"We cursed few who walk through the black are watched by eyes unseen; but yonder—a light?"

The page burned silver, curling to ash.

"Another?" said Satria, mocking. "At least this one cast no aspersions on your command in his note. One must wonder, though—even a wild bitch need not be beaten seven times to learn her lesson. I find myself curious how many such instructions you would require."

Maeve blew black flecks of char from her palm. "Oh, Satria, you know I adore your wit. Perhaps one day we will steal a moment of tranquility together and share drink from a gold-kissed cup. Then, I believe, you would understand the source of my resolve."

Seven. Cursed few indeed; although they had suffered no losses so severe as on the night of the black sphere, their numbers had been steadily whittled at, not by bloodshed but desertion. No fae of wavering loyalties would have been considered for this expedition, nor was there anything to flee to, but desert they had, disappearing in the night—or what passed for it in this unending darkness—to places far and gone. It was impossible to predict who would succumb, or why. Violet, personally, attributed it to the whispering wind, which could tie one's mind into knots where up was down and reason was fleeting. She had maintained Occlumency nearly constantly for three weeks now, and even she was beginning to feel the strain of it, at times failing in focus and realizing it only when her thoughts began to shift.

The cost was felt most heavily by Maeve's cohort—of the seven, just two were Satria's. But Satria had far fewer fae to lose, and with their ranks already devastated by the night of the black sphere, those two absences stood glaringly out. Where there had once been perhaps four fae of Maeve's colors to one of Satria's, there were now at least six. Even someone far more charitable than Violet would not have failed to note the suspiciousness of the disparity, but in this case she was forced to dismiss it as coincidence. Maeve's vows had been extensive and shockingly unqualified. Even if she had somehow found a way to weave a loophole into them, she would be a fool to risk provoking open hostilities while she was so bound.

That they had suffered no losses by other means was perhaps something she should be more grateful for. Never friendly, the Distant Lands had begun to shift over time to outright hostile. Patches of the gray were less firm than they appeared, and a misstep could potentially lead to … something. A coin dropped through one of these undetectable voids fell away without sound and was not seen again. It may be this answered Violet's question of whether anything existed beneath the ground here, but she had no wish to see it for herself.

And then there was the second dawning. A week ago now, they had been shocked and cheered to see the sun, which had been absent for agonizingly long then, peek just over the far horizon, small and weak and dark. But with every step it grew stronger until it was gloriously bright; too bright. The sun should never have been so strong or so red. But its light was welcomed all the same.

Under the light of the foreign sun, they had encountered things baffling and bizarre. The sea of gray had given way to green, a field of emerald grass stretching as far as they eye could see. But grass it was not; though they swayed as if in wind, the blades were of green glass, and the unwary first to tread upon the field bled for it. Wildflowers bloomed abundant, their petals of razor bronze and their nectar a white, weeping fluid that burned bitterly on the skin. They had left a path of shattered, flattened glass dust through that field, and it was strange enough, but it did not compare to what they found next beneath the red sun.

It was like a city, if a city grew organically and of glass so polished as to be like endless mirrors. Sculpted channels of smooth, curving glass twisted their footsteps into a haunting, sighing lament. The city was entirely, utterly desolate both of life and the very imagining of it. But when Violet looked and saw the legions of her repeated reflections surrounding her on all sides, there were times when she thought that not all of them shared her face. She was filled then with an overwhelming curiosity to gaze more deeply and a strange certainty that, should she, she would slip into the reflection where those not-Violets were and see the true world which they now merely walked the face of. But it was not to be and wiser not to try, and it was with some melancholy that she left the glass city and its elegiac beauty behind, knowing that she would certainly never see it again.

Night fell again, and into darkness they marched once more. Since then, not a day had passed without at least one fae slipping away, never to be seen again. Violet had caught a glimpse of one, once, trancelike as she was swallowed by the dark. Violet might have pursued her, but some deep instinct warned then that the place she was going was not one that could be returned from.

