A post-Crown short storyCharacter Focus: Cassie
The wind in Kierholt always tasted like salt and snow.
Even in midsummer, the cliffs never warmed fully. It was the kind of place where silence pressed in from the sea and only the stubborn remained.
Cassie liked it here.
She didn't speak often, but she worked: fishing nets in the morning, rune-darning coats in the evenings, and teaching the village youth how to walk on frost without slipping by instinct.
Some still remembered who she'd been.
Most didn't.
The Cold Stayed With Her
Even now, years later, her hands still shimmered faintly when she was angry. When she cried. When she dreamed.
Frost magic had never really left her — even after the leylines went quiet. It had rooted too deep, in her bones, in her blood.
She used it sparingly: to keep food cold, to soothe burns, to mark safe trails when storms came.
She no longer needed to prove herself with it.
The magic was no longer her weapon.
It was her language.
The Stranger at the Edge
One evening, a stranger arrived. Hood drawn, boots cracked with dust.
She was young, barely out of adolescence, and carried herself like someone who'd fled something she didn't understand.
She asked for shelter. Cassie offered her tea instead.
"You have power," the girl said after a long silence."I can feel it. Why aren't you using it?"
Cassie looked out the window at the sea, where ice drifted past dark cliffs.
"Because it's not mine to use like that anymore.""It's mine to remember."
The Girl Stayed
For days, then weeks.
Cassie didn't ask questions. But she listened.
The girl had touched something deep — not the Crown, but something like it. Old hunger. Left behind in the world's veins.
"It's still moving," she whispered one night. "Under the snow."
Cassie stared at the hearth.The fire flickered.The frost crept up the window, slow and deliberate.
"I know," she said."I've felt it too."
The Choice Again
She stood the next morning on the cliff's edge, salt spray freezing in her hair, cloak drawn tight.
She'd buried her friends. She'd unmade the thing that could've made her queen. She'd walked away from the war because it needed someone to walk away.
But if it was rising again—
She would not let it rise unchallenged.
She Looked Back
The girl stood watching, shivering slightly.
Cassie reached out, and the cold leapt from her hand — forming a blade of frostglass, humming faintly in the morning light.
She offered it, hilt-first.
"If you're going to walk into it," Cassie said,"don't walk alone."
The girl took the blade.
Cassie turned toward the inland path.
"One more winter, then."