I poured all my hope, all my longing, all my fear into that single kiss. He responded instantly, a groan rumbling in his chest as he lifted me into his arms. I wrapped my legs around his waist, my robes tangling around us.

He carried me deeper into the hollow beneath the bridge, laying me down on a drift of untouched snow. We were creatures of Winter and in our element.

There was no slow build, no hesitation. Just need. Raw, trembling need. His hands tightened against my spine as our mouths found each other with an intensity that shocked me. We moved as one, urgent, instinctual, like creatures that remembered each other from another life.

My robes fell away first. Then his hands were beneath my tunic, sliding against the bare skin of my waist with a reverence that made my skin tingle. As the cold air hit my bare skin, a soft, silver-blue light pulsed from me, shimmering like moonlight on glass. My magic, usually so quiet and restrained, answered the call of his. A faint, grey-white glow, eerie and ancient, rose from his own skin, mingling with mine.

He kissed my collarbone, then my throat, and lower still. Each press of his mouth left a trail of cold fire across my skin, not from heat, but from remembering that we knew each other. My breath caught as he worshipped every part of me.

Snow fell in lazy spirals, but under the bridge, warmth shimmered. His hands were steady. His mouth was sacred. Our magic curled between us, glinting like starlight reflected on black water.

“You don’t have to do this,” he said, voice low and ragged. “We can still escape each other. It’ll hurt, but I’ve known soul halves who decided to take other lovers, confirming the soul’s original intent to experience different lives.”

“I don’t want to do that,” I whispered. I wasn’t sure I could stay with him if he had anything to do with Halven’s imprisonment, but right now, every part of me yearned for this moment with him. “I need you.”

The heat returned to his eyes, and he knelt before me, the world dissolved into pure sensation. His breath touched my skin like a vow. He kissed me again, and I felt the shift—the invisible thread between us pulled taut.

We were no longer two.

His body moved over mine with reverence. The moment was one of surrender, of truth given without certainty. As we came together, the snow melted beneath us, revealing warm, dark earth like the breath of spring beneath winter’s weight. Our magics braided in silver and ghost-white light, curling and blooming in quiet pulses, like stars awakening.

He stilled for a moment, eyes locked on mine.

“Rielle?”

“I’m okay,” I whispered. “Don’t stop.”

The world fell away.

There was only breath and light. Only the rhythm of a bond that reached beyond flesh. A bond older than this lifetime. His aura enfolded me like mist; mine answered with shimmering threads of moonlight. We became a single current, an arc of longing fulfilled.

We moved like dreamers finding each other again after lifetimes of forgetting.

Our auras danced. Moonlight spilled. The world quieted around us as we reached for the place where our souls once fractured. And they began to knit again.

Then, in a silent rush of silver light, the moment crested.

Magic bloomed.

And we came undone.

He held me like I was a secret he would never give up.

And I, foolish girl that I was, let him.

We fell asleep tangled in each other beneath the quiet shelter of the bridge, snow falling gently outside our little sanctuary. For the first time in what felt like a lifetime, my mind was quiet. There were no visions. No warnings. Only the sound of his breath against my shoulder and a profound sense of peace. For a fleeting, beautiful moment, I felt like I belonged with the right person.

And then, I dreamed.

When I opened my eyes, I was still beneath the bridge. Same snow. Same quiet. Same weight of his arm across my waist. I blinked. The light shimmered strangely. The snow didn’t fall in flakes anymore, but in long, trailing strands like ribbons of glittery ash.

And I knew.

We were dreaming. But not just any dream. Not mine alone. I could feel him here. Beside me. Awake inside it too.

His hand moved up from the dip in my waist and cupped my breast, kneading. Instinctively I rolled my hips back and moaned as his hardness pressed into me. His breath tickled the back of my neck. We hadn’t spoken. We didn’t need to. The moment answered the question we both carried.

