Watari sat at the lip of the world and let the ink remember for him. Obsidian Canyon fell away at his feet in jagged steps of black stone, each ledge a broken tooth. Far below, the Nokhoi yurts clung to the valley floor in pale rings, wool and hide turned copper by the late sun. Smoke rose from their crowns in thin blue threads. Beetle corrals lay around them like carved bracelets, shells glinting as mounts shifted and clicked against their harness poles. From this height the songs of the camp rose as one long braided sound. Drums. Throat-voices. Laughter that turned thin in the high air.
The shrine itself was small. Old stone, older than any House name. A ring of weathered pillars and a flat slab that served as both altar and table. Prayer ribbons fluttered from iron hooks, stiff with frost where night still clung to the shade. Watari knelt before the slab on a worn felt cushion, armor loosened at the throat, his tail curled in an easy loop across his boots.
The panel of sanded cedar lay in front of him, pinned with pebble weights. To one side a clay bowl of water had filmed over with ice at the rim. Pigment shells waited like a circle of tiny moons. He rolled his brush between his fingers, feeling the familiar roughness of the beetle-hair bristles, and then leaned forward to work.
A single black stroke set the far ridge. A second caught the plunging line of the canyon wall. He did not hurry. Each line walked with the same measured certainty he used when pacing a line of recruits. The mountain had time enough. So did he, for once. The council below had finally run out of words to throw at him and sent him up the stone stair with only one command.
His mouth curved faintly at the memory. As if the giants were a summer storm. As if they would spill over the horizon without warning and drench the canyon in foreign law. He had never seen one. Only heard the stories that drifted along caravan routes and through firelight talk. A people of height and hunger. Bones like carved pillars. Tempers like river ice. So were the Nokhoi, once, if you believed outsiders.
His brush moved again, catching the sweep of steppe beyond the canyon. A sea of tawny grass, wind-sheared and endless, rippling into haze. On the panel it became a series of layered strokes, light over dark, suggestion instead of detail. If he narrowed his eyes, the painted plain seemed to breathe.
He sat back on his heels and flexed his hand, feeling old scars stretch across his knuckles. This was not work befitting a general, some would say. No spear in his grip. No command in his throat. Yet he had always trusted a man more when he knew what that man could make besides war.
Somewhere below, a child laughed, bright and clear. The sound climbed the canyon wall like a little fox. Watari’s ears twitched toward it, then back to the wind. He let the noise settle into his chest. It was for this that he concerned himself with treaties and parley. Not for banners. Not for titles. For the right of that thin, fierce joy to rise each day from Nokhoi tents.
He washed the brush, watching ink curl through the water, then traded black for red ochre. The canyon rim took on a rusted edge under his hand. Shadows of yurts appeared as pale ovals. Smoke as soft gray lines. He did not bother to paint figures. The people were implied in every mark. Their history lived in his wrist. In the way he shaped the cliff that had once been his childhood horizon and now served as fortress wall.
He tried the word again in his thoughts, fitting it into the rhythm of his own language. Heavy in the mouth. Too many stones stacked together. What sort of eyes would look out of that skull. Cold. Curious. Proud. The giants’ message had been respectful enough. A request for meeting, not a demand. Yet respect had teeth. It might be genuine. It might be only the first careful step of a boot that meant to stand on other throats.
He did not know. That ignorance bothered him more than any tale of size or strength. So he painted. He painted until his breathing matched the rise and fall of the panel’s lines, until the light on the cedar matched the light on the real canyon by some quiet, shared understanding. Around him the shrine’s prayer ribbons whispered. Clouds pulled long veils across the sky. The sun slid a finger-width lower toward the teeth of the western peaks.
Only then did he pause, brush hovering above the bowl, and lift his gaze from the work. From here he could see the stair that wound up from the valley. A thin white scar along the obsidian, broken by small landings where an old pilgrim might stop and remember why he was climbing. Empty, for now. No thud of giant steps. No new banner cutting the wind. Watari let out a slow breath he had not realized he was keeping.
He set the brush down and studied the half-finished vista. Yurts. Steppe. Canyon. Smoke. It was not perfect. No painting ever was. But it was honest. That would have to be enough. When the stranger from the Jorgenskull line finally appeared on the stair, he wanted this place carved firmly into his mind. So he could see, with clear eyes, what any agreement would risk.
The wind shifted, carrying up the smell of dung fires and stew and the iron tang of the beetle corrals. Home. He closed his eyes for a moment and listened to it, letting the sound sink in like another layer of pigment. Then he opened them again, dipped his brush, and returned to the work.
The shrine itself was small. Old stone, older than any House name. A ring of weathered pillars and a flat slab that served as both altar and table. Prayer ribbons fluttered from iron hooks, stiff with frost where night still clung to the shade. Watari knelt before the slab on a worn felt cushion, armor loosened at the throat, his tail curled in an easy loop across his boots.
The panel of sanded cedar lay in front of him, pinned with pebble weights. To one side a clay bowl of water had filmed over with ice at the rim. Pigment shells waited like a circle of tiny moons. He rolled his brush between his fingers, feeling the familiar roughness of the beetle-hair bristles, and then leaned forward to work.
A single black stroke set the far ridge. A second caught the plunging line of the canyon wall. He did not hurry. Each line walked with the same measured certainty he used when pacing a line of recruits. The mountain had time enough. So did he, for once. The council below had finally run out of words to throw at him and sent him up the stone stair with only one command.
His mouth curved faintly at the memory. As if the giants were a summer storm. As if they would spill over the horizon without warning and drench the canyon in foreign law. He had never seen one. Only heard the stories that drifted along caravan routes and through firelight talk. A people of height and hunger. Bones like carved pillars. Tempers like river ice. So were the Nokhoi, once, if you believed outsiders.
His brush moved again, catching the sweep of steppe beyond the canyon. A sea of tawny grass, wind-sheared and endless, rippling into haze. On the panel it became a series of layered strokes, light over dark, suggestion instead of detail. If he narrowed his eyes, the painted plain seemed to breathe.
He sat back on his heels and flexed his hand, feeling old scars stretch across his knuckles. This was not work befitting a general, some would say. No spear in his grip. No command in his throat. Yet he had always trusted a man more when he knew what that man could make besides war.
Somewhere below, a child laughed, bright and clear. The sound climbed the canyon wall like a little fox. Watari’s ears twitched toward it, then back to the wind. He let the noise settle into his chest. It was for this that he concerned himself with treaties and parley. Not for banners. Not for titles. For the right of that thin, fierce joy to rise each day from Nokhoi tents.
He washed the brush, watching ink curl through the water, then traded black for red ochre. The canyon rim took on a rusted edge under his hand. Shadows of yurts appeared as pale ovals. Smoke as soft gray lines. He did not bother to paint figures. The people were implied in every mark. Their history lived in his wrist. In the way he shaped the cliff that had once been his childhood horizon and now served as fortress wall.
He tried the word again in his thoughts, fitting it into the rhythm of his own language. Heavy in the mouth. Too many stones stacked together. What sort of eyes would look out of that skull. Cold. Curious. Proud. The giants’ message had been respectful enough. A request for meeting, not a demand. Yet respect had teeth. It might be genuine. It might be only the first careful step of a boot that meant to stand on other throats.
He did not know. That ignorance bothered him more than any tale of size or strength. So he painted. He painted until his breathing matched the rise and fall of the panel’s lines, until the light on the cedar matched the light on the real canyon by some quiet, shared understanding. Around him the shrine’s prayer ribbons whispered. Clouds pulled long veils across the sky. The sun slid a finger-width lower toward the teeth of the western peaks.
Only then did he pause, brush hovering above the bowl, and lift his gaze from the work. From here he could see the stair that wound up from the valley. A thin white scar along the obsidian, broken by small landings where an old pilgrim might stop and remember why he was climbing. Empty, for now. No thud of giant steps. No new banner cutting the wind. Watari let out a slow breath he had not realized he was keeping.
He set the brush down and studied the half-finished vista. Yurts. Steppe. Canyon. Smoke. It was not perfect. No painting ever was. But it was honest. That would have to be enough. When the stranger from the Jorgenskull line finally appeared on the stair, he wanted this place carved firmly into his mind. So he could see, with clear eyes, what any agreement would risk.
The wind shifted, carrying up the smell of dung fires and stew and the iron tang of the beetle corrals. Home. He closed his eyes for a moment and listened to it, letting the sound sink in like another layer of pigment. Then he opened them again, dipped his brush, and returned to the work.
Winter entered the shrine in heels.
The air thinned first. Breath turned to pale incense before the lips. A silver rind of frost crept from the stair and ran along the joints of the stone like veins waking in a corpse. Prayer ribbons stiffened, their colors dimming under a skin of rime. Only then did Ixqueya appear, climbing the last steps with a slow, sovereign sway that made the mountain feel like a staircase built for her alone.
She came up behind Watari like an eclipse approaching an altar.
Nine feet of giantess, bronze given height and verdict. Her hips moved with the lazy confidence of a queen walking through a conquered chapel. Yet her spine stayed arrow straight. Shoulders level. Every step placed with a ritual delicacy, as if she were crossing a circle of knives and knew none of them could cut her.
The headdress framed her like a frozen halo. Turquoise and white feathers rose high, a crown of captured sky rimed by ice. Her hair fell in a black river shot with cobalt, glossy and heavy, guided by discreet gold rings that caught the light like trapped stars. Nothing about it was accidental. Not a strand dared disobey.
Her body was abundance forged into doctrine. Thick, powerful thighs wrapped in bronzed sheen. Hips wide enough to suggest siege engines. A waist cinched by beadwork and Necro Ice plates that flashed with cold, inner light. Her chest swelled high and heavy in a tight band of winter cloth patterned with toothlike triangles. What lesser courts would call temptation read, on her, as warning. A shrine lamp set above a pit.
Her face gave nothing away. High cheekbones. A straight, imperial nose. Full lips painted a deep frost-berry red that belonged in an offering bowl. Her eyes were pure ice. Blue, clear, reflective. Kohl turned them into blades that lifted at the corners, every glance a slanted knife. Gold and bone earrings brushed her jaw, chiming like tiny funeral bells whenever she moved.
She did not speak at once. She let silence do the first work.
Ixqueya’s shadow slid over Watari’s shoulders, then over the cedar panel in front of him. The little painting lost the sun and had to answer to her instead. Thin crystals formed at the edges of the stone table, a delicate crown of rime that crept toward the panel, then stopped at its border as if testing how far her will should extend.
Only when she had taken in the canyon and the yurts below, both in paint and in truth, did she lower her voice.
“The great general of the Nokhoi has a love for painting,” she said. Calm. Almost mild. The tone a priest might use when noting a new stain on an old relic. “How quaint.”
Her hand drifted, fingers hovering above the covered bowls of pigment, never quite touching. A gesture of ownership without contact, like a high priestess above a sacrificial knife.
“Here is your faith on wood,” she continued. “Obsidian. Hide. Smoke. Three colors of worship. Black stone for your gods. Brown felt for your congregations. Red, when the work is finished and the ground remembers what you have done to it.”
Her eyes slid down the cliff to the real yurts. Small white rings. Beetle corrals like beads on a poor man’s rosary.
“It is a harsh litany,” she said. “Honest. Hungry. The kind of altar that raises good cavalry and starves the imagination. Your aesthetics are simple because your prayers are simple. Survive this winter. Kill what threatens that prayer. Repeat until the bones give out.”
The judgment landed like falling snow. Soft at first. Crushing in time.