Her reverie was broken by a sudden flurry of movement as Maeve spurred the expedition back into motion, its most recent loss already forgotten. Violet smirked at Satria's continuing irritation, earning a dour look in return. She would take amusement where she could at this point. The journey was already long, and its end seemed farther than ever. Violet had found Satria, yes, but the more time she spent here the more convinced she became that there was more to the Distant Lands than was revealed to the senses alone. They walked forward, ever forward, but where were they really going?

Perhaps if they traveled long enough they would find what they sought, but more likely not in Violet's estimation. Worse, they had only a scant idea of what it even was they searched for, and barely that. Nothing more than a vague expectation of discovering knowledge that would somehow be useful against Esrid, more wish than goal. There was something else worrying at her, a sense that a conclusion of great importance was just beyond her grasp. The constant Occlumency wasn't helping. She felt fuzzy-minded and tired however much she slept, but it was better than the alternative.

She was weary, too. Even now, she had not fully recovered from the blood she had shed tracking Satria. Perhaps it was merely the exertion of long days spent on the move that was ensuring her recovery was slow, but Violet didn't think so. It had been a sacrifice, after all. Blood spilled for power would not be so easily replaced. In any case, it was another distraction from her elusive thoughts.

She shook her head. It would come to her, or it would not. Driving herself mad trying to snatch the thought out of the air would only ensure she lost it entirely. Besides, her attention would be better spent on other matters like, for instance, not falling through an invisible void into a realm even stranger than the Distant Lands.

Violet rode at the front between Maeve and Satria on one of the few remaining horses. This was ideal for two reasons: firstly, she did not have to walk; secondly, she provided a physical impediment to Maeve and Satria's volatile relationship crossing the line into bloodshed.

And that's only mostly a joke.

The dull drum of hooves on the unyielding ground was even and tedious. The four-beat gait was steadily being hammered into Violet's head until she found herself anticipating each heavy thud. Thud. Thud. —

Silence. Violet had just enough time to glance to the side—she had slipped ahead of Satria and Maeve during their argument—but no one was reacting. A second hoofbeat was missed too, and then her horse gave a shudder and charged.

The horses of Winter were a fierce sort. When confronted with danger or pain, their instinct was not to flee or buck but to charge and crush their foe. Violet jerked in her saddle as her horse leapt forward in eerie silence, and a moment later she was struck by a sensation of fire across every inch of her skin, most intense in her eyes and ears. Her vision went dark, and she heard only a roar. Her horse collapsed under her and she nearly passed out too, brought back from the brink only by a shock of cold and an intense certainty of danger. She crashed to the hard ground as the breath rushed from her lips, scrabbling blindly with unfeeling fingers.

What the f—where? Who?

She could feel her thoughts beginning to fray, unconsciousness looming large over her. No part of her body seemed to be working as it should be. She had the Elder Wand in her hand somehow but could not remember drawing it. She tried to shout, but something was stopping her from breathing. Her tongue tingled, almost burning, as if she had drunk something unbearably fizzy.

She recalled a disgraced Unspeakable and an exotic spell, so long ago now.

With the last of her will, Violet cast, Ventus! and passed out.

She woke up slowly, unpleasantly, with her throat sore and her ears throbbing. Her eyelids stuck, but she forced them open. The world swam, and she had the vague impression that she was moving—yes, that was Satria's hair tickling her face; she was carrying her.

Satria's lips were moving, but Violet couldn't hear a thing. She squinted, and slowly the blurriness cleared. She still couldn't hear, but she knew what Satria was saying.

"Violet? Violet!"

"I'm fine," Violet tried to reply, though she could not tell how well the words were formed. Likely, they were very hoarse. "Satria, really—"

Finally fed up with this rather undignified treatment, she twisted free of Satria's grip, stumbling when she struck the ground but keeping her balance. One ear popped and she could hear again, though it came with another stab of pain. She looked around, getting her bearings, and saw the corpse of her horse only a few paces away. She hadn't been out long.

Maeve and a number of other fae were curiously stepping through the same space Violet had nearly died in, but they seemed quite unconcerned. She must have conjured a lot of air.

"I'm really all right," said Violet, seeing Satria was still watching her closely. "Really. That was just—unexpected."