For the first time in our shared dreams, we didn’t merely reach for each other, we made love, our hungry mouths never leaving the others’.

He moved over me with a kind of aching care, our bodies finding rhythm in breath and silence. The magic that always danced at the edges of our awareness now pulsed around us in full bloom. Silver and grey, soft and shimmering, like moonlight on moving water.

No words. Only touch. Only breath. Only the unmistakable sensation of being known. Claimed. Cherished.

We were no longer just soul halves separated by lifetimes. We were one.

And when we found our ecstasy together, I never wanted it to end.

But then, the scent of snow faded, replaced by the smell of stale air and ancient, layered magic.

I sat up slowly.

Neir wrapped an arm around me from behind, holding me to him.

The ground beneath us trembled, just once, like something shifting beneath the surface. The trees around the bridge twisted, branches curling in wrong directions. The snow darkened.

When I looked again, the lake was gone.

The stone of the bridge had given way to the damp, oppressive walls of a familiar tunnel.

My heart began to hammer against my ribs. I knew this place.

As I stood, I pulled away from him.

We stood naked now on smooth, frost-rimed stone, surrounded by massive arched walls that pulsed faintly with magical sigils. The air was thick, heavy with a silence that didn’t belong to the world above.

The sealed chamber. The one where Halven was trapped. Magic oozed from the chamber and bit into my bones. The dreamscape had shifted us here without warning, but it was no coincidence.

This was truth. Or some twisted version of it.

The desk was there, cluttered with papers. Candles burned with a cold, unwavering light. And there, against the far wall of ice, was the block of ice, glowing with a sickening, internal luminescence. With Halven inside.

I turned toward Neir. His expression was calm, accepting. He knew where we were, too. The realization was a cold dread seeping into my bones.

“You know this place,” I whispered, the words a ghost in the dreamscape.

He didn’t feign confusion. He didn’t ask what I meant. He simply nodded once. Slow. Heavy.

My stomach turned. “Why is your magic in the lake?”

His golden eyes, so full of warmth just moments before, now flickered with unease. “I cannot tell you.”

It was not a refusal. But I felt the impact of them deep in my ribs. He wasn’t being open with me, even when I knew deep down that his magic was not in the ice caging Halven. That he couldn’t be the reason Halven was taken from me, from us. But somehow, he was involved.

“Did you hurt him?” My voice was a thin, fragile thread. “Did you do this to Halven?”

Deep sorrow shadowed his eyes. He opened his mouth to speak, but the words that came were the most painful ones he could have offered. “I’m not allowed to speak of him.”

My heart didn’t just crack. It shattered. The fragile peace I had found in his arms dissolved into dust. I gave myself to him, my body, my hope, my duty, and he was a part of this.

“You let me touch you,” I whispered, my voice cracking. Tears flowed down my cheeks like they had the first time I saw Halven trapped here. They were not loud, dramatic sobs, but the soft, horrified tears of someone realizing the beautiful dream they were living was, in fact, a nightmare. “You let me want you. All while knowing.”

He reached for me, his expression tortured. “Rielle—”

“No.” I backed away, the chamber spinning around me. The frost on the walls flared. Sigils, unseen before now, brightened in the rock and the ice. My magic pulsed wildly, reacting to my emotions, to the betrayal clawing up my throat.

“Rielle, my life is yours, if you will only wait for me. Just a little longer. There’s someone who’s coming to help.”

“Who? And how will they help?”

He shook his head, lips pressed tight.

He couldn’t or wouldn’t say.

“You’re part of this, tied to Halven’s suffering, and you knew what he means to me.” I wrapped my arms around my body and shook my head, tears hitting the cold stone floor. “I gave myself to you. And you let me. You’re a monster.”

“Wait for me.” His voice drifted away in the dream, dissolving with the rest of the chamber.

I woke with a gasp.

The snow was real again. My back ached from the hard ground beneath it. The bridge spanned over me, filtering an early dawn light. And he was still beside me, curled in wolf form, his great silver-blue flank rising and falling with each breath.

