The sky is pale with stormlight, the air thick with iron and smoke. Snow drifts across the field like ash — the kind that falls when something old is dying.

Below the ridge, banners rise through the haze. Green and silver — crescent moons of Taur Im Duinath — and among them, a flash of white movement I cannot name until my heart remembers it.

A white doe.

She rides a doe, proud and unarmored but swift as riverlight, its antlers tipped in frost. It was mine once — a gift from Greenwood’s royal herds on the morning of our union. I had said then, “So long as the doe finds her way through shadow, the stag shall never lose her trail.”

How cruelly vows return.

I sit astride my great stag, his breath a cloud of silver in the cold. We stand upon the slope facing her army. Between us, the valley trembles with war. Yet I cannot move.

Time folds in upon itself — centuries collapsing into that single instant when her gaze lifts and finds mine. No fear. No mercy. Only recognition.

For a heartbeat, the field forgets to breathe. Her doe stamps once, snow scattering like stars. My stag answers, lowering his crowned head, and in that exchange — between the beasts, between us — I hear what neither of us dares to speak.

We were once one forest.

Then the horn sounds. The spell breaks. She turns her mount toward the eastern flank, her cloak whipping in the wind like moonlight torn in two. I draw my sword and give the order to advance.

And though I tell myself it is strategy that drives me toward her lines, every step of my stag’s hooves feels like penance.