"Your rule will stretch across forty-four cold winters, and you shall become a Dame. A queen whose very name remains unknown to all creatures of Mir-Grande-Carta and never heard in the Red Sea. Your very identity will fade into obscurity, known only as the Winterqueen by few. Your given name, Fiona Mageschstea, will go unspoken, and your regal title will be unacknowledged. You will become synonymous with Winter itself." Fiorna Mageschstea's prophecy, HEXE VOL One- The Great Exodus by Professor Edgar O. Duvencrune.

"Your Highness?"

The voice didn't reach her. Not really. It floated, weightless, somewhere above the fog she sat in.

Fiona stabbed the knife between her fingers.

Slow at first, then faster. A glint. A flicker. A blur. The metal rubbing so close to her knuckles—Thunk.

The blade drove clean through the back of her hand, the hilt trembling where it stood upright in the flesh.

Gasps fluttered around the table. A goblet tipped. Someone stood.

But Fiona didn't flinch. Didn't blink. Her expression stayed vacant, almost amused, as blue blood traced the grooves of the marble like a map remembering rivers.

She looked down, pulled the knife out slowly, and raised her eyes with a lazy grin.

"A little magic trick my father taught me," she said, holding up her bloodied hand like it was a card in a deck. "Funny, right?"

Not a wince. Not a tremor. Just that smile, too wide, too smooth. And silence as prophecy.

Laughter trickled around the room. It was forced, clinking, all the wrong wishes behind every smile.

All but one.

Regala Messe didn't laugh. He didn't even blink.

"Perhaps," the Magi said quietly, "we should focus back on the meeting."

Fiona tilted her head, still cradling her bleeding hand like it was no more than a spilt drink. "Speak of what, Regala?"

"The Drachs wish to formalise the union between Belmond Drach and Eura Berdorf," Regala replied, each word careful, as though walking on eggshells. "It would mean a great deal for the Berdorfs, the Mageschstea, and the Drachs to be seen… united. It would—"

"It would what?" Fiona snapped, "The child's not mine. Not by blood, not by bond. It is more than obvious."

She leaned back in her chair, blue smears still drying on her skin. "She could marry a pig for all I care."

"Your Highness, I don't think you want the dragons against us," Magi Messe said, each word clipped as if measured to keep the last threads of patience from snapping.

Fiona didn't look up. She twirled the bloodied knife slowly, letting it kiss the edge of her sleeve. "Does she wolf?"

There was a beat of silence. Then Messe blinked, uncertain. "I… beg your pardon?"

Her eyes flicked up, calm, cold, distant. "Does the child wolf?" she repeated. "Do I need to draw little teeth for you?"

Messe inhaled through his nose. "We have no report of such a… transformation."

"Hm." Fiona let the knife fall to the table with a soft clink. "Then she's entirely useless. If she can't wolf, she can't tame the dragons. She'll just be a charming side piece on someone else's leash. I won't waste breath meddling."

"She's only eight Summers old," one of the Whitecloaks offered, careful but naïve.

Fiona's head tilted. "Winters."

The room tensed.

"I—pardon?" the man stammered.

Her gaze pinned him, glacial and bone-deep. "I am still on the throne. It is the thirtieth Winter," she said.

The Whitecloak bowed stiffly, spine aching under the weight of her stare. "Of course, Your Highness."

Fiona rose, movements fluid, the hem of her white silked robe whispering across the marble. Without so much as a glance behind her, she flicked her fingers toward the door. "Send Dorielle to the pools. I'm craving tea, and I love how that little creature bleeds flavour into the leaves. I wonder what's her secret."

Day after day, the path never changed.

From the steam-choked kitchens to the glinting pools of central Whitestone, Dorielle walked the same marble corridors with the same tray balanced on the same trembling hands.

She'd tried belladonna, monkshade, and needlethorn, and stirred venom into rosehip. Swapped chamomile for bonevine. Nothing worked.

The Winterdame drank. The Winterdame smiled. The Winterdame lived.

She'd pressed pillows to her face—five times now. Held her breath and counted. The body never stilled. The breath always returned. Once, she'd even gone for the throat with bare hands, teeth clenched, heartbeat like a drum and still, still, the Winterdame had opened her eyes mid-choke and asked for lemon next time.

Dorielle's wrists were thin with failure. Her mind frayed where logic used to be. How did one kill a woman who wasn't alive in the right places?

