E L L E

The storm leaves a ringing silence behind it. Pages drift through the air like ash, settling over the tables, catching on my scarf. Everything smells of cold paper and candle smoke. The frost on the floor still pulses faintly, tracing slow spirals that breathe in rhythm with my heartbeat.

My hands won’t stop shaking and I can taste metal on my tongue. Behind me, the boy is a darker shadow against the aisle light, smoke curling off his burned hand. He doesn’t move, doesn’t speak, but the hum between us hasn’t faded.

The library feels alive now, listening, when the frost finally stills, one book remains on the floor, half-buried under torn pages, waiting, I kneel before I can stop myself.

The cover is older than anything that should still exist here, deep brown leather, corners frayed, spine split halfway through. No title, just the faintest trace of letters carved into the bottom edge.
Wrenwood, T.W.

My throat closes, the letters blur, and I blink too hard, terrified I’ll see them wrong, but they’re still there, pressed deep, proof carved into the hide itself. I brush the dust away. Frost follows the motion, sketching pale curls that look too delicate to be natural.

“She was here,” I whisper, mostly to the dark. “She.. she touched this.”

He moves closer, I hear the whisper of his coat, the soft scrape of boot against tile, but he stops just short of reaching me and I can feel him watching. The clasp gives with a sigh. Inside, the pages are thin as moth wings, edges brittle. A smell rises, old ink, lavender, smoke and my chest caves at that last one.

This is Mom’s scent. I swallow hard and turn the first page.

Her handwriting is the same as the notes she left in Nan’s attic, but steadier, more certain. She wasn’t guessing anymore, she knew.

The Final Seal must be born in blood, not bound by it.

Ink bleeds outward from the letters, dark to pale blue, like it’s alive.

Emotion calls the frost. Only truth opens it. Only love can shatter it.

The words make no sense and too much sense all at once. My fingers hover over the lines, close enough for cold to sting the tips. Across the margin, diagrams twist, circles of sigils, lines crossing like constellations. At the center, a symbol I recognize: the spiral carved into my locker door.

His breath catches behind me, sharp and almost a flinch. I glance up, but his face is unreadable, eyes fixed on the ink.

If the Rift stirs again, bind the guardian before the child can hear the call.

The page trembles under my hand and my pulse stumbles. A drop of melted frost slides down my thumb onto the paper, and the ink glows faintly where it falls, as if the book knows me, as if it’s waiting for me.

I whisper, “Mom, what did you do?”

The air shifts, so slight, it might be imagination and somewhere deep in the shelves, something sighs back.

My throat tightens until it hurts to breathe. The words blur again, not from frost this time but from tears. I blink hard, but they fall anyway, landing heavy on the parchment. The drops spread into the ink, making her lines bleed and fade. I press my palm over the page like I can hold them there, keep her voice from dissolving into nothing.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, no idea who I’m apologizing to. To her, maybe, for being too late, for not understanding sooner, for being here at all.

The paper is cold beneath my skin, but the ache inside my chest is worse. All the walls I’ve been holding since the term began, the whispers, the frost, Luke’s confusion, the fear I can’t say out loud, they all crack open at once. I fold over the book and cry, small, quiet sounds that feel too human for this place.

I don’t hear him move, but he’s there when I lift my head, close enough that his shadow falls over the page. The light catches in his hair, turning it silver at the edges. His hand hesitates halfway between us, burned skin still dark and raw. I shake my head, but he doesn’t pull back.

He reaches out slowly, as if giving me a hundred chances to stop him, and touches my cheek with the back of his fingers. Warmth, actual warmth, even with frost biting the air. The kind of warmth that doesn’t belong in Ravenshade.

He wipes away one tear, then another. His thumb lingers too long, tracing the edge of my jaw like he’s memorizing it. My breath trips.

The hum that’s been running under my skin since the book opened flares between us, a low thrum that feels like a heartbeat caught outside of a body. His jaw tightens, a flicker of pain in his eyes, but he doesn’t let go.

The Oath, whatever it is, reacts to touch. I feel it, heat rippling through the frost, curling the corners of the parchment. My pulse matches it, wild and uneven.

He whispers, barely sound at all, “You shouldn’t cry for the dead.”

I swallow hard. “You don’t get to tell me that.”

He almost smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. The air between us bends, full of words neither of us knows how to say.

When his hand falls away, the cold rushes back in like punishment. I pull the folio closer, blinking the blur from my eyes. The ink has bled where my tears hit, but the margins hold, tight loops of script crowding the edges, small and hurried.

My mother’s handwriting again.

If she reads this, the binding has begun.
A Guardian must be chosen before the Rift claims her heart.
I have done what must be done.

The words tilt sideways near the bottom, the ink smudged by what looks like fingerprints, and there, pressed into the lower corner in faint graphite, smaller than the rest:

Bound a guardian to my child.

I stop breathing, the room seems to tilt, the shelves leaning closer. I trace the words once, just to be sure they’re real, and the paper chills instantly under my fingertip. Behind me, He stiffens, that stillness of his turning sharp.
“What does it say?” he asks, voice low.

I can’t look at him. I can barely think past the pounding in my ears.

“It says…” My throat dries out. “It says someone was bound. A guardian.”

His silence feels heavier than any answer, something inside me knows, knows before reason catches up, that he’s part of this. That every whisper, every flicker of frost, has been circling back to this truth. I finally looked at him. His eyes are too bright, too full of things I don’t understand.

The air changes, it’s not just cold, but it’s aware. The frost on the table ripples outward, curling toward my hands like it wants to listen. Somewhere deeper in the library, a book spine cracks open by itself.

Then I hear it, a whisper, too soft for sound, too close to mistake.

Elowen.

My mother’s voice, or what’s left of it, drifting through the stacks. My pulse jumps.

“Did you hear that?” I ask.

He closes his eyes, jaw locking. “I feel it.”

The frost climbs the legs of the table, thin veins of ice reaching for the folio. Light bends over the page, blue-white, humming with that same rhythm that’s lived in my bones since the first day here. The whisper comes again, clearer this time, sweet as memory and wrong as hunger.

Choose.

The word ghosts across my skin like breath.

I look down at the margin one more time, the tiny graphite words shimmering faintly under frost: Bound a guardian to my child.

It feels like a hand closing around my ribs, my mother didn’t just warn me, she made him.  Whatever he is, whatever this bond is, she built it before I was even born. I turn toward him slowly, the light from the cracked windows catches his face, half silver, half shadow. His hand is still burned, the skin marked in the same sigil that scorched the folio’s corner.

My voice breaks before it reaches full sound. “It’s you.”

He doesn’t answer, he doesn’t move. The look in his eyes is both apology and confirmation, the kind that doesn’t need words. The hum between us spikes, almost painful, frost bursts across the floor in a perfect spiral, curling around my boots, connecting us with a thread of light.

Something in the dark stirs, an echo deeper than sound, like the library itself holding its breath. I whisper, “What did she do to us?”

And the frost answers, whispering back the word that’s haunted me since the beginning.

Choose.