Chapter 1 – The Weight of a Lie

The root punches through the boiled leather of my coat and sinks dead-center into my sternum.

No blood spills. There is only a glacial, blooming pressure that forces the air from my lungs in a single, ragged hiss. My boots scrape backward against the slick ice of the ledge. The wooden puzzle-box I just spent three hours climbing the sheer face of the Needle to open falls from my numb fingers, tumbling silently into the mile-deep gorge below.

The thing left in my hands—the living heart of the mountain—pulses.

It is roughly the size of a fist, crystalline and jagged, wrapped in veins of frost that now snake directly through my clothes and into my chest cavity. It beats. Once. Twice. The rhythm does not belong to me, but it violently syncs with my own heart, overriding my pulse with the slow, crushing cadence of shifting tectonic plates.

I drop to one knee on the freezing stone. The wind on the Sky Staircase howls, tearing at the edges of my hood, trying to peel me off the cliff face.

I am an altitude courier. I smuggle possibilities between the warring lowland factions and the sky monasteries, trading in the physical weight of words. The atmosphere up here is too thin to hold deception lightly. I carry three sealed letters in my satchel right now, bought by the lowland warlords, filled with heavy, leaden truths. Truths anchor you. They act as ballast. A verified fact drops like a stone in this air, keeping a courier from blowing right off the mountain when the gales hit.

But right now, the truth is dragging me down. The weight of the mountain heart embedded in my chest is staggering. I cannot carry this and the letters. I cannot climb with a mountain’s core attempting to root itself in my vascular system.

I need an updraft. I need to move.

I press my back against the sheer rock face and look up. The suspension bridge hangs three hundred feet above, a fraying line of rope and wood cutting through the blizzard.

I tilt my head back, exposing my throat to the biting wind.

"I will deliver this heart to the Emperor untouched," I scream into the gale.

It is a total, absolute lie. I have every intention of carrying this heart to the high monastery, cracking it open, and selling the mountain’s secrets to whoever offers the most unbroken altitude-tethers.

The thin air registers the false promise instantly. A lie has no anchor. A lie up here is volatile, weightless, and desperate to ascend.

The words dissolve into a violent, upward spiral of snow. The localized gale catches the heavy fabric of my coat, negating the anchor of the truths in my satchel. The lie yanks me upward. I ride the updraft, my boots scrambling for purchase on the frost-slicked stone, letting the sheer aerodynamic force of my own dishonesty propel me up the vertical face.

The ascent is brutal, reckless. The frost-veins from the heart pulse against my collarbone, spreading a numbing cold down my arms. Every time the updraft threatens to falter, I feed the wind another half-truth. I am completely fine. I know exactly what I am doing.

My gloved hand crests the ledge. I haul myself over the lip of stone and collapse onto the wooden slats of the suspension bridge.

The wind dies. The lie spends itself.

The air at this station is razor-thin. I take a sharp breath, and my lungs seize. The cold burns, an acidic fire scraping the inside of my ribs, but it’s the sudden, violent lack of oxygen that twists the knife.

My knees hit the frozen wood. I gasp, pulling nothing but empty, freezing static into my throat.

Wait here.

The memory echoes, uninvited, carried by the physical sting of the thin air.

I’ll bring back an oxygen tether. Just wait. Don’t move.

The sensation hits me with the force of an avalanche. It is heavier than the truth-letters in my bag. The ice-rimmed camp at the twelfth station, ten years ago. The receding crunch of boots in the snow. The slow, numbing realization setting into my fourteen-year-old bones that the footsteps were never coming back. You do not survive the high peaks by waiting. You do not survive by trusting someone else to bring the air back.

You survive by turning the path into a game where you never, ever stop moving. If you never stop, you are a moving target. You cannot be left behind if you are already gone.

I force a breathless, jagged laugh, slapping my numb cheeks with a leather-clad palm to shock the blood back into them.

"Just a stroll," I croak to the empty, violently swirling gorge. "First one across the rotting bridge wins."

I push up, ignoring the agonizing burn in my chest. The bridge sways wildly under my boots, the ropes groaning against the iron pitons driven into the cliff. I take one step. Then another. I do not look down. I treat the swaying wood like a puzzle floor, plotting my steps, refusing to let the panic set in.

Then, the blizzard parts.

He does not step out of the storm; he is the center of it.

He stands at the far end of the bridge, a tall, severe silhouette cutting through the whiteout. Aro Sen. The storm prince.

