She had walked these paths a thousand times.
Not one had ever led her here.
The snow had begun to fall more heavily as they crossed the ridge. Not a storm, just the kind of quiet snow that blurred the edge of the world and made time walk slower.
No words had passed between her and her attendants since they left the palace.
The wind did not howl here. It whispered—soft and scraping, like dry silk pulled through stone.
A fox crossed her path without fear.
A hawk circled twice, then vanished.
The mountain was not empty. It was watching.
She paused beneath a half-frozen willow, its branches locked in glassy curves, bent from decades of wind. Her hand rose to brush against one of the strands, but she did not touch it.
Then she heard it.
Not a cry.
At first it was something thinner. A thread of sound, fragile and trembling, not strong enough to pierce the wind but persistent enough to ripple through it.
She frowned—barely, subtly.
Her guard appeared beside her without being summoned, brow knit, gaze alert.
"Not an animal," he said quietly.
"Too thin to be screaming. Too steady to be dying."
"It's waiting."
He vanished before she answered, gone into the thick snow as if swallowed by the mountains themselves.
She stood still beneath the willow and listened.
One breath. Two. A sip of silence.
Then: footsteps.
His return.
He knelt before her.
"A site," he said. "A body half-buried by ice. Another thrown further downhill."
He hesitated.
"A child beneath the first one. Alive. Weak. I… did not move them."
She didn't reply. She walked.
It wasn't a clearing. It was a place the snow had forgotten how to fall.
The trees grew crooked. Wind had carved a spiral into the drifts, leading her downward as if something had melted the air around the moment.
The bodies were not lying gently.
One—a man—was sprawled against a jagged rock, head twisted, limbs unnaturally bent. The snow around him had been disrupted violently.
The other—a woman—had clearly crawled.
She had clawed her way to the child. Her hands, bloodied and cracked, were frozen into the fabric wrapped around the small form beneath her chest. Her spine had curled in one final act of shelter. Her face was buried into the snow.
It was no longer a woman. Just ice in a shape.
But the child whimpered. Faint. Breathless. Still here.
Shuangli stood over the scene, unmoving.
This was not staged.
This was a struggle.
This was a failure.
This was a scream buried in time.
She knelt slowly, brushing the snow away from the small, soaked bundle.
So light. So close to ending.
The child's skin had gone nearly grey. The lips cracked, the eyes sunken but open. The cry was not strength. It was a refusal.
Her maid hesitated behind her.
"My lady—"
Shuangli raised her hand. The words died.
She stared into the child's face. It was no one. A stranger. A dying thing.
And yet it felt like a mirror.
Not of her past.
But of the future she had never written.
Then she bit into her fingertip—deep, harder than before. Blood welled dark and slow.
The child was dying.
But the thread had not yet snapped.
And that was all she needed.
Shuangli knelt, knees pressed into snow that did not melt beneath her weight.
The wind hushed. The mountain grew quiet around her, as if breath itself had been stilled in anticipation.
She unfastened the outer layer of her cloak and wrapped it around the child, her bloodied fingertip held close to her chest, bleeding slowly into the frost.
The maid behind her dared not move. The guard stood like stone.
She had not spoken a word since the wind brought her here.
There are spells that must be memorized.
There are spells that must be studied for decades.
And then there are spells that are born—not from knowledge, but from decision.
This was one.
Her hand moved with terrible grace.
She pressed her bleeding fingertip to the child's bare skin, just above the stomach. Mana followed blood. The air shifted.
Draw the circle.
Thread the line.
Carve the bridge.
Bend the thread.
Choose.
She did not know when her tears began. Only that they froze as they fell, catching on her lashes like crystal dust.
She was not crying for the child.
Not yet.
She was crying because her hands did not shake. Because for the first time in her long, still life…
she was moving toward something.
The circle took shape across the child's skin.
It was not beautiful.
It was jagged. Rushed. A miracle built in blood and instinct.
The glyphs twisted as they formed, reacting to the child's karma and the weight of a fate that had not yet grown. Her own mana surged, then twisted, biting into her veins.
She bled from the eyes.
Her breath caught.
Her vision blurred—yet her hands kept moving.
You will not die in the snow, she thought.
You will not vanish with no one to weep for you.
If fate did not give you a name, I will write one for you with my own blood.
The sigils burned white-blue.
Her mana heart cracked—once.
The sky trembled above her.
The air pulsed.
And then…
The child took her first breath.
Not the first of her life—but the first true breath.
And it came out as mist.
No—frost.
A ripple of silver-blue ice swept across her legs. Scales formed. Horns pushed gently through soft hair. The child whimpered once, then stilled.
Her heart beat.
Her eyes fluttered.
She had been remade.
Shuangli collapsed forward, catching herself with one hand.
The snow around her spiraled into frost-laced petals, freezing in waves from the force of the ritual's aftermath.
She vomited blood into the earth. Her soul thrashed against her ribs, unaligned and distorted from the cost. The mana backlash struck through her spine like lightning, ripping through every unsealed meridian.
She did not scream.
She bit down so hard her mouth filled with iron.
This pain was hers to carry.
She turned, finally, and took the child into her arms.
No longer a stranger.
No longer dying.
Hers.
"Ruxia," she whispered.
Like snow falling on water.
"Bing Jiuhua."
Like frost blooming through stone.
The name crystallized in the air.
And in that moment, the child became real—not just alive, but known.
Ruxia Bing Jiuhua.
Graceful frost.
The sorrowed bloom of ice.
Daughter born of defiance and devotion.
Behind her, the maid exhaled softly—an involuntary breath as if she, too, had been holding it all this time.
The wind moved again. The silence broke.
The mountain allowed them to leave.