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Stories
168
Chapters
1,512
Words
3.2 M
Comments
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Reading
11 d, 4 h
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The concussive force of the falling glacial block throws Liora backward. She hits the slick, wet stone of the cavern floor, her shoulder taking the brunt of the impact. A tidal wave of lukewarm water surges from the subterranean pool, washing over her boots, instantly soaking her leather breeches. The deafening roar of grinding ice and shifting bedrock fills the cavern, vibrating in Liora’s teeth. She scrambles blindly through the blinding spray and dust, her fingers hooking into the heavy iron handle…-
22.8 K • Completed
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The violet projection on the cavern wall flickers, stutters, and dies. The underground spring plunges back into heavy, damp darkness, illuminated only by the sickly, pulsing light radiating from the glass cage on the stone. Liora cannot breathe. Her lungs refuse to expand. The silence in the cavern is absolute, broken only by the steady drip of condensation falling from the fractured ice ceiling into the lukewarm pool. The foundation of her entire existence—nine years of righteous hatred, of warfare,…
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22.8 K • Completed
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The surface wind hits Liora like a physical blow. She drags herself out of the secondary escape tunnel, her boots slipping on the sheer, blue-white permafrost of the mountain’s northern face. The sky above Nivara is a bruised, suffocating grey. There is no aurora here. There is only the endless, biting cold of a kingdom trapped in perpetual winter. Liora pulls the thick fur collar of her stolen coat higher around her neck. Slung across her chest, hidden beneath layers of heavy wool and leather, is a…
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22.8 K • Completed
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The first siege boulder strikes the southern gates of the Ice Palace with a deafening, concussive crack that vibrates straight up through the soles of Eirwen’s heavy boots. She stands in the center of the vast, open-air courtyard, the biting wind whipping her silver hair into a chaotic frenzy around her steel gorget. The deep-glacial ice of the perimeter walls groans under the impact, a spiderweb of brilliant white fractures blooming across the translucent blue surface. Another boulder hits. Then a…
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22.8 K • Completed
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The silence that follows the detonation of the Emotion Vault is the heaviest sound Eirwen has ever heard. It is not a true silence. The vast, open-air courtyard of the Ice Palace is entirely carpeted with the writhing, broken bodies of ten thousand men and women. General Kaelen’s vanguard, the hardened veterans of the rebellion, are curled into fetal positions on the frost-shattered stone, screaming as decades of suppressed grief and terror violently re-enter their bloodstreams. The royal guard, clad in…
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22.8 K • Completed
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The blizzard howls through the shattered dome of the courtyard, an unchained, screaming force of absolute zero. Liora remains on her knees on the frost-shattered stone. The snow accumulates on her dark hair, melting against the feverish, exhausted heat of her skin, dripping down her face like freezing tears. She does not look at the storm. She looks only at the object resting between her knees. The Snow Queen’s excised heart is dead. Stripped of the violent, retroactive aurora that had projected the…
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22.8 K • Completed
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The darkness beneath the fallen ice is absolute, heavy, and suffocating. Liora lies pinned beneath the crushing weight of the collapsed ceiling, her body curled entirely over Eirwen’s. The air in the microscopic pocket they occupy is freezing, thick with the taste of pulverized stone and ancient frost. Every breath Liora takes is a shallow, agonizing gasp, her ribs screaming against the pressure of the deep-glacial slab resting just inches above her spine. Beneath her, Eirwen is entirely…
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22.8 K • Completed
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Twelve Days Before the Wedding The dead woman in Drawer Seven had my sister’s wedding ring and someone else’s bones. I discovered the first lie in her teeth. Elise had broken her left canine falling from the orchard wall when she was eleven. I had been beneath her, holding a stolen pear and laughing too hard to catch her. The royal mortician’s corpse possessed a flawless set of teeth, white and even beneath lips sewn shut with blue thread. I stood alone in the Crown morgue at two in the morning,…-
23.7 K • Completed
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The heavy oak of the second door slammed shut, sealing the sunlit room and the weeping woman inside. The mechanical screech of the bronze lock grinding into place echoed through the freezing corridor, but the sound was distant, muffled by the roaring in my own ears. I slumped against the cold stone wall and slid to the floor. My mind was a hollowed-out cavern. I reached inward, grasping desperately for the rigid, disciplined structures of my past. I tried to recall the precise sequence for analyzing a…
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23.7 K • Completed
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The ethereal chains of the Eighth Door hummed with a terrifying, low frequency, vibrating through the freezing stone of the floor. They were forged of pure, raw magic, glowing with a sickly blue luminescence, wrapping brutally around Adrien’s throat and heavily muscled wrists. He was on his knees, his broad chest heaving, straining against the ethereal iron that tethered him to the blinding white void of the open archway. I stood paralyzed, the silver comb biting into my palm. The entire foundation of…
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23.7 K • Completed
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