A blur of white and gold. A snarl like shattered glass.

  Eleven-year-old Winter, small and feral, slammed into Crook at the speed of sound.

  She was a storm of wild, dark curls that bounced with the violence of her motion, a single stark strand of white streaking through them near her right temple. Her feet were bare, already scraped and dirty. The simple white dress she wore was torn at the hem and sleeve, and spattered with flecks of dark, dried blood that was not her own.

  And her eyes burned with a light that was not human, a deep, molten gold that held the fury of a caged sun.

  Claws raked. Teeth flashed.

  Crook staggered, her helmet cracking as she skidded back.

  For the first time, she looked surprised. Not alarmed, but genuinely intrigued, like a historian discovering a lost text.

  Winter stood between them, her golden eyes burning, her tiny frame trembling with primordial rage.

  Crook straightened, the cracked lens focusing intently on the girl. Her head tilted, not in threat, but in the manner of a sage recognizing a forgotten truth in a storm.

  "The wild seed breaks the paved stone," she breathed, her voice a low, resonant hum of ancient recognition. "Of course it does."

  Winter's response was a guttural snarl. She lunged again, but this time her hands blurred, not with flesh, but with five overlapping afterimages of pure, hungry darkness. Conceptual Claws. They didn't tear air; they severed the idea of whatever they passed through: durability, cohesion, existence itself. They lashed towards Crook's center in a converging star-pattern, leaving faint, spidery cracks in reality itself in their wake.

  Crook did not block. She could not block such a thing.

  Instead, she leaned back. Not a dodge, but a profound, almost lazy reclination, her spine bending at an impossible angle as if hinged on a single, perfect point below her navel. It was an ancient, forgotten form: The Willow Avoids the Axe. The five converging claws passed through the space where her torso had been, close enough to stir the fabric of her suit, severing nothing but empty air.

  As Winter's killing strike extended into empty space, overcommitted, Crook's own hand moved. Not a strike, but a series of five impossibly fast, feather-light taps from her index finger. Each tap landed on a precise point along the meridian of Winter's outstretched arm: wrist, inner elbow, shoulder, a point just below the collarbone, and finally the center of her forehead.

  Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

  There was no sound of impact, only a soft, dissonant chime, like five notes played on a cracked bell. Each tap sent a wave of perfect, neutralizing stillness through Winter's nervous system.

  Winter gasped, a sharp, shocked inhalation. The Conceptual Claws flickered, fragmented, and winked out of existence as if un-made. Her arm dropped to her side, numb and heavy, the metaphysical pathways to that terrible power temporarily severed by the precise, clinical counter-technique. The wild, golden light in her eyes flickered with a moment of pure, instinctual confusion: the fury was still there, but the conduit to express it had been gently, perfectly unplugged.

  For a single, vulnerable second, the feral god was just a bewildered child, staring at her own useless hand.

  Her survival instinct—older than thought, deeper than magic—screamed.

  Not to attack. To create distance.

  Her body obeyed before her mind could parse the reason. She didn't run. She uncoiled.

  The motion was pure, explosive biology. Tendons like steel cables released. She didn't push off the ground; she rejected it, her bare feet cracking the marble as she launched herself backward in a blur of white linen and dark curls. She flew twenty feet through the air, not in a controlled leap, but in a frantic, horizontal scramble, putting raw space between herself and the impossible woman who had turned her deadliest weapon into a numb, hanging limb.

  She skidded to a halt in a low, bestial crouch, one hand braced on the cold floor, her golden eyes wide and analyzing. She looked from her own dead arm to Crook, then back again. The snarl on her lips was now mixed with something new: primal calculation. Why didn't it work? How did she touch the idea?

  That moment of reassessment, that desperate need to understand the unknown, was the opening.

  ///

  Crook’s hand moved, a flick of her wrist, and a new weapon materialized: not the sleek pistol from before, but something heavier. It was a cannon in the shape of a handgun, all bronze alloys and glowing power coils, humming with contained annihilation. It didn't aim; it simply oriented on Winter.

  The report wasn't a gunshot. It was a localized thunderclap, a vacuum collapse that punched the air from Lóng Yán’s lungs even from across the room. The muzzle flash was a miniature sun. The projectile wasn't visible, but its passage was a hypersonic tunnel of superheated air and warped light, a line of pure erasure drawn directly at the center of Winter's chest.

  Winter didn’t dodge.

