The door to Butter’s room hissed shut behind her, sealing out Lucien’s mansion and the suffocating weight of his polite concern. She'd been secretly eavesdropping on their conversation focusing her sharpened senses as hard as needed to catch every word.

  The mansion’s whispers had clung to her eardrums like syrup, every murmured word between Lucien and Yume, every click of Blur’s wings, even the drone of distant appliances. She’d dialed her hearing to a razor’s edge, carefully, just like Dad had taught her: Listen like the air itself is gossiping. Lucien monitored her magic, not her biology. So she'd let her ears do the stealing.

  Butter didn’t throw herself onto the bed. She melted onto it, face-first into a mountain of plushies. A slate-grey beanie, the color of rainclouds and forgotten candy wrappers, was pulled low over her forehead, hiding her eyes. Her eardrums hummed with the aftershock of overclocked senses.

  The room was a chaotic ode to her fractured world. Walls painted a soft, dreamy lavender were plastered with intricate pencil sketches, fantastical creatures peeking from behind floating islands, candy-colored nebulas, detailed diagrams of improbable machines. Shelves groaned under the weight of her beanie collection: a rainbow explosion of knit and fleece, from neon green frog-shaped ones to a deep velvet one dotted with embroidered stars.

  In the corner, towering like a monument to artificial joy, were stacks of candy cartons, sour belts, gummy worms, imported Japanese sodas, chocolate truffles, all pristine, untouched, purchased by Lucien himself. They felt less like treats and more like provisions for a siege. Scattered across a fluffy rug were plushies of unsettling adorableness; a three-eyed axolotl, a fanged bunny holding a tiny chainsaw, a squid wearing a top hat.

  Curled amidst the plushie avalanche, Butter clutched a new sketchbook to her chest. This one was covered in soft, fuzzy red fabric. Her shoulders hitched silently. The grey beanie muffled the sounds, but the damp patch spreading on the axolotl plushie’s head was evidence enough.

  She lay there for a long time, the only sound the too perfect hum of the mansion’s climate control. Then, slowly, she uncurled. Her eyes, peeking from under the beanie’s brim, were pink-rimmed, her pale cheeks blotchy.

  "I miss you, Dad."

  The whisper barely left her lips, dissolving into the suffocating silence of her room. His face flickered behind her eyelids, that smile like sunlight through stained glass, warm and fractured all at once. His voice, a low hum that used to steady the tremors in her hands, now just a ghost tangled in her memories.

  Fresh tears carved hot trails down her cheeks. Lucien’s gilded cage. Winter’s razor-edged vigilance. They stood between her and him like castle walls, not to protect her, but to bury the truth she ached to uncover.

  She knew the risks. The Syndicate didn’t want her, they wanted her taken apart, every magical synapse mapped and harvested. She was a living riddle, and they were the blade.

  But still. Still.

  She would burn down every safeguard, every rule, every warning, if it meant one more second of his voice. One more flicker of his smile. Even if it killed her. The memory hit like a sucker punch.

  Eight years old. Knees scraped from training. Gummy worm dust still crusted under her nails.

  The snow hadn’t been white. That was the first wrong thing.

  It fell in jagged flakes, black at the edges. It didn't just fall; it consumed, swallowing the sound of the world, the heat, the very light itself. The cold didn’t bite; it entombed, a silent, absolute zero that promised to freeze and preserve the world in a perfect, dead tableau for eternity.

  Her breath fogged the air, but the fog lingered, clotting into the black flakes themselves, adding to the storm.

  This wasn't weather. It was an ending.

  Paris had knelt in front of her, his usual smirk gone, replaced by a grimace of immense strain. His long coat was torn, one sleeve soaked in something too dark to be blood. His own shadow seemed to writhe and bleed from him, pouring upwards into the sky to fuel an impossible counter-spell. Behind him, twenty-three year old Lucien stood unnaturally still, his pale eyes reflecting the storm like cut glass. Twenty-one year old Winter hovered at his shoulder, her black claws flexing.

  Butter had known something was wrong before he spoke.

  Dad never took off his hat for no reason.

  The slate-gray beanie, the one he’d worn every day since she could remember, peeled away, letting his curls tumble free. He pressed it into her tiny hands. His fingers were ice-cold.

  "Protect her for me, Luce."

  Winter snarled, a sound of pure, helpless rage. "You can come protect her yourself."

