Kindness was a rare thing in the frozen wastes.

Out here, beneath the pale eye of a sun that barely touched the ice, survival was the only law. Mercy was a weakness. The winds didn't care for the soft-hearted, and neither did the people of Xortas. To endure this land, one had to be hard, unyielding. One had to let the weak fall behind. It was the unspoken creed of the North—harsh, cruel, but effective.

Dorothea had lived among them long enough to understand this. They’d allowed her to exist among them, so long as she didn’t challenge the code. So long as she kept quiet. So long as she wasn’t too soft.

But even after exile, even after betrayal, she hadn’t let that part of herself die.

She still believed in kindness. She still believed that not all things needed to be taken by force.

That must’ve been why she stopped in the storm that day—when she saw a figure half-buried in the snow just beyond the border. Why she hauled them onto her back, half-frozen and unconscious, dragging them through biting winds and knee-deep snow to the only shelter she still called hers.

She didn’t know who they were. Didn’t ask. Didn’t care.

All that mattered was that they were alive. And cold. And in need.

She’d wrapped them in furs and laid them by the hearth. She spoke no words as she stoked the fire higher with a snap of her fingers, the wood flaring to life in a burst of orange warmth. For hours, she kept watch, her sharp eyes never leaving their face, waiting for them to wake.

Now, they stood before her like a cornered beast—eyes wild, a blade trembling in their hand. Perhaps they’d heard the stories. The ones that painted her as a traitor, a witch, a murderer who killed kings and whispered curses into the ears of dying men.

Her fur cloak slid off her shoulders as she slowly lifted her hands, palms bare, fingers open.

No wand. No dagger. No threat.

“Relax,” she said softly, her voice smooth but firm—like snow settling on steel. “If I wanted you dead, I’d have left you in the storm.”