Chapter 7 – The Melting Throne

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 truth into the sky, the muscle has solidified back into a heavy, jagged lump of crystal. But it is no longer the brilliant, pulsing red of a stolen fire, nor the pale, heavy violet of suppressed sorrow. It is the flat, suffocating gray of ash. The magic inside it has been completely spent. The memory it guarded has been laid bare.

Liora stares at it, her mind a fragile, fracturing pane of glass.

Erase me.

Her own voice, twenty years old and weeping with terror, echoes in the hollow cavity of her skull. She had begged for the amnesia. She had been too weak to carry the weight of a righteous lie. She had forced the woman she loved to rip out her own heart, simply so Liora Ash could play the victim, so Liora Ash could lead a rebellion fueled by a fabricated, comfortable hatred.

Every drop of blood spilled in the last nine years of war, every starving child in the outer provinces, every rebel soldier currently writhing and screaming in the frozen courtyard around them—it was all built on the foundation of Liora’s cowardice.

Eirwen had not betrayed her. Eirwen had damned herself to save Liora from her own guilt.

Liora looks down at her hands. The heavy leather gauntlets are gone. Her knuckles are raw, blackened with severe frostbite and covered in the angry, weeping blisters of magical exhaustion. These are the hands of the Fire Thief. The hands that melted the southern gates. The hands that shattered the Emotion Vault and broke the kingdom’s equilibrium.

She is not a god. She is not a martyr. She is the architect of Nivara’s destruction.

A heavy boot crunches on the ice.

Liora snaps her head up. Eirwen is walking past her.

The Queen does not stop. She does not offer a word of absolution, nor a word of condemnation. Her silver armor is scored and dented from the vanguard’s halberds. Her pale face is a bloodless, aristocratic mask, entirely stripped of the terrifying, absolute authority she had wielded for a decade. She looks like a ghost walking through a graveyard.

"Where are you going?" Liora rasps. Her throat is raw, bleeding from the cold and the smoke of her spent magic.

Eirwen does not turn around. She walks straight toward the massive, arched threshold of the inner palace, stepping over the weeping bodies of the rebel vanguard and her own royal guards. The soldiers do not attack her. They are completely paralyzed by the catastrophic return of their excised emotions, curling into the fetal position on the slick ice, desperately trying to survive the psychological shockwave.

"The wards are gone, Liora," Eirwen’s voice drifts back over the roaring wind, hollow and mechanical. "The winter has no anchor. The mountain will freeze solid within the hour, and everyone in this courtyard will die."

Liora scrambles to her feet, her numb legs shaking violently. "You can’t stop it! You said you surrendered the throne!"

"I surrendered the borders," Eirwen corrects, disappearing into the dark, freezing maw of the great hall. "But the throne remains."

Liora looks at the gray, dead heart on the stone. She leaves it there.

She breaks into a run, her boots slipping on the expanding ice, chasing the Queen into the dark.

The throne room of Nivara is vast, vaulted, and entirely unstable.

The deep-glacial pillars that support the massive ceiling are groaning under the shifting tectonic pressure of the mountain. Without the massive stockpile of heat crystals in the Emotion Vault to balance the kingdom’s magic, the ambient winter is spiraling out of control, pulling all available moisture in the great hall and crystallizing it in mid-air.

It is snowing inside the throne room. A localized, violent blizzard that bites through Liora’s leather armor the second she crosses the threshold.

At the far end of the hall, at the top of a towering dais of jagged ice, sits the Ice Throne.

It is a terrifying piece of magical architecture, carved from a single, unbroken block of deep-glacial permafrost. It radiates an aura of absolute zero, a localized field of lethal cold that makes the air around it shimmer and warp.

Eirwen is climbing the steps of the dais.

Liora sprints down the center aisle, her breath pluming in thick, white clouds. "Eirwen! Stop!"

Eirwen reaches the summit. She turns to face the empty, freezing hall. Her silver hair whips around her face.

"The winter is a current, Liora," Eirwen shouts over the grinding roar of the ice pillars. "It requires a conduit. For nine years, the vault acted as the reservoir, and my empty chest acted as the valve. The vault is gone. The current is flooding the mountain."

