6 - Journey

The families of June and Eve sobbed. The girls were helped onto two of the horses. The scarred man’s gaze fell on Winter, standing alone.

He looked from her to the empty space around her, a flicker of something like surprise or contempt, in his eyes.

“You. On the horse,” he commanded, pointing to the last one.

Winter’s limbs felt like lead. She tried to move, but her body wouldn’t obey.

This was it. This was real. She was leaving. The second man, the one with the cold eyes, let out an impatient sigh.

He strode over, grabbed her by the arm with a grip of iron, and practically threw her into the saddle. She let out a small gasp of pain and surprise as she landed awkwardly.

He didn’t say a word. He just turned, mounted his own powerful warhorse, and without a backward glance, led the way out of the village.

Winter risked one look over her shoulder. She could see the figures of the villagers watching them go.

She saw Jorunn standing outside his smithy, a dark, unmoving silhouette.

Then the path turned, and her village, the only home she had ever known, disappeared from view. She faced forward, the cold wind whipping at her face, and did not look back again.

The journey north was three days of grueling travel. The landscape grew progressively wilder and more intimidating. The rolling hills and familiar forests of her home gave way to jagged peaks and dark, dense pine woods where the sun barely pierced the canopy.

The air grew thinner, colder. The silence of the two guards was more unnerving than any threat. They spoke only to give commands: “Eat.” “Drink.” “We make camp here.”

June and Eve tried to talk to her on the first day.

“Aren’t you scared?” Eve had asked, her voice trembling as she rode beside Winter.

Winter had just nodded, unable to form words.

“My mother said it’s a great honor, ” June offered, trying to sound brave. “She said the King’s Citadel is carved from the heart of the mountain itself. That it’s the grandest place in the world.”

Winter stayed silent. Her throat was too tight to speak.

After a while, they gave up, put off by her suffocating aura of misery. They kept to themselves, whispering to each other, leaving Winter alone with the thunder of the horses’ hooves and the frantic beating of her own heart.

On the third day, she saw it.

They rounded a high mountain pass, and the guard with the cold eyes pointed. “The Crescent Citadel.”

It wasn’t grand....it was terrifying.

It wasn’t so much a building as it was a scar on the face of the largest mountain Winter had ever seen.

A fortress of black, jagged stone that seemed to grow out of the rock itself, reaching for the sky like skeletal fingers. there were no pennants, no bright colors, no signs of life.

Just sheer, intimidating walls of dark rock and narrow slits for windows that looked like the eyes of a predator. The entire structure seemed to suck the light and warmth from the air around it. It was a place of power, not comfort.

A tomb for a king with a heart of stone.

Fear, cold and sharp, pierced the numb dread that had enveloped Winter.

She began to tremble, a deep, uncontrollable shaking that rattled her bones. This was where she was going to die.

They rode through a massive, iron bound gate that groaned open for them and closed with a deafening boom, sealing them inside.

The courtyard was vast, paved with uneven stone and empty save for a few guards who watched them pass with unsettling stillness. The air inside the walls was even colder, the silence absolute.