  She spun.

  Her body became a white-and-gold vortex. As she pivoted, her right leg lifted in a balletic, impossible arc. The hypersonic round, traveling at a velocity that could pierce a bunker, intersected the space between her big toe and the next.

  CLANG.

  The sound was a cathedral bell ringing inside a steel coffin. A visible shockwave, a perfect sphere of distorted air, bloomed from the point of impact. The round, a thumb-sized slug of collapsed matter, didn't ricochet. It stopped, held perfectly, impossibly, between her toes.

  The spin continued, seamlessly becoming a throw. Winter’s leg snapped out like a whip. The round reversed its vector, screaming back the way it came with all its original, city-killing velocity, now aimed at the center of Crook’s helmet.

  Crook’s free hand snapped up. Not to block. Not to evade. To pluck.

  Her thumb and forefinger closed in the air before her visor.

  PING.

  A sound like a tuning fork struck against the bones of the world. The hypersonic round was arrested between her fingers, its insane kinetic energy dissipating into her arm with a tremor that visibly vibrated through her magpie-blue suit for a fraction of a second. She held it up, examining the still-smoking slug with profound, silent curiosity.

  "That is—" she began, her voice the calm at the eye of the storm.

  She didn’t get to finish. Winter was already there.

  The air shattered as Winter moved, crossing the distance before the sound of her snarl even finished echoing.

  Crook blocked. Not fast enough.

  THOOM!

  Winter’s fist caved in the reinforced plating of Crook’s magpie-blue suit, the impact cratering the wall behind her. Plaster rained down as Crook skidded back, her boots carving trenches in the marble.

  Her helmet tilted, assessing the damage with clinical detachment. "Strength blooms from unexpected soil."

  ///

  Winter's next attacks were a blur of chaos, a kinetic language written in contortions. She didn't move like a fighter; she unfolded like a puzzle-box of violence.

  1. The Extended Hook:

  Winter stood facing Crook. She threw a standard right hook. But as her arm extended, her shoulder popped with an unnatural sound, the joint dislocating forward. Her fist shot out an extra six inches, punching through the space where Crook's head had been a moment before. Crook ducked under it, but the fist's passage was so violently fast it created a vacuum shockwave that blasted the mahogany desk behind her into splinters.

  2. The Inverted Scissor & Twist:

  Before the wood finished falling, Winter was already moving down and under. She dropped, planted both palms on the floor, and arched her back until her heels were above her own head. From this inverted handstand, she scissor-kicked both legs at Crook's standing head. Crook leaned back to avoid the twin heels.

  Winter used the momentum of her missed kick to kip-up, flinging herself back to her feet. But as she rose, she performed an impossible mid-air torsion: her torso twisted a full 180 degrees backwards like an owl, so her chest faced the ceiling while her eyes locked on Crook. From this twisted position, she threw a reverse elbow at Crook's temple with the force of her entire rising body.

  3. The Melt-Down & Split Sweep:

  Crook flowed with the blow, redirecting the elbow past her. But Winter didn't follow through. Instead, she melted downward as if her bones had turned liquid. She dropped into a perfect sideways split on the floor, her leading leg extended. In one smooth motion, she swept that leg in a wide, low arc aimed to cut Crook's feet out from under her.

  4. The Split-Spring & Corkscrew Piston:

  Crook hopped lightly over the sweeping leg. But Winter used the split itself as a spring. She snapped her legs together with explosive force, launching herself vertically upward from the sitting position. As she rose, she tucked into a corkscrew flip, spinning once, and untucked to drive her heel straight down like a piston aimed to crush Crook's jaw from above.

  Crook twisted her upper body, flowing with the motion to dissipate the force of the descending kick, but the attack was not a simple impact.

  In the microsecond before contact, Winter's leg had vibrated, not dozens, but thousands of times, concentrating a kinetic payload that held, in its theoretical potential, enough force to shift the planet itself in its orbit.

  But it was more than physics. It was law. The blow was imbued with a golden, feral magic —Sekhmet's essence— weaving a simple, brutal imperative into the strike: Hit. It was a conceptual, sure-hit attack, designed to bypass all evasion and guarantee its connection.

  Crook's twist was perfect, a masterwork of redirection that would have voided any purely physical force. But against this compulsory imperative, it was insufficient. The universe itself conspired to ensure contact.

  There was one final option. Not a dodge. Not a block. An erasure.

