough for one eye—deep ocean blue and dangerously still—to catch the flicker of hers. The inside of the carriage felt smaller suddenly. More aware.
She didn't flinch. Brave. Or stupid. Maybe both.
His voice, when it came, was low. Hoarse. Like it hadn't been used in weeks. "You don't want to know."
The girl blinked. "That bad, huh?"
A pause. Then, just the faintest trace of a smirk. Not from amusement. More like… resignation.
"I'm not here to just awaken," he said, gaze drifting back to the frost-covered window. "I'm here because I ran out of places to run, the central empire seems like a nice spot."
The girl tilted her head. "That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I have."
She frowned, but didn't press. Not yet. She just sat back and studied him with a little more care. As if she was starting to realize that maybe, just maybe, the boy wrapped in worn furs and silence wasn't like the rest of them.
And she'd be right.
Because Aether Norvind wasn't chasing dreams.
He was trying to outlive a prophecy.
"Well, I'm Caliea," she said, undeterred, like his gloom hadn't just tried to freeze the conversation dead.
There was that smile again—full of reckless optimism and the kind of warmth that made you forget, briefly, that the snow outside could strip skin from bone.
"From Farrowheel," she added with a little shrug. "It's a village up past the ice bridges near the Hollow Glen. You've probably never heard of it. Most haven't."
Aether gave no indication either way.
"Real quiet place. Lots of snow, not a lot of anything else. My family runs a smokehouse—salted fish, dried roots, that kind of thing. It's not exciting, but we get by."
She smiled again, softer now, like the memory of home was something she was trying not to hold too tightly.
"I'm hoping to awaken something healing-related. Maybe earth magic, if I'm lucky. I just want to help people, you know?" she said, eyes searching his mask. "Not everyone gets out of places like mine. So this… Verminy thing? It's a shot."
Aether finally turned toward her again. Not fully. Just enough.
"You're not afraid?"
Caliea paused, then grinned. "Of course I am. But being afraid's not the same as stopping. Besides, if I pass… I could make it to the Central. Maybe even see the Imperial Gardens. Can you imagine?"
He couldn't.
But he didn't say that... It would be too cold.
Instead, he just looked at her—really looked—and for a fleeting second, something unreadable flickered behind his eyes.
Caliea of Farrowheel.
He'd remember that name.
Even if the world didn't.
"Aether," he said, after a beat.
Just that. No surname. No lineage. Just the first name, clipped short and casual, so it didn't carry centuries of fear and prophecy in its syllables.
He could've said anything. Made something up—Kale, Ren, Darron, even something ridiculous like "Snow."
But no. He wasn't a creative guy. Never had been. So he trimmed the truth and left the rest behind.
Aether.
Caliea blinked, clearly waiting for more. When none came, she leaned back with a little hum, as if trying the name on for size.
"Huh. That's kind of nice. Aether. Sounds... floaty. You know, like the wind between stars or something."
He didn't answer. He wouldn't.
Because if she knew what the full name was—Aether Norvind—she wouldn't be smiling. She wouldn't be talking.
She'd be screaming.
And for now, quiet was the better choice... But this was the first time in a while he actually got to talk to someone.
Aether's gaze flickered for a moment, a shadow passing over his features as he spoke again. "The name's old Varn," he explained, his voice flat. "It means... 'to carry the storm,' in the old tongue. It's not much anymore, just a remnant of a dead language."
Caliea blinked, clearly intrigued. "That's kind of cool, though!" She said with a smile. "I had no idea names like that even existed. My parents didn't think too hard about mine. They just... slapped it on because it sounded cute." She smiled a little, shrugging. "They probably didn't know I'd end up in the middle of a frozen wasteland chasing magic and new lives."
Aether didn't smile, but the brief flicker in his eye might've been as close as he got.
Before he could respond, a shout from outside sliced through the air, sharp and urgent.
"Arrived! We've arrived!" the coachman yelled, his voice muffled by the rattling of the carriage wheels over snow and ice.
The world outside—the one Caliea had been dreaming of, the one Aether had been running from—was just beyond the doors. The weight of everything that came with it, both hopeful and cursed, was only a few steps away.
Caliea's eyes sparkled. "Well, here goes nothing." She jumped up and moved to the door, practically vibrating with anticipation.
Aether sat still. His gaze turned back to the frosted glass, his thoughts already lost in a place far from the present.
Nothing was ever as simple as it seemed. Not for him. Not anymore.