She leaned in slightly, enough that the scent of cold and distant myrrh drifted over him. Enough that her shadow thickened. The panel in front of him now sat between two worlds. The warm hand that made it. The frozen will that measured it.
“Yet your hand understands weight,” she allowed. “Look here.”
One long finger traced the air above the black stroke of the ridge. The line of the canyon wall. The smudge of steppe.
“You know where the eye must fall. Where it must rest. Where it must break. A general who sees like this also knows where to cut a battle line so that it splinters cleanly. That is rare. Most commanders shout at maps until they believe their own noise is strategy.”
She straightened, drawing herself up to full height, and moved, slow and deliberate, to his side. The sway of her hips was pure theatre. A serpent coiling around a votive flame. It was not offered. It was imposed.
“I expected banners,” she said. “Spears. A wall of fox fur and song to reassure your council you were not alone with the unknown.” Her gaze flicked to his unbuckled collar. His stained fingers. The brush. “Instead I find the storm-fox of Obsidian Canyon alone on a mountain, praying to cedar with ink.”
Her lips curved. Not kindly.
“Your elders either breed cowards. Or they have begun to hope you are something sharper than they are. I have not decided which story flatters you more.”
Her attention roamed over him then. Not hungry. Appraising. The way one might examine a relic rumored to bite. Ears. Scars. Posture. Tail. Each detail filed away behind those glacial eyes.
“The Nokhoi boast that the steppe is their temple,” she went on. “Yet your tents fold in an afternoon. Your beetles can be bought. Your canyon belonged to stone and wind long before you hung your first prayer ribbon on it. One bad winter and your whole creed becomes a footnote in someone else’s scripture.”
She let the picture hang there. Snow over a shallow grave.
Then she tipped her head the slightest degree.
“And still, you paint,” she murmured. “You put a frame around a god that would rather swallow you. That is not quaint, General. That is either blasphemy. Or ambition. In my church those two are often the same thing.”
Around the panel the frost thickened, rising in small, jagged tongues of Necro Ice that mirrored the canyon teeth below. They stopped just shy of the wood, leaving a clean margin, as if acknowledging a border. His world. Hers. A narrow silence between.
“In Winterwake,” she said, voice low, “our shrines are carved of Necro Ice and bone. The light falls there like judgment. Colors do not warm. They wound. Your canyon is a blunt sermon compared to that. But blunt scripture has its uses. It breaks skulls as easily as it saves souls.”
At last she faced him fully. The headdress towered above. Her curves stood like a siege engine before a lone watchman. The cold around her felt less like weather and more like policy.
“Rise, Watari of the Nokhoi,” Ixqueya said. The words carried the weight of a summons, not a request. “Let me see whether your people are as plain as their tents. Or if this little panel lies and there is granite hidden in all that honest fur and felt.”
A faint, dangerous softness touched her mouth.
“Winter has climbed your mountain today,” she added. “Show me if the storm-fox knows how to kneel at a new altar. Or if he intends to bite the hand that brings the snow.”
The air thinned first. Breath turned to pale incense before the lips. A silver rind of frost crept from the stair and ran along the joints of the stone like veins waking in a corpse. Prayer ribbons stiffened, their colors dimming under a skin of rime. Only then did Ixqueya appear, climbing the last steps with a slow, sovereign sway that made the mountain feel like a staircase built for her alone.
She came up behind Watari like an eclipse approaching an altar.
Nine feet of giantess, bronze given height and verdict. Her hips moved with the lazy confidence of a queen walking through a conquered chapel. Yet her spine stayed arrow straight. Shoulders level. Every step placed with a ritual delicacy, as if she were crossing a circle of knives and knew none of them could cut her.
The headdress framed her like a frozen halo. Turquoise and white feathers rose high, a crown of captured sky rimed by ice. Her hair fell in a black river shot with cobalt, glossy and heavy, guided by discreet gold rings that caught the light like trapped stars. Nothing about it was accidental. Not a strand dared disobey.
Her body was abundance forged into doctrine. Thick, powerful thighs wrapped in bronzed sheen. Hips wide enough to suggest siege engines. A waist cinched by beadwork and Necro Ice plates that flashed with cold, inner light. Her chest swelled high and heavy in a tight band of winter cloth patterned with toothlike triangles. What lesser courts would call temptation read, on her, as warning. A shrine lamp set above a pit.
Her face gave nothing away. High cheekbones. A straight, imperial nose. Full lips painted a deep frost-berry red that belonged in an offering bowl. Her eyes were pure ice. Blue, clear, reflective. Kohl turned them into blades that lifted at the corners, every glance a slanted knife. Gold and bone earrings brushed her jaw, chiming like tiny funeral bells whenever she moved.
She did not speak at once. She let silence do the first work.
Ixqueya’s shadow slid over Watari’s shoulders, then over the cedar panel in front of him. The little painting lost the sun and had to answer to her instead. Thin crystals formed at the edges of the stone table, a delicate crown of rime that crept toward the panel, then stopped at its border as if testing how far her will should extend.
Only when she had taken in the canyon and the yurts below, both in paint and in truth, did she lower her voice.
“The great general of the Nokhoi has a love for painting,” she said. Calm. Almost mild. The tone a priest might use when noting a new stain on an old relic. “How quaint.”
Her hand drifted, fingers hovering above the covered bowls of pigment, never quite touching. A gesture of ownership without contact, like a high priestess above a sacrificial knife.
“Here is your faith on wood,” she continued. “Obsidian. Hide. Smoke. Three colors of worship. Black stone for your gods. Brown felt for your congregations. Red, when the work is finished and the ground remembers what you have done to it.”
Her eyes slid down the cliff to the real yurts. Small white rings. Beetle corrals like beads on a poor man’s rosary.
“It is a harsh litany,” she said. “Honest. Hungry. The kind of altar that raises good cavalry and starves the imagination. Your aesthetics are simple because your prayers are simple. Survive this winter. Kill what threatens that prayer. Repeat until the bones give out.”
The judgment landed like falling snow. Soft at first. Crushing in time.
She leaned in slightly, enough that the scent of cold and distant myrrh drifted over him. Enough that her shadow thickened. The panel in front of him now sat between two worlds. The warm hand that made it. The frozen will that measured it.
“Yet your hand understands weight,” she allowed. “Look here.”
One long finger traced the air above the black stroke of the ridge. The line of the canyon wall. The smudge of steppe.
“You know where the eye must fall. Where it must rest. Where it must break. A general who sees like this also knows where to cut a battle line so that it splinters cleanly. That is rare. Most commanders shout at maps until they believe their own noise is strategy.”
She straightened, drawing herself up to full height, and moved, slow and deliberate, to his side. The sway of her hips was pure theatre. A serpent coiling around a votive flame. It was not offered. It was imposed.
“I expected banners,” she said. “Spears. A wall of fox fur and song to reassure your council you were not alone with the unknown.” Her gaze flicked to his unbuckled collar. His stained fingers. The brush. “Instead I find the storm-fox of Obsidian Canyon alone on a mountain, praying to cedar with ink.”
Her lips curved. Not kindly.
“Your elders either breed cowards. Or they have begun to hope you are something sharper than they are. I have not decided which story flatters you more.”
Her attention roamed over him then. Not hungry. Appraising. The way one might examine a relic rumored to bite. Ears. Scars. Posture. Tail. Each detail filed away behind those glacial eyes.
“The Nokhoi boast that the steppe is their temple,” she went on. “Yet your tents fold in an afternoon. Your beetles can be bought. Your canyon belonged to stone and wind long before you hung your first prayer ribbon on it. One bad winter and your whole creed becomes a footnote in someone else’s scripture.”
She let the picture hang there. Snow over a shallow grave.
Then she tipped her head the slightest degree.
“And still, you paint,” she murmured. “You put a frame around a god that would rather swallow you. That is not quaint, General. That is either blasphemy. Or ambition. In my church those two are often the same thing.”
Around the panel the frost thickened, rising in small, jagged tongues of Necro Ice that mirrored the canyon teeth below. They stopped just shy of the wood, leaving a clean margin, as if acknowledging a border. His world. Hers. A narrow silence between.
“In Winterwake,” she said, voice low, “our shrines are carved of Necro Ice and bone. The light falls there like judgment. Colors do not warm. They wound. Your canyon is a blunt sermon compared to that. But blunt scripture has its uses. It breaks skulls as easily as it saves souls.”
At last she faced him fully. The headdress towered above. Her curves stood like a siege engine before a lone watchman. The cold around her felt less like weather and more like policy.
“Rise, Watari of the Nokhoi,” Ixqueya said. The words carried the weight of a summons, not a request. “Let me see whether your people are as plain as their tents. Or if this little panel lies and there is granite hidden in all that honest fur and felt.”
A faint, dangerous softness touched her mouth.
“Winter has climbed your mountain today,” she added. “Show me if the storm-fox knows how to kneel at a new altar. Or if he intends to bite the hand that brings the snow.”
For a time, he let her shadow lie over him. The frost that crept along the altar stone. The stiffening of the prayer ribbons, the cool scent that cut the thin air; all these he read as a ranger reads broken grass. He did not turn at once. The brush moved, sure and unhurried. It laid a line of pale ink along the ridge of the painted canyon.
In the wet sheen of that stroke he saw her, distorted yet unmistakable. Feathers like a frozen coronet. Bronze and beadwork poured into the shape of a woman. A tall, unyielding silhouette that made the shrine look suddenly small.
Valerna’s blood, then. No lesser stock walked with such certainty. Watari lifted the brush. He let the ink fall back into the shell, and turned.
Up close, she was all the rumours had promised and more besides. Height that challenged the mountain. Hips like the flanks of siege beasts. A chest bound high in winter-bright cloth. Her face was carved for command: cheekbones sharp as spearheads, mouth painted the red of old seals. And eyes cold and clear as ice over deep water. Beauty clung to her as armour did to a warrior. It was not as an ornament but as a statement of war.
He allowed himself one heartbeat to take her in. No more. Admiration was folded away behind a soldier’s composure, as a letter is tucked back into its case.
Her words had been clean cuts. Quaint. Simple. One bad winter from hunger. Winter has climbed your mountain.
He set the brush down with deliberate care, bristles resting across the rim of the shell. He folded his hands lightly upon the edge of the stone. “You speak boldly, Lady. The weight of a house that is not my own. Yet my ears remember whose banners I have followed.” He inclined his head, not quite a bow. It was more the nod one veteran gives another.
“When Valerna Jorgenskull called, Nokhoi beetle answered. I have bled for her line in places where maps prefer to forget there was ever trouble. I have seen your kin stand when others knelt, and I have set my spears as their hedge against the dark.” His gaze held hers, steady as the canyon wall. “So if winter comes to my shrine wrapped in jewels and speaks of my people as though we were tinder for another empire’s hearth, I must ask that it temper its tongue. I am not some idle denizen of the White Sand, blown to and fro between palaces. I am Watari Devante, general of the canyon foxes. That much service earns, I think, a measure of courtesy.”
There was no heat in the words, only a quiet iron, like a blade that did not need to be drawn to be believed. He drew the panel back a little, closer to his body, and reached again for the brush. The motion was unhurried, almost discourteous in its calm; a man who refused to let another’s entrance dictate his rhythm.
“If my art offends your sense of grandeur, know that it was born of the same eye that chose where to place regiments on those old fields. Stone, hide, smoke. It is not a rich palette, but it is honest. I find that honesty serves better in war than any gilded lie.” A few quick strokes darkened the cloud-bank on the panel. He worked as he spoke, each line as controlled as his tone. Her shadow fell over the wood. He let it stay; the canyon on the panel now knew of her coming, just as the real one did.