The dream clung to me, a shroud of ice and betrayal. The intimacy of the moment was gone, tainted by the horror of what I now knew for certain—what I had hoped was wrong. The air felt wrong now. Too still. Too quiet. Like the world was holding its breath, waiting for me to do something.

My breath hitched on a sob, and I sat up, heart hammering, throat raw.

My hands shook, not from the cold, but from the force of my heartbreak. I scrambled to find my clothes, my fingers fumbling with the frozen laces of my robes. His own clothes, those that he’d wear before showing up naked inside the academy, lay in a neat, folded pile near mine. And peeking from the pocket of his trousers was a small, rectangular card.

His ID card.

Not a student pass. Not a visitor token.

A special visitor's pass for Nivara Hall. Issued by Lady Isa.

A keyed access badge from the highest levels of the Academy. Not proof. Not entirely. But a tangible link to the conspiracy, to the woman whose magic held Halven prisoner. On pure, desperate instinct, I took it.

It wasn’t a thought-out act of malice. It was the desperate grab of a drowning person for anything that might keep them afloat, a tool I might use to find the truth he refused to give me. Shara had told us how we could use other ID cards in the Docilis Vault. All we had to do was to touch the fingerprint on the stone board first, then input the ID number. I could use Neir’s ID card to gain more insight. I shoved it deep into my own pocket, the cold card a hard, painful reminder against my thigh.

He stirred behind me, a soft growl rumbling low in his chest as his massive form began to shift. The soft sound of his fur against the snow made me flinch. But before he could wake, before he could shift back into the man whose touch I now recoiled from, another shadow fell over us. A voice cut through the air like a blade.

“You’ve been gone too long.”

I froze.

Lady Isa.

She stood at the edge of our hollow, her expression unreadable, her posture as rigid as the ice on the lake. She did not look surprised to see us. She looked at me, a flicker of something cold and assessing in her eyes, then her gaze shifted to the Neir, lounging in the snow in his full, glorious naked self again.

Still no surprise changed the Grand Magister’s expression as she took in Neir.

Something like jealousy filled me, and I ruthlessly cut it from my heart.

Her attention stayed on him, dismissing me. “We have a problem. The resonance from the lake is growing stronger. We may be running out of time.”

She wasn’t scolding. She was reporting. Like to a partner. An equal. A confidant.

I pictured the image of them standing close together right here at the shores of Wintermere as we saw in that newssheet from nearly three hundred years ago. The final, brutal confirmation slammed into me, stealing the air from my lungs. They were working together. He had been working with her the whole time.

Neir stood slowly, his back to me, tension lining every muscle as he dragged on his clothes.

He turned to me, his expression twisted in pain, but he said nothing.

“You’ve been standing there the whole time. Beside her. Always beside her.” My voice was flat even though my heart was breaking.

“Rielle, let me explain.”

But I was already backing away, shaking my head. I didn’t know what he was anymore. A guardian? A weapon? A traitor?

“I gave myself to a shadow.” My throat burned. I looked from him to Isa, the image of their silent alliance a scar on my heart. “And you did this for what? To use me?”

He took a step toward me, his hand outstretched, the gesture making me pause.

“I would never use you,” he said.

“Docilis Avarielle dal Velinrae.”

I partially twitched at the sound of my True Name from the Grand Magister, but without a command, I ignored Isa, my eyes locked with Neir’s.

His mouth opened. No sound came out.

I stepped back again. “Don’t come into my dreams anymore.”

He flinched.

My voice gained a strength I didn’t know I possessed. “Don’t come near me at all.”

And with that, I turned and fled, running back toward the cold, false safety of the academy walls. The snow fell harder as I left them, an image of him and Isa, two guardians of a terrible secret, burned forever into my mind.

The line between truth and dream shattered, but one thing remained clear.

He had been part of this all along. And I had let him in.