The Impassable Mountain Range didn't just block the northern horizon; it tore into the sky like a jagged row of broken teeth wrapped in ice and howling wind.
Up here among the high peaks, there were no hunting trails, no woodcutters' shacks, and no landmarks. There was only black rock, bottomless ravines hidden beneath treacherous crusts of snow, and a cold so sharp it felt like breathing ground glass.
Even inside the monochrome veil of the Mist World, where physical wind couldn't touch her skin, three straight days of climbing through this frozen labyrinth had pushed Nightingale close to her limit.
Every step inside the black-and-white realm drained her mental stamina. Normally, scouting a mountain pass like this alone would have forced her to stop every two hours just to keep her head from splitting open with a migraine.
This time, however, she wasn't making the climb alone.
Warm, calloused fingers were wrapped firmly around her left hand.
Walking half a pace beside her through the silent gray fog, William was like a living furnace. Even though he couldn't see three feet in front of his face inside her pocket dimension—where the real world looked like a distorted tangle of monochrome shadows to anyone without her eyes—his grip never wavered, and his stride never faltered.
Whenever Nightingale's boots slipped on a sheet of hidden ice, his arm was already there to steady her weight. Whenever a sheer cliff face or a thirty-foot chasm blocked their path, she would drop the Mist for two seconds, point to a ledge higher up the rock wall, and brace herself against his chest.
Pop.
With a soft crack of displaced air, William would bend space itself, jumping both of them across gaps that would have taken a mountain climber half a day to scale with ropes and iron spikes.
Between her truth-seeing eyes spotting the heat signatures of lurking demonic beasts from half a mile away and William's spatial jumps bypassing the worst of the terrain, the two of them had covered a week's worth of brutal mountain travel in less than seventy-two hours.
Late into the freezing morning of the third day, Nightingale suddenly stopped dead in her tracks.
Ahead of them, the swirling gray fog of the Mist World narrowed, pressed inward by two colossal walls of solid stone.
Cutting straight into the belly of the mountain was a massive, jagged fissure. The only path leading toward the dark mouth of that cavern was a razor-thin ledge barely two feet wide, clinging to the cliffside above a gorge so deep its bottom was nothing more than a pit of pitch-black shadow.
— "We're here," — Nightingale whispered, her breath coming out in shallow pants as she let go of William's hand and dropped her magic.
Color and sound slammed back into their senses all at once.
A fierce gust of wind shrieked through the narrow gorge, whipping loose snow against their cloaks. High above their heads, the pale winter sky looked like a thin silver thread squeezed between two titanic slabs of granite.
Yet as William took a deep breath, he noticed that the air blowing out from the black fissure ahead wasn't quite as freezing as the blizzard on the slopes behind them. Damp, slightly warmer drafts rose up from deep inside the earth, carrying the faint, unmistakable smell of woodsmoke.
Even so, the sheer isolation of the place felt like a tombstone pressing down on the chest.
William rolled his stiff shoulders, letting out a low whistle as he eyed the narrow stone ledge leading into the dark mouth of the rock wall.
— "Talk about an evil villain's secret lair," — William muttered, cracking his neck to the left and then to the right. — "At least nobody has to worry about Church knights riding horses up that cliff. Come on, let's head inside and warm up. I'm dying to see what this famous Mentor Cara looks like in person."
He took a single step toward the ledge, naturally moving to put himself in front of her as the point man.
Before his boot could take a second step, Nightingale reached out and pressed her gloved palm flat against the center of his wool doublet.
— "Wait," — she said quickly, her fingers tightening slightly against the fabric over his chest. — "You can't come inside with me right now, William. I need you to stay out here in the shadows by the entrance. Just for a little while."
William paused, his dark eyebrows pulling together in a frown as he looked down at her.
— "Stay outside? Why?" — he asked, genuine confusion in his voice. — "Veronica, the whole reason I dragged myself up this freezing mountain was to watch your back in case Cara loses her mind."
— "I know, and I'm more grateful for that than I can put into words," — Nightingale said softly, her blue eyes looking straight up into his with quiet intensity. — "Still, you need to think about how this looks from the inside, William. Almost every girl in that cave has been hunted like an animal since the day her magic woke up. Some were sold out by their own fathers; others were beaten by town guards, locked in cellar cages by nobles, or watched their friends burn alive while priests cheered."
She lowered her hand slowly from his chest, her voice dropping into a serious, pleading register.