  For a single, impossible second, Crook invoked her technique: Absent.

  She did not move. She was removed.

  She deleted herself from the fundamental parameters of reality. She was not in the space she occupied. She held no position in time. The concept of "Crook" as a tangible entity that could be struck was temporarily undefined. The magical imperative of Hit was presented with a syntax error. There was no valid target.

  The planet-shifting, conceptually-bound knee passed through the space where she had been. It was not that it missed. It was that it encountered a perfect, absolute null.

  And then, in the next second, she was back. The cost was a searing, blue-white corona of existential backlash that flared around her form, the universe violently rewriting her back into existence. The strain was immense, a toll paid directly from her core being.

  But it was done. The unavoidable had been avoided. The sure-hit had hit nothing.

  Her shoulder, now fully real and present once more, dislocated with a sickening, wet pop from the residual, non-conceptual kinetic force she had chosen to accept upon her return, redirecting the dissipating energy into the joint to ground it.

  Winter didn’t let up.

  The air warped as Winter lunged, but her path was impossible, a zigzag of flips and rebounds that used the walls and floor as springboards.

  Crook watched, patient as stone.

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  Winter's first feint: A handspring toward Crook's chest. But as her hands touched the floor, she pivoted, using her arms as an axle to spin her entire lower body horizontally. Her heel whipped toward Crook's knee from the side.

  Crook shifted her weight to block the low kick.

  Winter's second feint: She collapsed the spinning move instantly, dropping onto her shoulders. From this upside-down position, she fired both legs straight up like pistons, aiming a twin kick at Crook’s chin.

  Crook tilted her head back, letting the feet whistle past her visor. "Predictability is the death of the wild thing."

  Winter's counter-retreat: She used the momentum of her missed kick to cartwheel backward. But mid-cartwheel —fully upside down, back exposed— she performed an impossible spine-arch, looking backward over her own shoulder to aim a needle-thin kick at Crook’s temple.

  Crook sidestepped the blind kick, but the move’s unnatural geometry forced her to adjust her footing.

  Winter's finishing spin: She completed the cartwheel, but landed on one hand instead of her feet. Using that single hand as a pivot, she spun her body like a top, her free leg extending in a blistering horizontal sweep aimed at Crook’s standing leg.

  CRACK.

  Crook’s dislocated shoulder snapped back into place. Her free hand shot out and caught Winter’s ankle in mid-sweep, stopping the spin dead. The impact echoed like a gunshot. "Disorientation is a tool. But a tool requires a stable hand to wield it."

  Winter’s trapped move: Instead of pulling back, she hooked her free leg around Crook’s forearm. With terrifying flexibility, she folded her entire body upward, bringing her teeth toward Crook’s wrist in a feral bite.

  "Fluidity without foundation is a river without banks," Crook observed. "All flood, no direction."

  Crook’s endgame: Her other hand closed around Winter’s throat, not choking, just holding, a cage of unyielding fingers. Winter gagged, her contorted body still twitching instinctively. Her own hands scrabbled uselessly at Crook's wrist, nails scraping against the magpie-blue material. But then, in a burst of desperate leverage, Winter released her hooked leg and planted both bare feet against Crook's chest and shoulder. She pushed, not to escape, but to create a single inch of space, her body forming a tense, struggling arch between the hand at her throat and the feet braced against her captor.

  Crook did not budge. She simply observed the strain, the raw physics of the struggle, her helmet tilting.

  "Tell me," Crook said, her voice calm, almost conversational. "Are you familiar with the Theory of Anchored Momentum? The principle that a force, no matter how fluid, is rendered inert if its point of origin is fixed?"

  Winter’s golden eyes blazed up at her, fury choking out any breath for words. Her bare feet pushed harder against the immovable suit.

  Then, her voice came, not a snarl, not a scream, but a low, ragged, and perfectly clear rasp. It was the first time she had spoken.

  "How about the... Shut Your Bitch-Ass Up... theory?"

  For a fraction of a second, the ancient room was silent save for the hum of broken systems and settling dust. The vulgar, modern defiance hung in the air, clashing violently with Crook’s timeless, philosophical tone.

  Crook’s head tilted a final, considering degree. The amber lens seemed almost to glint with something that might have been the ghost of amusement.

  "An eloquent rebuttal," she conceded.

  Then, with a shrug of her arm that dismissed both the theory and the theorist, she flung Winter out the window.