"I do not understand," Satria admitted. "All seemed well, and then your horse fell from under you—I tried to reach for you, but I was nearly overcome myself."

"It was a vacuum," Violet said. "It shouldn't—it doesn't make sense, but that's just this place for you. Patches where there's no air. Why not?"

"Quite so. I had never seen anything like it," said Maeve, having come over, with a curiously pleased smile. Violet had not taken her as the sort to be taken by magical curiosities. "Most fortunately, you were swift to react. If you had not, I fear there would have been little we could have done. So remarkable is the flexibility of mortal magic!"

Two days later, the sun rose again. Unlike before, there were no changes to the environment to come with it, but Violet was certain that when she once looked to the horizon there was something standing there, very far away. Nothing human. Too tall by half and with its form seeming to shift and sway, it was gone in a blink. But there it had been.

It was becoming painfully clear by then that the thing bothering Violet in the back of her mind was in fact a something, a hard shell of thought dreaming dreams that were not hers. And, gloomily, she reasoned that out here, there could be only two plausible sources for such an intruding presence. Either it was Esrid, or it was an even stranger and more terrible entity that roamed this endless plane, perhaps the very intelligence that conspired to pick words from thought and throw them to the wind.

On the whole, she thought Esrid more likely. Her inability to expel him from her own mind remained a source of utmost frustration and concern. Damn him.

But there was something … different about this. There was no voice not her own, no attempts to seize control. No—it was passive, weak, so slight that if Violet were not analyzing her mind with such paranoia she might have missed it entirely. But it was most certainly there, and she thought it might be saying something she could not hear over the sound of her own thoughts.

If her consciousness was too loud, then perhaps she would have better luck without it. Before each time she slept, she contemplated the presence and its tiny message—a pull, she was beginning to think—likely baffling Satria with her unusually timed concentration. And, eventually, it worked.

Violet dreamed first of mortal cities, of steel and thunder and, yes, magic. Then her dreaming world half-turned, and the cities were twisted into palaces, the steel to silver, the thunder to song. Summer sun and winter wind. Though her sleeping self was not so aware, the meaning was obvious.

The cities returned. She wandered through streets nearly familiar but not so, occasionally passing figures but never faces. Gradually, her surroundings became odd, the mundane reshaping itself into the extraordinary, and the people she passed were not human at all, but neither could she put any description to them. They were of grace, as the fae, and gentle and wise, but they came and went like fireflies—or men.

A most curious thing. But if these were men who were not men, what of the fae who were not fae?

The graceful city turned like the familiar one, becoming a refraction of itself. Lakes of liquid metal gleamed under a sun of nameless colors, and forests of crystal surrounded great mechanical works of iron and lead. And there were beings here—timeless but ever young and full of fire and genius, inspired to transform their unnatural world to suit their whims. And something else, a tree in which a greatness resided, over two worlds presiding, an entity so vast that Violet could compare it with only two others.

This ancient and vast thing turned, and Violet could see it a thousand times at once, unchanged and unchanging, watching as one world drowned under ash and a second waned in sympathetic reflection. Watching as crystal shattered and oil fields burned. Speaking only to itself, in a voice halfway familiar.

ALONE.

In the moment of waking, the tree lingered, black against an uncaring sun, ruling over a corpse-land, left by the wolves who had felled it, by the vultures who had picked it clean. And under that black tree, under the hostile stars, a lone figure who had long since forsaken his grace approached. And an idea began to have ideas of its own.

Violet awoke with a gasp, her body convulsing. Satria, beside her, was shocked awake as well and called out her name in startled concern.

"I've seen it," said Violet, rising and beginning to dress. "I can bring us there."

"Where, Violet?" exclaimed Satria, even more alarmed now.

Violet did not respond. In her hands, she conjured a crystal of ice, nearly shuddering at the relief of Winter's familiarity. She must be bold now.

"The Third, the Other. I know what Esrid met out here."

With her heart scarcely daring to beat, she divided the ice in two.

