The world is fracturing, she thought. The beasts are moving wrong. The ruins are waking. Something old and terrible is breaking through the skin of reality. And at the center of it is me.
It wasn't a thought born of arrogance. It was the opposite. It was the specific, soul-deep exhaustion of someone who had been the "problem" for as long as she could remember.
A god inside a mortal body that was never meant to hold one. A fire sealed in ice, and the world cracking around the pressure of it.
My fault, she thought, even though she knew it wasn't rational. She thought it anyway.
She passed a large window and stopped. Below, in the courtyard, two children of the palace staff were running through the light snow. Their breath was visible in the cold, their laughter muffled by the thick glass. They looked so simple. So easy.
