Page 25 of Sereis
My friend stayed against that wall for long moments, and I watched him slowly slide down it until he was sitting on the floor, knees drawn up, head in his hands. The other servants walked around him, not cruel but careful, knowing that acknowledging his breakdown would only make things worse for everyone.
The window flickered, the image dissolving back into the Frost Veil's frozen landscape, but the damage was done. Guilt clawed at my throat with talons made of ice and self-loathing.
Here I was, wrapped in impossible luxury, transformed into something powerful and protected, claiming to suffer from isolation while wearing dresses that cost more than Tam would see in a lifetime. I'd been given magic, immortality, a dragon lord who called me precious and meant it. And what had I done with these gifts? Hidden. Waited. Followed rules while my best friend faced Caelus's retribution for my escape.
The seven-day wait until the Pact suddenly felt like an insult. Seven days of safety while Tam endured seven days of hell. The power building in my transformed body meant nothing if I couldn't use it to help the one person who'd helped me survive.
I pressed my forehead against the window, and frost spread from the contact in fractal patterns that looked like screaming. "I'm sorry," I whispered to the friend who couldn't hear me, to the boy who'd snuck me extra bread and terrible jokes and the kind of friendship that survived servitude. "I'm so sorry."
The responsive magic around me shivered, picking up my distress. Books fell from their shelves, their pages turning to chapters about guilt, about debt, about the weight of survivor's shame. The rose sculpture on the mantle turned black, its petals falling one by one to shatter on the floor with sounds like breaking promises.
Four more days until the Pact. Four more days until I had the full power of a dragon's mate, until even Caelus would have to recognize me as beyond his reach. Four more days of Tam suffering for the crime of being my friend.
I wanted to scream, to rage, to tear through these beautiful chambers until something finally broke instead of reshaping itself to my desires. But I didn't. I stood at that window, watching the alien landscape of my new home, and let the guilt eat me hollow from the inside.
Because that, at least, was real.
The guilt crystallized into something harder and sharper than the ice surrounding me—rebellion. I couldn't save Tam from here, but I could stop being the fragile thing everyone seemed determined to protect. I was transformed now, immortal, carrying enough ice magic in my veins to freeze a small lake. The idea that I needed constant supervision suddenly felt like the worst kind of insult.
My feet carried me to the moonlight doors before I'd fully decided to act. They stood closed as they'd been for three days, elegant panels of frosted crystal that caught the light and threw it back in rainbow spirals. But now, with my enhanced vision, I could see what I'd missed before—threads of magic woventhrough the crystal like silver wire, forming patterns that spelled out Sereis's will in the Old Tongue.
Stay. Protect. Contain.
The words pulsed with his power, with the absolute authority of a dragon lord in his own domain. They should have been unbreakable, especially to someone only three days into their transformation. But as I pressed my palm against the cold surface, I felt something else—gaps in the weaving where his distraction had left the magic incomplete. He'd been so focused on the approaching traders, on preparing his defense, that the wards were more suggestion than command.
I reached for the power inside me, that well of ice magic that had replaced my human blood. It responded eagerly, almost too eagerly, flooding through my arm and into the door with enough force to make the crystal sing. The wards resisted at first, Sereis's will pushing back against mine. But I thought of Tam, of his hands shaking behind his back, and pushed harder.
The magic felt like extending a limb I hadn't known I possessed. Not my human hands but something else, something that existed in the spaces between solid and liquid, in the quantum foam where ice crystals formed. I found the weakest point in the ward—a place where two commands intersected imperfectly—and drove my will through it like an ice pick through soft snow.
The wards shattered with a sound like wind chimes falling from a great height. Musical, almost beautiful, but unmistakably the sound of something breaking. The doors swung open silently, revealing the corridor beyond with its impossible geometry and shifting perspectives.
I should have felt guilty. Should have hesitated. Instead, I felt powerful for the first time since my transformation. Not just physically changed but capable of changing things myself.
The journey to the lower levels pulled me like gravity. I didn't consciously decide which walls to pass through or which dimensional folds to follow—my new instincts guided me toward something that sang to the ice in my blood. The palace grew stranger the deeper I went. The walls shifted from worked crystal to raw ice, from deliberate architecture to something more organic, as if the structure had grown rather than been built.
The scent reached me first—ozone and ancient earth, like the moment before lightning strikes permafrost. It carried promises of power, of magic so pure it predated names and categories. My transformed body responded to it the way flowers turned toward sun, inevitable and unconscious.
The stairway that appeared wasn't made of steps but of frozen waterfalls, each cascade caught mid-motion and turned solid. I descended by instinct, my feet finding purchase on surfaces that should have been too smooth to climb. The temperature dropped with each level, but the cold felt like coming home rather than danger.
When I finally emerged into the Deep Ice Gardens, I understood why Sereis had forbidden them.
This wasn't a garden in any sense humans would recognize. It was a cavern, vast enough that the ceiling vanished into darkness my enhanced vision couldn't penetrate. But growing from floor and walls and even hanging from invisible points in the air were trees made entirely of ice. Not sculptures—living things, somehow, their crystalline branches moving in breezes I couldn't feel, their frozen leaves chiming against each other in harmonies that made my bones ache.
They glowed from within, each tree lit by a different color of trapped light. Deep purple here, electric blue there, a gold so pure it hurt to look at directly. The light shifted constantly, thetrees breathing it in and out in patterns that might have been communication or might have been dreams.
The magic here wasn't contained or controlled. It was wild in the truest sense, older than the Frost Veil itself, older than Sereis, older than the concept of dragons having human forms. It pressed against my mind like too many voices speaking at once, each one offering secrets I wasn't equipped to understand.
But I was mesmerized. How could I not be?
I moved deeper into the garden, drawn by a massive tree at its heart whose light cycled through every color I could see and several I couldn't, creating new hues at the edges of perception.
The path toward it looked solid—black ice polished to mirror perfection, reflecting the tree lights in dizzying patterns. I stepped onto it without thinking, my mind too full of wonder to register danger.
The ice shattered instantly.
Not cracked, not broke—shattered, like it had been waiting centuries for something foolish enough to trust its surface. I plummeted through, the false floor giving way to nothingness, to a crevasse that yawned beneath the gardens like the world's hungry mouth.
My hand shot out by instinct, catching the edge as my body swung out over the abyss. The impact nearly tore my shoulder from its socket—transformed or not, I still had joints that could suffer. My fingers found purchase on the ice edge, but it was already beginning to crack under my weight, spreading in spider web patterns that promised another fall any second.