~#~

Something, somewhere, was calling. And only Violet could hear it. It was not calling to her. It was calling to Esrid, in a sense, yet that was only partly true. It was the Other, the Third, for which the call was meant, and Violet now knew just how much that meant. She knew what the Other was.

It was like Summer. It was like Winter. It was neither. What would become of the fae if the humans vanished? Would they continue to echo on, growing ever more distorted until all that remained was mockery? Or would they, too, fade? And if the fae were gone, what of Summer and Winter?

Violet didn't know. But she was certain that was exactly what had happened to the Other. In a distant world, not so unlike those she had known, mortals had walked above and eternals below. And there was a Summer or a Winter or perhaps both, but then all came unwound and was coated in ash. And to that hollowness, a bitter, desperate, madly alone exile of Winter had come. And of two there was then one.

But the land the Other had abandoned was now calling out, and Violet could hear an echo of its cry by sympathy, by her link to the thing that was Esrid and the Other both, by its parasitic hijacking of her connection to Winter. In retrospect, she had known what the Other was from the moment it slipped between her and Winter. Only an entity—if, indeed, the word fit—of the same grandeur could have done such a thing.

It was not enough. Not yet.

"Violet," Satria whispered, her her voice low and charged. The silken cloth of the tent around them rippled in the whispering wind, patterns of light and shadow crawling across it as it churned. "We agreed it was too dangerous for you to touch Winter."

Violet divided the ice again. Tiny flecks flickered above her hand. Not mist. Not yet.

"Perhaps," Violet admitted. "But what other option do we have? I can lead us to the place where it all began. Where Esrid, the Esrid we know, began."

"Any option," Satria hissed, grasping Violet's arm tightly enough to hurt. "Not this."

Violet shook her head, dividing again. Familiar cold was beginning to creep over her. And was it just her imagination, or could she taste the scent of ash?

"You heard Maeve. She intends to see this to the end, one way or another. How many Knights do you have left? How long until you join them, vanishing into the night? How long until I do?"

She divided again and shuddered, her eyes fluttering shut. Winter was with her once again. No finer sensation had there ever been. "At least now we'll have a chance. Better the words of the alien god we know than the whispers of the one we don't."

A brackish taste flooded Violet's mouth, and her skin crawled, as if thousands of insects had burrowed beneath it. The call rang like a great brass bell now, clarion and pure. Her eyes opened and she stood.

So bold … you hide no longer?

A little shudder went through her. They were just words. She laughed and sharpened her thoughts into something sharp and cruel. Winter, its prior faltering before the Other's first intrusion forgotten, stood behind her, a blanket of numbing strength. Days, weeks, of accumulating weariness, aches and pains and weaknesses Violet had not even been aware of, all burned away under a freezing fire. "Well," she said, speaking aloud for the satisfaction of it, "if you knew anything about me, you'd know I can never resist a dance."

And with that she stole first blood, raking the thing in her mind even as it tried to respond, filling the wound with icy venom. No more running. No more hiding. Esrid, Voldemort, Bellatrix. Shadows all, I await you.

~#~

A dance it was not. Art, of a sort, it might be, as far as torture could be so; some saw it as such, in the Wyld and out. It was a game, perhaps, a great game with spectacular stakes, the sort of game favored by those with something to prove, the kind of courage-game played in hardcore military units and old-fashioned boarding schools alike, the kind that left you with scars.

The funny thing about sharing a mind with someone was that you were both really very vulnerable to the other. Under the right circumstances, with the right partner, it could probably be pleasant. A shame it had to be this way instead.

It was clear that Esrid, or the Other, or whatever she should be calling the enemy she had invited into her mind, wished to break her, to beat her down into her fundamental parts until she was as formless and moldable as clay. It bent all its effort to this purpose, with only brief, halting respites when mysterious other matters drew its attention. These rests never lasted as long as they could have, for they were logically the times when the Other was most distracted, most vulnerable, and Violet invariably seized the opportunity to counterattack. She lashed out, grasping some small part of the immeasurable expanse of the Other's psyche. She would savage it, like the killing motions of a great cat's back claws, and soothed her aches with the taste of transcendental blood. Her efforts were faltering at first, but in time she learned how to wound a god.

