The chill of Kaelen's office clung to me like a second skin as I walked back through the Academy's hushed corridors. Elara's cheerful chatter was a distant buzz, my mind trapped in the silent, charged space I had just left. His words, "You would be safe," echoed alongside the stark image of the Frostfall Mountains on his map.
Conflict was a tempest inside me. On one hand, a dizzying, desperate relief. A lifeline thrown across a chasm of poison and political quicksand. The North was a fortress, and Kaelen was its unbreachable gate. To be near him, to have the chance to prevent the future I remembered, to learn the man behind the title and the scars—it was a pull as fundamental as gravity.
