When they left the camp, Sera did not look back.
Barbarian fires burned low behind them, half-choked by wind and ash. The songs of last night—the drumbeats, the hoarse laughter, the clatter of bone-cups—were gone. In their place, only the memory of warmth clung to the air like stubborn smoke.
Snow stretched ahead.
White. Endless. Silent.
She walked beside them as Chief Sera of the North, as the curse-bearer of her tribe, as the one destined—prepared—to offer her life at Scarder Lake so the next generation might breathe a little longer beneath winter's teeth.
At least, that was what she had believed.
Until a boy with tired eyes and a death curse walked into her camp and recited poetry that sounded like war declared against fate itself.
Now, as she tread through the snow with him, she felt something beneath her ribs shifting—pain, yes.
And something more dangerous.
Possibility.
Kel walked at the front.
His coat was simple compared to barbarian leather and fur—a long, dark garment lined with pale wool, fluttering like a tattered banner. His boots sank into the snow with each step, leaving prints that filled slowly with white. His hair—dark brown, almost black—fell over his eyes whenever wind rose, a stray, stubborn thing that the world kept trying to blind him with.
Sera watched him.
Not with warmth.
With the focus one gives a puzzle that refuses neat answers.
This boy was cursed, his body frail, his breathing sometimes shallow. She could feel the wrongness in him even before he stood close—the way his life-force rippled unpredictably, tied to a knot of something hostile beneath his chest.
He should have been bent.
He walked straight.
When the mountain came into view—a black behemoth rising from the white horizon, its ridges cutting the sky—Sera felt the old stories coiling inside her.
The mountain that hides the lake.
The lake that judges the cursed.
The cursed that bleed so others don't.
She had grown up with those words. Her first memories were not lullabies, but whispered warnings.
Her fingers brushed the edge of her cloak, feeling the familiar patterns stitched into it—bones, spirals, waves. Symbols of her tribe. Symbols of burden.
Scarder Lake lay somewhere beyond that stone.
A grave or a miracle.
She had come prepared for the first.
The other three… had not.
The journey up the mountain felt like being slowly swallowed by an old god.
The wind turned harsher, battering against cloaks. Snow thickened, not in gentle flakes but in sharp, icy flecks that stung exposed skin. The trees grew twisted and rare, like the last survivors of a long war.
They fought beasts.
Frozen boars enraged by hunger.
Wolves whose eyes had forgotten daytime.
Once, a drake whose cry made even Sera's curse shudder in resonance.
She watched how the others moved.
Reina—sharp, clean, her spear making lines in the air as precise as carved script. She moved like someone who had chosen to live when death would have been easier.
Landon—weighty, stubborn, his sword arcs heavy as falling boulders. He fought as if he had never learned the word retreat.
And Kel—
Kel fought like someone whose every motion was borrowed time.
He stepped in only when necessary, his breath techniques allowing him bursts of speed that surprised even Sera. He shielded vital points, dodged more than he struck. His fingers trembled after each fight, pressed against his ribs as if something inside had clawed him.
Still, he did not fall.
How much pain does your body pay for each decision you make? she wondered.
Barbarian curses demanded blood.
His… demanded everything.
The cave was exactly as the stories said.
A mouth in the mountain.
Black.
Too perfectly placed to be coincidence.
Sera recognized the subtle shifts of power in the air. Old aura. Old magic. Old decisions.
She placed her hand upon the stone and felt the faint tremor beneath it—the echo of the lake's pull far below.
"Mouth That Eats the Road," she murmured.
Her people's name for it.
The place where paths end and judgments begin.
She warned them: inside, the mountain would hear Kel. Hear his curse louder than anything.
They walked in anyway.
She did, too.
Duty, she told herself.
Not… curiosity.
The trial in the mist greeted her with ice and faces.
A graveyard of frozen pillars. Souls locked in translucent prisons—warriors, elders, children. All those who had died early because the curse had not been contained.
Because her curse was not enough.
Voices accused and pleaded in equal measure.
She faced herself there—an older Sera, hair paler, eyes dimmer. A woman turning into a monument instead of a person.
"You resent them," the older self said.
Sera watched her own lips shape the answer.
"…Yes."
It hurt.
Ugly. Raw.
"Yes, I resent them," she whispered. "I resent the expectation, the stories, the way my life was decided before I even knew what 'choice' meant."
She pressed her palm against the frozen pillar of a child's sleeping face.
"But I also love them."
The admission felt like ripping skin.
"I don't know how to be anything else," she said. "I don't know how to live without this curse. I only know how to walk toward the lake and hope my body is enough."
The ice cracked.
The graveyard melted into mist.
Her curse coiled inside her chest, cold and hungry.
She walked forward anyway.
Scarder Lake was worse than she imagined.
It was not a pool of shimmering hope.
It was stillness.
Grey and perfectly calm, like an eye that had stopped blinking centuries ago. The mist above it moved slowly, almost lazily, pretending softness while hiding pressure.
Her breath hitched when she saw it.
This was her end.
This had always been her end.
Her feet moved of their own accord, drawing her toward the edge.
She could feel the lake tugging at her curse, like a magnet recognizing a matching shard.
If she stepped in—
All the pressure in her chest said: now. now. now.
And then Kel's hand closed around her wrist.
His grip was not as strong as Landon's, not as firm as a barbarian warrior's.
But it was steady.
"Stop," he said.
She turned sharply, anger flaring more from panic than from offense.
His eyes met hers.
"Do you think this kind of lake is free for all?"
Her lips parted.
His words cut through the trance.
No guardian.
No ritual.
No priest.
No offering.
He lifted his gaze to the water.
"We don't see any guardian near it," he said. "Or perhaps the guardian is… in the lake."
