I was not sleeping.
I had not slept since Kaelen left my chambers, since his words had settled into my heart and taken root there. I sat by the window, watching the darkness on the northern horizon deepen and spread, watching the stars fade one by one as the grey light of false dawn began to seep across the sky.
The fortress was quiet. Not the heavy, waiting silence of the past days, but something else—a stillness that felt almost like peace. "The calm before the storm," I had called it. But now, as the light grew and the darkness gathered, I knew that the calm was ending.
The horn sounded without warning.
It was not the sharp, urgent blast of the watchtower alarms I had heard during drills. This was something else entirely—a deep, mournful sound that seemed to come from the very bones of the mountain. It echoed through every corridor of Frosthold, reverberated off every stone, and penetrated every chamber and hall and hidden space where people had taken shelter.