  ///

  Glass exploded outward as Winter tumbled into open air, her white dress fluttering like a dying moth.

  For one breathless moment, she hung there, suspended against the skyline, before gravity took her.

  Crook didn’t watch her fall.

  Somewhere below, the sound of impact shook the courtyard.

  Winter’s body hit the stones, not with the wet crunch of bone, but the ringing clang of something harder.

  Crook didn’t flinch. She never did.

  ///

  The window exploded inward.

  Winter came back as shrapnel, her body a white-knuckled blur of claws and teeth, her golden eyes burning with twelve years of concentrated hate.

  A golden aura, thick and primal, erupted from Winter's body: Bast's essence. The air grew heavy with the scent of sun-baked stone and wild musk. Her claws shinked back into existence. The next move Winter took wasn't a blur.

  Crook smiled beneath her helmet.

  She'd seen this coming, five seconds ago. The resilience was noted, cataloged.

  Winter vanished. Not in a blur, but in a total absence of presence. The goddess essence didn't just soup up her muscles. It rewired her thalamocortical loops, turning her nervous system into a quantum-coherent processor. Her reaction speed wasn't measured in milliseconds, but in Planck-time increments. To move at the speeds she did, her reality had to be a slow-motion tableau where light itself seemed to crawl. She moved, and the concept of her path through space became irrelevant. She was a hundred times beyond light, a paradox of physics given form, her fist already an inch from Crook's jaw before the neurons in her own brain had finished firing to initiate the strike.

  One moment she was ten feet away, coiled to spring. The next, Crook's head snapped to the side, an invisible force cratering the magpie-blue armor at her temple. There was no wind-up, no travel time. From Lóng Yán's paralyzed perspective, he didn't see two people fighting. He saw Crook fighting, blocking, and being struck by attacks that seemed to come from empty air itself.

  ///

  Winter's claws raked toward Crook's throat, only to tear through empty air as Crook sidestepped before Winter had even leapt.

  A backhand sent Winter crashing through a marble pillar.

  "Velocity is a variable," Crook stated, her voice the only steady thing in a room now boiling with distorted physics. "Not a victory condition."

  Winter rolled midair, rebounding off the wall like a bullet, her fist aimed for Crook's spine, but Crook was already turning, her elbow meeting Winter's jaw with a crack that shook the room.

  Winter landed in a crouch, shaking off the impact. When she pounced again, something had shifted. It was no longer pure, unpredictable rage.

  Now, it was instinct.

  Crook’s next strike -a knife-hand aimed to sever Winter’s collarbone- was met not by a dodge, but by a forearm that snapped up to block it before Crook’s muscles had fully committed. The block was automatic, pre-conscious, a feline reflex faster than thought.

  Crook’s follow-up elbow, designed to crush ribs, was intercepted by Winter’s palm, which slapped the blow aside with a sharp crack of redirected force. Winter wasn't predicting. She wasn't even seeing. Her body was reacting, operating on a primal, sub-neural level to the subtle shifts in air pressure, intent, and threat.

  Winter pounced, a blur of feral motion, yet Crook flowed between the strikes like water, her precognition a step ahead, but only just. Where before it had been a choreographed dance, now it was a duel between foresight and reflex.

  "You're fast, but speed without sight is merely haste," Crook mused, as Winter’s clawed swipe was once again met by a parrying forearm that seemed to materialize in its path. "The wildest beast," Crook amended, her tone shifting from instruction to observation, "is still bound by its nature. But nature has its own eyes."

  She feinted high, then drove a spear-hand toward Winter’s solar plexus. Winter’s torso contracted sideways, the evasion so minimal it was barely a movement at all, letting the strike whistle past. In the same motion, her own claws lashed out.

  This time, Crook didn't catch the wrist. She was forced to lean back, the tips of Winter’s claws missing her helmet’s lens by a millimeter.

  Crook’s helmet tilted. The cracked amber lens focused. "Fascinating."

  She stopped attacking.

  Instead, as Winter lunged again, a whirlwind of claws driven by pure, reactive instinct, Crook simply redirected. She didn't block the strikes; she guided them. Her hands became gentle, imperceptible nudges against Winter's elbows and wrists, subtly altering their trajectory.