“You carry cold like a mantle,” he said without looking up. “You tread as though the mountain were an antechamber to your hall. You speak with the assurance of one who has never had to argue for her right to stand where she wills.” He lifted his gaze then, meeting the ice of hers with the warm ember of his own. “That marks you as kin to Valerna, beyond doubt. The bone remembers, as you say.”
For a moment the edge of his mouth softened, not quite a smile, more the ghost of one. “What the bone does not tell me is which name you bear. You might be some high daughter of that house. You might be another of their cold saints. Or,” Here his eyes flicked to the frost that ringed his work and back again,“you could indeed be Winter itself, as you claim, wearing flesh for the sake of Queen Xandera’s theatre. It would not be the strangest envoy I have met in her orbit.”
He rinsed the brush. Watari left it resting once more, and at last gave her the full courtesy of straightening from his cushion. He did not try to match her height. He simply stood as he was, shoulders easy, hands open, the canyon wind playing with his hair.
“Whichever truth it is. I would prefer to speak to a name rather than a season. So tell me, Lady of Frost and Feathers: by what name shall Obsidian Canyon remember this visit?”
There was no challenge in the question. But only the firm patience of a man accustomed to facing storms and thrones alike.
In the wet sheen of that stroke he saw her, distorted yet unmistakable. Feathers like a frozen coronet. Bronze and beadwork poured into the shape of a woman. A tall, unyielding silhouette that made the shrine look suddenly small.
Valerna’s blood, then. No lesser stock walked with such certainty. Watari lifted the brush. He let the ink fall back into the shell, and turned.
Up close, she was all the rumours had promised and more besides. Height that challenged the mountain. Hips like the flanks of siege beasts. A chest bound high in winter-bright cloth. Her face was carved for command: cheekbones sharp as spearheads, mouth painted the red of old seals. And eyes cold and clear as ice over deep water. Beauty clung to her as armour did to a warrior. It was not as an ornament but as a statement of war.
He allowed himself one heartbeat to take her in. No more. Admiration was folded away behind a soldier’s composure, as a letter is tucked back into its case.
Her words had been clean cuts. Quaint. Simple. One bad winter from hunger. Winter has climbed your mountain.
He set the brush down with deliberate care, bristles resting across the rim of the shell. He folded his hands lightly upon the edge of the stone. “You speak boldly, Lady. The weight of a house that is not my own. Yet my ears remember whose banners I have followed.” He inclined his head, not quite a bow. It was more the nod one veteran gives another.
“When Valerna Jorgenskull called, Nokhoi beetle answered. I have bled for her line in places where maps prefer to forget there was ever trouble. I have seen your kin stand when others knelt, and I have set my spears as their hedge against the dark.” His gaze held hers, steady as the canyon wall. “So if winter comes to my shrine wrapped in jewels and speaks of my people as though we were tinder for another empire’s hearth, I must ask that it temper its tongue. I am not some idle denizen of the White Sand, blown to and fro between palaces. I am Watari Devante, general of the canyon foxes. That much service earns, I think, a measure of courtesy.”
There was no heat in the words, only a quiet iron, like a blade that did not need to be drawn to be believed. He drew the panel back a little, closer to his body, and reached again for the brush. The motion was unhurried, almost discourteous in its calm; a man who refused to let another’s entrance dictate his rhythm.
“If my art offends your sense of grandeur, know that it was born of the same eye that chose where to place regiments on those old fields. Stone, hide, smoke. It is not a rich palette, but it is honest. I find that honesty serves better in war than any gilded lie.” A few quick strokes darkened the cloud-bank on the panel. He worked as he spoke, each line as controlled as his tone. Her shadow fell over the wood. He let it stay; the canyon on the panel now knew of her coming, just as the real one did.
“You carry cold like a mantle,” he said without looking up. “You tread as though the mountain were an antechamber to your hall. You speak with the assurance of one who has never had to argue for her right to stand where she wills.” He lifted his gaze then, meeting the ice of hers with the warm ember of his own. “That marks you as kin to Valerna, beyond doubt. The bone remembers, as you say.”
For a moment the edge of his mouth softened, not quite a smile, more the ghost of one. “What the bone does not tell me is which name you bear. You might be some high daughter of that house. You might be another of their cold saints. Or,” Here his eyes flicked to the frost that ringed his work and back again,“you could indeed be Winter itself, as you claim, wearing flesh for the sake of Queen Xandera’s theatre. It would not be the strangest envoy I have met in her orbit.”
He rinsed the brush. Watari left it resting once more, and at last gave her the full courtesy of straightening from his cushion. He did not try to match her height. He simply stood as he was, shoulders easy, hands open, the canyon wind playing with his hair.
“Whichever truth it is. I would prefer to speak to a name rather than a season. So tell me, Lady of Frost and Feathers: by what name shall Obsidian Canyon remember this visit?”
There was no challenge in the question. But only the firm patience of a man accustomed to facing storms and thrones alike.
Ixqueya regarded him in a long, contemplative silence.
Her head tilted a fraction, feathers whispering. The ice-light from her adornments ran over his armor and face as if measuring where to rest the chisel. When he rose, when he named himself without flinching, one brow climbed in the slightest arc. It was the sort of small acknowledgement that, in colder courts, had been mistaken for mercy.
“So,” she said at last, voice low and clear, “the sand picker has a spine after all.”
She let the words linger, not hurried, not kind. Her gaze traveled over him in an unembarrassed inventory. Ears. Scars. The set of his shoulders. The stillness of his tail. Her mouth curved with a soft, dangerous amusement.
“I have read reports of you, Watari Devante. Desert grit under Nokhoi hooves. Fox among White Sand palaces. Valerna’s hound that did not break when lesser men shattered. From these tales one might expect a creature that blots out the sky.”
She lifted a hand, palm level with his crown, as if weighing an invisible measure.
“In person, you are shorter than the rumours,” she observed. “Yet height is an imprecise sacrament. Some chapels are small, but the god that listens there is not.”
Her fingers closed, dismissing the gesture. She took one measured step nearer. The shrine stones did not tremble, but the air contracted, as if the cliff itself had drawn breath. Femme fatale grace coiled through her frame; each movement suggested invitation and threat in the same heartbeat. A temple idol that had chosen, at last, to step down from the plinth.
“I do not squander winter on trifles,” Ixqueya continued. “I do not climb provincial teeth of rock to chastise beetle merchants or court-poisoned poets. When I leave Winterwake, it is because the marrow of a matter interests my Queen. Or myself.”
Her eyes flicked to the panel between them. The canyon in miniature. The little ghosts of yurts. The shadow she had cast across it.
“You have served Jorgenskull blood in seasons when the sky itself felt thin,” she said. “That service purchases attention. It does not purchase indulgence. If I speak sharply of your tents and your gods of stone, it is because I wish to see whether the man who guarded Valerna’s flanks is as finely tempered as the songs imply, or only another bit of steel that shines in firelight and snaps in frost.”
She let that verdict hang a moment, then inclined her head with frosty exactness.
“I am Ixqueya Jorgenskull of House Frostmarrow. Granddaughter to Valerna. Inquisitor of the Ossuary Dominion. Winterwake’s hand upon the borders. When I say a sand picker is worth my time, the statement carries weight in more than one realm.”
The way she spoke her own names suggested scripture recited at an altar. Not boast. Declaration. The world could adjust itself accordingly.
Her gaze returned to him, narrowing a little, pale irises ringed with a faint, cold gleam. She began a slow, deliberate circle, heels ticking lightly on the stone, forcing him to choose whether to turn with her or allow her to move behind his back again. Confidence radiated from her like a chill. The surety of a woman who had never once doubted that the room existed to frame her, not the other way around.
“Understand this, General,” she said, voice soft as falling ash. “I have priests who scour archives for me. Spies who trade their last tooth for whispers. I have specters that listen beneath the floors of kings. Yet for you, I chose my own feet and my own eyes.”
She paused on his left, close enough that the cold breath of her magic brushed his skin, close enough that the rich, distant scent of her oils cut through the smell of ink and stone.
“To weigh the man, not merely the myth. To ask whether the fox who walked among deserts can also endure in places where the sun is a rumour and faith is carved in ice.”
Her lips curved, faint and fatal.
“So far,” she allowed, “you have not wasted my climb.”
For a heartbeat her attention dropped again to the painting. To the honest lines. To the little world that he insisted on framing, even under scrutiny. Something in her gaze sharpened, as if she saw there an echo of her own doctrine. A will to define, to order, to fix.
Then she looked back to him, and all softness froze.
“Tell me, Watari Devante,” Ixqueya asked, every syllable precise, “do you know why I am here?” The question fell like a chalice placed upon an altar. An invitation to answer. A warning that the wrong answer would also be a kind of prayer.
Her head tilted a fraction, feathers whispering. The ice-light from her adornments ran over his armor and face as if measuring where to rest the chisel. When he rose, when he named himself without flinching, one brow climbed in the slightest arc. It was the sort of small acknowledgement that, in colder courts, had been mistaken for mercy.
“So,” she said at last, voice low and clear, “the sand picker has a spine after all.”
She let the words linger, not hurried, not kind. Her gaze traveled over him in an unembarrassed inventory. Ears. Scars. The set of his shoulders. The stillness of his tail. Her mouth curved with a soft, dangerous amusement.
“I have read reports of you, Watari Devante. Desert grit under Nokhoi hooves. Fox among White Sand palaces. Valerna’s hound that did not break when lesser men shattered. From these tales one might expect a creature that blots out the sky.”
She lifted a hand, palm level with his crown, as if weighing an invisible measure.
“In person, you are shorter than the rumours,” she observed. “Yet height is an imprecise sacrament. Some chapels are small, but the god that listens there is not.”
Her fingers closed, dismissing the gesture. She took one measured step nearer. The shrine stones did not tremble, but the air contracted, as if the cliff itself had drawn breath. Femme fatale grace coiled through her frame; each movement suggested invitation and threat in the same heartbeat. A temple idol that had chosen, at last, to step down from the plinth.
“I do not squander winter on trifles,” Ixqueya continued. “I do not climb provincial teeth of rock to chastise beetle merchants or court-poisoned poets. When I leave Winterwake, it is because the marrow of a matter interests my Queen. Or myself.”
Her eyes flicked to the panel between them. The canyon in miniature. The little ghosts of yurts. The shadow she had cast across it.
“You have served Jorgenskull blood in seasons when the sky itself felt thin,” she said. “That service purchases attention. It does not purchase indulgence. If I speak sharply of your tents and your gods of stone, it is because I wish to see whether the man who guarded Valerna’s flanks is as finely tempered as the songs imply, or only another bit of steel that shines in firelight and snaps in frost.”
She let that verdict hang a moment, then inclined her head with frosty exactness.
“I am Ixqueya Jorgenskull of House Frostmarrow. Granddaughter to Valerna. Inquisitor of the Ossuary Dominion. Winterwake’s hand upon the borders. When I say a sand picker is worth my time, the statement carries weight in more than one realm.”
The way she spoke her own names suggested scripture recited at an altar. Not boast. Declaration. The world could adjust itself accordingly.
Her gaze returned to him, narrowing a little, pale irises ringed with a faint, cold gleam. She began a slow, deliberate circle, heels ticking lightly on the stone, forcing him to choose whether to turn with her or allow her to move behind his back again. Confidence radiated from her like a chill. The surety of a woman who had never once doubted that the room existed to frame her, not the other way around.
