She surfaced from sleep like someone dragged upward by the hair—lungs locked, throat sealed, heart battering itself against her ribs. For a wild instant she couldn’t tell if she was breathing air or swallowing lake water. Her vision flickered. Her hands clawed at the furs.

  I can’t breathe.

  Her body remembered before her mind did: the darkness under the water, the dead-silent pressure in her ears, the slip—her fingers losing the rung and the world tilting away beneath her.

  She pressed her palm hard against her chest. Again. Again. A small, rusty gasp broke through. Not enough. She forced another. Slower. The tent came into focus one shape at a time—coals hissing low, canvas walls, a faint curl of steam where snow melted on the floor.

  Only when her breath steadied did the rest uncoil.

  The trial.

  The cold that made thoughts shatter.

  The climb.

  The stones clattering against the altar.

  The darkness after everything went still.

  And beneath it all, the question she hadn’t had room to hear while she was fighting for air:

  What am I doing?

  It rose now, sharp and impossible to swallow.

  Why had she agreed to this? Why had she let anyone talk her into a trial meant to break soldiers twice her size? Why had she told herself she had a choice at all, when every step of this path felt carved long before she set foot on it?

  A sound escaped her—thin and uneven. She couldn’t tell if it was a laugh or the beginning of a sob.

  Maybe she’d fooled herself. Maybe none of this had ever been hers to choose. Not when every road out of Central led to another set of hands deciding her fate. Not when kingdoms weighed her like a commodity. Not when Roderic watched her with that unnerving mixture of strategy and… something she refused to name.

  He’d said he wouldn’t let her be harmed.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Then she nearly drowned.

  Nearly broke her spine on a rung of ice.

  Nearly slipped so cleanly into death that no one would have been surprised.

  Maybe it comforted her—barely—that he cared enough to keep her alive. That he wouldn’t let the Northerners destroy something he needed.

  A pawn had value, after all, if placed well.

  The thought sliced deeper than she’d expected.

  Her eyes stung. Not with panic now, but with something older, heavier.

  Lucan.

  She saw him every time she closed her eyes. She’d spent a year and more refusing to follow the memory to its edges—where he might be now, whether he’d escaped or been dragged screaming into a guardhouse because she wasn’t there. Whether he’d grown, hardened, disappeared.

  Whether he’d forgive her for surviving when he hadn’t been given the chance.

  A tear slipped down her cheek, quiet and final—as if her body decided she no longer got to choose what she held inside.

  Why didn’t I look for him?

  She’d slept in Eryndor’s stone halls for weeks. She could have asked a soldier. A clerk. A healer. She could have begged for records, followed rumors, chased any scrap of information.

  But she hadn’t.

  Fear had kept her small. Survival had kept her silent. She’d been too busy not breaking to even wonder if she could save someone else.

  And now she was here—training for a future she didn’t understand, letting strangers call her brave while she barely held her own breath steady.

  Another tear followed. Then another. She didn’t bother wiping them.

  She didn’t know what the prophecy wanted from her. Everyone seemed convinced she was the hinge the realms would turn on. Destroy or remake. As if the Everlight had reduced her life into two neat extremes with no place for the shaking, exhausted middle she actually lived in.

  She pressed both hands to her face.

  She didn’t believe in destiny—not with the certainty the Northerners carried like a birthright. But she had survived something she should never have survived. And a frightened part of her whispered a truth she didn’t want to touch:

  What if I’m wrong?

  Not chosen.

  Not fated.

  Just… wrong. Wrong about her limits. Wrong about her path. Wrong about how breakable she thought she was.

  Her shoulders trembled. The sound that came out of her wasn’t a sob—it was the sound of a lock finally giving way.

  She curled inward, forehead to her knees.

  She was scared.

  Of the next trial.

  Of the prophecy.

  Of what Roderic wasn’t saying.

  Of what the Northerners had begun to see in her.

  Of the girl she was becoming without meaning to.

  Outside, camp life carried on—voices calling orders, metal striking metal, the world moving whether she moved with it or not.

  She drew in a slow breath. Then another.

  Not steady—just anchored.

  She wasn’t ready. For the trial. For the prophecy. For any of it.

  But she wasn’t drowning anymore.

  For this morning, that was enough.