  Winter’s own ferocious momentum became her enemy. A raking claw aimed for Crook’s throat was steered downward. A driving knee was coaxed wider. Crook flowed around her like a tide around a stone, each minimal touch compounding Winter's force, bending her assault into a spiraling, self-defeating vortex.

  With a final, almost tender palm placed against the small of Winter's back, Crook didn't push. She guided the accumulated vector.

  Winter didn't trip. She accelerated, her own uncontrollable pounce hijacked and aimed downward with terrible, elegant precision.

  She slammed Winter face-first into the floor.

  The impact didn't just crack the marble: it sent a shockwave through the entire fortress, shaking dust from the distant ceilings and silencing the distant hum of the facility for a single, stunned second.

  A golden shockwave of pure defiance erupted from Winter's pinned form, blasting her out of Crook's grip. She flew backward, claws screeching against the ceiling before she dropped, landing in a low crouch. Her snarl was less sound and more a tear in the fabric of silence.

  Then, they erupted from her. Nine phantom tails of pulsating light, invisible to any eye not tuned to the soul's wavelength. They were not appendages, they were concepts given form: wrath, severance, protection, vengeance.

  They moved.

  And Crook's eyes widened behind her helmet.

  The tails had no travel time. They did not cross the space between them. In one reality, they were coiled at Winter's back. In the next, they were already there, spearing towards nine vital points on Crook's body. It was not speed; it was an edit, a deletion of the intervening space.

  Lóng Yán saw nothing. Only Winter, crouching on one side of the room, panting, and Crook on the other, her form suddenly a flickering blur of evasion, jerking and weaving against an assault of pure nothingness.

  Impossibly, unbelievably, Crook was dodging. Her precognition was the only thing that saved her, her body moving on the faith of a prediction, flinching from impacts that were already occurring. For the first time, it was not a dance. It was a desperate, flawless parry against a law of reality being broken.

  Winter felt the strain, a screaming feedback loop tearing through her nervous system. The phantom tails were a power not meant for a mortal frame. With a final, agonized scream of will, she sucked the nine blazing concepts back into her body.

  For one nanosecond, the concentrated power granted her a terrible clarity. She did not move.

  She simply was.

  Her perception was not merely accelerated; it was unbound from inertial frames. She no longer ‘saw’ in picoseconds or femtoseconds, she parsed reality in yoctoseconds, perceiving time not as a river, but as a static crystal lattice where every Planck-scale vibration of an opponent’s intent was as legible as the slow arc of their falling body.

  There was no leap, no blur. In the span of a yoctosecond, a duration in which light barely crosses a thousandth of a proton, she was no longer across the room. She was already there, her fist buried in Crook’s chest plate, the blow not striking but having always been struck.

  It was not an attack to be avoided. It was a completed fact, etched into the quantum foam before Crook’s neurons could fire. Crook’s precognition, which had always painted branching futures, showed only one outcome in that singular nanosecond:

  Her death had already happened. There was no avoiding this.

  ///

  A pulse of blue aura erupted from Crook, but this was not her power. This was reality itself screaming.

  To bypass an attack that had already landed, she had to commit the ultimate transgression: she forced her own timeline to rewind. Her form flickered, reversing through the nanoseconds, not to dodge the blow, but to un-write the moment of its conception. It was a violation of causality so profound that the universe itself retaliated, the blue aura searing her essence as the cost for her heresy against time.

  But she endured the burn. For her, time was a resource to be spent, and reality's wrath was just another tax.

  To bypass Winter’s pre-conscious, feline instinct, which reacted to attacks in the very same instant they were launched, Crook didn't attack in the present at all.

  She attacked in the immediate past.

  She invoked her time-reversal technique, but not to undo Winter’s move. Instead, she used it to create a split in causality. For her, the flow of time became a river she could step slightly upstream in. She moved backwards, just a fraction of a second, while the rest of the world remained frozen in the extended now of her previous temporal adjustment.

  In that stolen sliver of retroactive time, she launched her counter-attacks. The knife-hand, the cross, the liver shot, the heel kick, they were not thrown after Winter’s lunge. They were thrown before it, in a timeline that only Crook was experiencing.

  The world froze into a perfect diorama of violence around her. Winter hung suspended mid-lunge, a statue of feral rage, unaware her guaranteed victory had just been retroactively erased from existence.

  A knife-hand to the vagus nerve, already struck, and Winter's vision tunneled into blackness.

  A right cross, already landed, and the sickening crunch of ribs caving in echoed in a now that had just caught up to the past.

