Chapter 203: Heart of Winter

Beneath the shattered Winter Archive lay the Heart of Winter.

The crack in the floor widened into a blinding blue-and-white pit, and the party made their way down a set of ice steps. Each step held an image trapped inside it. Someone giving their food to another. A shelter keeper warning of bad weather. Two men debating whether to cross a frozen river. A baby sleeping on three blankets that strangers had given. Austin Veyron tried to step lightly, as though his weight might crack the moments preserved beneath him.

As they descended deeper, the wind from the archive above stopped blowing. The party was soon wrapped in near-total darkness, broken only by a faint blue light glowing at the bottom of the steps.

Sigrun laid her hand on one of the ice steps.

"The old north understands this," she said. "No one owns the cold. It only kills those who think they do."

Nyra clutched the heart shard as it pulsed blue and black. As they inched their way down, the last fragment of frost traveled below them.

"It wants to be the center of the cold," she said. "Not the map. It wants to be what every route follows."

Austin Veyron could feel the urge.

The fragment was small. He could easily devour it and finish this once and for all. Take the cold source and consume it, so that no cold route could ever hurt him again.

After everything they had been through, it seemed like such a simple task. Devour the last piece of the echo, and he’d be done.

Veyra walked beside him on the ice steps.

"Name it."

"I want the last piece."

"And what would it make?"

"My last hunt, because I’d be the one to finish it."

Sable’s crown shard lit up the bottom of the pit. "Then we finish the claim, not the fragment."

The party reached the bottom and saw the Heart chamber.

It was a vast lake of clear, colorless ice. The walls and ceiling were covered in ice stars that gave off no heat. The chamber was so quiet that Austin Veyron could hear his own heartbeat and the sound of his boots on the ice. In the middle of the lake stood a small piece of ice that hadn’t been carved into anything. Above it floated the last piece of the echo.

No one spoke, but the room echoed a message to them.

ONE COLD. ONE SURVIVOR.

Guards made of ice rose up from the frozen lake.

They weren’t dead men or women, or statues carved from ice. They were memories frozen in time. A man with a lantern in his hand, walking through a blizzard. A shelter keeper holding nothing in his hands. A hunter making his way across a whiteout alone. All of them walked toward the party, holding blades made of ice.

Rin’s claws struck one of the guards right in the lantern. The image fell apart into snow, but it gathered itself back together and walked toward them again, ice blade in hand.

Tamsin held one guard back from Sigrun with her spear. Veyra cut through another, grimacing from the pain in her shoulder. The memory spilled across the floor where the guard had stood. It showed someone refusing to help another person, because helping meant sharing their route.

The ice-memory guards showed each of them something different.

Austin Veyron saw himself in a blizzard, with the Grand Meridian not far behind him. He made it through the storm by himself because he was stronger than the others. They all died from the cold, but Austin Veyron reached the shelter and saved hundreds of lives.

The vision waited for him to accept it. It wanted him to carry the fuel pack on his back, to feel the cold in his lungs, and to know that he was the only one who had made it out alive.

The vision wanted him to make that choice because it would benefit the most people. But it left out so much.

Veyra’s voice cut through the wind in the ice chamber.

"Smaller."

Austin Veyron looked beneath the vision he had been given.

The choice the guard had shown him wasn’t true. There were so many other options it could have shown him. He could have given away his fuel pack, or sent out a signal, or marked the route for others to follow, or asked the people with him what they could carry. It only showed one person surviving alone, because it wanted the cold to be a competition.

He could read the phrase on the guard’s ice blade.

ONE COLD. ONE SURVIVOR.

"Target," Austin Veyron said. "The one-cold-one-survivor claim. Not the ice. Not the memories. Not the people in them."

"Witnessed," Veyra said.

"Witnessed," Sable said.

Austin Veyron pressed the white root chain to the ice blade.

DEVOUR opened. The claim tasted like a winter night with no shelter to go to.

ONE COLD. ONE SURVIVOR.

He consumed one.

The ice-memory guard fell apart.

The other guards stopped walking toward the party. The images they showed changed. The man walking through the blizzard now shared his lantern with two others. The shelter keeper now had fuel to give away. The hunter was following stones that others had placed so he could find his way home.