In that moment, Sera remembered all the stories she had not been told, only hinted at. Vague warnings of "boundaries" and "judgment."
Her fingers shook.
"I… didn't think of that," she admitted.
It felt like confessing to nearly walking into someone's home without knocking.
He released her wrist gently.
Then he called.
The guardian answered.
And Sera saw, for the first time, the being her tribe had prayed to and feared.
A woman-shaped colossus woven from mist and depth, towering above the lake. Not a god. Not merely a spirit.
Something in between.
When she laughed, Sera's bones vibrated with it.
She listened as Kel spoke—about his curse, his ignorance of its origin, his unwillingness to die as something worthless. He said the word with such calm that Sera's jaw clenched.
Worthless?
This boy was anything but.
Sera spoke next.
Her voice shook once, then steadied.
"I know how I got my curse," she said. "I know when. I know the elder who carved it into me. I know what I was expected to pay."
Extraordinary power, at the cost of her years.
"I want," she forced herself to say, "to live as long as I can."
The guardian listened.
And for the first time in Sera's life, someone—something—seemed to consider her desire to live not as selfishness.
But as… reasonable.
When she allowed them to bathe, Sera thought her legs would give out.
They didn't.
Not until she stepped into the lake.
Scarder Lake seeped into her bones like a second consciousness.
The instant its surface touched her skin, her curse reacted—flaring, thrashing, trying to either devour or be devoured.
The water did not soothe her.
It seized her.
It held her.
Every use of her curse. Every time frost had crawled up her veins, every life she had saved with its lethal blessing. Every night she had lain awake, feeling her lifespan burning like oil in a lamp.
The lake saw it all.
Her chest burned.
Her lungs forgot how to breathe.
Water surged into the core of her curse and tore it apart.
Not maliciously.
Efficiently.
It felt like someone had reached inside and ripped out a tumor that had grown around every nerve.
She screamed.
The sound never left her throat.
Her eyes blurred. She tasted iron. Her fingers clawed at nothing. Frost patterns spidered under her skin, then shattered.
And then—
Silence.
The presence that had overshadowed every heartbeat of her life.
Gone.
She coughed, sucking in air like it was the first time she had earned it.
Her body felt…
Lighter.
Smaller.
Free.
Her hand flew to her chest.
Her heart beat there, steady, unhurried.
She waited for the answering chill, the hungry pull.
Nothing came.
Tears pricked the corners of her eyes.
She bit them back.
I am still me, she thought. Without it, I am still…
Sera.
Not a curse.
Not a vessel.
Just—
Sera.
She surfaced from the water quietly, chest heaving. Reina pretended not to look. Sera pretended not to notice.
It was a fragile, sacred lie.
She appreciated it.
She thought that was the end.
She would return to her people as someone who had lived through the lake instead of died in it. They would not know what to do with that. She did not know what to do with that.
Then Kel did something she had not predicted.
He asked the guardian a question.
Not for power.
For history.
"How long have you guarded this lake?"
Sera watched the mist-lady's posture shift.
Unease.
Memory.
"Since the lake's beginning," the guardian said.
Alone, Sera heard.
Kel did, too.
"You've been lonely since then," he said.
Sera almost flinched.
Lonely?
The word settled over the waters like a thin sheet of ice.
She realized, then, that Kel understood this being in a way her tribe never had.
To her people, the guardian was a force.
To him, she was someone enclosed in duty.
He spoke of being trapped in his room, of being unable to step beyond his curse. He recognized a cage when he saw one.
Then he made his offer.
Become my contracted partner.
Sera's heart nearly seized.
He's trying to bind the lake's guardian.
But his next words changed everything.
He didn't speak of commands.
He spoke of shared sight.
Of mutuality.
Of freedom.
The guardian's anger was vast and cold. The lake rippled like it might swallow all of them in a single annoyed breath.
Kel didn't retreat.
His voice held steady as he swore on his life that any attempt to force her would break the contract and end him.
Reckless.
Insane.
Correct.
The oath rang in Sera's bones.
He was giving an ancient entity the power to end him if he ever chained her.
It was the most barbarian thing she'd ever seen someone from the Empire do.
Fierce.
Honorable.
Utterly without self-preservation.
When the contract took shape—mist spiraling, light searing the air around their joined hands—Sera felt the mountain itself shift. The lake's presence moved, just a little.
Kel would never be alone in his head again.
Part of her envied that.
Part of her pitied him.
All of her respected it.
"Equal," she murmured, more to herself than anyone. "He made it equal."
How long had it been since she had seen a pact like that?
Never.
Not even among spirits and shamans.
Her people asked for power.
Kel offered companionship.
As they left, snow began to fall again.
Kel paused once at the edge of the mist, looking back. His expression softened the tiniest fraction. Sera felt the faint brush of something in the air—an impression, a name.
Sairen.
The guardian's true name.
She knew it now, not from hearing it aloud—but from the way the air hummed around Kel afterward.
A shared secret.
Between mortal and myth.
Chief Sera of the barbarian north walked behind them, cloak trailing in the snow, hand over her heart, feeling it beat freely for the first time in many winters.
She had come to the lake prepared to die for her people.
She left it alive.
Curse-free.
And following a boy who had just rewritten the terms between mortal and divine.
Perhaps, she thought, watching Kel's back as he stepped into the pale daylight beyond the cave, fate is not simply endured.
Perhaps, with the right words, it can be negotiated.
She adjusted her cloak, lifted her chin against the wind, and walked forward.
Not as a sacrifice.
Not as a container.
As Sera.
And whether she liked it or not—
her path was now tangled with the boy who had looked at an ancient guardian, recognized her loneliness, and offered her the world through his eyes.