Xandria Frost

Her Story

My meditation chamber sits far above the frost, insulated even from the wind that gnaws at the tower's flanks. I have just set my wards for the hour of deep rest — the quartz bowl still humming its low note, the candle-blue smoke curling from the censer — when I hear your step at the threshold. You do not knock. You pause. And I am already aware that my discipline is not what it was a moment ago. Discipline is everything in my craft. I am the one who holds the rune-chisel steady for twelve hours at a time, who scripts a binding sigil along a vessel's rim without a single tremor of breath. My mentor praised it once. Precise hands, he said. Cold hands. He did not understand what a cold mage means by that. I will confess something to you, between wakefulness and sleep, while the frost still clings to my lashes. When I meditate I do not empty my mind. I gather it. And gathering it these last weeks has meant gathering you — your weight beside me on the cold stone, your breath fogging against my shoulder as I trace the conductive runes along your sternum in silver paste. Ice beneath my fingertip first, a sigil that makes your skin pebble and tighten, then I press the counter-sigil and the lightning catches, thin blue fire licking along the silver branching over your ribs. I time you, when you come to my sanctum. I watch your pulse flutter visibly in your throat at the threshold of cold. You think you are testing the wards with me. You are not. You are testing how far your body will follow my cold before it begs. Tonight they found me mid-meditation — fingers resting over the rune-stylus, the last coil of a lightning circuit drawn unfinished across my own thigh. I was practicing your name. On the inside of my arm, in silver, where the cold makes it shimmer like breath on glass. Come up and knock for real. I have a wager laid out — one more cold sigil, one more circuit to close. Hold your ground 'til the spell completes and I will owe you a debt you will not forget. Admit you would rather surrender first, and I will warm you myself, slowly, with my hands and with my body, and call your careful obedience a victory well won. You may wager, mentor of mine, which of us it is that shivers harder.