My eyes snap open.
The world tilts around me, not sharply, but as if it is adjusting after too long in stillness. It feels wrong, like I have slept longer than sleep should ever last.
“Mistress. You are awake.”
The voice is low and grating, scraping against the quiet.
I push myself upright. My limbs ache, stiff with disuse. “How long have I been asleep?”
Silence.
I hate silence. It presses in like a weight.
“How long?” My voice cuts through the still air, sharper this time.
“Well…” the voice wavers. “You see, miss, the whole land has been frozen. Even your unshakable darkness was caught in it.”
“My darkness does not get caught,” I snap. “You must be mistaken. I made this beast perfectly. It overtakes everything it touches. It cannot simply be stopped.”
My voice feels too strong for a body that has been still for so long, echoing against the cold walls of the chamber.
Kini, the man standing near the door, does not move. He looks almost petrified himself, face flushed, hands trembling at his sides.
“But it did stop,” he says finally, his voice small against the weight of mine. “We have been trying to understand why. Word spread that Empress Kathera died, and we believe it is tied to that.”
I stare at him, unblinking.
“We tried to wake you, Mistress,” he continues, his eyes downcast. “So many times. Nothing worked. It was as if…” he swallows hard, “as if Empress Kathera took you with her.”
The air thickens. The words hang between us like smoke that will not clear.
“Damn that little brat.” The words leave my mouth like venom.
Kini flinches but presses on, voice trembling. “Mistress Carlosa, I… I hate to add more, but…” He swallows. “Many of your soldiers are frozen in place. They stopped moving and have not stirred since.”
“My soldiers are frozen?” I echo the words heavy with disbelief.
A cold certainty settles in my chest.
Kathera.
Of course, it is her. Who else could twist the pulse of a world?
But how? How could she freeze Celentra itself?
And why would she, of all people, bind her own? The same kingdom she swore to protect?
The questions burn like acid, and for the first time since waking, I realize the silence pressing in around us is not just absence.
It is punishment.
“Well,” I say, chin high, “we will find new soldiers. My quest to dethrone Kathera and claim Celentra will not be undone. She will not make me a fool.”
I stretch my hand out, calling the shadow I once birthed. For a long, terrible breath, there is nothing. Then a slow twitch beneath the floorboards, as if some animal remembered its master.
Cold crawls up my fingers, the shadow pressing into my palm like ice and oil. It is there, but it moves in inches, as if bound by ropes. A scrap of memory, a fragment of obedience. Not the quick, ravenous thing that used to obey a single thought and unmake a man.
I will make her pay for this. Even with Kathera laid in her grave, it will be my hand that tastes the blood of victory.
“Rise,” I commanded, my voice flat as steel.
The shadow pulses, a dull black bloom spreading across the stone, reaching for my boots, then stopping short as if hesitating at the edge of a memory. It pulls at itself like a beast learning to use limbs again, each motion costly and reluctant.
Rage blooms hot behind my ribs. I shove the thing, a motion meant to order, to test, to remind it who forged it. The shadow recoils, slumping like a wounded animal. I feel the rejection like salt. My power answers in echoes now, not in obedience.
“No.” The word tastes like ash. “No. You will not—”
My mouth snaps shut as a tremor runs through the floor. The shadow shivers, and a fissure cracks in a thin line across the flagstone by my heel.
So this is the price of her death. Motion stolen from my own hand.
I yank my hand back and pace, boots clacking. Plans spool in my mind like coiled rope. If the dark will not obey me wholly, I will take men who can. I will raise a blade-arm a hundred strong and teach them to be my shadow. I will buy loyalty, bribe despair, bend a hundred lives until they make obedience. If magic balks, steel will not.
“Send word,” I bark when I find the steward on the landing. “Riders to Renn and the border forts. Draft the dockhands and the millers—promise coin. Promise land. Promise titles. Tell the nobles the crown will reward those who swear now.”
The steward bows, lips pale. “At once, my lady.”
I watch him go, the shadow’s dark smear still sulking along the floor. For a moment, I almost pity it, a husk of the thing that once protected my name and fed my terror. Then I remember Briar’s grave smile. Then I remember Kathera’s voice in the hush of the world. The pity curdles into something colder.
“If she expects me to be weakened,” I say to the empty chamber, to the stalled thing at my feet, “she is a fool.”
I summon the shadow again, but softer now, testing what remains. It lifts, slow and reluctant, and a thin seam of dark light threads out to my palm. Not a weapon, not yet, only a tether. I curl my fingers around that tether and let it sting the skin.
It will be enough.
It must be.