  A liver shot, already delivered, and a burst of capillaries bloomed like an ugly flower beneath her skin.

  A spinning heel kick, already completed, and her jaw snapped with a sound like dry kindling.

  Then, she let time resume its flow.

  To Winter, it was incomprehensible. Her instincts were flawless against any attack that originated in her present. But these blows did not originate in her present. They arrived as if they had always already been there, their point of origin a fractional moment in the past that her senses could not perceive or react to. Her automatic dodging was rendered useless because, by the time her body could register a threat, the strikes had already landed seconds ago in Crook's personal timeline.

  The effect was absolute. Winter's body responded to damage that had, in a metaphysical sense, preceded the cause.

  Winter flew, her body ragdolling through two walls before collapsing in a heap of shattered stone and sparking wires.

  Crook straightened her suit. She exhaled, long and slow, the only sign she'd exerted herself at all.

  She stared at Winter’s motionless form. "You all have made my afternoon... instructive."

  Her helmet tilted, the cracked lens focusing on Winter's twitching fingers. A pause, not of threat, but of profound, clinical recognition.

  "Look at you," she murmured, her voice a low, almost reverent hum. "A blade needs no teacher. It only needs a whetstone. And suffering has honed you to a razor's edge."

  She turned her gaze to Paris, her tone shifting back to its imperious finality.

  Paris, tasting his own blood—copper and serum—pushed himself up on a trembling elbow. The new teeth in his jaw, forced into existence by Crook's violent healing, throbbed with a deep, phantom ache, as if the memory of their shattering was still etched into the bone. His storm-gray eyes, clouded with pain and fury, locked onto her helmet.

  "Why?" he rasped, the word torn from his bruised throat. "What is the point of all this? This... cruelty? This game?"

  Crook went still. Not in surprise, but in a sudden, profound focus. The cracked amber lens of her helmet seemed to see not him, but something ancient and vast behind his eyes. The air in the shattered room grew heavy, not with threat, but with the weight of a story about to be told.

  When she spoke, her voice had changed. It was no longer the crisp, analytical tone of a teacher. It was lower, smoother, resonant with the cadence of reciting something learned at the dawn of time.

  "Listen, Moon, and I will tell you of the Three Smiths," she began, her hands clasping loosely behind her back.

  "The First Smith worked in Sunlight. He took fine silver and precious gold. His hammer fell with a merry ring, and he fashioned a cup, beautiful to behold. It shone on the king's table for a day. Then it tarnished. And was thrown away.

  "The Second Smith worked in Starlight. He took cold iron and tempered steel. His hammer fell with a purpose clear, and he fashioned a sword, flawless and real. It won a hundred battles for its lord. Then it broke. And was forgotten.

  "The Third Smith worked in Bloodlight. He took the dross, the slag, the flawed. He did not ask if the ore was willing. His hammer fell with the sound of God. He did not craft a cup, nor a blade to wield. He forged the Anvil upon which all else is revealed."

  She paused, the echo of the parable hanging in the dusty air. She took a single step closer, her shadow falling over him.

  "The Syndicate of the Magpies has many cups. It has many swords. They are pretty. They are useful. They serve their purpose and are replaced." Her helmet tilted toward Winter's motionless form, then back to him. "You were brought here not to be a cup, Paris Moon. Not even to be a sword."

  Her voice dropped to a whisper that vibrated in his very bones.

  "You were brought here to see the Anvil. To feel its heat. To understand, in your marrow, what true forging costs. The point is not the cruelty. The point is the material you choose to become when the hammer falls."

  "Remember the lesson. Next time, the curriculum will be less forgiving."

  She turned, clasped her hands behind her back, and walked away, her boots clicking a final, dismissive rhythm against the broken marble.

  The door shut behind her, leaving only the sound of ragged breathing and the settling dust of a destroyed world.

  Lóng Yán dragged himself to the edge of the crater, his body still trembling from the paralysis.

  Paris crawled toward Winter, his broken body useless, his breath ragged.

  Winter didn’t move. But her fingers twitched. And in the ruins of Crook’s empire, something growled.

  ///

  In the present day Lóng Yán’s fist clenched on the tree branch, the memory burning in his skull.

  Winter was gone now.

  But that moment, that snarl, that defiance, still lived in him.

  Somewhere below, a wolf howled. Or maybe it was him.