  Paris didn’t look at her. His gaze was locked on the sky, where the clouds rippled, not with wind, but with the pressure of something vast and infinitely cold pressing itself into their dimension. "It's a mother. A womb of forever-winter. Her ice doesn't melt. It just... remains. Until everything is her." He gestured to the black snow. "This is the best I can do. My gloom for the world's light. It makes it... temporary. It can melt. But the cost..."

  A barely audible wail came from the sky, like a mourning cry. Paris exhaled, sweat heading on his forehead even in the impossible cold.

  "Cahindra... the mother of a thousand gods. She didn't come to fight. She came to inherit."

  A gust of the poisoned, gloom-infused snow howled between them.

  "I don’t think I can come back," he whispered, and for the first time, Butter heard not just fear, but exhaustion so profound it sounded like death.

  Then he’d kissed her forehead, his lips chapped and trembling.

  "Haha, your forehead’s so slick and greasy, like you're made of butter." His voice cracked. "Did you forget to wash your hands after eating gummy worms again?"

  A lie. She always washed her hands. He always teased her about it.

  But this time, his laugh was too thin, his fingers too tight on her shoulders.

  "Here. Keep this for me, okay?" He tucked the beanie over her wild curls. "I’ll be back."

  Another lie. She knew it when he let go. When he stood.

  Winter lunged.

  She grabbed Paris by the collar, yanking him into a crushing embrace. Her claws pierced his coat, drawing pinpricks of crimson, but she didn’t let go. Butter had never seen Winter touch anyone before, let alone hug them.

  "You suicidal bastard," Winter hissed into his shoulder. Her voice was raw, but her face, when she pulled back, was dry. Only Butter noticed the wet gleam on Paris’ coat where Winter’s cheek had been. "You better come back or I’ll rip you apart."

  One last smile at Butter, a nod at Lucien, a transfer of responsibility, and he had disappeared, reappearing a thousand feet above, his katanas already drawn, their blades catching the last clean light in the world.

  The clouds split.

  A silhouette unfolded, vast, wingless, and geometrically wrong, as if reality itself had cracked and something from the other side was pressing through. And then, a creature stepped from the tear.

  Her skin was transparent ice, revealing slow, glacial currents of pale blue light where veins should be. Her hair and eyelashes were the white of a fresh blizzard, and her dress was a living tapestry of individually crystallized snowflakes, whispering and tinkling with her every motion. On her shoulder stood a fox, its fur a stark map of white and glacial blue, its eyes chips of absolute zero.

  She did not look at Paris. She looked at the world below, and with a casual, graceful wave of her arm, the fresh falling white snow transformed.

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  It coalesced into a legion of heraldic horrors. Jagged ice dragons with breath that froze the air solid. Massive polar bears with hides of permafrost and claws that ripped the fabric of the cold itself. And penguins, a rain of them, plummeting from the sky. They were the most horrifying, their waddling forms a grotesque mockery of life. As they fell, they opened their beaks, and where there should have been tongues, were whirling, concentric shredders lined with needle-sharp ice-teeth, buzzing with a sound like a thousand frozen hornets.

  But they were not just falling. They were landing.

  The city below was already a charnel house of ice. The screams were not of panic, but of terminal agony, cut short into frozen silence. A dragon’s breath flash-frozen an entire city block, the inhabitants locked in postures of flight, their faces masks of eternal terror. A polar bear swiped a claw through a skyscraper, and the building didn't just collapse; it crystallized, shattering into a million frozen shards.

  And the penguins. They were the foot soldiers of the apocalypse. One landed on a fleeing man, its whirling beak-drill guzzling him down in a spray of crimson that instantly froze to its chest in a grotesque bib. Another hit the snow-covered ground and slid on its belly with unnatural speed, releasing a wave of sharp, shimmering ice shards that radiated outwards. A woman tripped, her hand brushing one of the shards. Instantly, the living blue magic crawled up her arm, and in less than a second, she was a perfect, terrified statue of ice, her final scream preserved for all eternity.

  Paris’s eyes widened, the storm in them churning with a horror that went beyond battle. Behind him, Winter snarled, her claws extending as she prepared to launch herself into the slaughter. Lucien’s hands were raised, the air around him beginning to warp with the nascent energy of a cataclysmic counter-measure.