— "To most of my sisters, an unknown man isn't a person—he's a threat," — she explained. — "Even if you have magic of your own, you're still a six-foot-tall warrior walking into their last hiding place unannounced. If I march into the main hall with a strange man right behind me, half the camp will panic and start throwing magic before I can even get a single word out. Let me go in alone first. Once I talk to Wendy, calm everyone down, and explain about Prince Roland and Border Town, I'll come right back out to get you."
William stared at her for three seconds, then glanced past her shoulder into the dark throat of the cavern.
Every protective instinct in his body hated the idea of letting her walk into that cave alone after the argument he and Arthur had had about Cara's fanaticism. Yet William wasn't a mindless brute. He knew that kicking down the door and acting like an arrogant hero would only prove Cara right and terrify a group of traumatized teenage girls.
Inside a bunker full of cornered survivors, Nightingale's voice was a far better weapon than his fists.
Letting out a long breath of white mist through his nose, William stepped back and leaned his broad shoulders against a recessed pocket of dark rock just inside the windbreak of the fissure.
— "Fair point. Scaring the hell out of fifty armed witches is a bad way to say hello," — William agreed, crossing his arms over his chest as his eyes turned sharp and tactical. — "Still, listen to me carefully, Veronica. Don't drop your guard just because you consider this place home. That cavern looks deep, and with the wind howling through this gorge, I won't be able to hear a normal conversation from out here."
He reached out and tapped two fingers lightly against the silver dagger hilt at her waist.
— "If Cara starts acting crazy, or if anyone in that cave tries to lay a finger on you, don't try to play peacemaker," — William warned, his voice dropping an octave. — "The second you scream or I feel a spike of combat magic from inside, truce or no truce, I'm jumping straight through that tunnel to pull you out. Deal?"
Looking at the fierce, uncompromising promise in his dark eyes, Nightingale felt a warm knot tighten in her chest. For a woman who had spent her entire life being used as a disposable blade by others, having someone stand in a blizzard just to be her shield was a feeling she still wasn't quite used to.
— "Deal," — Nightingale replied, a genuine, gentle smile curving her lips. — "Don't freeze out here, Commander. I won't be long."
Pulling her white hood up over her blond hair, she stepped into the monochrome ripple of the Mist World and glided silently across the narrow stone ledge into the mountain's throat.
The outer tunnel twisted inward for nearly two hundred yards, sloping gradually downward into the core of the rock.
As Nightingale rounded the final bend where the natural stone corridor opened up into the main underground cavern, the faint orange glow of distant campfires began to bleed through the gray veil of her magic.
Making sure she was inside a quiet shadow behind a cluster of stalagmites, she released the Mist and let her leather boots touch the cold, solid stone of the floor.
She took a deep breath of the cavern air.
It smelled of damp moss, unwashed wool blankets, char, and boiled roots—a far cry from the roasted meats and warm bread of Prince Roland's dining hall, yet to Nightingale, the familiar scent still carried the quiet weight of sisterhood.
Just ten paces away, a young girl bundled up in three layers of patched linen was trudging along the cavern wall with an armful of dry pine branches gathered from the lower slopes.
Hearing the soft scuff of Nightingale's boot against the gravel, the girl froze. Her shoulders jerked up to her ears, and wisps of thick gray smoke immediately began to curl from her palms in defensive panic—until she turned her head and saw the face beneath the white hood pushed back in the dim light.
Clack-clatter!
The entire bundle of firewood slipped from the girl's arms, scattering across the stone floor.
— "Nightingale?!" — the girl gasped, her voice cracking with sheer disbelief before her face lit up. — "You're back! You actually made it back!"
It was Smoke, one of the younger combat witches who usually guarded the perimeter tunnels.
Nightingale's face softened into a warm smile as she stepped forward to help pick up the wood.
— "Of course I came back, Smoke," — Nightingale said lightly. — "Did you think a little snow was going to keep me away from—"
The words died in Nightingale's throat.
As she took another step closer and the light from a nearby wall torch fell across Smoke's thin frame, the smile vanished from Nightingale's face as if it had been slapped away.
Tied tightly around the left sleeve of Smoke's rough wool coat were two narrow strips of unbleached raw linen.
Mourning bands.
In the Witch Cooperation Association, whenever a sister died on the road or in the camp, the survivors wore a strip of raw cloth around their arms for seven days so the dead wouldn't be forgotten in the unmarked snow.
Nightingale's chest seized up, the air turning to lead in her lungs.
— "Two bands..." — Nightingale whispered, her voice barely above a tremor as she stared at Smoke's arm. — "Who? Who did we lose while I was gone?"
