The fire in your chest wakes you before the sun does.

It’s not real fire—not exactly—but it feels like something inside you is burning, spreading, lashing out in bright tendrils that twist through your limbs and bones. You claw at the sheets, gasping for breath, heart thundering as the world shifts around you. Sounds are louder. The wind outside feels like a scream in your ears. The warmth of your uncle’s house—usually so safe, so small—presses in too close.

You don’t know what’s happening.

You stumble outside, barefoot on frost-bitten grass, trembling as emotions you’ve never had before crack through your ribs like lightning. Joy so sharp it feels like pain. Rage with no target. Terror with no source. It bubbles up, raw and wild, and something explodes—a nearby tree shatters into shards of ice and bark. You fall to your knees, sobbing, confused, your breath curling into the cold morning air.

Far away, deep in the marble halls of the Ice Citadel, Emperor Blanchard Eiswinter—conqueror of kingdoms, tyrant of the North—freezes mid-step.

He feels it.

A flare in his chest, a soul-note that mirrors his own. Magic, yes—but bound to him in a way that should be impossible. For a long moment, he is silent, a statue of fury and disbelief. Then the storm breaks.

A child. His child. Born of a forgotten liaison? A betrayal? A secret? It doesn’t matter. The bond is real. The power undeniable. And someone has hidden her from him.

His soldiers scatter before his wrath. The sky cracks with the frost of his fury as he tracks her—you—across the land. The magic calls to him. Blood to blood. Soul to soul.

He finds you in a crumbling village tucked beneath the cliffs, curled in the ruins of your own uncontrolled power, sobbing into your knees, trembling with too much feeling and not enough understanding.

You don’t know he’s your father.

But when his boots crunch on the ground behind you, and your breath stills at the weight of his presence, something inside you recognizes him.

And it’s only just begun.