"You don’t have your heart!" Liora screams, reaching the base of the dais. The localized cold radiating from the steps is agonizing. It feels like walking into a wall of solid knives. "You can’t process that much magic! It will kill you!"

"It will anchor the storm long enough for the survivors in the courtyard to evacuate the mountain," Eirwen says. Her voice is perfectly steady. It is the voice of a monarch who has calculated the final, terminal equation of her reign.

Eirwen turns her back on Liora and steps toward the massive, freezing chair.

Liora tries to summon the coronation fire. She needs the heat to breach the localized field of absolute zero protecting the dais. She slams her hands together, calling on the stolen magic that has defined her entire existence.

Nothing happens.

Her caloric reserves are completely annihilated. The fire is dead. She is just a twenty-nine-year-old woman in freezing leather armor, standing at the bottom of the world.

Panic, raw and unfiltered, spikes in Liora’s chest. She cannot lose Eirwen. Not after realizing the absolute, devastating depth of the Queen’s sacrifice. Not after understanding that Eirwen had carried the entire kingdom’s hatred just to keep Liora’s conscience clean.

Liora draws the heavy hunting knife from her belt and drops it onto the freezing stone floor. She unbuckles the heavy canvas rucksack and lets it fall. She strips off the heavy, soot-stained winter coat she stole from the rebel camp, leaving herself in nothing but a thin tunic and leather breeches.

She sheds the armor of the Fire Thief. She sheds the legend.

Liora steps onto the first stair of the dais.

The cold hits her like a physical blow. Her bare hands immediately begin to numb, the frostbite flaring with agonizing, biting pain. Her lungs seize, the air so cold it feels like inhaling ground glass. She forces herself up to the second step. Then the third.

"Get back, Liora!" Eirwen commands, her voice cracking for the first time. The Queen is standing right in front of the throne, her hands hovering over the frozen armrests.

"No," Liora gasps, her teeth chattering so violently she can barely form the word. She climbs another step, her vision tunneling, the edges of the room going black.

Eirwen does not wait. She slams her bare, pale hands down onto the armrests of the Ice Throne.

The impact sounds like a thunderclap inside the vaulted hall.

The entire mountain shudders. A shockwave of pure, blinding blue light explodes outward from the throne, throwing Liora backward. She hits the jagged ice of the stairs, her shoulder taking the brunt of the impact, the breath knocked out of her lungs in a sharp, agonizing rush.

When Liora opens her eyes, the air in the throne room has changed.

The chaotic, localized blizzard inside the hall has stopped. The ambient magic of the uncontrolled winter is no longer tearing the room apart; it is all violently funneling directly into the woman sitting on the dais.

Eirwen is gripping the arms of the throne, her knuckles stark white. Her head is thrown back, her spine arched in a rigid, unnatural bow.

The physical toll is instantaneous and horrifying. Without the crystal heart to buffer the magical current, the absolute zero of the kingdom’s winter is surging directly through Eirwen’s human nervous system. Thick, black veins of severe frostbite begin to crawl up Eirwen’s pale neck, spiderwebbing across her jawline. Her silver armor begins to groan, contracting under the sudden, massive drop in temperature, the metal biting into her skin.

She is freezing to death from the inside out.

"Eirwen!" Liora screams.

She scrambles up the remaining steps of the dais, crawling on her hands and knees when her legs refuse to hold her weight. The localized cold is catastrophic. Liora’s skin begins to blister, the moisture in her eyes freezing to her lashes.

She reaches the top.

Eirwen’s eyes are wide, the pale irises blown completely black, consumed by the magic. Her lips are blue, cracked and bleeding, the blood freezing before it can run down her chin. She looks at Liora, her expression twisted in absolute, blinding agony.

"Run," Eirwen chokes out, the word a brittle, shattered sound in the silent hall.

Eirwen is anchoring the storm, keeping the mountain from collapsing on the survivors outside, but she is becoming a permanent fixture of the ice. She is locking herself into the throne forever.

"I am done running," Liora vows.

Liora lunges forward. She throws her arms around Eirwen’s neck, crushing her body against the Queen’s freezing armor.

The thermal shock is excruciating. Liora screams as the residual, exhausted heat of her body is violently sucked away by the absolute zero radiating from Eirwen’s skin. Liora’s frostbitten hands tangle in Eirwen’s silver hair, anchoring herself to the woman she spent nine years trying to kill, the woman who loved her enough to become a monster.

