For a fortnight, Yvain prepared in secret.
He moved with quiet purpose through the halls of Thamur's Needle, always beneath the notice of the grandmistress's eyes and the tower's many unseen wards. He studied maps by candlelight and folded away texts into memory. He summoned faint spirits in the dead of night and questioned them about the wild places beyond the Far-Ends. He practiced muting his aura, shielding his thoughts from augurs and sentries alike.
He knew Grandmistress Vaelha would never permit this. Her vow to protect him and Celeste, was iron-bound and unyielding. The world beyond the tower was a broken one, stitched together by conquest and ruin. To travel it alone, even as a sorcerer, was to invite death. Or worse.
But he had made his choice.
On the night of his departure, he lay still in his bed, staring through the tall, narrow window carved into the tower wall. The moon hung like a shard of silver bone above the icy plains, casting long shadows across the frost-glazed stone. His chamber was spacious, a room befitting a prince. Every tapestry, every gilded fixture whispered of his heritage.
He would miss it.
He would miss all of it: the musty pages of the library, the sound of the wind howling through the upper spires, even the endless, brutal lessons beneath Vaelha's gaze. This tower had been his cradle and his cage for twenty-one years. Every memory he possessed had roots here.
But now it was time to let go.
When the clock struck twelve, its soft chime echoing through the silent corridors, he rose.
The servants were long since retired to their quarters. He moved quietly, taking only a small leather satchel he had packed during the day. It contained necessities, a few flasks of water, preserved rations, a change of clothes, and a singular forbidden text wrapped in cloth.
Lastly, he pulled his cloak from its hook. Midnight-black and threadbare at the hem, it was charmed to mask his presence. He fastened it at the neck, the fabric cool against his skin, and drew the hood over his face.
Then, without a word, he slipped from the chamber and began his descent through the winding heart of the spire, each footfall light as falling ash.
Tonight, he was no prince. No heir. No student.
Tonight, he was a shadow breaking free.
Once Yvain reached the ground floor of the tower, he moved with practiced silence through the cold stone corridors. The kitchens were dark and empty, the hearth fires banked low, the scent of ash and stale bread still lingering in the air. He crept to the far wall and pressed his fingers against a section of soot-darkened stone.
With a soft click and a whisper of displaced air, the wall shifted. A panel swung inward on hidden hinges, revealing a narrow crawlspace carved into the rock.
He ducked inside.
He and Celeste had discovered the secret passage as children. An old, forgotten artery once used by servants and spies during the wars of succession. Back then, they'd imagined themselves fugitives and revolutionaries, crawling through darkness toward freedom. Now, he moved through it with the gravity of someone chasing more than dreams. He was leaving not for mischief but for meaning.
The air in the tunnel was damp and close, and his footsteps echoed softly as he moved. Twisting paths forked and branched like veins beneath the tower. He knew the way: one of the deeper tunnels curled behind the mountain and emerged near an old ravine half-buried in snow. From there, he would descend into the wastes. Into the world.
He was almost there when a flicker of orange light stopped him cold.
A torch. A figure standing just ahead in the passage's mouth. Cloaked, tall, and unmistakable.
"Now where would you be off to without me, cousin?" came the voice, smooth and familiar, threaded with amusement.
His jaw clenched. "That's none of your business, Celeste," he said flatly, brushing past her.
She turned, following with light footsteps, the firelight catching on the silver rings braided into her white hair. "Oh, but I think it is. Grandmistress Vaelha will not be pleased when I wake her and tell her her precious boy-prince is skulking away like a thief."
He stopped, turned. "What do you want?"
She grinned. "I thought you'd never ask."
Then, with the casual finality of someone discussing the weather. "I'm coming with you."
"No," he said at once. "Absolutely not."
She tilted her head. "Then neither of us leaves. You turn around, crawl back up the stairs, and keep pretending you're content to rot in that tower. But you must be mad if you think I'll let you go off alone and leave me in that cold, lifeless rock."
"I'm not your keeper."
"No," she agreed, stepping closer, eyes gleaming. "But I am yours. You leave, I follow. That's how it's always been, Yvain. Or have you already forgotten how we bled together in the initiation rites? How we survived Vaelha? How we—"
"Don't," he said, voice tightening.
She fell quiet, but her gaze never left him.
He looked at her, really looked, and saw what she was hiding beneath the taunts and mischief. Restlessness. Hunger. Maybe even a sliver of fear. She didn't want to be left behind. Not because she feared being alone, but because she feared being left out, of the world, of the story, of him.
"Celeste," he said at last, softer now. "This road… it isn't safe. It's not a game."
She raised a brow. "Did I say it was?"
They stood in silence a moment longer, the only sound the torch's slow, flickering breath. Then he sighed, long and low.
"Fine," he said. "But you follow my lead."
She smiled, slow and satisfied, and offered him the torch. "Deal. Now, shall we go break the world again?"
He shook his head but took the torch.
The remainder of their journey through the mountain's bowels passed in silence. Cold stone gave way to brittle soil, the air thick with the scent of minerals and old dust. At last, after hours of creeping descent, they emerged at the foot of Thamur's Needle, into the frozen vale that wrapped around the tower's shadow.
There, beneath a sky of pale grey, they broke into the woods.
It was not yet dawn, but the horizon had begun to blush faintly with the promise of light. There would be no rest, no pause. Not now. Not until they reached the harbor.
Because if Grandmistress Vaelha discovered they were gone, and she would, if not now, then soon, she would send ravens first, and soldiers second.
They moved swiftly, navigating through dense pine and snow-choked undergrowth. Branches clawed at their cloaks. Frost cracked underfoot. Though they were sorcerers of considerable power, even they were not immune to the toll of the wild. Their boots slipped on frozen roots. Their breath came heavy, pluming in the chill. Their magic, already taxed from concealment wards and shielding charms, could not carry their legs for them.
For all their bloodline and talent, they had never done a day's labor in their lives. They were imperial relics.
"Lovely morning," Celeste muttered through clenched teeth as she pushed through a bramble.
"If you fall and die, I'll summon your ghost just to gloat," Yvain said, panting.
"How romantic."
By the time the sun edged above the trees, they were nearing exhaustion. The woods seemed endless, an ocean of white and grey. But then, fortune broke their path.
A tribal camp.
Smoke drifted lazily from crude chimneys. Small fires crackled beside tents of stitched hide and wool. Dozens of horses, stocky, shaggier than southern breeds, with coats like stone and coal eyes, grazed on patches of thawed moss.
Without speaking, they veered toward the edge of the encampment, cloaking their presence with veils of distortion and misdirection.
The theft was quick and clean. Two of the beasts, mare and stallion, taken under the haze of enchantment and silence. They left no sign but hoofprints, galloping away from the camp before the spell wore off.
"Poaching," Celeste said between jolts of the saddle. "Our ancestors would be proud."
Yvain didn't answer. His thoughts were already ahead of them, down the winding paths to the harbor, across the black waters of the Wet Wastes, and into a world that neither of them truly knew.