The air inside the carriage was cold, but Fenris burned.
He read the raven's message again, though the words hadn't changed.
Sayori is missing.
Every heartbeat was thunder.
Every breath was a roar against the world.
The moment he crossed the border into his northern lands, the sky split open—not with rain or snow, but with black mist, unnatural and twisting, curling into the carriage windows like fingers.
The horses shrieked.
The world outside faded.
And then... silence.
---
He stood in a forest, but not one he knew.
The trees bled ash.
The ground pulsed like flesh.
Above him, the moon hung red and too close—huge enough to swallow the sky.
He tried to speak, but his voice didn't come.
And then he saw her.
Sayori.
Barefoot, thin, her pale skin streaked with soot and blood. Her back to him.
She stood at the edge of a lake made of ink.
A hand reached for her shoulder—not his.
It was made of bone.
"She is the key," whispered a dozen voices behind him. "And the lock."
"Let her go, and the world will live."
"Keep her, and it will burn."
Fenris stepped forward.
The ground broke beneath his foot.
From the cracks spilled white fire.
It burned him to the bone.
Still, he reached for her.
And she turned.
Her face—
Was not hers.
It was twisted in grief, in fury, in power.
Her lips moved, but the sound came from behind him.
"I didn't ask for this."
The lake exploded into flame.
---
He woke in the snow, on his knees, the shattered remains of the carriage behind him.
His guards scrambled toward him, horrified.
His skin smoked where fire had licked him in the vision—but there were no flames.
No burns.
Only one truth burned clear:
Sayori was more than the Council feared.
And she was more than he had realized.
The choice he made next might not only doom the North…
But decide the fate of them all.