She tried not to shake as she passed the spiral columns.

A single porcelain cup sat in the centre of the tray. Today's blend: fevervine, widowmilk, star mushroom and a pinch of sea-sleet. Enough to take down a golem, if not more.

She breathed in once, then stepped through the archway.

The pools steamed like shallow mirrors. And there she was.

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The Winterqueen.

Floating in the centre, draped in silk and silence, her hair spread like milk through the water. Eyes closed, still as glass. But Dorielle knew better.

She always opened them.

There was no question that Fiona was beautiful.

Not the kind sung about in court ballads, but something colder. Skin pale enough to shame snowdrifts. And those eyes, blue, but not like skies or oceans. They were the kind of blue found in blades before they cut and kill.

When she saw Dorielle, she approached the edges of the pool and sat. Her feet started idly stirring the water in slow circles. Ripples curved outward like she was rewriting the surface one lazy thought at a time.

"There you are," she said without turning her head.

Dorielle swallowed. "I'm sorry, Your Highness. I was requested by—"

"Hush." Fiona raised a single finger to her lips. "I'm immortal. I can wait. No one can claim I lack patience."

Dorielle stepped forward and set the tray down beside her. The porcelain clicked against the stone. She bowed not deeply, not stiffly, just enough to pretend she hadn't tried to kill the woman in front of her more times than she could count.

Then she waited, breath caught between duty and dread.

"Sit."

The word landed like a pebble in still water. Small, but impossible to ignore.

Dorielle blinked. "I beg your pardon?"

Fiona sighed without sound, her gaze cutting sideways. "Why does everyone make me say things twice? Sit. Here. Next to me."

A pause.

"Take your shoes off. I want you to tell me how the water feels."

It wasn't the first time.

Dorielle hesitated, then obeyed. She slid out of her shoes and peeled off the socks that stuck slightly to her skin. Her feet hit the marble with a soft slap. Then she sat, careful not to get too close, careful not to breathe too loudly.

This was after the visit. After the strange woman elf with purple hair and the other one, the fat boy with the rotten smell of cabbage, Xendrix. After Fiona stopped drifting and started being sober again, she was… nicer now.

But only in the way frost sometimes looks like lace before it burns.

Dorielle dipped her toes into the water. It curled around her ankles. She didn't speak. Not yet. Not until she was told to.

Fiona raised the cup slowly, nostrils flaring as if memory alone could conjure scent. Nothing. Her face didn't move, didn't betray the slightest twitch. Just that blank stillness.

She sipped.

The silence, after, stretched long enough to bend time.

"The colour's different today," she said at last, swirling the liquid like it might reveal something beneath. "Did you change the herbs?"

Dorielle straightened her back. "Yes."

"Star mushrooms?"

A heartbeat.

"Yes."

"Hm." Another sip. Then, calmly, "It's strange. I can't taste it. I can't tell if you're perfecting the flavour... or perfecting the poison." Fiona turned her head and then smiled. Not cruelly. Not warmly. Just... sincerely. "I like you," she said. "You make my teas interesting. And when you try to kill me, at least you're creative. It's fun."

Dorielle's throat tightened. Her tongue fumbled the shape of words. "I… well…"

But nothing useful followed. Only her pulse was loud in her ears.

"How does the water feel?" Fiona asked, eyes fixed on the steam rising from her cup.

Dorielle dipped her toes deeper, wincing. "It's freezing. I can barely feel my feet."

"That's what it's like," she murmured, lifting the cup to her lips. "All the time. I can't feel." She drank without pause as though it were nothing more than a broth.

Then her eyes wandered over Dorielle, studying her not as a servant but like something under glass.

"You look very young," Fiona said, "for a…human?"

Dorielle kept her posture still. "Herbs," she offered, a little too quickly.

"Herbs," Fiona echoed, not smiling, not frowning. Her voice trailed with quiet curiosity. "You know a great deal for something so... fragile."

She leaned in then, just enough to drop her voice to a thread. "So fragile, yet powerful enough not to notice. That's the dangerous kind. Humans."

Dorielle stared at the water, watching her toes lose colour beneath the surface. She didn't dare look at the Dame, not directly. But not looking felt just as loud. Her hands clenched in her lap.

"Thank you," Fiona said, rising in one fluid motion. Her pale robe barely stirred, yet the air seemed to hush around her.