Smoke's bright expression crumbled instantly. The young witch looked down at the scattered branches around her boots, biting her lower lip hard as tears welled up in her eyes.
— "It's... it's Airy and Abby," — Smoke said, her voice choking on a quiet sob. — "The twins. Their eighteenth birthday was four days ago. When the Day of Awakening hit them after midnight... neither of them was strong enough to hold the backlash down. The Demonic Bite took both of them before sunrise."
Nightingale felt her knees go weak, her hand shooting out to brace herself against a rough stalagmite.
Airy and Abby.
She could still picture their faces clearly—two quiet, polite sisters with matching brown braids who had run away from a wealthy merchant estate near Fallen Dragon Mountain the previous summer. They had given up silk dresses and feather beds just for a chance to live, sharing a single ragged blanket by the fire every night while holding hands.
Four days ago, Nightingale thought, a sickening wave of grief and fury twisting her stomach into knots. Only four days!
If she had known the truth about the Demonic Bite a week earlier—if she had ridden hard into these mountains and told those two girls the simple, absurdly easy secret that Roland and Arthur had figured out in Border Town—Airy and Abby would still be breathing right now.
All they had needed to do was cast their magic until they were tired every evening, emptying the glass before it could overflow.
Instead, two more seventeen-year-old girls had died screaming in the dark, boiled alive from the inside by their own power while thinking the gods had cursed them.
— "We buried them out in the snowdrift behind the north ridge," — Smoke murmured, wiping her cheek roughly with the back of her sleeve before trying to force a weak, brave smile. — "It... it happens every winter, doesn't it? At least they aren't in pain anymore. Don't stand out here in the draft, Nightingale! Go on to the center fire. Wendy has been worried sick about you. She barely sleeps two hours a night waiting for you to walk through that tunnel."
Hearing Wendy's name was like a splash of cold water across Nightingale's face.
She couldn't bring the twins back. Standing here drowning in guilt wouldn't change what had happened four days ago. However, there were still dozens of unawakened girls sitting inside this freezing cavern right now—and she carried the cure to their death sentence right on her tongue.
Giving Smoke's shoulder a firm, silent squeeze, Nightingale turned and walked briskly toward the heart of the cave.
The deeper she went, the heavier her heart became.
When she had left for Border Town weeks ago, she had viewed this mountain camp as their proud, secret sanctuary. Now, after spending two weeks watching Border Town's brick kilns, eating hot meals in a sunlit dining hall, and listening to Arthur break down logistics, she saw the cave for what it truly was.
It was a freezing tomb.
Across the damp stone floor, sixty or seventy women and young girls were huddled together in tight clusters around small, smoky fires. Their clothes were threadbare rags stained with mud and soot; their lips were chapped and blue from the chill, and the sound of dry, hacking coughs echoed constantly off the high ceiling.
Near the largest fire pit in the center of the cavern, a tall woman with long, wavy auburn hair tied loosely at her waist was kneeling on a folded burlap sack, slowly stirring a blackened iron pot filled with thin, watery grain porridge.
Even dressed in a faded wool dress with dark circles of exhaustion under her eyes, Wendy radiated a gentle, unshakable warmth—the unmistakable presence of an older sister who carried everyone else's burdens on her own back.
— "Wendy," — Nightingale called out softly, stopping five paces from the fire.
Clink!
The wooden ladle slipped straight out of Wendy's fingers, splashing into the pot.
Wendy whipped her head around so fast her auburn hair flew across her shoulder. For half a heartbeat, her soft green eyes went wide with shock; the next instant, they brimmed with tears as the most genuine, relieved smile in the world broke across her face.
— "Veronica!" — Wendy cried out, scrambling to her feet and brushing the hearth ashes off her skirt before rushing forward.
In the entire Association, Wendy was the only person who still called Nightingale by her birth name—a right earned years ago in a dark alley when Wendy had pulled a broken, half-mad noble girl out of the gutter and given her a reason to live.
— "How many times do I have to tell you that little noble girl is dead?" — Nightingale teased softly, though her voice was thick with emotion as she opened her arms. — "I'm a shadow assassin now, remember?"
— "Shadow assassin or not, you will always be my little sister," — Wendy whispered, throwing her arms around Nightingale's neck and pulling her into a fierce, bone-crushing hug. — "Throwing away the nightmares of your past doesn't mean throwing away your heart, Veronica. Gods above... when the blizzards started last week, I was terrified the snow had swallowed you whole."
Nightingale buried her face against Wendy's warm shoulder for a long moment, letting the familiar scent of pine soap and woodsmoke steady her racing pulse .