Those were the good moments. Other times, more often, the Other had the advantage, and Violet could do nothing but slump against the neck of her horse, her cheek pressed to its coarse hair, as carefully constructed agonies pulsed through her in endlessly inventive patterns, never the same and never possible to properly prepare for. Sometimes the strategies were crude, but more often they were subtle.

Physical pain—or at least the approximation of it that could be achieved by deceiving the mind—was a rare treat. No, the Other favored more esoteric methods. A favorite was to confront her with mental images of warping, intersecting geometry that resolved into infinite sequences of such ghastly scale and horror that the finite mind recoiled, screaming. It was an unfamiliar pain, an impossible one, and all the more effective because of it. Worst of all was the possibility that hurting her wasn't even the point. In the beginning, it had hurt worse than it did now, as if the images were no longer quite so incompatible with her way of thinking as they once were. The Other was changing her mind in some way, reshaping it, and whether intentional or not, it scared her.

For Violet's part, experimentation had revealed that her most effective weapon was the Other's own memories, exposed to her perusal like an open book. For all its power, the Other was weak in some ways. It was no Occlumens, perhaps lacking some fundamental quality that would allow it to protect its secrets, and Violet exploited its vulnerability fervently. She conjured latent images of the Other's world in its desolate decay, extracting the vitality of them, sharpening them to knife-points, and it was working, at least a little. She could sense the Other bleeding, in a sense, smoky existence trailing away like underwater blood. For an idea come alive, an attack on its conceptual identity was as visceral as a knife through flesh. The Other was adrift, existing in a way it had never been meant to, and every time Violet pointed that out to it, it broke a little.

She tried to attack the part that was Esrid, too, both through his memories and through more conventional Legilimency, but surprisingly he was the less vulnerable of the pair to mental attack. Or perhaps the two were too closely joined now for any differentiation to be drawn between them.

Worse than the pain, worse than the furious war being waged in her mind, were the times when the Other was quiescent, contemplative, communicative. It never ran out of things to say.

You're going the wrong way. The Cold's rise is the devourment of All. Violet, you ashen thing, you know not what you lost. Turn back. Turn back. Life thrives beneath a sun.

It was during one of those times that Violet decided she hated the Other even more than Bellatrix, more than Voldemort. She might have been willing to cut off a hand—or at least a few fingers—if it meant getting it out of her mind. It wouldn't have taken that. It would have been easy, effortless, requiring her only to withdraw from Winter as she had before, and the Other would go too. But she could not, because as long she could endure, as long as she could keep up the fight, they would draw ever nearer the Other's forsaken home. And she was certain—triumphantly certain—that the Other had not the slightest idea where she was or what she sought, and she was equally certain that if it did know, it would react most dramatically. It was the secret she kept, tucked away in the quietest corner of her mind, and so far the Other had not found it.

So on Violet traveled, with Satria and Maeve beside her and Jon behind her, and it was Violet who led now, not Maeve. For her part, Maeve was less outwardly appreciative of Violet's solution to their wandering than might have been expected given the lengths she was going to to provide it, but Maeve was an inscrutable mystery at the best of times. Violet's assessment of her true intentions was murkier than it had ever been—though perhaps that was just the Other's mind-fuck slowly eroding her ability to think like a human.

Whatever the cost, it was working. Not even Maeve could argue that. Since Violet took the lead, there was a new purpose to the fabric of the Distant Lands, a rhythm to the bizarre where before chaos had reigned unchallenged. Their losses had lessened as well, with only a few more fae swallowed by the night. Slowly but steadily, the great question was shifting from whether they would find the Other's homeland to what would await them when they did.