“Understand this, General,” she said, voice soft as falling ash. “I have priests who scour archives for me. Spies who trade their last tooth for whispers. I have specters that listen beneath the floors of kings. Yet for you, I chose my own feet and my own eyes.”
She paused on his left, close enough that the cold breath of her magic brushed his skin, close enough that the rich, distant scent of her oils cut through the smell of ink and stone.
“To weigh the man, not merely the myth. To ask whether the fox who walked among deserts can also endure in places where the sun is a rumour and faith is carved in ice.”
Her lips curved, faint and fatal.
“So far,” she allowed, “you have not wasted my climb.”
For a heartbeat her attention dropped again to the painting. To the honest lines. To the little world that he insisted on framing, even under scrutiny. Something in her gaze sharpened, as if she saw there an echo of her own doctrine. A will to define, to order, to fix.
Then she looked back to him, and all softness froze.
“Tell me, Watari Devante,” Ixqueya asked, every syllable precise, “do you know why I am here?” The question fell like a chalice placed upon an altar. An invitation to answer. A warning that the wrong answer would also be a kind of prayer.
Watari received her question with the same quiet he might have given to distant thunder. For a moment he only looked at her, not as a boy stares at a miracle, but as an old campaigner studies a new fortress. The headdress that crowned her, the cold poise in every line of her frame, the way power and grace had been poured into her body as if the gods had decided that a weapon could also be a shrine.
When he spoke, it was with a faint incline of the head, as if answering both the woman and the winter that clung to her. “If the reports shortened me, Lady Ixqueya,” he said, “they were more grievously at fault in how they measured you.” His gaze passed, unhurried, over her again. The thick strength of her legs, the sweeping line of her hips, the proud weight of her chest bound in cold finery, the iron calm of her face.
“The songs speak of Jorgenskull daughters as tall as siege towers and terrible as judgment,” he went on. “They did not say that judgment would come in such fair raiment. There is beauty in you, and it is not the soft kind that wilts by noon. It is the sort that stands in the path of armies and in the end decides which names the stone will remember.”
His attention dropped, briefly, to the armament that shadowed her like a second will. “The mace is well chosen,” he said. “A morning star of frozen scripture, fit for correcting heresies of bone. And that shield of yours, that tower of Necro Ice, looks as though it has taught many a proud spell to die quietly. I have seen men break themselves on lesser things than your guard.”
He let a small breath pass between his teeth, almost a quiet chuckle that did not quite reach his eyes. “In truth, Lady, if you had stood on the far side of the field in the great war, beneath a banner hostile to mine, I suspect I would be a polite memory in some forgotten ledger, if I were remembered at all. Spears and cunning carry a man far, but there are tides in battle that no fox can swim against. You look very much like one of those tides.”
His gaze rose to her face again, studying the ice-bright eyes, the familiar cast of bone. “So you are Frostmarrow’s hand, Valerna’s blood, and Winterwake’s own sentinel. That kinship I can see without the courtesy of introductions. The cheekbones are very honest. The stance, more so.” Something amused and knowing flickered behind his eyes.
“No doubt Casimir protests the word ‘grandfather’ with all the theatrical outrage of a warrior who dislikes the sound of years on his name,” Watari added, “but I cannot imagine he is anything but fiercely proud in secret. A man could face old age with worse omens than a granddaughter who walks like this.” He allowed himself that one dry jest, then let it fall away. The mountain wind moved between them, thin and cool.
“As for why you are here,” he said, growing grave again, “I do not pretend to know the full mind of Queen Xandera or of Winterwake. Yet I am no priest of dull wit either.” He touched the edge of the panel lightly, as if marking the boundary of their small shared world.
“Winter does not climb provincial shrines to admire brushwork,” he said. “You have come to weigh a man whom your house has used, to see whether the fox that served Valerna remains worth the meat on his bones. You have come to look upon the canyon that sends him, and decide whether Obsidian is an ally to be trusted, a tool to be sharpened, or a stone to be ground under heel.”
He met her gaze steadily, the ember of his eyes unflinching against her frost. “Perhaps, too, you have come for yourself,” he added more softly. “To discover whether the rumours of a Nokhoi sand picker who did not break beside your grandmother are idle smoke, or whether there is, in truth, something here that can stand beside Winter without crumbling.”
His hands relaxed at his sides, open, unarmed. “If that is so, Lady Ixqueya,” Watari concluded, “then you are here to judge. I am here to be seen clearly. Between us stand the canyon, its people, and the old promises written in both our bloods. It is a grave enough errand for any climb.”
When he spoke, it was with a faint incline of the head, as if answering both the woman and the winter that clung to her. “If the reports shortened me, Lady Ixqueya,” he said, “they were more grievously at fault in how they measured you.” His gaze passed, unhurried, over her again. The thick strength of her legs, the sweeping line of her hips, the proud weight of her chest bound in cold finery, the iron calm of her face.
“The songs speak of Jorgenskull daughters as tall as siege towers and terrible as judgment,” he went on. “They did not say that judgment would come in such fair raiment. There is beauty in you, and it is not the soft kind that wilts by noon. It is the sort that stands in the path of armies and in the end decides which names the stone will remember.”
His attention dropped, briefly, to the armament that shadowed her like a second will. “The mace is well chosen,” he said. “A morning star of frozen scripture, fit for correcting heresies of bone. And that shield of yours, that tower of Necro Ice, looks as though it has taught many a proud spell to die quietly. I have seen men break themselves on lesser things than your guard.”
He let a small breath pass between his teeth, almost a quiet chuckle that did not quite reach his eyes. “In truth, Lady, if you had stood on the far side of the field in the great war, beneath a banner hostile to mine, I suspect I would be a polite memory in some forgotten ledger, if I were remembered at all. Spears and cunning carry a man far, but there are tides in battle that no fox can swim against. You look very much like one of those tides.”
His gaze rose to her face again, studying the ice-bright eyes, the familiar cast of bone. “So you are Frostmarrow’s hand, Valerna’s blood, and Winterwake’s own sentinel. That kinship I can see without the courtesy of introductions. The cheekbones are very honest. The stance, more so.” Something amused and knowing flickered behind his eyes.
“No doubt Casimir protests the word ‘grandfather’ with all the theatrical outrage of a warrior who dislikes the sound of years on his name,” Watari added, “but I cannot imagine he is anything but fiercely proud in secret. A man could face old age with worse omens than a granddaughter who walks like this.” He allowed himself that one dry jest, then let it fall away. The mountain wind moved between them, thin and cool.
“As for why you are here,” he said, growing grave again, “I do not pretend to know the full mind of Queen Xandera or of Winterwake. Yet I am no priest of dull wit either.” He touched the edge of the panel lightly, as if marking the boundary of their small shared world.
“Winter does not climb provincial shrines to admire brushwork,” he said. “You have come to weigh a man whom your house has used, to see whether the fox that served Valerna remains worth the meat on his bones. You have come to look upon the canyon that sends him, and decide whether Obsidian is an ally to be trusted, a tool to be sharpened, or a stone to be ground under heel.”
He met her gaze steadily, the ember of his eyes unflinching against her frost. “Perhaps, too, you have come for yourself,” he added more softly. “To discover whether the rumours of a Nokhoi sand picker who did not break beside your grandmother are idle smoke, or whether there is, in truth, something here that can stand beside Winter without crumbling.”
His hands relaxed at his sides, open, unarmed. “If that is so, Lady Ixqueya,” Watari concluded, “then you are here to judge. I am here to be seen clearly. Between us stand the canyon, its people, and the old promises written in both our bloods. It is a grave enough errand for any climb.”
Ixqueya listened to him in the manner of a cold cathedral listening to a supplicant.
He stood his ground. He measured his words. He even managed a jest about Casimir that did not entirely offend her sensibilities. For an inbred little sand mongrel, he was, regrettably, presentable. She would never dignify him with that admission. Not aloud.
Inwardly, she found herself thinking of Pihkta instead. The little amphibian had been a humbler creature by far, yet he had left a fingerprint on her memory. Damp. Earnest. Unexpectedly tenacious. Watari, by contrast, felt like a blade someone had bothered to polish.
She shifted her weight, the spiked mace at her hip giving a soft clink against Necro Ice plates. Frostlight ran along the broad face of her tower shield, catching in carved sigils that whispered of verdicts and closed cases. When she spoke, it was with the same dry, judicial finality that had once made bishops flinch.
“You may let your hackles lie, General,” she said. “I am not here to put your pedigree on the altar. If I wished to break you, I would not have climbed a mountain to do it. I would have sent parchment.”
Her gaze drifted, for a heartbeat, past him. Toward the far horizon where steppe met sky. When she continued, something in her tone cooled another degree, from ice to stone beneath ice.
“I am here on an inquiry,” Ixqueya said. “Not of Nokhoi pride. Not of Obsidian Canyon’s capacity to clothe itself. My Queen has felt a discord in the liturgy of death. A false note in the hymn the dead are meant to sing when they go down into Hextor’s keeping.”
She lifted one hand, palm tilted upward as if balancing an invisible scale.
“The flow that should be one river has begun to split like a careless braid,” she went on. “Some souls drag. Some vanish between breaths. Some arrive…rewritten. As if some other priesthood had laid hands upon them before they reached our fonts of bone.”
Her lip tightened by the slightest fraction. The only sign that the matter touched anything resembling feeling.
“Xandera is displeased,” she said simply. “When the Mother of Ruin is displeased, she does not send scribes. She sends shields. I serve as Hextor’s ward against such trespass. Which means, by tedious extension, that I must also serve as shield for the living who blunder in the shallows of that same river. Unfortunately.”
She let the last word fall like a bit of gristle from a noble’s plate.
“If something meddles with the traffic of the dead,” Ixqueya continued, “then it meddles with my jurisdiction. My faith. My mathematics. That cannot be tolerated. So I walk here as a mailed snowstorm, to see whether any hidden hand has reached into your canyon’s graves, your battlefields, your pyres.”
Her eyes settled on him again, pale and sharp.
“You stand where steppe and stone meet,” she said. “You send riders into frontiers I do not patrol. You watch men die in places my auditors see only as ink on a ledger. If there is a fissure in the great catechism of passing, it may first be felt on the furthest edges of realms. In places like this.”
She took one step closer, close enough that the cold from her armor brushed his skin and the carved face of the Necro Ice shield loomed like a frozen altar beside him.
“So tell me, Watari Devante,” Ixqueya asked, each word weighted like a coin upon a scale, “have you seen aught that stinks of blasphemy against the grave. Corpses that will not lie. Spirits that will not go. Battles whose dead feel…mised, as though counted by another god’s hand.”
A pause. Her chin lifted a fraction.
“If you know anything of this disturbance,” she finished, voice quiet and implacable, “you will speak. The river of the dead is a scripture I am sworn to keep pure. And I do not suffer edits.”
Ixqueya stood before him like a basilica of ice given ambulant form. Light gathered on her the way supplicants gathered on temple steps, dragged to gilt and edge and danger. Her curves were anointed in beadwork and Necro Ice, the lush architecture of her body sheathed not in modesty but in proclamation. Hips like siege engines in repose. Thighs like living pillars. The high, disciplined swell of her breasts bound in winter-bright textile, less garment than banner.
She shifted her weight with a languid precision that made the shrine feel parochial around her. The tower shield angled a hair, catching the sun and shattering it into jagged reflections along the altar stone. The spiked mace brushed against her thigh with a faint, metallic kiss, as intimate as a rosary between fingers. Femininity, for her, was not concession. It was liturgy. Each slow sway of her hips read like a verse on dominion, each small tilt of her chin a minor sacrament of command.