"I… I only made tea," Dorielle murmured.

Fiona glanced over her shoulder, her smile almost kind. "Thank you for trying to kill me," she said. "Maybe tomorrow… you'll get it right."

The door slammed shut. Papers rustled. A candle guttered.

Regala Messe didn't look up. "I take it the tea failed."

Dorielle stormed across the room, feet barely touching the floor, hands tangled in her hair like she might pull answers from her scalp.

"She knows!" she hissed, wings twitching, stuck hidden in her corset. "She knows I've been trying to kill her! She looked me dead in the eye and said—Maybe tomorrow you'll get it right. Who says that?"

She spun in place, knocking a quill off the desk. "She's unhinged. Frozen-calm. She'll figure it out. She'll figure me out. Then what? She'll pluck my wings and roast me like she did my sisters, like I'm some... some canapé!"

Messe sighed and scratched a note in the margin of his report. "You're very loud for someone trying to stay hidden."

"I'm panicking!" Dorielle shouted, hands in the air. "I'm too pretty to be eaten!"

Messe blinked, finally glancing up. "Mm. Debatable. Just calm down."

Dorielle whirled on him, eyes wide and glittering with panic. "Calm down?" she barked. "How do you calm down when you're being stalked by a walking glacier with a crown? Maybe I should just eat her—" she flung her arms up, "—but knowing her, she'd survive digestion and eat me from the inside out!"

Messe snapped the ledger shut. The sound smashed like a verdict. "That's enough, Claramae."

She froze. The room seemed to tilt with the name. Dorielle stepped in close, voice dropping low. "Don't say that. Not here. Not ever."

Messe's jaw flexed, but he said nothing.

"Claramae died during a Nightmare attack in the Trial of Elements. That's the tale Whitestone remembers. Enough faeries have died. I won't let the same fate swallow Faewood. Or Adelberan."

"And that's why we have a plan."

"Please don't tell me it's the dragons again."

Messe didn't flinch. "It's always been the dragons."

She threw her arms up in frustration. "That's not a plan. That's a death wish!"

"It's our last resort," Messe said. "And we're at the edge of the rope now."

Claramae paced, shoes tapping the tile too fast. "So we're doing it? Just like that? Handing her over?"

"She will marry Belmond. The Drach will protect her and her domain."

"She's a child."

"She's a key."

"She's not a sacrifice!" Claramae snapped, spinning to face him. "This isn't what—" Her throat caught. The name hovered unspoken. It tasted like sad ashes. "This isn't what he would've wanted."

"Don't you dare say his name," Messe said, the candlelight casting sharper lines across his face. "It was those fantasies—true love, fate-bound saats, love conquers all—that led us into this mess. That era's dead. Burned out. What comes now is fire. Dragon fire!"

She stared at him, truly stared as if trying to find some trace of the man she used to trust. "And you think fire, dragon fire, will save us?" she asked. " You think fire destroys the Nightmares? That is not what I witnessed. You think a girl barely old enough to name her likes and dislikes is the one to burn for it?"

"She's not burning," Messe replied too calmly. "She's becoming."

Claramae's hands clenched at her sides, nails pressing little crescents into her palms. "She never asked for this. She didn't choose it."

"Heroes never do. It's not a choice that makes them. It's the weight that's already been set on their shoulders—before they can even stand."

"And what if she breaks beneath it?"

Messe didn't answer. He only looked at the map laid out between them as if the ink had already decided everything. "That is not what Fiorna promised us."

"In the early Summers, I received a letter I was certain had been penned by a child playing scholar. The cursive was almost too delicate, the questions—about a friend who had 'wolved'—too naïve to take seriously. I thought, what kind of fool writes to a professor like me about a curse, expecting an answer that won't ruin their precious anonymity?

So, like the arrogant idiot I was, I threw it away.

If I had known it was Eura Berdorf's hand guiding that ink—my own daughter's— I would have burned the words into memory. I would have written back, even if only to admit I knew nothing. And still know nothing.

But my mission was grander, wasn't it? Prevent the End of Times, chase the Point of No Return, play god while ignoring the smallest, most kind plea that ever reached me. Congratulations, Professor Duvencrune. You had a chance to bond with your child, and you filed it straight to the trash. Idiote."

—The Hexe – Book Three by Professor Edgar O. Duvencrune, First Edition, 555th Summer.

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