Frostbound Dragon's heir

CHAPTER 2

The cold seeped deep into my skin, making my bones tremble. It was a heavy, suffocating blanket that pressed against my consciousness, deeper and more violently than any winter I had ever endured in the Vornic stronghold.

I woke up in a tomb of complete black darkness and a quick fear gripped me. My lungs were completely paralyzed, and for a terrifying moment, I thought I was dead. I thought I had finally become the statue the Commander wanted me to be.

But just then, a flicker of light—a foreign, pulsing cerulean glow—throbbed in my chest.

Thump-thrum. Thump-thrum.

It was the dragon spirit. It wasn't beating like a human heart, but thumping like the countdown of a time bomb. It was the only thing keeping my body from shattering into dust.

I clawed at the ice above me desperately. The frozen weight above me was thick and dense with the magical residue of the massacre.

“Ah!” A scream ripped from my throat as my fingers broke, bleeding into the ice.

But the pain didn’t last long. My nervous system was muted, dampened by the frost. My left hand was a dead, heavy block of meat, numb and frozen to the color of tarnished silver, completely unresponsive to my commands. 

I pushed with everything I had. The ice gave way with a sickening, wet crunch, and I spilled out of the crevasse onto the shattered, blood-stained remains of the sanctuary floor.

I gasped when the reality of time hit me. Three bloody days. I had been buried in the heart of the glacier for three days.

I stood up, my knees buckling. The Sanctum was a graveyard of ice, blood, and silence. The remnants of our ancestral halls were unrecognizable; the walls were blackened by sun-fire, and the great banners of House Vornic were nothing more than scorched, hanging rags.

I didn't look at the bodies. If I looked at them—if I let my eyes trace the faces of my mother or Damien—I wouldn't have the strength to stand. I would just lie down, cry my eyes out and let the frost claim me.

Instead, I looked at my own skin. Beneath the surface of my forearms, glowing, crystalline veins traced a web of faint blue light—the path the spirit was carving through my body, feeding on my life force like a parasite.

"Evander?" A dry, rasping whisper from the shadows of a fallen pillar called me.

I spun immediately, my movements stiff and jerky as my blurry vision swam.

It was Orsa, our head healer. She was hunched over, clutching a shard of strong ice to her side to stem a deep, weeping gash in her stomach. She was the only thing breathing in the entire hold. She looked as ancient and broken as the pillars around us.

"Orsa," I rasped, my voice sounding like it had been shredded by glass. "Everyone... they’re..."

"I know," she cut in, her eyes fixing on my dead, frozen hand. She gasped at the sight of it and shook her head, but she didn’t grieve. She was a Vornic healer; she understood that grief was a luxury for those who weren't already ghosts. 

She crawled toward me, her breath hitching in agony. She reached out, her fingers trembling as she hovered over my frost-bitten skin. "The bond is unfinished, boy. Alros tried to force the rite, but the interruption severed the flow. The spirit isn't anchored; it’s just… drifting in your body and worse… it’s feeding."

She tapped a finger against my chest. The blue glow flared in response, a searing light that illuminated the gore-streaked ice.

"It’s eating you, Evander. It’s turning your marrow to frost. In a week, maybe two, it will reach your heart and stop it cold. You’ll be a statue, and the spirit will drift back into the ether, lost forever. Your family died to pass this on to you, but they didn't succeed. They only gave you a death sentence."

I swallowed hard, those words making my body shiver with terror. I looked at my dead, numb hand, clenching it into a fist despite the lack of feeling. "H-How do I fix it? There has to be a way, right, Orsa?"

Orsa’s eyes darkened, a shadow of genuine, bone-deep fear flickering behind them. She knew the cost. She knew the impossibility of what I was asking. "There is only one place where the original binding scrolls are kept. Not the sanitized copies, but the true, blood-inscribed texts from the Age of the First Warden."

"Tell me! I will go get them. I can’t let this bloodshed all be for nothing." I demanded, the frost in my veins surging. My patience for riddles had died with my brother.

"The Imperial Repository," she whispered, her voice failing. "In the heart of the Capital. The same palace that sent the Sunfire soldiers to butcher your family. That library is the only place in the world that houses the knowledge to complete the binding."

The world seemed to tilt. The irony was a physical blow to my guts, sharper than any blade. To save my life, I had to walk into the lion’s den—the very place that had orchestrated my family's extinction. I had to infiltrate the belly of the Empire, navigate their halls of power, and steal the secrets of the monsters who had turned my home into a tomb.

“That’s…near impossible, Orsa.”

"The bond is a curse, Evander," Orsa warned, her gaze locking onto mine pitifully. "If you go, you aren't just a survivor anymore. You are a target. Every Sunfire soldier, every inquisitor, every shadow in the capital will smell that dragon-frost on you like blood in the water. You will be hunted from the moment you step within the city walls."

I looked down at my hand again. The blue light pulsed, a steady, glowing reminder that my death was already ticking down. The icy numbness was creeping up my wrist, a silent thief stealing my humanity.

"Let them come," I said. My voice hardened and devoid of the boy I had been three days ago. That boy died under the ice, crushed by the weight of the mountain and the loss of his blood. "If I’m going to freeze, I’m going to do it on the throne."

I stepped over a shattered piece of masonry, ignoring the crunch of frozen glass beneath my boots. The journey to the capital would be a death sentence, but as I looked back at the ruin of my legacy, I realized that for the first time in my life, I wasn't afraid.

The dragon spirit growled within me, a cold, hungry resonance that echoed through my own. I wasn't going to the capital to beg for a cure. I was going to find out exactly why they killed us—and then I was going to make sure they all burned for it.

Every step away from the ruins was a step toward a war I had no business winning. But I had the frost in my veins, and I had the memory of Damien’s blood on the floor.

The Empire had forgotten that when you try to bury a dragon, you are actually just planting a seed.