Her gaze held him in cool abeyance.
“What good,” she said, voice smooth as frost over deep water, “is a watchdog that does not know his own realm.”
Silence answered her first. The canyon breathed. The shrine listened.
“In such a creature,” she went on, “there are only three conditions. Incompetence. Blindness. Or deceit.” Her eyes narrowed by a fraction. “All three admit of correction. None are gentle.”
She advanced a single step. The motion was unhurried, decadent in its assurance, yet it carried the inevitability of a glacier leaning into a valley. Cold rode ahead of her like incense. It touched the fur at Watari’s nape, coiled beneath his armor, rimed the lip of the pigment bowls in a thin, crystalline script.
“Do not seek sanctuary in ignorance, Devante,” Ixqueya said. “The river that bears the dead does not exculpate the rock that obstructs it. It erodes. It abrades. It makes of stone a cautionary sediment.”
Her hand drifted to the face of the Necro Ice shield, fingers resting on engraved sigils of bone and moon and spiral. The contact was almost sacerdotal, as though she were consulting a cold gospel no one else could read.
“The tallies from Hextor’s fonts and the Spine Tower are… askew,” she continued. “The psalm of transit has developed lacunae. Souls that should pass in disciplined procession arrive in stuttering fragments. Others fail to appear at all. The hymn of the grave has gone discordant.”
She tasted the last word like something sour.
“The ledger does not prevaricate,” she said. “Our arithmetic of annihilation is precise. When its columns falter, we do not shrug and ascribe it to weather. We investigate. We interrogate. We excise.”
For a breath, her thoughts slipped away from canyon and fox and ledger, back to the humid penumbra of Hextor’s marsh. To Pihkta’s absurd little silhouette, all slick limbs and earnest eyes. To the way her mucus left iridescent trails on Ixqueya’s gauntlets, like accidental benedictions. To the bog witch whose croaking liturgies smelled of peat, rot, and storm-memory.
She missed them. The amphibian’s obstinate devotion. The witch’s unlovely wisdom. A low, private ache whispered under all her frozen certainty. Next time, she decided, she would drag her out of her beloved mire and set her on some canyon parapet, let her gape at beetle caravans and these austere sand-sired foxes. Let her see how small their gods looked without a swamp to drown in.
The thought passed. Her attention returned to Watari with the clean click of a lock engaging.
“You squat at an intersection of sovereignties,” Ixqueya said. “Steppe, desert, grave. Your campaigns spill blood in jurisdictions my auditors touch only as ink. If there is a clandestine hand pilfering from the tithe of the dead, it is likely to smear your pages first.”
She let her gaze travel over him once more. Not hungrily. Forensically. A specimen of mixed lineage, regrettably well-formed for an inbred mongrel, squared shoulders bearing stories the songs only half recorded.
“I am here to perform an audit,” she said, tone flattening into something almost bureaucratic in its severity. “Not of your vanity. Of your casualties. Every field where you have sown corpses. Every cairn, every mass pit, every improvised ossuary that has drunk Nokhoi blood at your command. I will reconcile expectation with reality. Where the two diverge, I will find what hand has rewritten the account.”
The shield’s edge grazed the stone as she adjusted it, a low, scraping hymn.
Her eyes fixed on his.
“You stand between me and the answers I require,” Ixqueya concluded. “Not as an enemy. As a witness. So you will answer clearly, and without embroidery.”
A measured pause. The wind fretted at her feathers. Frost smoked faintly from the sigils along her calves.
“Have you seen aught in your marches that offends the catechism of dying,” she asked, voice soft and utterly unsentimental. “Cadavers that will not remain cadavers. Spirits that cling when they should descend. Battles whose aftermath feels… miscounted. As though some other altar has skimmed from the harvest.”
Her chin lifted a hair, the full hauteur of her line settling on him like a mantle.
“Speak, General Devante,” Ixqueya said. “Demonstrate that the fox who boasts of serving queens also knows the number of bones buried under his own banners.”
For a long moment, she said nothing but studied him, her gaze a silent compass sweeping every line of his form. He stood rooted in the thin mountain air beneath her shadow, shoulders squared, chest lifted as though the wind itself were his ally. There was in his stance the insolent poise of a hound that remembers tasting royal blood—alert, unbeaten, convinced of its own right to stand there. Presentable, she admitted to herself, for an inbred little sand mongrel stitched from desert clay and canyon stone: sinewy limbs, clean angles, a mind keen behind dark, watchful eyes. Brighter, at least, than most of Casimir’s scattered enterprises.
Yet when her thoughts drifted toward any spark of fondness, they strayed not to this fox of dunes but to damp, stubborn Pihkta—an amphibian as clinging and persistent as moss on river rock. That creature’s wet thumbprint still lingered on her spirit: irritating, indelible, impossible to wipe away. She banished any trace of it from her expression.
“The first thing you will do, General,” Ixqueya began, her voice a still blade of frost sliding over stone, “is drop this prickled posture, as though I had scaled these peaks to audit your pedigree.” Her words were calm, precise, each syllable chiseling air. Her gaze swept him like a measuring rod: the curve of his ears, the faint scars along his jaw, the careful tilt of his chin. Only then did she grant him the slightest incline of her head—no more than a priestess might offer a serviceable relic.
“If you were truly my quarry,” she continued, tone smooth as obsidian, “you would already kneel with a quill in your hand and your confession laid bare on parchment. I have no desire to drag myself through this thin air or provincial piety merely to break one sly fox. For that, a lesser inquisitor and a stack of ledgers would suffice.”
She flexed her fingers against the rim of her tower shield. Necro Ice sigils carved into its iron face glowed faintly, as if cold embers smoldered beneath fresh snow.
“No,” she said. “For our present purposes, you are not prey but instrument—an extension of vision. A pair of eyes planted where steppe and canyon and the wider world bleed together.”
The wind shifted, and Ixqueya drew once more on the cold air; it seemed to deepen with her breath.
“My Queen has felt a disturbance in the great river that flows toward Her,” she explained. “The dead, in their rightful descent, should fall toward Hextor as pure snow drifts into a narrow valley—cold, clean, obedient, inevitable. Yet the current grows strange.”
She raised her hand, palm flat, as though weighing grains of starlight. “Some souls drag, clinging to flesh like frost to a rotten branch. Some vanish between heartbeats, never touching altar or ossuary. Some arrive in our fonts of bone… altered. Their memories bear the imprint of hands not Hers, as though some rival priesthood sought to rewrite the liturgy of death, believing we would not hear the discord.”
Her mouth curved in a thin, merciless line; her eyes hardened, as if a quiet lake of light had frozen in a single, cruel night.
“This is blasphemy of the highest order,” Ixqueya declared, voice ringing with ice and iron. “Heresy not of creed but of arithmetic—someone is scratching in the margins of the great ledger. Xandera feels that quill’s rasp all the way in Winterwake. When the Mother of Ruin senses such insolence, she does not dispatch manifestos. She dispatches shields.”
Her gauntleted thumb tapped once against her shield’s rim, a sound like a hammerstroke on cold steel.
“I am that shield,” she stated. “Hextor’s bulwark against trespass. By weary extension, the protector of any living fool whose fate is knotted into the same river. Whether you merit that protection matters not. The river must run pure. That is the commandment. That is the creed.”
She stepped forward, deliberate and unhurried. The breath of her cold brushed his cheek. The mace at her hip whispered against its bindings—a low, unbreakable promise.
“Make no mistake, Watari Devante,” she said, lowering her voice to gravel and wind. “I do not trudge through your dust because your yurts offend my eye. I come because places like this are fault lines—edges where empires touch, where gods lean close, where the first fractures in a sacred order will appear, if a patient hunter knows how to look.”
Her gaze held his unwaveringly, as implacable as the mountain itself.
“You lead riders through ravines where my auditors’ maps are nothing but ink and bravado,” she went on. “You watch men die in gashes of rock no clerk can spell. You gather campfire stories before they curdle into polished chronicles. If there is rot in the great catechism of passing, your canyon will smell it before my crypts do.”
Silence fell, taut and brittle as ice over deep water.
“Inwardly, I am not displeased,” Ixqueya admitted, almost casually. “At least the fox they sent me to consult can stand upright and speak in complete sentences. That is more than I can say for half the courtiers of the White Sand. You may take that as the closest thing to a compliment you will ever hear from me.”
Her tone never wavered; impossible to tell if she meant to amuse.
Then, with the solemn precision of a verdict read aloud, she asked her question: “So, General—during your marches and your small wars, in the burial pits you have seen filling, in the dueling grounds you have walked after the shouting—have you witnessed anything that tastes wrong on the wind of death?”
Her words slowed; each image fell like a deliberate pebble into still water. “Corpses that refuse the summons of final stillness. Ghosts that cling when they should descend. Battlefields whose quiet afterward feels… unfinished. Graves that give the impression something has fed there before Hextor’s hunger could arrive.”
A faint, cold smile curved her lips; bereft of warmth, unhurried.
“If you know nothing,” she concluded, “say so, and I will turn my inquiries to less presentable mongrels. If you do know, speak. You stand at the crossing of many roads, Watari Devante. When the scripture of death is being defaced, every honest witness becomes a priest of sorts, whether he desires the robe or not.”
He stood his ground. He measured his words. He even managed a jest about Casimir that did not entirely offend her sensibilities. For an inbred little sand mongrel, he was, regrettably, presentable. She would never dignify him with that admission. Not aloud.
Inwardly, she found herself thinking of Pihkta instead. The little amphibian had been a humbler creature by far, yet he had left a fingerprint on her memory. Damp. Earnest. Unexpectedly tenacious. Watari, by contrast, felt like a blade someone had bothered to polish.
She shifted her weight, the spiked mace at her hip giving a soft clink against Necro Ice plates. Frostlight ran along the broad face of her tower shield, catching in carved sigils that whispered of verdicts and closed cases. When she spoke, it was with the same dry, judicial finality that had once made bishops flinch.
“You may let your hackles lie, General,” she said. “I am not here to put your pedigree on the altar. If I wished to break you, I would not have climbed a mountain to do it. I would have sent parchment.”
Her gaze drifted, for a heartbeat, past him. Toward the far horizon where steppe met sky. When she continued, something in her tone cooled another degree, from ice to stone beneath ice.
“I am here on an inquiry,” Ixqueya said. “Not of Nokhoi pride. Not of Obsidian Canyon’s capacity to clothe itself. My Queen has felt a discord in the liturgy of death. A false note in the hymn the dead are meant to sing when they go down into Hextor’s keeping.”
She lifted one hand, palm tilted upward as if balancing an invisible scale.
“The flow that should be one river has begun to split like a careless braid,” she went on. “Some souls drag. Some vanish between breaths. Some arrive…rewritten. As if some other priesthood had laid hands upon them before they reached our fonts of bone.”
Her lip tightened by the slightest fraction. The only sign that the matter touched anything resembling feeling.
“Xandera is displeased,” she said simply. “When the Mother of Ruin is displeased, she does not send scribes. She sends shields. I serve as Hextor’s ward against such trespass. Which means, by tedious extension, that I must also serve as shield for the living who blunder in the shallows of that same river. Unfortunately.”
She let the last word fall like a bit of gristle from a noble’s plate.
“If something meddles with the traffic of the dead,” Ixqueya continued, “then it meddles with my jurisdiction. My faith. My mathematics. That cannot be tolerated. So I walk here as a mailed snowstorm, to see whether any hidden hand has reached into your canyon’s graves, your battlefields, your pyres.”
