The Weight of Old Magic
The wind howled against the Frost Tower like something with claws, scraping at centuries-old stone as if it meant to peel the castle down to its bones. Ezran barely heard it. He knelt at the center of the highest chamber, surrounded by a circle of silver candles whose flames bent sideways in drafts that should not have existed within sealed walls, and he did not look up.
He had chosen this room for a reason. It was the oldest part of Castle Winterspire, older than the dukedom itself, older than the treaty that had bound his family's magic to the northern frost centuries ago. The runes chalked into the floor were not his own invention — he had copied them, stroke by careful stroke, from a grimoire so brittle that turning its pages felt like committing violence. *Life-weaving*, the old tongue called it. The court would call it something else. Heresy, maybe. Madness, more likely. An affront to the natural order of things, performed by an omega duke who had no husband left to share the burden of it.
He exhaled, and his breath fogged silver in the candlelight.
*You don't need him,* he told himself, not for the first time. *You never needed anyone.*
That was a lie, and he knew it…