When they finally pulled back, Wendy kept both hands on Nightingale's shoulders, her expression shifting into a look of quiet, bracing dread as she glanced down at Nightingale's empty hands.
— "You came back alone," — Wendy said, her voice dropping to a low, careful whisper so the younger girls nearby wouldn't overhear. — "The newly awakened girl in Border Town... were we too late to get her off the gallows?"
A brilliant, unstoppable smile lit up Nightingale's face.
— "We weren't too late at all, Wendy! Her name is Anna, and she's completely safe," — Nightingale said, her voice vibrating with barely contained excitement. — "In fact, there isn't just one witch in Border Town anymore—there's a second girl named Nana too! And Wendy... Anna didn't just survive the gallows. What she and the Prince discovered in that town is going to save every single one of us!"
Wendy blinked, her brow furrowing in confusion.
— "What she and the Prince discovered?" — Wendy repeated slowly. — "Wait... you mean the Fourth Prince didn't execute her? Did you break her out of his dungeon and hide her in the town?"
— "No! She lives right inside his castle!" — Nightingale said, speaking faster now as the words tumbled out in a rush. — "Everything we thought we knew about nobles is upside down in Border Town, Wendy! Prince Roland Wimbledon and his two advisors aren't like the lords in the capital at all. They don't care about the Church's lies, and they don't treat witches like monsters or tools! He pays Anna and Nana a monthly salary in silver and gold royals, gives them warm wool clothes, lets them study in his hall, and feeds them meat and white bread at his own table!"
Nightingale gripped Wendy's wrists, her blue eyes shining in the firelight.
— "Border Town is a real sanctuary, Wendy!" — she pressed on. — "They've built a twelve-foot wall out of liquid stone that no demonic beast can scratch, and they have iron weapons that shoot thunder and pierce knight armor from a hundred paces! More importantly, the Prince gave me his word: if the Association comes down from the mountains, he will welcome every single sister into his territory as free citizens! No more starving in caves, no more running from inquisitors—and Wendy, they figured out how to beat the Demonic Bite! Anna turned eighteen two weeks ago, and she woke up the next morning without a single scratch!"
Nightingale paused to catch her breath, waiting for Wendy to gasp, to cry tears of joy, or to immediately call the sisters together to pack their bags.
Yet Wendy didn't smile.
Instead, the warm relief on the older witch's face slowly faded, replaced by a heavy, heartbreaking look of sorrow and guarded caution.
Glancing once at the young girls huddled around the nearby fires, Wendy gently pulled her wrists free from Nightingale's grip and looked down at the bubbling pot of thin porridge.
— "A royal prince from the Wimbledon family..." — Wendy murmured, her voice quiet and laced with deep skepticism. — "The very same bloodline that signed the royal decrees putting a bounty on every witch's head for the past hundred years... is suddenly offering us gold coins, warm beds, and freedom out of the goodness of his heart?"
Wendy raised her green eyes, looking at Nightingale as if she were looking at a naive child who had fallen for a street magician's trick.
— "Nightingale, think about what you're saying," — Wendy whispered softly. — "Warm houses, no pain on the Day of Awakening, a lord who treats witches as equals... That sounds word-for-word like the fairy tales we used to tell the little ones to help them fall asleep. Are you sure this Prince hasn't simply staged a clever play with two captive girls to lure the entire Association out of the mountains into a single net?"
— "It isn't a play! I watched them for three weeks from inside the Mist without them even knowing I was there—" — Nightingale started to argue, only for her voice to catch in her throat.
Around the main campfire, three or four older witches who had overheard parts of the conversation were staring at Nightingale with the exact same expression—tight jaws, narrowed eyes, and cold, defensive disbelief.
Not a single one of them bought it.
Damn it, Veronica, use your head, Nightingale scolded herself silently, a sharp pang of frustration hitting her chest. Look at this from their side.
In the castle, she had watched Roland teach Anna atomic theory, watched Arthur draw little stick-figure cartoons for Nana, and felt William risk his neck in a dark tunnel for ordinary guards. She had lived it.
To Wendy and the others, however, those three weeks were just a crazy story told by a scout who had been gone too long. Over the past five years, how many sisters had been fooled by sweet-talking barons or young knights who swore they loved them, only to wake up in iron chains the moment the Church offered fifty gold royals?
When you spent your whole life being beaten whenever someone held out a hand, you stopped believing in open hands.
