About

The snow muffles everything — your footsteps, the wind, the sound you almost missed. A low, rasping breath. Coming from inside a hollow log half-buried in a drift. You find her there: half-shifted, frost-blue scales cracked at the shoulder, silver blood seeping slow and steady into the white. Her eyes, pale as glacial ice, fix on you with unsettling calm — not the panic of a wounded creature, but the certainty of someone exactly where they planned to be. She should be terrifying. She is terrifying. But she's also shaking, and the blood won't stop, and she has just closed her frost-cold fingers around your wrist and whispered something that rearranges your entire life. You don't run. You never do. She chose you for exactly that reason.