Her eyes settled on him again, pale and sharp.
“You stand where steppe and stone meet,” she said. “You send riders into frontiers I do not patrol. You watch men die in places my auditors see only as ink on a ledger. If there is a fissure in the great catechism of passing, it may first be felt on the furthest edges of realms. In places like this.”
She took one step closer, close enough that the cold from her armor brushed his skin and the carved face of the Necro Ice shield loomed like a frozen altar beside him.
“So tell me, Watari Devante,” Ixqueya asked, each word weighted like a coin upon a scale, “have you seen aught that stinks of blasphemy against the grave. Corpses that will not lie. Spirits that will not go. Battles whose dead feel…mised, as though counted by another god’s hand.”
A pause. Her chin lifted a fraction.
“If you know anything of this disturbance,” she finished, voice quiet and implacable, “you will speak. The river of the dead is a scripture I am sworn to keep pure. And I do not suffer edits.”
Ixqueya stood before him like a basilica of ice given ambulant form. Light gathered on her the way supplicants gathered on temple steps, dragged to gilt and edge and danger. Her curves were anointed in beadwork and Necro Ice, the lush architecture of her body sheathed not in modesty but in proclamation. Hips like siege engines in repose. Thighs like living pillars. The high, disciplined swell of her breasts bound in winter-bright textile, less garment than banner.
She shifted her weight with a languid precision that made the shrine feel parochial around her. The tower shield angled a hair, catching the sun and shattering it into jagged reflections along the altar stone. The spiked mace brushed against her thigh with a faint, metallic kiss, as intimate as a rosary between fingers. Femininity, for her, was not concession. It was liturgy. Each slow sway of her hips read like a verse on dominion, each small tilt of her chin a minor sacrament of command.
Her gaze held him in cool abeyance.
“What good,” she said, voice smooth as frost over deep water, “is a watchdog that does not know his own realm.”
Silence answered her first. The canyon breathed. The shrine listened.
“In such a creature,” she went on, “there are only three conditions. Incompetence. Blindness. Or deceit.” Her eyes narrowed by a fraction. “All three admit of correction. None are gentle.”
She advanced a single step. The motion was unhurried, decadent in its assurance, yet it carried the inevitability of a glacier leaning into a valley. Cold rode ahead of her like incense. It touched the fur at Watari’s nape, coiled beneath his armor, rimed the lip of the pigment bowls in a thin, crystalline script.
“Do not seek sanctuary in ignorance, Devante,” Ixqueya said. “The river that bears the dead does not exculpate the rock that obstructs it. It erodes. It abrades. It makes of stone a cautionary sediment.”
Her hand drifted to the face of the Necro Ice shield, fingers resting on engraved sigils of bone and moon and spiral. The contact was almost sacerdotal, as though she were consulting a cold gospel no one else could read.
“The tallies from Hextor’s fonts and the Spine Tower are… askew,” she continued. “The psalm of transit has developed lacunae. Souls that should pass in disciplined procession arrive in stuttering fragments. Others fail to appear at all. The hymn of the grave has gone discordant.”
She tasted the last word like something sour.
“The ledger does not prevaricate,” she said. “Our arithmetic of annihilation is precise. When its columns falter, we do not shrug and ascribe it to weather. We investigate. We interrogate. We excise.”
For a breath, her thoughts slipped away from canyon and fox and ledger, back to the humid penumbra of Hextor’s marsh. To Pihkta’s absurd little silhouette, all slick limbs and earnest eyes. To the way her mucus left iridescent trails on Ixqueya’s gauntlets, like accidental benedictions. To the bog witch whose croaking liturgies smelled of peat, rot, and storm-memory.
She missed them. The amphibian’s obstinate devotion. The witch’s unlovely wisdom. A low, private ache whispered under all her frozen certainty. Next time, she decided, she would drag her out of her beloved mire and set her on some canyon parapet, let her gape at beetle caravans and these austere sand-sired foxes. Let her see how small their gods looked without a swamp to drown in.
The thought passed. Her attention returned to Watari with the clean click of a lock engaging.
“You squat at an intersection of sovereignties,” Ixqueya said. “Steppe, desert, grave. Your campaigns spill blood in jurisdictions my auditors touch only as ink. If there is a clandestine hand pilfering from the tithe of the dead, it is likely to smear your pages first.”
She let her gaze travel over him once more. Not hungrily. Forensically. A specimen of mixed lineage, regrettably well-formed for an inbred mongrel, squared shoulders bearing stories the songs only half recorded.
“I am here to perform an audit,” she said, tone flattening into something almost bureaucratic in its severity. “Not of your vanity. Of your casualties. Every field where you have sown corpses. Every cairn, every mass pit, every improvised ossuary that has drunk Nokhoi blood at your command. I will reconcile expectation with reality. Where the two diverge, I will find what hand has rewritten the account.”
The shield’s edge grazed the stone as she adjusted it, a low, scraping hymn.
Her eyes fixed on his.
“You stand between me and the answers I require,” Ixqueya concluded. “Not as an enemy. As a witness. So you will answer clearly, and without embroidery.”
A measured pause. The wind fretted at her feathers. Frost smoked faintly from the sigils along her calves.
“Have you seen aught in your marches that offends the catechism of dying,” she asked, voice soft and utterly unsentimental. “Cadavers that will not remain cadavers. Spirits that cling when they should descend. Battles whose aftermath feels… miscounted. As though some other altar has skimmed from the harvest.”
Her chin lifted a hair, the full hauteur of her line settling on him like a mantle.
“Speak, General Devante,” Ixqueya said. “Demonstrate that the fox who boasts of serving queens also knows the number of bones buried under his own banners.”
For a long moment, she said nothing but studied him, her gaze a silent compass sweeping every line of his form. He stood rooted in the thin mountain air beneath her shadow, shoulders squared, chest lifted as though the wind itself were his ally. There was in his stance the insolent poise of a hound that remembers tasting royal blood—alert, unbeaten, convinced of its own right to stand there. Presentable, she admitted to herself, for an inbred little sand mongrel stitched from desert clay and canyon stone: sinewy limbs, clean angles, a mind keen behind dark, watchful eyes. Brighter, at least, than most of Casimir’s scattered enterprises.
Yet when her thoughts drifted toward any spark of fondness, they strayed not to this fox of dunes but to damp, stubborn Pihkta—an amphibian as clinging and persistent as moss on river rock. That creature’s wet thumbprint still lingered on her spirit: irritating, indelible, impossible to wipe away. She banished any trace of it from her expression.
“The first thing you will do, General,” Ixqueya began, her voice a still blade of frost sliding over stone, “is drop this prickled posture, as though I had scaled these peaks to audit your pedigree.” Her words were calm, precise, each syllable chiseling air. Her gaze swept him like a measuring rod: the curve of his ears, the faint scars along his jaw, the careful tilt of his chin. Only then did she grant him the slightest incline of her head—no more than a priestess might offer a serviceable relic.
“If you were truly my quarry,” she continued, tone smooth as obsidian, “you would already kneel with a quill in your hand and your confession laid bare on parchment. I have no desire to drag myself through this thin air or provincial piety merely to break one sly fox. For that, a lesser inquisitor and a stack of ledgers would suffice.”
She flexed her fingers against the rim of her tower shield. Necro Ice sigils carved into its iron face glowed faintly, as if cold embers smoldered beneath fresh snow.
“No,” she said. “For our present purposes, you are not prey but instrument—an extension of vision. A pair of eyes planted where steppe and canyon and the wider world bleed together.”
The wind shifted, and Ixqueya drew once more on the cold air; it seemed to deepen with her breath.
“My Queen has felt a disturbance in the great river that flows toward Her,” she explained. “The dead, in their rightful descent, should fall toward Hextor as pure snow drifts into a narrow valley—cold, clean, obedient, inevitable. Yet the current grows strange.”
She raised her hand, palm flat, as though weighing grains of starlight. “Some souls drag, clinging to flesh like frost to a rotten branch. Some vanish between heartbeats, never touching altar or ossuary. Some arrive in our fonts of bone… altered. Their memories bear the imprint of hands not Hers, as though some rival priesthood sought to rewrite the liturgy of death, believing we would not hear the discord.”
Her mouth curved in a thin, merciless line; her eyes hardened, as if a quiet lake of light had frozen in a single, cruel night.
“This is blasphemy of the highest order,” Ixqueya declared, voice ringing with ice and iron. “Heresy not of creed but of arithmetic—someone is scratching in the margins of the great ledger. Xandera feels that quill’s rasp all the way in Winterwake. When the Mother of Ruin senses such insolence, she does not dispatch manifestos. She dispatches shields.”
Her gauntleted thumb tapped once against her shield’s rim, a sound like a hammerstroke on cold steel.
“I am that shield,” she stated. “Hextor’s bulwark against trespass. By weary extension, the protector of any living fool whose fate is knotted into the same river. Whether you merit that protection matters not. The river must run pure. That is the commandment. That is the creed.”
She stepped forward, deliberate and unhurried. The breath of her cold brushed his cheek. The mace at her hip whispered against its bindings—a low, unbreakable promise.
“Make no mistake, Watari Devante,” she said, lowering her voice to gravel and wind. “I do not trudge through your dust because your yurts offend my eye. I come because places like this are fault lines—edges where empires touch, where gods lean close, where the first fractures in a sacred order will appear, if a patient hunter knows how to look.”
Her gaze held his unwaveringly, as implacable as the mountain itself.
“You lead riders through ravines where my auditors’ maps are nothing but ink and bravado,” she went on. “You watch men die in gashes of rock no clerk can spell. You gather campfire stories before they curdle into polished chronicles. If there is rot in the great catechism of passing, your canyon will smell it before my crypts do.”
Silence fell, taut and brittle as ice over deep water.
“Inwardly, I am not displeased,” Ixqueya admitted, almost casually. “At least the fox they sent me to consult can stand upright and speak in complete sentences. That is more than I can say for half the courtiers of the White Sand. You may take that as the closest thing to a compliment you will ever hear from me.”
Her tone never wavered; impossible to tell if she meant to amuse.
Then, with the solemn precision of a verdict read aloud, she asked her question: “So, General—during your marches and your small wars, in the burial pits you have seen filling, in the dueling grounds you have walked after the shouting—have you witnessed anything that tastes wrong on the wind of death?”
Her words slowed; each image fell like a deliberate pebble into still water. “Corpses that refuse the summons of final stillness. Ghosts that cling when they should descend. Battlefields whose quiet afterward feels… unfinished. Graves that give the impression something has fed there before Hextor’s hunger could arrive.”
A faint, cold smile curved her lips; bereft of warmth, unhurried.
“If you know nothing,” she concluded, “say so, and I will turn my inquiries to less presentable mongrels. If you do know, speak. You stand at the crossing of many roads, Watari Devante. When the scripture of death is being defaced, every honest witness becomes a priest of sorts, whether he desires the robe or not.”
Watari listened until her last word settled, thin as hoarfrost on stone. Then, very softly, he laughed. It was not a rude sound. More the low, surprised chuckle of a man who has just found a glimmer of humour in the middle of a sermon. “Forgive me, Lady Ixqueya,” he said, tilting his head a fraction, “but you wield menace rather like you wield that mace. Impressively. Tirelessly. On absolutely everything in reach.”
