A second ago, Mira was sure she was asleep by the river, sharing warmth with Kars beneath his gray cloak and brown coat. The next moment, that warm world was ripped away from her body like a yanked carpet, replaced by the sensation of falling into an endless white.

  When her back hit the ground, there was no pain. Only cold.

  Deadly cold.

  Mira jolted awake. She tried to take deep breaths, but the air here wasn't air. It was glass dust. Sharp, dry, and so fine that her lungs felt like crumpled paper. When she coughed, her cough didn't disappear; it echoed.

  The echo felt wrong. Too loud, too distant.

  Mira forced her eyes open. A blinding white light assaulted her mercilessly. She was no longer in the forest. The forest had vanished, replaced by a landscape that should not exist.

  It was like standing on top of the world.

  A solitary mountain towering amidst a sea of swirling black clouds. Beneath her feet was not earth or rock, but a stretch of deep blue ice so clear that Mira could see its depths, millions of frozen cracks resembling the veins of a dead giant.

  The snow here did not fall from the sky; it rose from below, floating against gravity like dust attracted by a magnet.

  "Where…" Mira's voice cracked in the thin air.

  Mira looked up, and her breath caught. The sky above had no sun, no moon, no stars. The sky had been torn by them.

  Aurora.

  But this was not an ordinary aurora. It was a river of liquid light in emerald green, purple, and blood red, flowing fiercely across the dome of the sky. They did not stay still. They hissed. They sang, a low humming sound that made Mira's ears ache, as if the sky itself were a giant grinding machine crushing stars into dust.

  The particles fell, touching Mira's face. She didn’t feel cold, but hot—electric, static heat.

  Suddenly, Mira felt a vibration. The vibration came from behind her back. A vibration that was not heard by the ears, but felt by the ribs.

  Mira turned around, her foot slipping on the slippery ice.

  There, standing at the edge of the ice cliff jutting into the cloud chasm, was the creature.

  A bear. The creature was at least four meters tall when standing on all fours. Its fur was not made of hair, but of thousands of ice needles that refracted the aurora into a blinding rainbow. As the creature breathed, the vapor from its snout instantly froze into crystals in the air.

  The bear did not roar. It just stared at Mira. Its eyes were empty, like two dense black holes without pupils, without whites, just a void that absorbed all the light around it.

  Mira wanted to run, but her legs were nailed to the ice. The bear stepped forward, one step. The ice beneath it cracked with the sound of a cannon blast—the second step.

  But then, the bear's shadow changed.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  From behind the body of the giant ice bear, darkness began to seep out. As ink dropped into clear water, the darkness spread, swallowing the aurora's light, devouring the whiteness of the snow. The bear's figure began to melt, its ice fur falling off and turning into boiling black mud.

  In the midst of that mass of darkness, two points glowed. Red.

  Blazing red. Red like forged iron, like the core of a star about to explode into a supernova.

  Those eyes. Mira recognized those eyes. They were the same eyes from the attack in the capital, the eyes that opposed her father.

  The red-eyed figure had no definite form, only a fluctuating silhouette of smoke and heat that had a presence. Its gravitational pressure was so intense that Mira fell to her knees, her hands clawing at the ice, trying to hold back the contents of her stomach that wanted to come out.

  The figure extended its shadow's hand. Mira wanted to scream, but her mouth was frozen.

  Suddenly, another hand grabbed Mira's shoulder.

  “Mara?”

  The girl stood there, right next to Mira, kneeling on the ice as if she had been there from the beginning. Her face is identical to Mira's. Same eyes, same nose shape, same jawline. Her twin.

  But Mara looks wrong.

  She was wearing a white dress soaked in blood on her chest. But the blood was not red, but golden white, dripping slowly onto the ice and sizzling. Her face was pale, as pale as a corpse, but her eyes were wide open, looking at Mira with terrifying intensity.

  "Mara, we have to run!" Mira shouted, her voice finally coming out. She tried to grab his sister's hand.

  Mira's hand pierced Mara's body, like trying to grasp the fog.

  Mira didn't blink. She didn't look at the red-eyed figure that was getting closer. It just stared at Mira, its lips moving without a sound, forming words that Mira couldn't hear because the sound of the aurora above them grew louder, more screaming.

  Seven… Again…

  "What? I can't hear!"

  The red-eyed figure was now right in front of them. The heat burned Mira's facial skin. The shadowy hand raised high, ready to strike. Not to strike Mira. But to strike Mara.

  "DON'T!" Mira threw herself to protect her sister.

  But there was no impact.

  The world shattered like a mirror struck with a sledgehammer.

  Shards of aurora skies, icebergs, and Mara's face scattered into pieces of glass. Mira floated in the pitch-black emptiness. There was no up, no down—only darkness and lingering echoes of laughter from that red-eyed figure.

  Then, a light appeared.

  Small, steady, calm.

  In the middle of that darkness, someone was walking closer. Her footsteps could be heard, like wearing shoes with stiff soles on a marble floor, even though there was no floor here.

  A woman.

  She was different from the previous chaos. She looked so solid. So real amidst this illusion.

  Her hair was metallic silver that shimmered as if each strand were made of pure silver wire. The hair was intricately braided, wrapping around her head like a crown, leaving a few strands that framed her graceful yet stern face.

  Her eyes were gray, like Kars', but brighter. In the palm of her hand, the silver-haired woman held an object. A polyhedral star made of black metal, yet inside it pulsed a soft blue light.

  "Time is almost up," said the woman. Her voice did not echo. Her voice was clear, cutting through the chaos like a scalpel. "He is waiting at the gate. And they…" The woman glanced into the darkness behind Mira, "…they are beginning to discover your presence."

  Mira tried to reach for the woman, reaching for the black star in her hand. "Who are you? Where is Mara?"

  The woman did not answer the question. She only gave a faint smile, a smile full of secrets and the weight of thousands of years of history. She lifted the black star, then with a gentle motion, blew it toward Mira.

  "Breathe," she commanded.

  The blue light from the star exploded, dazzling, engulfing everything.

  "BREATHE!"

  The woman's voice turned into Kars's shout.

  "BREATHE!"

  Mira's eyes opened wide.

  The first thing he felt was pain in his lungs, as if he had just drowned and been forcibly pulled to the surface. The second was heat. Real heat.

  He was still by the riverbank. The campfire was still burning dimly. Kars was gripping his shoulders, shaking him roughly. The man's face was right in front of his, his gray eyes wide open, not out of anger, but out of alertness.

  "You stopped breathing," Kars said, panting. "For a full minute. Your heart almost stopped."

  Mira was panting, cold sweat soaking her entire body beneath her cloak. Her hands trembled violently as she touched her own chest, making sure she was still alive, making sure there was no black hole there.

  “I saw it…” Mira whispered, her voice hoarse. “That mountain, those red eyes, Mara. And… a woman who has eyes like yours.”