“Tokotahn, the wizard-city of the Tiger Highlands, was a hidden gem of the emerald-spired kingdoms: decadent, luxuriant, and cruel. A curated paradise of temple-monasteries and cloud-bridging causeways that had withstood more than one Sundering and several shakings of the world. Its longhalls housed alchemical craft-mills and meaderies. Silk merchants fattened along the polished walkways. It was an ancient city. Respected. Heralded. And full of death and treason.”

---

I

Tafu Tahn, apprentice to Induzh Rai of the Obsidian Court—the great and most-feared conjurer of the district—now stepped lightly over the old tiger’s corpse. Face-down in his study, choked on poisoned rice.

A “peasant’s trick”.

Fitting.

He had called her peasant when she failed. Peasant when she did well. Peasant when she poured his drink or bit her lip beneath his gaze. When his noble hand slid down her back toward her ass, it was always with that same smug disdain. But he had not touched her. He knew his limits.

Now, he was dead. She sneered.

Death by rice.

How common.

She had coveted his library for years. That would be her first act—taking it. He had grown too arrogant in his isolation, boasting in recent months that he was the last of his order, the sole living master of Tokotahn’s fading magical lineage. Now she was the last. And everything he thought would die with him? Would not. She stole his key and spat on the back of his rotting head.

He had lifted her out of the gutters, yes. Taught her magic. But at the price of her name, her pride, her flesh. She had paid it. She had taken the pain. And now she took his place. The library was silent when she opened it. Silent and hers. And of course, the very first thing she did was the one thing he had forbidden. Never open the emerald case. Never touch the glass. Never disturb the volumes within. She opened it. The glass chimed like a bell. The air grew tight. She reached for the golden-bound volume he had once pointed out to her, long ago, when she was too young and scared to feign disinterest.

“And mind you, young one,” his cruel voice echoed in memory, biting like a curse.
“Should you ever think yourself clever—some thieving little peasant whore—this book, The Curses and Death-Traps of Most Barbarous Yorozh, will be your end. The book itself—and all its kind—have sworn that my magic dies with me. Should you try… they will see to it.”

She grinned.

And picked it up.

Damned.

She did not even have time to scream.

II

The pages shredded in her hands—turning to sand, light, and wind—and a golden portal yawned open, dragging her forward in a burst of light and fury. She hit cracked stone and heat. The scream burst out of her just as the portal closed…

Severing her feet at the ankles.
Pain ripped through her like fire and ice braided together.
She screamed again—but bit off the tip of her own tongue in the panic. Blood sprayed from her mouth. She tried to crawl, but her nerves would not obey. Her limbs twitched, dumb with shock, her thoughts shattered like glass. Her body went cold even as the sand baked her raw.

Only then, writhing, bleeding out, did she realize how damned she was.

I cannot tell you where she landed in Yorozh—because no king, no clan, no mapmaker, and no living war-shaman sane enough to speak has ever charted that place. Yorozh is not a desert.

It is a curse.

In the elder Izhanian tongue, Yorozh means “Place Host to the God of Death.” And so, once again, it had been used.

---

III

Weeks later, in the quiet study of Induzh Rai—now reeking of mold and flybuzz—the ministers of the Obsidian Court finally arrived to investigate his silence.

They found his corpse. Cold. Familiar.

And beneath the emerald-glass case in the high library, they found nothing missing…

…save for a pair of severed legs.

Clothed in silk.

Wearing the shoes of a well-dressed peasant.

The girl ran through the frost-bitten woods, her limbs a blur against the whitening dusk. Behind her, the trees rose like the ribs of some colossal carcass, each one rimed in blue ice, each one echoing her passage with the hollow, brittle music of the cold.

Above, the sky was a vast bruise—darkening, deepening—and through it drifted the faint glow of the departing airship, already no larger than a drifting coal in the distance. Its engines were fading, the last tremor of living sound swallowed by the wind. She stumbled, fell, and the snow accepted her with the indifference of the dead.

For a moment she tried to rise, but her body no longer obeyed its own commands. Her lungs burned; her breath burst in clouds that froze before they fell.

Around her stretched the desolation of Londorai—an endless continent of cold, cruelty, and silence. No light but the auroral pulse of the storm-sky. No warmth but the fever of panic still thrumming in her chest.

The airship was gone now, sliding toward the horizon like a memory being erased. She watched until even its vapor trail was lost among the clouds.

Then she bowed her head.

Her sobs came without sound.

The frost took them too.

She pressed her muzzle into the snow, trembling beneath the gaze of a world that did not care whether she lived or died.

–

Londorai was vast and without mercy. The wind carried no scent of rescue, no echo of clan or kin. Only the deep, endless cold, and the promise of teeth. Above her, the aurora shivered once—green fire on a frozen sea—then vanished into night.

At 14, It was her first year in the guild without her sire. He would never have let them lift from the ice without her aboard. But he was gone now, and the others had already weighed her worth and found it light.

She had complained it was harsh, that the cold bit too deep, that the beasts came too close at night. They had laughed. Now the shares were six instead of seven.

They would speak of her softly, perhaps once, in the warmth of the galley, then let the silence swallow her name as the wind had swallowed her cries.

The airship would reach the southern cities in a week—if the storms did not tear its hull apart first.