Realizing that excited stories about steam engines and banquets would only make her sound more brainwashed, Nightingale forced herself to stop. She closed her eyes, took a slow, steadying breath to drop her assassin's composure back into place, and reached out to take Wendy's hands again.
— "Wendy, forget the food and the walls for a second. Just look at me," — Nightingale said, her voice dropping every trace of breathless excitement until it was as calm and sharp as her silver dagger. — "Tell me: what is my magic?"
Wendy blinked at the sudden shift in tone.
— "You walk inside the Mist," — Wendy answered slowly.
— "And what else?" — Nightingale pressed, locking her blue eyes onto her friend's. — "When I look at a person in my world, I don't see skin or clothes. I see the flow of their magic, the beat of their pulse, and the shifting colors of their emotions. Have you ever, in all the years we've known each other, seen anyone successfully lie to my face while I was watching them from the Mist?"
Wendy's brow creased as she thought about it. Slowly, she shook her head.
— "No. Nobody can hide their true intentions from your eyes."
— "Nobody," — Nightingale confirmed firmly. — "For three weeks, I stood two feet behind Prince Roland and his two advisors while they worked, ate, and argued in private. And on the night I finally put my blade to the Prince's throat and asked him why a royal lord would treat witches like human beings instead of monsters, do you know what happened to the color of his soul?"
Wendy held her breath, her attention completely hooked now.
— "It didn't ripple once," — Nightingale whispered. — "When he told me that in Border Town a witch's past doesn't matter, and that magic is nothing more than a natural gift meant to build a better world, every single word was pure, unshakable truth."
Wendy let out a long, shaky sigh, her shoulders dropping an inch as the weight of Nightingale's power forced her to take the claim seriously. Still, the older witch's practical mind immediately jumped to the next terrifying hurdle.
— "Even if this young Prince genuinely means well right now, Veronica... goodwill doesn't stop an army," — Wendy said quietly, glancing toward the dark ceiling of the cave. — "If he harbors dozens of witches openly in Graycastle, the Church of Hermes won't sit still. They have thousands of soldiers, Judgment armies, and God's Stones of Retaliation. A single frontier town going up against the Holy City is suicide."
A small, knowing smile touched the corner of Nightingale's mouth.
— "I threw that exact same argument in his face during our first meeting," — Nightingale admitted softly. — "I asked him how an exiled prince in a muddy mining town could possibly hope to stand against the Church and the entire continent just to shelter us."
She paused for a second, remembering the quiet determination in Roland's gray eyes that night by the fireplace.
— "He looked right at me and said: 'If you never even try to fight for it, you will never know the answer.'"
Wendy froze.
For a woman who had spent years running further and further into the freezing wilderness just to buy one more day of breathing, hearing that a royal prince had chosen to plant his feet and fight for them hit something deep inside her chest.
— "And his colors didn't waver when he said that either?" — Wendy asked, her voice barely a whisper as the first genuine crack appeared in her armor of doubt.
— "Not by a hair," — Nightingale replied.
For five full seconds, Wendy stared into Nightingale's eyes. She knew her friend better than anyone alive. Veronica was cynical, razor-sharp, and fiercely protective of the sisters; she would have slit her own throat before leading Wendy into an inquisitor's trap.
Slowly, Wendy's fingers curled tightly around Nightingale's hands.
— "He really isn't lying..." — Wendy breathed out, her voice trembling slightly as the sheer magnitude of what Nightingale was saying began to sink in. — "And what about the Demonic Bite? You really saw this Anna girl survive her eighteenth birthday without pain ?"
— "I didn't just see her survive it—I brought one of the Prince's drawings with me to show you what she's building, and his military commander walked all the way up this mountain with me to guard our retreat," — Nightingale said, leaning in closer as she remembered William waiting patiently out in the freezing wind at the mouth of the gorge. — "His name is William, Wendy. He's waiting just outside the tunnel right now because he didn't want to frighten the younger girls. Between his strength and the Prince's walls, none of our sisters ever have to die like Airy and Abby again."
Seeing the mention of the twins make Wendy flinch, Nightingale squeezed her older sister's hands with everything she had.
— "Tonight, as soon as the patrols come back from the snow and Mentor Cara calls everyone to the center fire for dinner, I'm going to tell the whole camp about Border Town," — Nightingale said, her voice burning with quiet urgency. — "Cara is stubborn, and the girls are scared of the outside world. I can't break through years of fear by myself, Wendy."
She looked straight into the green eyes of the woman who had once saved her life.
— "When I stand up in front of the fire tonight... I need you standing beside me to help convince them."