The Carolinas smelled like salt and heat, like asphalt baking under an August sun. Malik Thorne had grown up with that scent, and the way it clung to the air like a stubborn ghost. Even now, as he stood on the crumbling porch of his mother's shotgun house, duffel bag in hand, the scent wrapped around him, trying to hold him back.
The streets here weren't paved for dreams. They were cracked, faded, and carried the weight of too many footsteps that went nowhere. Malik knew—he'd almost been one of them.
At sixteen, he'd run with the South Grove Kings, half for protection, half because survival didn't leave room for clean choices. By eighteen, he'd buried two friends and realized if he stayed, his name would be carved into cheap stone before he ever saw twenty.
Then came the Letter.
No one in South Grove had seen one in decades—official, sealed in thick vellum, its wax stamp pressed with the insignia of the Auric Council. He didn't know how they'd found him. He only knew what it meant. An invitation to The Culling Trials.
Win… and you earned a ticket beyond the ice walls.
Lose… and the world would never hear your name again.
The world had whispered for generations that Antarctica wasn't the end. The ice was only a wall, built in some ancient age to cage the known lands. Beyond it… oceans without end, continents uncharted, storms that sang, beasts the size of cities.
Malik didn't believe rumors. He believed in what he could touch, hit, and bleed. But when he was fourteen, Shayla had told him the story.
They'd been sitting on the roof of her grandma's apartment, legs dangling over the ledge, the city lights stretching like stars below them. She'd looked at him, hair tied back, brown eyes holding the kind of certainty he could never doubt.
"My granddad said there's another world out there," she told him. "A place where the sky is bigger, the air's cleaner… and nobody tells you who you can be."
Malik had laughed, but the way she'd looked at him made the words stick in his chest.
Now, four years later, it was the only thing pulling him forward.
The bus ride to the port city was quiet. Nobody spoke much when they saw the black-clad Watchers in the aisle, rifles across their chests. The Watchers worked for the Council. They didn't smile. They didn't explain. They just made sure you got to where you were supposed to be.
Where Malik was supposed to be… was the edge of the world.
The ship waiting for him at the docks looked like something torn from a fever dream—iron hull reinforced with ice-crystal plating, sails threaded with Auric energy that shimmered like northern lights.
The Watchers herded them aboard—ninety-nine other young men and women, each carrying their own mix of fear, pride, and hunger. Malik noticed how some moved with confidence, their steps sharp and trained. Others kept their heads down, clutching weapons.
He didn't carry a weapon. His body was the weapon. His Spiral—that was his blade.
Most people could only awaken one Layer. Malik had two. And a dangerous way of twisting them together.
The air grew colder as they sailed south. The ocean turned to slush, then to jagged floes of blue ice. On the third night, Malik saw it:
The wall.
It rose from the horizon like the spine of a god, jagged peaks and sheer cliffs of glittering white, stretching as far as the eye could see. Above it, storms rolled in lazy spirals, lightning flashing in green and gold.
The Watchers didn't speak of what was beyond it.
They only told them the rules of the Culling Trials. Survive the month. Be in the final ten.
As Malik stepped off the ship into the Hollow Arena's frozen courtyard, he spotted her.
A woman with hair like snow at night, black at the roots, silver at the tips. Eyes sharp as frostbite. She was leaning against the wall, watching the new arrivals like she was already choosing who to kill first.
When her gaze locked with his, her lips curved into the faintest smirk.
Later, he'd learn her name—Nia "Icefang" Dray.
But for now, Malik only knew one thing:
The trials had begun.