"Ash," Violet whispered, her temple throbbing with the effort of speech. It was the words—her mind was so twisted up that straightening it out enough to form coherent speech made it ache like frozen flesh beginning to thaw. Maeve watched her, patiently, an absent smile concealing the secrets below. "And poison. It—it doesn't remember like us, doesn't think—it's hard to translate …"

"It," Maeve said, seeming to savor the word. She had taken the revelation of the nature of the entity Esrid had become one with with the same even consideration as everything else on this accursed journey. It was beginning to grate on Violet's nerves. Maeve had always been more volatile than this. But she couldn't bear to think on it further. A note of melancholy entered Maeve's voice as she returned her attention to the horizon. "To think Brother succeeded in the end. It was always his fondest wish to be free of Winter."

Days more passed. The going was easy, their weapons not drawn, all while Violet fought her private war. Passionate and cruel, it was waged with hooks and barbs, trickery and venom. But despite it all, despite the chance that her mind would crack under the strain, she did not fight a smile when in the far distance white-blue sparks played for her eyes alone.

Let it be devoured. Let the cold crawl, as it did over me. I am coming, Esrid. The cold is coming.

~#~

A sun rose. It was dead.

Broken apart, it burned in the sky like strands of golden hair stretched and melted. It wept great radiant tears as thick and slow as glass, and towering fires burned where they splashed to the ground, of such scale and fury that even from kilometers away their warmth was felt, the shadow of their smoke a cloak of darkness covering vast stretches of ground.

Crystals grew from the gray ground, rising up and splitting the sunlight into their myriad internal colors, colors which Violet had once had no names for but now did. She was pulled forward inexorably, dragged by the Other's nostalgic yearning for its homeland like a fish snared on a hook. But her anticipation, that was her own. At last.

The ground turned uneven, rock taking the place of gray, blasted black and studded with crystals. The air was no longer clear either, made hazy by smoke and floating ash. The gray-white particles flurried about and settled on the ground, muting the crystals' vibrance. It was hot, suffocatingly so, and growing worse as they pressed deeper into the sun-scorched land. On all sides the great fires burned, rumbling the ground and the air with a deep, visceral roar.

But despite the burned and desecrated hostility of this land, there was also something Violet had not seen for over a month: true fauna. Somehow, through the flame and smoke, life clung on. Silvery moss grew in the cracks of crystals, and a kind of tiny white flower that sprouted from the ash bloomed and died in minutes, scattering infinitesimal seeds on the infernal winds to find other crevices to take root. Even some of the fae seemed taken by the sight after so long in the Distant Lands.

"Magnificent," breathed Maeve, her cheeks flushed with unrestrained passion. "Woe indeed to the conquered."

Violet shook her head, swaying in her saddle, and barely felt Satria's touch as she stabilized her. "It's too much, Violet," she murmured. "I know not what you have suffered for our sake, but it is done. You must pull away again, however hard it might be. Even the grace of Winter is not worth the price of madness."

"Can't," Violet gritted out. "Got to find the … the …"

"No, Violet," Satria said, and impossibly gently she lifted Violet's chin to the horizon and up, up, up. "You did it. You found it."

Twisted black limbs crawled from the fields of ash to the burning sky. Violet stared at it, not comprehending, until at last her sluggish mind recognized the visual pattern before her.

The carcass of a dead world was laid out before them, no less grand in scale than the Wyld. A sensation of almost overwhelming déjà vu filled her, the landscape both intimately familiar and entirely other. Stories had been written here, songs sung, and but one remained, poised on the note that Violet would have be this land's very last.

And at the center of it all, a black tree lingered beneath the uncaring sky.

AN:

Sleet and Hail is starting to approach its final stages. There's still a fair way to go, but I've started thinking about what I might write next. I have a number of ideas already, but if you're interested in pitching your own, the discord is the best way to do so, which you can join here (without spaces): discord . gg / HfyNqfMqfJ

In other news, I have created a P atreo n account for anyone who wants to support my writing. I hesitated for a long time to do so because I didn't want to give the impression that I'm not writing for fun (I am), but suffice to say that real life circumstances have convinced me to take the step.

(Without spaces): p atreo n . com [slash] friss

Any support you might show would be deeply appreciated, but just by reading you're already exceeding my expectations.

No derivative work of mine (that is, fanfiction) will ever be behind a paywall, temporary or otherwise.

Thank you,

- Friss