His eyes warmed with a fox’s mirth, though his posture stayed courteous. “I am not quite so green a recruit as to miss the chains on your wrists,” he went on. “You have been sent as shield, not as scythe. You may glower like a winter idol and speak of confessions on altars, but we both know you are not permitted to dash my brains upon your pretty stones. Not yet, at least. Xandera does not squander tools before she has measured their full length.” He allowed himself a small, wicked glint.
“It is…endearing,” he added, “that you still think the ‘tough girl’ liturgy will cow me. Charming, even. Like watching a blizzard try to frighten a canyon that has seen a thousand winters and grown bored of counting.” His tail gave the faintest flick behind him as he spread his hands.
“As for your river of the dead and its miscounted grains,” he said, “I must disappoint you. I have marched in many campaigns, and stood over more corpses than I care to number, but to my soldier’s eye the fallen have done what they have always done. They stop shouting. They stop bleeding. They go quiet. Whether they drift toward your bone fonts or some rival ledger, I confess I have not the faintest notion. I am a general, not a grave-accountant.”
He glanced out over the canyon, then back to her. “If there is some skulking hand stealing souls from your Queen’s coffers, it has not yet chosen my battlefields on which to flaunt itself. I have nothing of worth to give you on that score. No restless barrows. No half-stolen shades. Only the old, honest dead, lying where they fell.”
He dipped his chin, acknowledging the gravity of her concern without pretending insight he did not have. “Yet,” he added. “Should that change. Should I see death behave in some fashion that makes even a dull fox think twice… then I will make it my business to see word carried to you. However far Winterwake sits from these stones.”
A thoughtful look crossed his face, and his mouth curved, slow and sly. “Which does raise a practical question,” Watari mused. “You speak of rivers and ledgers and scriptures of passing. Tell me, Lady of Frost, is there any honest way for a living fool to send a letter into that great bureaucracy of bone and shadow?”
His tone was light, almost conversational, but the image had a strange, earnest poetry to it. “A missive folded in shroud-cloth and slipped into a cairn. A report written on a man’s ribs and posted with his last breath. Some little form for a soldier to fill out, so that when he falls he may arrive at your Queen’s desk carrying news instead of only his own history.” He spread his hands again, the gesture an easy bridge between jest and genuine curiosity.
“If I am to serve, however briefly, as one of your ‘instruments’ here at the edge of things,” he concluded, “it would be useful to know whether the next fox you lose on some far frontier can do more than merely die in the proper direction. Can he send Winter a message with his passing. Or must all letters to the realm of the dead be written only in the ink of necromancers and inquisitors such as yourself?”
His eyes warmed with a fox’s mirth, though his posture stayed courteous. “I am not quite so green a recruit as to miss the chains on your wrists,” he went on. “You have been sent as shield, not as scythe. You may glower like a winter idol and speak of confessions on altars, but we both know you are not permitted to dash my brains upon your pretty stones. Not yet, at least. Xandera does not squander tools before she has measured their full length.” He allowed himself a small, wicked glint.
“It is…endearing,” he added, “that you still think the ‘tough girl’ liturgy will cow me. Charming, even. Like watching a blizzard try to frighten a canyon that has seen a thousand winters and grown bored of counting.” His tail gave the faintest flick behind him as he spread his hands.
“As for your river of the dead and its miscounted grains,” he said, “I must disappoint you. I have marched in many campaigns, and stood over more corpses than I care to number, but to my soldier’s eye the fallen have done what they have always done. They stop shouting. They stop bleeding. They go quiet. Whether they drift toward your bone fonts or some rival ledger, I confess I have not the faintest notion. I am a general, not a grave-accountant.”
He glanced out over the canyon, then back to her. “If there is some skulking hand stealing souls from your Queen’s coffers, it has not yet chosen my battlefields on which to flaunt itself. I have nothing of worth to give you on that score. No restless barrows. No half-stolen shades. Only the old, honest dead, lying where they fell.”
He dipped his chin, acknowledging the gravity of her concern without pretending insight he did not have. “Yet,” he added. “Should that change. Should I see death behave in some fashion that makes even a dull fox think twice… then I will make it my business to see word carried to you. However far Winterwake sits from these stones.”
A thoughtful look crossed his face, and his mouth curved, slow and sly. “Which does raise a practical question,” Watari mused. “You speak of rivers and ledgers and scriptures of passing. Tell me, Lady of Frost, is there any honest way for a living fool to send a letter into that great bureaucracy of bone and shadow?”
His tone was light, almost conversational, but the image had a strange, earnest poetry to it. “A missive folded in shroud-cloth and slipped into a cairn. A report written on a man’s ribs and posted with his last breath. Some little form for a soldier to fill out, so that when he falls he may arrive at your Queen’s desk carrying news instead of only his own history.” He spread his hands again, the gesture an easy bridge between jest and genuine curiosity.
“If I am to serve, however briefly, as one of your ‘instruments’ here at the edge of things,” he concluded, “it would be useful to know whether the next fox you lose on some far frontier can do more than merely die in the proper direction. Can he send Winter a message with his passing. Or must all letters to the realm of the dead be written only in the ink of necromancers and inquisitors such as yourself?”
Ixqueya’s lips twitched first, a barely visible quiver at the edge of her composed mask. Then, quite against the grave decorum she wore like polished steel, she let out a low, genuine chortle. It rolled across the granite slabs beneath their boots like distant thunder rumbling through a frozen canyon—warm and alive for three fierce heartbeats before the surrounding frost reclaimed it.
“Well,” she murmured, ice-blue eyes glinting with predatory delight, “at least the fox is not gelded.”
Her gaze drifted downward in a deliberate, taunting sweep—tracing the lines of his tailored coat, the weight at his belt—before climbing back to his face in a cold, insolent survey. The smirk that curved her frosted lips was pure femme fatale, lacquered in winter’s cruelty.
“Such audacity,” she crooned. “To stand upon a mountain under my shadow, to poke at my temper, and then lecture me on the chains that bind my hand. Courage, certainly. Or perhaps idiocy cut in the finest cloth. Either way, impressive.”
She tilted her head; a whisper of raven feathers at her nape rustled in the biting wind.
“Tell me, Watari Devante,” she asked, voice like silk sliding over steel, “how do you walk with them; these legendary stones of yours? Do they drag you down like toll bells between your thighs, chafing you raw on every ascent? Or have you grown calluses in precisely the necessary places by now?”
The vulgar question hovered between them, heavy as incense in a chapel, and she swept it aside with a casual flick of her frost-nipped fingers, as if clearing smoke from a sacred icon.
“Very well,” Ixqueya conceded, her eyes sparking with reluctant respect. “You have earned something rare from me: an ounce of regard. You do not flinch. You do not grovel. You answer Winter with wit instead of whimpering. By Hextor, that alone puts you above half the courtiers who drown in their own perfumes.”
Her tone steadied, the inquisitor’s steel shining through the woman’s frost.
“As to your little fancy about letters to the dead,” she continued, voice measured, “you are not entirely foolish. The river has its couriers. A dying man may dispatch more than a final curse downstream—if his will is sharp and his witnesses competent.”
She tapped the Necro Ice shield strapped to her forearm. The sigils carved into its surface flared with inner luminescence—pale runes flickering like moonlight on broken glass.
“There are rites in Winterwake,” she said, “chants that bind testimony into bone. A rib carved at the moment of death. A tooth pulled, anointed in cold oils, and cast ahead as a herald. The necromancers of my Queen can take such tokens and read them like scripture when the body arrives in Her ossuaries.”
Her gaze narrowed, frost veining her lashes.
“If you truly wish to serve Winter as its messenger, you will speak my name to any Hextoran priest you meet: Ixqueya of Frostmarrow. They will know which ledger to open. They will know how to mark a soul that falls in service, ensuring its last vision reaches my desk rather than being lost among the common dead.”
She stepped back half a pace, the wind catching the hem of her cloak, revealing him in full once more beneath her shadow.
“Until then,” she concluded, voice crisp as newly fallen snow, “keep your legendary burdens under control, General. Strut if you must; but keep your eyes open. If this blasphemy touches your canyon, I expect more from you than clever jests about my mace.”
A ghost of that earlier smirk flickered again, pale frost against her cheeks.
“Make me glad I climbed all these miserable stairs,” she added softly. “It would be a pity if those great, sagging virtues of yours turned out to be only decoration.”
“Well,” she murmured, ice-blue eyes glinting with predatory delight, “at least the fox is not gelded.”
Her gaze drifted downward in a deliberate, taunting sweep—tracing the lines of his tailored coat, the weight at his belt—before climbing back to his face in a cold, insolent survey. The smirk that curved her frosted lips was pure femme fatale, lacquered in winter’s cruelty.
“Such audacity,” she crooned. “To stand upon a mountain under my shadow, to poke at my temper, and then lecture me on the chains that bind my hand. Courage, certainly. Or perhaps idiocy cut in the finest cloth. Either way, impressive.”
She tilted her head; a whisper of raven feathers at her nape rustled in the biting wind.
“Tell me, Watari Devante,” she asked, voice like silk sliding over steel, “how do you walk with them; these legendary stones of yours? Do they drag you down like toll bells between your thighs, chafing you raw on every ascent? Or have you grown calluses in precisely the necessary places by now?”
The vulgar question hovered between them, heavy as incense in a chapel, and she swept it aside with a casual flick of her frost-nipped fingers, as if clearing smoke from a sacred icon.
“Very well,” Ixqueya conceded, her eyes sparking with reluctant respect. “You have earned something rare from me: an ounce of regard. You do not flinch. You do not grovel. You answer Winter with wit instead of whimpering. By Hextor, that alone puts you above half the courtiers who drown in their own perfumes.”
Her tone steadied, the inquisitor’s steel shining through the woman’s frost.
“As to your little fancy about letters to the dead,” she continued, voice measured, “you are not entirely foolish. The river has its couriers. A dying man may dispatch more than a final curse downstream—if his will is sharp and his witnesses competent.”
She tapped the Necro Ice shield strapped to her forearm. The sigils carved into its surface flared with inner luminescence—pale runes flickering like moonlight on broken glass.
“There are rites in Winterwake,” she said, “chants that bind testimony into bone. A rib carved at the moment of death. A tooth pulled, anointed in cold oils, and cast ahead as a herald. The necromancers of my Queen can take such tokens and read them like scripture when the body arrives in Her ossuaries.”
Her gaze narrowed, frost veining her lashes.
“If you truly wish to serve Winter as its messenger, you will speak my name to any Hextoran priest you meet: Ixqueya of Frostmarrow. They will know which ledger to open. They will know how to mark a soul that falls in service, ensuring its last vision reaches my desk rather than being lost among the common dead.”
She stepped back half a pace, the wind catching the hem of her cloak, revealing him in full once more beneath her shadow.
“Until then,” she concluded, voice crisp as newly fallen snow, “keep your legendary burdens under control, General. Strut if you must; but keep your eyes open. If this blasphemy touches your canyon, I expect more from you than clever jests about my mace.”
A ghost of that earlier smirk flickered again, pale frost against her cheeks.
“Make me glad I climbed all these miserable stairs,” she added softly. “It would be a pity if those great, sagging virtues of yours turned out to be only decoration.”
Watari laughed, and this time there was no disguising it. It came up from his chest in an easy, rolling sound, warm as a campfire in thin air. For a moment the mountain seemed to share it; the echo went wandering along the black teeth of the canyon and came back to them softened, like an old jest remembered.
“You do me a kindness, Lady Ixqueya,” he said, when the mirth thinned to a smile, “though I suspect you would rather bite your own tongue than admit it plainly. I shall treasure the knowledge that somewhere in Winterwake there now exists a ledger with my name in it and the word ‘presentable’ scribbled in the margin.”