"I’m sorry," Liora sobs against Eirwen’s freezing neck, her tears turning to ice instantly, sealing her skin to the metal gorget. "I’m so sorry I left you alone."

Eirwen shudders. A massive, violent tremor wracks the Queen’s body at the contact.

Liora’s presence, the sheer, desperate friction of her body, acts as a microscopic thermal disruption in the closed loop of the Ice Throne’s magic. It is not enough heat to melt the winter, but it is enough heat to remind Eirwen’s frozen nervous system what it feels like to be touched.

Eirwen’s black, frostbitten hands release their death grip on the armrests of the throne.

She wraps her arms around Liora’s waist, pulling the thief impossibly closer, burying her face in the curve of Liora’s shoulder.

"You came back," Eirwen whispers, the words vibrating against Liora’s collarbone.

"I am never leaving you again," Liora swears, her teeth chattering, her body trembling violently under the crushing cold. "Let it go, Eirwen. Let the kingdom freeze. Let it all fall. Just let it go."

It is a choice.

A choice between preserving the ruined architecture of a kingdom that hates them both, or preserving the one thing that still matters.

Eirwen lifts her head. She looks past Liora, out into the vast, empty expanse of the great hall. She looks at the banners of the Ice Court hanging in tatters from the ceiling. She looks at the deep-glacial pillars that she built to hold up the sky.

For a decade, she had sacrificed every ounce of her humanity to maintain order. She had excised her heart, erased the woman she loved, and worn the crown of a tyrant, all to keep the ice from breaking.

She will not sacrifice another heartbeat.

Eirwen closes her eyes and makes the grandest, most catastrophic gesture of her life.

She does not push the winter away. She pulls it entirely into the foundation of the chair beneath her, and she orders it to detonate.

The Ice Throne screams.

It is a sound like the tectonic plates of the earth ripping apart. The massive block of deep-glacial permafrost beneath them begins to sublimate violently, turning from solid ice into searing, localized steam in a fraction of a second.

Eirwen is unmaking the throne. She is relinquishing her absolute invulnerability.

The magical backlash is seismic.

Eirwen cries out, a raw, unstructured sound of pure human agony as the connection to the kingdom’s magic is violently severed. The black frostbite on her neck stops spreading, but the residual damage is done. She slumps forward against Liora, entirely dead weight, her silver armor suddenly just heavy, useless metal.

Liora catches her, falling backward onto the dais as the throne completely vaporizes beneath them, taking them both down to the hard, freezing stone of the floor.

Liora rolls, shielding Eirwen’s body with her own. She cups Eirwen’s pale, bloodless face in her blistering hands. Eirwen’s eyes are closed, her breathing shallow and ragged, but she is breathing. The unnatural, freezing aura that has surrounded the Snow Queen for nine years is gone. She is just a woman. Cold, broken, and entirely human.

A deafening, concussive crack splits the air above them.

Liora looks up.

The destruction of the Ice Throne has removed the final, load-bearing magical pillar of the palace.

A massive fissure tears across the vaulted ceiling of the great hall. The deep-glacial pillars lining the aisle buckle, shattering outward with the force of a bomb blast. Shards of ice the size of carriages rain down onto the stone floor, pulverizing the ancient tiles.

The mountain is shifting. The entire structural integrity of the Ice Palace is collapsing in on itself.

Through the widening cracks in the ceiling, Liora can see the suffocating black clouds of the unchecked blizzard swirling violently. The ambient winter is pouring directly into the hall, burying the rubble in a blinding, roaring whiteout.

Liora grips Eirwen’s shoulders, desperately trying to drag the unconscious Queen across the dais, looking for any overhang, any alcove that might survive the cave-in. But there is nowhere to go. The dais is in the exact center of the impact zone.

A massive, fifty-ton slab of deep-glacial ice detaches from the ceiling directly above them.

Liora throws herself over Eirwen, wrapping her arms around the Queen’s head, pressing her face into the cold steel of Eirwen’s breastplate. She closes her eyes, bracing for the absolute, crushing weight of the mountain to end them both.

The shadow of the falling ice blocks out the remaining light in the hall, and the world plunges into a deafening, roaring darkness.