  "NO!" Paris's voice tore through the chaos, a command that brooked no argument. "You can't stop the symptom. You have to cure the disease."

  He didn't charge. He didn't attack. He closed his eyes.

  And he stopped time.

  The effect was not global, but localized over the city, a millisecond of absolute, deafening silence. The screams froze in throats. The falling snow hung motionless. A penguin was suspended mid-guzzle, a ribbon of blood crystallized in the air before its beak.

  And then, Paris began to reverse it.

  It was a strain unlike any he had ever known. The veins on his temples bulged, and a trickle of black blood, the essence of his Gloom, seeped from his nose. The world outside their protective bubble began to rewind. The frozen statues unfroze, the woman stumbling backwards. The blood retreated from the penguin's beak, the man reforming whole and screaming, pulled back up into the sky. The shattered building reassembled. The scene reversed at a dizzying speed, until the entire horror show was reset, the legion of ice creatures were once again just beginning to fall from the sky, their descent newly initiated.

  In that single, perfect moment before the carnage could begin again, Paris moved.

  He became a storm of his own.

  Slashes of pure, blue shadow, the essence of his own being, flew from his katanas, not in single strikes, but in a net of annihilation so vast it blotted out the sky. Not a thousand, but tens of thousands of slashes, a galaxy of void-born crescents, met the falling army. They did not simply shatter; they were unmade, exploding into harmless, melting mist before they could even touch the ground. He was a sculptor of void, carving a path through her army by erasing its very existence from the timeline.

  He leaped, a comet of defiance against the endless winter, his katanas carving arcs of desperate light in the gloom. He shot toward her, the source of the ending.

  Cahindra turned her head. A slow, deliberate motion. Her snowflake-lashed eyes finally settled on him, and a voice like the cracking of a continent’s worth of ice echoed in the silent, dead air.

  "Do you come to perish, little shadow? Or merely to be the first exhibit in my new world?"

  Paris didn't answer with words. He answered with a violation. Gritting his teeth against the searing feedback in his soul, he reached for the flow of time itself again, trying to wrap its strands around her, to freeze this moment and end her in a single, timeless strike.

  It was like grabbing a glacier bare-handed.

  Cahindra didn't resist. She didn't counter. She simply... accepted his grasp. And then, she squeezed.

  The air didn't just freeze. It shattered.

  A sound like a universe of glass breaking screamed through the void. The very concept of time, in the space around them, crystallized and then exploded. Shards of frozen moments, a splinter of a scream, a sliver of a falling snowflake, a fragment of Paris's own determined snarl, fell around them like lethal, glittering rain, tinkling as they hit the ground and vanished.

  She hadn't stopped his power. She had broken the medium he sought to control.

  The fox on her shoulder chittered, a sound of dry bones rattling.

  And Cahindra grinned. It was a slow, spreading crack in a pristine ice field, a gesture of pure, predatory amusement that reached her frozen eyes. She stared directly at Paris, into the core of his being, and in that grin was the absolute understanding that his most potent weapon was, in her presence, nothing more than a child's trick.

  Then the black snow swallowed him whole.

  Back to the present day:

  Butter sniffed, wiping her nose on the sleeve of her oversized hoodie, another Lucien provision, impossibly soft cashmere. With trembling fingers, she opened the fuzzy blue sketchbook to a fresh page.

  She didn’t draw a dragon or a castle. She drew fireflies. Tiny, simple things. Just soft pencil outlines of little glowing bodies with delicate wings. Dozens of them. Not meticulously detailed, just... suggestions of light. She sketched them hovering, drifting, bumping gently into each other in the margins of the page.

  As her pencil touched the paper for the last firefly, a faint, warm tingling spread from her fingertips. She gasped softly.

  One by one, the sketched fireflies pulsed with a soft, golden light. Then, with a sound like tiny bubbles popping, they lifted off the page. Not perfect, glowing orbs, but little flickering shapes of contained light, shedding gentle golden sparkles like dust.

  They drifted upwards from the open sketchbook, filling the lavender-hued air of her room. They moved exactly as she’d drawn them, not in straight lines, but with a gentle, drunken wobble. They bumped into each other with soft sounds, changing direction haphazardly.

  One bonked gently against her slate-grey beanie, leaving a tiny golden sparkle before wobbling away. Another bumped nose-first into the window, bounced off with a comical little tink, and zigzagged towards a shelf, narrowly avoiding a neon-green frog beanie. A pair collided midair, spun in a dizzy circle, then drifted apart like confused friends.

