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“A… child?” Dawsyn hesitates to ask. Even now, she looks young. Too young.

“Ten and five,” she says. “Ten and five.”

Fifteen,Dawsyn thinks.A girl.

“I vowed to my dead that I would kill every last soul in the valley. I swore I would rid this earth of those that take and take and leave nothing. And the Mother…”

Yerdos pauses. Her eyes open. “The Mother tried to take me. I refused.”

“You went back to your mountain,” Dawsyn says for her. “You protected it.”

“And the Mother sent Moroz,” Yerdos answers, anger returning to her tenor. “And she smothered everything, suffocated it all – all but the mage-born.”

Dawsyn hesitates. “The mage-born?”

“Kladerstaff could not bleed them all,” Yerdos says, her gaze far away, hundreds of years removed from this place. “He could not find them all.”

“There was still a clan on the mountain,” Dawsyn says, realisation dawning. “The mages, they originated on the mountain.”

“And Moroz chased them into the valley. Moroz took them from our mountain. Just as I had been taken.”

Dawsyn breathes. She remembers Baltisse telling her of the mages that still lived.

“Are you the last mage in Terrsaw?”

Baltisse rolled her eyes. “No. But you will not find the others.”

“Why?”

“They do not want to be found.”

“We knew the mountain’s secrets and it flourished as we flourished,” Yerdos continues. “We bled into its streams and absorbed the energy from its soil. We travelled the ridges and caves and it cradled us. We took and it took. We gave and it gave.”

Dawsyn watches Yerdos’ face vacillate between hatred and yearning, all at once young and ancient. “Kladerstaff took you from your home,” she says carefully, gently. “And then Moroz took your home from you.”

Yerdos’ eyes turn molten, as Baltisse’s once had, as lethal and scorched as the pit below. And in them, Dawsyn can no longer see a great creature of brimstone, nor an ancient saint of legend. She sees a woman burning.

She sees her grandmother, bitterness etched in her brow, smothering anything soft.

She sees Briar, lost in grief and pitching herself into its depths.

She sees Baltisse.Baltisse.Incinerated by guilt, slowly boiling from within.

And finally, Dawsyn sees herself, cloistering into a pit of rage that she made her own, unable to claw her way out.

Dawsyn sees a woman forged in anger, in a wrath vehement enough to split a mountain in two.

“Moroz endures still,” Yerdos says. “And the Mother doesnothing.”This last word turns vicious. It reverberates around the cavern and pounds in Dawsyn’s blood.

But Dawsyn hears again that old mantra, the one that kept her among the living in a place meant for the dead. The words her grandmother passed to Briar, who then passed them on to her, and it saw her through the very worst Moroz could brandish.

“The cold is not alive.”

Yerdos’ churning eyes land squarely on hers and Dawsyn can feel the heat of their touch. Her lip curls back. “Moroz endures.”

“Moroz endures,” Dawsyn agrees, nodding her head slowly, carefully. Her heart breaks for this woman, trapped for an eternity in a hell of her own making. “But the cold does not live. It does not breathe, or move, or hold a sword,” she urges. “It… it does notlove.” The words come hoarsely, with the last vestiges of her breath. “And so it cannot die.”

Yerdos’ chin quivers, her eyes closing again. “No.”