Even through the swirling snow, I can see the ragged, raised scars on his shoulders where his wings used to be—the brutal physical cost of dropping a city from the sky. He wears no heavy courier coat, only dark, close-fitting leathers that seem entirely unaffected by the lethal temperature. He does not fight the thin air. He dictates to it.

I freeze. My hand goes instinctively to the glowing frost-veins spreading across my chest. He was sent to escort the package. To make sure the courier didn’t look inside.

I took the job because a blind delivery pays double. I opened the box because playing by the rules is a great way to end up frozen to a rock.

Aro’s pale eyes lock onto me. They are the color of a winter sky right before it kills you.

I pivot, drawing breath to throw another massive lie into the wind, hoping to blow myself backward, off the bridge, down to a lower ledge.

He is already moving.

He is impossibly fast, utilizing the atmospheric pressure rather than fighting it. The distance between us compresses in a fraction of a second.

He hits me.

We crash onto the bridge hard. The rotting wood screams under the impact. His body covers mine, a crushing, unyielding weight pinning me to the slats. But the moment his skin makes contact with mine, a shockwave of pure, concentrated oxygen floods my starved lungs.

It is his storm-blood. He is sharing his pulse, forcing his regulated, perfect heartbeat into my erratic, failing one. The magic breaches my skin, a surge of atmospheric equilibrium that clears the black spots from my vision and fills my chest with rich, heavy air.

It is a life-saving embrace. It feels exactly like a bear trap snapping shut.

His hand clamps around the back of my neck, his fingers threading into my hair, holding my skull an inch from the splintering wood. The heat radiating from him is absolute, burning away the frost on my collar. I can breathe, fully and deeply, but I am entirely, completely pinned. My limbs are trapped under the dense muscle of his body. I am relying on his biology to keep me conscious.

The panic spikes, sharp and feral. I hate it. I hate the tether.

"You opened the package, Nima," Aro says. His voice is a low, vibrational rumble, entirely devoid of breathlessness. It is steady as bedrock.

"Customs inspection," I wheeze, forcing a smirk, fighting the overwhelming urge to relax into the heat of his chest. "You’re out of your jurisdiction, prince. I haven’t missed the delivery window yet."

His eyes drop to my chest. He stares at the crystalline frost-veins of the mountain heart, glowing faint blue through the torn leather of my coat, anchored directly into my flesh. His jaw tightens, a hard line of suppressed fury and rigid calculation.

"You foolish, arrogant girl," he murmurs, his grip on the back of my neck tightening just enough to remind me who controls the air in my lungs right now. "Do you have any idea what you have anchored to yourself?"

"A bargaining chip," I shoot back, twisting my wrist, trying to find an angle to draw the small climbing knife at my hip.

He catches my wrist without looking, pinning it flat against the wood. His thumb presses into my pulse point.

"You are going to die up here," he states, a matter of fact. Not a threat. A weather report.

"I’ve been told that before." I flash my teeth. "Yet here I am, wasting your air."

He does not rise to the bait. His pale eyes shift from my face, looking past me. He is looking toward the east.

The storm breaks, just for a second.

The sky on the horizon cracks open, bleeding a pale, bruised violet.

Dawn.

The bridge begins to hum. It is not the wind vibrating the ropes. It is a deep, tectonic frequency that rises through the stone, up the iron pitons, and into the wood, rattling the teeth in my skull.

Aro’s weight shifts, pressing me harder against the bridge. He braces himself.

"What is that?" I demand, the bravado slipping for a fraction of a second. The vibration grows from a hum to a deafening, grinding roar.

Down at the base, miles below in the red zone, the mountain claims its morning toll. A sacrificial body is fed to the stone on the sky staircase. The peak consumes it.

The mountain climbs.

The entire cliff face jerks violently upward.

It is the height of one human body, achieved in a single, catastrophic tectonic shift. The bridge snaps taut. The woven cables scream, shedding layers of ice and hemp in a spray of shrapnel. The wooden slats beneath us buckle, twisting under the sudden, immense shear force of the stone walls moving in real-time.

Aro’s weight is the only thing keeping me from being launched into the abyss. He presses me flat, his forearm dropping to bar my collarbone, stripping every ounce of my physical control as the world violently ascends.

The piton on the left side of the bridge shears out of the rock with a sound like a cannon shot.

The wood splinters beneath my spine, the deck dropping to a terrifying forty-five-degree angle, and the mile-deep gorge opens its jaws to swallow us whole.