His eyes shone with fox-bright amusement as he regarded her. Towering, frost-wreathed, mace at her hip and ossuary shield at her side. A woman shaped like a verdict and dressed like a shrine to hard seasons. “And as for these rites of yours,” he went on, “ribs inscribed, teeth anointed, souls tallied and filed like coins in a cold treasury… I will grant they are very orderly. Very proper. Your Queen keeps a stern house. No man could mistake it for anything else.”
He glanced past her, toward the unseen horizon where Hextor lay coiled beyond mortal sight, then back again, his grin turning wry. “Yet if it be all the same to you, Lady,” Watari said, “I find myself hoping that, when my own bones have finished their business here, they do not wash up upon your Mistress’ doorstep.”
He lifted a hand, palm open, in a courteous little ward against offense. “No disrespect meant,” he added. “But your realm, as you describe it, sounds a trifle drear to a fox of the open steppe. Ledgers of bone. Rivers that never thaw. Cathedrals of Necro Ice where even the prayers shiver. Very fitting for its sovereign… and very like her, I think. Stark. Exact. Unforgivingly magnificent. Not, perhaps, the first hearth a tired soldier dreams of when he lays down his spear.” The smile softened, sincerity glinting through the jest.
“If fate must drag me there, I will go as any other,” he allowed. “I have no quarrel with your Queen, nor with the work you do in her name. But should some kinder power take pity on an old campaigner and send him to a place with a little more sunlight and a little less bookkeeping, I confess I would not complain.” He dipped his head to her, a small, respectful bow that did not quite hide the spark in his eyes.
“Until that day,” Watari finished, “I am content to trouble you from this side of the ledger only. You may keep your necromantic post office, Lady Ixqueya. I will keep my canyon and my wind. When I am ready to trade them for your snow and silence, I promise I shall let you know.”
“You do me a kindness, Lady Ixqueya,” he said, when the mirth thinned to a smile, “though I suspect you would rather bite your own tongue than admit it plainly. I shall treasure the knowledge that somewhere in Winterwake there now exists a ledger with my name in it and the word ‘presentable’ scribbled in the margin.”
His eyes shone with fox-bright amusement as he regarded her. Towering, frost-wreathed, mace at her hip and ossuary shield at her side. A woman shaped like a verdict and dressed like a shrine to hard seasons. “And as for these rites of yours,” he went on, “ribs inscribed, teeth anointed, souls tallied and filed like coins in a cold treasury… I will grant they are very orderly. Very proper. Your Queen keeps a stern house. No man could mistake it for anything else.”
He glanced past her, toward the unseen horizon where Hextor lay coiled beyond mortal sight, then back again, his grin turning wry. “Yet if it be all the same to you, Lady,” Watari said, “I find myself hoping that, when my own bones have finished their business here, they do not wash up upon your Mistress’ doorstep.”
He lifted a hand, palm open, in a courteous little ward against offense. “No disrespect meant,” he added. “But your realm, as you describe it, sounds a trifle drear to a fox of the open steppe. Ledgers of bone. Rivers that never thaw. Cathedrals of Necro Ice where even the prayers shiver. Very fitting for its sovereign… and very like her, I think. Stark. Exact. Unforgivingly magnificent. Not, perhaps, the first hearth a tired soldier dreams of when he lays down his spear.” The smile softened, sincerity glinting through the jest.
“If fate must drag me there, I will go as any other,” he allowed. “I have no quarrel with your Queen, nor with the work you do in her name. But should some kinder power take pity on an old campaigner and send him to a place with a little more sunlight and a little less bookkeeping, I confess I would not complain.” He dipped his head to her, a small, respectful bow that did not quite hide the spark in his eyes.
“Until that day,” Watari finished, “I am content to trouble you from this side of the ledger only. You may keep your necromantic post office, Lady Ixqueya. I will keep my canyon and my wind. When I am ready to trade them for your snow and silence, I promise I shall let you know.”
"For such a diminutive figure," Ixqueya said, her glacial-blue gaze appraising him as one might contemplate an audacious inscription etched upon a tawdry relic, "you grant your silvered tongue dominion over territories vast and thoroughly undeserved."
Her words fell like snowflakes upon stone. It was crystalline, immaculate, devoid of passion’s heat yet weighted with judgment’s finality. Those ice-bright eyes traversed his form once more, recalibrating his worth as though his flippant jest concerning her hallowed dominion had disturbed some ancient, silent calculus veiled behind those wintry, fathomless irises.
"You misapprehend a fundamental truth, General," she continued, her voice a velvet-wrapped blade, low and melodious yet unyielding as first frost upon a graveyard field. "The afterlife bears no resemblance to a boisterous tavern bedecked with revelry. It labors under no obligation to satiate your provincial appetites. Men do not drift dreamily into Hextor’s embrace as they relinquish their battle-worn spears. They arrive because mortality has claimed them; because my Sovereign Queen has ordained that the great river of souls flows inexorably in Her direction. Comfort remains the ephemeral indulgence of those still drawing breath; order stands as the sacred privilege bestowed upon the departed."
She allowed those words to linger in the air between them, delicate and perilous as icicles poised above an unwary neck, before inclining her bronzed head by the smallest degree—no more than the suggestion of movement; while a cool half-smile, reminiscent of a crescent moon reflected in still, black water, touched the full curve of her lips, dark as winter-berry wine against her cinnamon-brown skin.
"Should you find such notions drearily austere," she proceeded, each syllable precisely placed like footprints in virgin snow, "I would counsel you to embrace your beloved canyon with fervent devotion and postpone your inevitable introduction to our meticulous ledgers for as long as fate permits. Yet harbor no delusions that some tender-hearted scribe might extend clemency to a fox merely because he yearns for sunlight’s caress and songbirds’ warbling. When the final reckoning descends, the sole question of consequence shall be whether your life’s arithmetic closes in perfect equilibrium—not whether you found pleasure in death’s austere architecture."
Her slender fingers—bronze burnished to a deep umber, their knuckles kissed by faint veins of hoarfrost. It whispered across the rim of her Necro Ice shield, awakening a pallid luminescence within the intricately carved sigils. Ancient symbols stirred like dormant constellations behind cloud, their cold radiance catching in the hard planes of her cheeks and the proud bridge of her nose, rendering her every inch the winter idol she had been bred to be.
"Nevertheless," Ixqueya conceded, her voice softening only by a hair’s breadth, like distant chimes carried on a midnight gale, "your impertinence serves one worthy purpose. It illuminates the essence of your nature with remarkable clarity. A man capable of gazing unflinchingly into Winter’s merciless countenance and pronouncing it merely ‘dreary’ has, at minimum, comprehended that it shall never contort itself to accommodate his comfort. Such understanding already places you a rung above the perfumed sycophants who infest the White Sand’s courts and expire without ever grasping that the world does not, in fact, exist for their amusement."
She glided past him then with an almost liturgical grace, her towering, feather-crowned silhouette cutting against the sky, bestowing upon him the full majesty of her regal profile—the strong jaw, the proud nose, the glacial eyes set like shards of frozen sky above high Mesoamerican cheekbones and the lingering chill of her otherworldly presence as she drifted toward the shrine’s precipice. Her gaze swept the vast canyon below, unfurling like a tapestry of shadow, steppe, and stone at her bronzed feet.
"Speak as grandly as you desire, little fox," she murmured over one powerful shoulder, her words misting in the cold air like transient spirits fleeing an altar fire. "Provided that, when true cold descends; that ancient, inescapable winter which cares nothing for wit or charm. Your deeds manifest with at least half the audacity of your clever tongue. In all my brief years and my House’s long centuries, it is rarely the boisterous men whose likenesses endure in eternal stone, but rather those who execute their sacred duty when nothing remains that even remotely resembles warmth’s gentle embrace."
Her words fell like snowflakes upon stone. It was crystalline, immaculate, devoid of passion’s heat yet weighted with judgment’s finality. Those ice-bright eyes traversed his form once more, recalibrating his worth as though his flippant jest concerning her hallowed dominion had disturbed some ancient, silent calculus veiled behind those wintry, fathomless irises.
"You misapprehend a fundamental truth, General," she continued, her voice a velvet-wrapped blade, low and melodious yet unyielding as first frost upon a graveyard field. "The afterlife bears no resemblance to a boisterous tavern bedecked with revelry. It labors under no obligation to satiate your provincial appetites. Men do not drift dreamily into Hextor’s embrace as they relinquish their battle-worn spears. They arrive because mortality has claimed them; because my Sovereign Queen has ordained that the great river of souls flows inexorably in Her direction. Comfort remains the ephemeral indulgence of those still drawing breath; order stands as the sacred privilege bestowed upon the departed."
She allowed those words to linger in the air between them, delicate and perilous as icicles poised above an unwary neck, before inclining her bronzed head by the smallest degree—no more than the suggestion of movement; while a cool half-smile, reminiscent of a crescent moon reflected in still, black water, touched the full curve of her lips, dark as winter-berry wine against her cinnamon-brown skin.
"Should you find such notions drearily austere," she proceeded, each syllable precisely placed like footprints in virgin snow, "I would counsel you to embrace your beloved canyon with fervent devotion and postpone your inevitable introduction to our meticulous ledgers for as long as fate permits. Yet harbor no delusions that some tender-hearted scribe might extend clemency to a fox merely because he yearns for sunlight’s caress and songbirds’ warbling. When the final reckoning descends, the sole question of consequence shall be whether your life’s arithmetic closes in perfect equilibrium—not whether you found pleasure in death’s austere architecture."
Her slender fingers—bronze burnished to a deep umber, their knuckles kissed by faint veins of hoarfrost. It whispered across the rim of her Necro Ice shield, awakening a pallid luminescence within the intricately carved sigils. Ancient symbols stirred like dormant constellations behind cloud, their cold radiance catching in the hard planes of her cheeks and the proud bridge of her nose, rendering her every inch the winter idol she had been bred to be.
"Nevertheless," Ixqueya conceded, her voice softening only by a hair’s breadth, like distant chimes carried on a midnight gale, "your impertinence serves one worthy purpose. It illuminates the essence of your nature with remarkable clarity. A man capable of gazing unflinchingly into Winter’s merciless countenance and pronouncing it merely ‘dreary’ has, at minimum, comprehended that it shall never contort itself to accommodate his comfort. Such understanding already places you a rung above the perfumed sycophants who infest the White Sand’s courts and expire without ever grasping that the world does not, in fact, exist for their amusement."
She glided past him then with an almost liturgical grace, her towering, feather-crowned silhouette cutting against the sky, bestowing upon him the full majesty of her regal profile—the strong jaw, the proud nose, the glacial eyes set like shards of frozen sky above high Mesoamerican cheekbones and the lingering chill of her otherworldly presence as she drifted toward the shrine’s precipice. Her gaze swept the vast canyon below, unfurling like a tapestry of shadow, steppe, and stone at her bronzed feet.
"Speak as grandly as you desire, little fox," she murmured over one powerful shoulder, her words misting in the cold air like transient spirits fleeing an altar fire. "Provided that, when true cold descends; that ancient, inescapable winter which cares nothing for wit or charm. Your deeds manifest with at least half the audacity of your clever tongue. In all my brief years and my House’s long centuries, it is rarely the boisterous men whose likenesses endure in eternal stone, but rather those who execute their sacred duty when nothing remains that even remotely resembles warmth’s gentle embrace."
Moderators: Ixqueya Jorgenskull (played by The_Diva)