The girl ran through the frost-bitten woods, her limbs a blur against the whitening dusk. Behind her, the trees rose like the ribs of some colossal carcass, each one rimed in blue ice, each one echoing her passage with the hollow, brittle music of the cold. Above, the sky was a vast bruise—darkening, deepening—and through it drifted the faint glow of the departing airship, already no larger than a drifting coal in the distance. Its engines were fading, the last tremor of living sound swallowed by the wind.
She stumbled, fell, and the snow accepted her with the indifference of the dead. For a moment she tried to rise, but her body no longer obeyed its own commands. Her lungs burned; her breath burst in clouds that froze before they fell. Around her stretched the desolation of Londorai—an endless continent of cold, cruelty, and silence. No light but the auroral pulse of the storm-sky. No warmth but the fever of panic still thrumming in her chest.
The airship was gone now, sliding toward the horizon like a memory being erased. She watched until even its vapor trail was lost among the clouds. Then she bowed her head. Her sobs came without sound. The frost took them too.
Londorai was vast and without mercy. The wind carried no scent of rescue, no echo of clan or kin. Only the deep, endless cold, and the promise of teeth. She pressed her muzzle into the snow, trembling beneath the gaze of a world that did not care whether she lived or died.
Above her, the aurora shivered once—green fire on a frozen sea—then vanished into night.
It was her first year in the guild without her sire. He would never have let them lift from the ice without her aboard. But he was gone now, and the others had already weighed her worth and found it light. She had complained it was harsh, that the cold bit too deep, that the beasts came too close at night. They had laughed. Now the shares were six instead of seven.
The airship would reach the southern cities in a week—if the storms did not tear its hull apart first. They would speak of her softly, perhaps once, in the warmth of the galley, then let the silence swallow her name as the wind had swallowed her cries.