  They didn’t fly straight. They zigzagged, bumped, failed. Just like her. But they glowed anyway.

  Butter watched, her tear-stained face holding a hint of amusement. A tiny, wobbly smile touched her lips. It wasn’t joy, not yet. It was the faintest crack in the grey clouds. A spark of her own whimsy, defiantly glowing in the pristine, oppressive silence Lucien provided.

  She reached out a finger. A firefly, wobbling precariously, bumped into it. It didn't burn; it felt like a warm, fuzzy static shock. It clung for a second, its tiny light pulsing gently against her skin, before clumsily launching itself back into the air, colliding immediately with a plushie’s ear.

  A small, shaky breath escaped Butter, almost... almost a laugh. She pulled the sad grey beanie a little further down, hiding the smile but not the tiny spark of light returning to her tired pink eyes.

  A firefly wobbled past her face, its glow flickering, just for a second, into a shade of blue she’d only seen once before.

  That exact shade of summer dusk clinging to his eyelashes when he’d taken the gummy worm. Stupid. She shouldn’t remember. Shouldn’t wonder if his hands still smelled like solder and sardine tins.

  Brad.

  The boy from the alley. The boy who’d looked at her like she was a person, not a weapon or a ghost. Jet-black hair messy as a crow’s nest, eyes like faded denim. She wondered if he was okay. She wondered if he ever thought about her at all.

  She could still feel the exact texture of his jacket sleeve when she’d shoved him, worn-thin cotton over a bicep tighter than expected for a dumpster-diving kid.

  The firefly guttered back to gold, taking Brad’s blue with it. Her ribs ached where the boy’s memory had briefly flared, a match struck against the frozen cliff of her solitude.

  Had he looked for her after she vanished? Had it hurt him, not getting a goodbye?

  The thought was a pebble dropped into still water. Ripples spread.

  Winter’s power had always been easy to measure, a glacier, vast and crushing, but finite. She could see its edges.

  Lucien was different.

  Every time she’d tried to sense him, her magic recoiled. Not like hitting a wall. Like staring into a sky so deep it stopped being blue and became nothing. No horizon. No end. Just the vertigo of realizing something was looking back.

  He’d never raised his voice at her. Never needed to. His anger wouldn’t be a storm. It would be the absence of storms, the moment before a supernova collapses, when the universe holds its breath.

  She tugged her beanie lower.

  Better to be good. Better to stay small. Better to never, ever find out what happened when a force like that finally snapped.

  She watched her imperfect, bumping fireflies fill her room with gentle, chaotic golden light, a silent rebellion drawn in pencil and brought to life by a magic fueled by tears and sour candy dreams.

  One firefly sputtered out mid-flight, its light dissolving like a sigh. Butter caught the fading spark in her palm, just like Dad’s laughter the day he vanished, before it winked out.

  There it was again.

  A tremor in her ribs. A pull behind her navel. His signature.

  Faint as a dying radio signal, but alive.

  Paris’ energy had always felt like summer dusk, indigo bleeding into gold, the scent of asphalt after rain. Now it was just echoes, but echoes didn’t fade unless the source was gone. And this one... this one pulsed.

  Somewhere out there, her dad was fighting.

  The realization was a hook in her heart.

  She’d felt it first six months ago, a flicker during a nightmare. Then again in the mansion’s library, so sharp she’d dropped a book. Lucien had glanced up, his ice-chip eyes dissecting her tremor. She’d lied. Said it was a cramp.

  That night, she’d started planning her escape.

  Because if Paris was alive, he was trapped. And if he was trapped, every second she spent in this gilded cage was a betrayal.

  She curled around the ache in her chest. The fireflies dimmed, sensing her distress.

  Where are you?

  The signature never stayed long. A breath of warmth in the dark, then gone, like he was flickering between worlds. But it was enough.

  Enough to make her pack sour belts and bolt into the night.

  Enough to endure Winter’s wrath.

  Enough to risk the Syndicate’s scalpels.

  Because if there was even a chance...

  A firefly landed on her knee. She stared at it, her vision blurring.

  Come home.

  Another firefly, bolder than the rest, drifted toward the vent. For a second, its light caught on something metal inside the grate. A pearl-white glint.

  A drone. Watching. Recording.