Page 27 of Frostforge: Passage Two

"Explain yourself," she demanded, turning to a pale-faced Einar.

"I — I don't know what happened," he stammered, his Northern accent thickened by fear."I followed all the specifications, I swear it."

"Clearly not," Wolfe said, her voice laced with contempt."This is shoddy workmanship, rushed and careless.Your construct was fundamentally unstable — the magical channels improperly aligned, the metal inadequately prepared.You endangered everyone in this forge with your negligence."

The boy's face flushed with humiliation as Wolfe continued to dismantle his work, pointing out every flaw and mistake to the now-attentive class.Thalia listened with only half her attention, her mind spinning with possibilities.The golem's failure confirmed her suspicions — the substandard metals were causing catastrophic instabilities when infused with magic.

A flicker of movement caught her eye.While Wolfe lectured and the other students watched in morbid fascination, a figure detached from the shadowed wall and moved with silent purpose toward the scattered golem remains.

Senna.

Her movements were fluid and practiced as she knelt, ostensibly to examine the damage.With a motion so quick Thalia almost missed it, Senna's hand darted out and snatched a jagged shard of the broken chest plate.The piece disappeared into her pocket as she straightened, her face a mask of studious concern.

Their eyes met across the forge.For an instant, Senna's silver-gray gaze locked with Thalia's, sharp and calculating.Then she looked away, her expression smoothing into bland attentiveness as she rejoined the group of students.

Thalia's pulse quickened.Why would Senna want a piece of a failed golem?What possible use could she have for a fragment of substandard steel?

Unless…

Unless she already knew the metals had been tampered with.Unless she was collecting evidence — or analyzing the results of her work.

The suspicion crystallized in Thalia's mind as Wolfe dismissed the class with a warning about the consequences of rushing their work.As students filed out, many casting wary glances at their own constructs, Thalia remained at her station, one hand resting protectively on her brass golem's shoulder.

Someone was systematically sabotaging the academy's materials.Someone with access to the forges and knowledge of metallurgy.Someone who moved through Frostforge unseen and unquestioned.

And Senna had just moved to the top of Thalia's list of suspects.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Thalia's breath clouded in front of her face as she turned another brittle page ofPrinciples of Frost Manipulation.The tome weighed heavy in her lap, its leather binding cracked with age and cold.She shifted on the iron chair, grateful for the wolf pelt that separated her from the frigid metal.In the dim torchlight of Frostforge's library, the words seemed to shimmer and dance, either from the flickering flames or from her own exhaustion — she couldn't tell anymore.Three hours of study, and still the fundamental principles of cryomancy eluded her grasp like morning mist, as they had since she’d first arrived at Frostforge.

Unlike the grand, sprawling libraries of her homeland — those marble-floored monuments to knowledge where Southern nobles paraded their wealth as much as their intellect — Frostforge's library was compact and utilitarian.No gilded shelves or stained glass, just walls of reinforced ice-steel lined with books and scrolls.The collection was impressive not for its size but for its specialization: metallurgy, elemental magic, combat tactics, and Northern history.Knowledge is meant for survival, not pleasure.

The space had been carved directly into the mountain, with low ceilings that trapped the perpetual cold in a way that made even breathing feel like an exercise in endurance.Between the stacks, students hunched over their work, visible only as dark silhouettes against the scattered light of wall-mounted torches.The library's layout created perfect pockets of isolation — sound was swallowed by the dense shelving and the perpetual layer of frost that coated all surfaces.

Thalia underlined a passage with her fingernail, trying to commit it to memory: "The practitioner must envision not the creation of cold, but the extraction of heat — a subtle distinction that separates novices from masters."She closed her eyes, extending her awareness toward the small metal bowl of water on the table beside her.Breathe in, breathe out.Heat is energy.Energy can be redirected.She imagined drawing the warmth from the water, pulling it through herself and dispersing it.

When she opened her eyes, the water remained stubbornly liquid.Not even a hint of frost at the edges.

"Hells," she muttered, pushing back a strand of hair that had escaped her tight braid.Ice magic should not be this difficult.She could sense the vibrations in metal across a room, could manipulate the complex dance of elements needed to animate a golem heart, but ask her to freeze a bowl of water and suddenly she was as magically adept as a stone.She thought her troubles might lie in the distinction between materials and energy — the properties of existing matter were easy for her to sense, but cryomancy required the practitioner to create a reaction, to alter states.

The sound of boots on stone broke her concentration — heavy, deliberate steps approaching from between the stacks.She recognized the rhythm before she saw the face.Kaine.

He emerged from the shadows, his broad shoulders nearly filling the narrow passage between shelves.In his arms he carried a stack of parchment and loose notes, their edges curling with age.The torchlight caught the sharp planes of his face, highlighting the intensity in his ice-blue eyes.

"Found you," he said, his deep voice lowered to the library's obligatory whisper.Without waiting for an invitation, he set his materials down on the table beside her, claiming the space with the casual confidence that always left her both irritated and intrigued.

"I was trying to be difficult to find," Thalia replied, but moved her bowl of water to make room.The tome on her lap slid dangerously toward the floor, and she caught it with a quick reflex."What's all this?"

Kaine's normally stern expression had softened with something rare — excitement.She'd seen that look only a few times before, usually when he'd mastered a particularly challenging forge technique.

"I've been researching those markings we found beneath the forge last year," he said, arranging the papers in a specific order."And I've made progress.Real progress."

Thalia closed her book and set it aside, her frustrations with cryomancy instantly forgotten."You deciphered more of it?"

"Not just more.All of it."His fingers, calloused from years at the forge, gently smoothed out a central piece of parchment covered in his precise handwriting."It took cross-referencing with some obscure Northern runic systems and a dialect that's practically extinct, but I found patterns, repetitions."

Thalia leaned forward, her eyes scanning his notes.His handwriting was as controlled and disciplined as the man himself — each character formed with mechanical precision, annotations arranged in clean columns.It was the work of someone who approached problems methodically, leaving nothing to chance.

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