The last piece of the echo trembled above the ice.

"You have made survival fragile," it whispered through the ice walls.

"We’ve made it visible," Sigrun replied.

The last piece of the echo settled onto the piece of ice.

Frost spread across the lake, trying to build something around the last fragment. The Heart of Winter showed them what it would become if the claim wasn’t removed from the world: a giant made of winter storms, ruling over every route in the north.

DEVOUR flared inside Austin Veyron.

He could devour the giant before it took over. He could become the cold he had spent months refusing to be.

Veyra didn’t reach for him this time. She waited for his decision.

Austin Veyron looked around at his companions. Nyra was straining to hold the heart shard’s boundary. Sigrun stood on one of the marked steps. Tessa and Ceryn had spread the map across the ice. Calder and Sable were keeping the crown shard between the pedestal and the echo’s black-white core.

They all trusted him to find the right answer.

He decided to speak first.

"I want the entire Heart."

"And what would it make?" Veyra asked.

"Something every winter would listen to."

"Then what’s the smaller target?" Sable asked.

Austin Veyron looked at the ice roots growing around the pedestal.

They weren’t the cold. They were what told the cold that it needed a ruler.

THE FINAL SOURCE NEEDS A NAME.

"Target," Austin Veyron said. "The final-source naming claim. Not the Heart. Not the frost fragment. Not the northern routes."

"Witnessed," Veyra said.

"Witnessed," Sable said.

Austin Veyron made his way across the ice lake toward the pedestal.

The giant began to take shape around it. Winds howled across the chamber, and the map nearly took flight, but Tessa, Ceryn, and Calder held it in place on the ice. Nyra widened her boundary around the fragment so it couldn’t join the roots of the claim.

Sigrun planted her staff beside the map and began speaking the count of the north route.

"Shelters, fuel, weather, and the marks we saw along our route."

The rest of the party began speaking with her. Austin Veyron heard Rin’s voice and Tamsin’s, Calder’s deep voice, and Nyra’s as she spoke the words too. None of them could fill the room alone. Together, they could.

Austin Veyron reached the ice pedestal.

DEVOUR opened. The final-source naming claim showed him every hunger source he had survived. It tried to give him one more title, one that would mean he never had to ask anyone for help again. Emperor of Hunger. Guardian of the Winters. Title after title that would benefit him and harm the world around him. The claim tasted like a crown carved from ice, beautiful and so cold it burned.

Austin Veyron let the titles slip past him.

THE FINAL SOURCE NEEDS A NAME.

He consumed needs.

The ice roots broke apart with a sound like a frozen river cracking at the first thaw.

The giant melted into snowflakes that drifted down onto the ice lake. The last piece of the echo fell apart and became nothing but pale white cold. It could no longer create a body or rule over the world around it.

The echo turned into a spiral of snow and spoke one last message to Austin Veyron.

"You cannot leave hunger without a name."

"We name harm," Austin Veyron said. "Not owners."

The spiral of snow opened and released its last black-white thread into the ice lake. No body could form anymore. The sovereign echo was gone.

The Heart of Winter wasn’t destroyed.

It became a clear lake of ice that showed what was happening in the world beyond it: maps of where hunger was still wounding the world, and where no one had tended to it yet.

Tessa made her way to the edge of the lake.

"It’s showing us all the open wounds we still have."

"There are so many," Ceryn said, looking at the lines of the map.

Nyra placed the heart shard against the ice.

"The Heart will show us what’s happening around us now."

Sigrun smiled slightly at the map.

"Cold can be merciful when it shows us these things."

The party stood around the Heart of Winter, with no one claiming it as theirs.

The mark on Austin Veyron’s wrist was no longer pulsing.

It wasn’t gone, but it wasn’t hurting him either.

For the first time in a long time, the hunger wasn’t pulling him anywhere.

Veyra looked at Austin Veyron and asked him what he wanted to do now.

"I want to help where people are suffering," Austin Veyron replied.

"And what would it make?"

Austin Veyron looked at the maps spread out around them.

"A route we all decided on together."