The cold was a living thing in Jotunheim. It wasn't the simple absence of heat I'd known in my life of sterile seclusion; this cold had teeth. It coiled around my thin prisoner's shift, slithered over my skin, and leeched the warmth from my marrow until my bones ached with it.
Two Lycan guards, mountains of fur and muscle stuffed into black steel armor, dragged me through the corridors of the Obsidian Keep. My bare feet scraped against stone so dark it seemed to drink the light from the glowing crystal sconces. The air smelled of ice, old stone, and something else... something sharp and predatory that was the scent of power itself.
To them, I smelled of nothing.
That was the nature of my curse, my gift, my abomination. I was a Null. A blank space where a soul, a scent, should be. The Lycans I passed in the halls, their faces a mixture of hard-won scars and northern grit, recoiled from me. Not because I smelled foul, but because I was a void. Their primal senses searched for a scent—prey, predator, pack—and found only an unnerving emptiness. It set their teeth on edge. I saw it in the subtle flare of their nostrils, the stiffening of their shoulders. They looked at me as if I were a ghost already.
Maybe I was. My handlers, the very people who had raised me, had sent me on a fool's errand. Get close to the King's court, they'd said. Sow discord. I hadn't even made it past the outer patrol. Now, I was being dragged to the Soulless King himself, the one Lycan in the world who, by all accounts, was as broken as I was.
The guards shoved me through a set of monolithic doors carved with snarling wolves and ancient runes. The throne room. It was less a room and more a cavern of breathtaking, brutalist art. Shadows clung to the impossibly high ceiling, where jagged icicles hung like the teeth of some great beast. The floor was a polished mirror of obsidian, reflecting the cold, blue light from a massive, enchanted crystal that floated near the ceiling.
And at the far end of the hall, upon a throne that looked like it was forged from a shard of the night sky itself, sat the King.
I had heard whispers, of course. That King Jorvik was more monster than man. That his curse had hollowed him out, leaving nothing but ambition and cruelty. The whispers hadn't done him justice.
He was unnervingly still, one hand resting on the carved wolf's head of his armrest, the other lying loosely in his lap. He wore no crown, yet there was no mistaking the absolute authority that radiated from him, a palpable pressure in the air. His hair was the colour of winter frost, a stark white that contrasted with the severe black of his tunic. As the guards forced me to my knees, my gaze finally lifted to his face.
It was a face of harsh, aristocratic beauty—all sharp angles and unforgiving lines. But it was his eyes that held me captive. They were the color of a frozen sky, a pale, piercing blue that held no warmth, no flicker of emotion. They were the eyes of a predator, ancient and intelligent.
The silence in the room was thick and heavy as a shroud, broken only by the sound of my own ragged breathing. The assembled court—a dozen or so grim-faced Lycans in fine furs and leather—watched the tableau with a hungry stillness.
The King's cold gaze swept over me, a slow, methodical assessment from my bare feet to my tangled, dark hair. It was a look of such profound detachment it was more terrifying than any open rage. It was the look a scholar gives a new specimen before pinning it to a board.
"Leave us," he said.
His voice was not loud, but it cut through the silence like a shard of glass. It held a low, resonant timber that promised violence and commanded obedience in equal measure. Instantly, without a single word of protest, the court turned and filed out of the throne room. The two guards holding my arms gave me a final, rough shove that sent me sprawling onto the freezing stone and then retreated, the great doors booming shut behind them with a sound of finality.
I was alone with the monster.
He did not move from his throne for a long moment. He simply watched me, his head tilted slightly, an unnerving curiosity in those winter-blue eyes. I pushed myself up, my limbs trembling from a combination of cold and terror. My training, all those years of being molded into a weapon, screamed at me to show no fear. But faced with this king, in the heart of his power, fear was a suffocating ocean.
Finally, he rose. He moved with a liquid grace that was utterly at odds with his powerful build. He was a creature of absolute control. The sound of his boots on the obsidian floor was the only sound as he descended the few steps from his dais and approached me.
He stopped a few feet away, circling me slowly, like a wolf assessing an unknown creature that had wandered into its territory.
"The Null," he murmured, his voice a soft rumble that vibrated through the stone floor. "They said you were an abomination. A weapon to unravel the fabric of our kind."
I remained silent, my heart hammering against my ribs. I would not give him the satisfaction of a pleading response.
He came to a stop directly in front of me. He was taller than I'd imagined, a towering presence that blocked out the room's faint light. He crouched down, bringing his face level with mine. I could feel a faint warmth radiating from him, the only source of it in the entire accursed room. His scent finally reached me—not the earthy, musky scent of a typical Lycan, but something sharper. Ozone after a lightning strike. The clean, cold scent of a winter storm.
"There is no scent," he observed, his voice a low whisper. His gaze was intense, searching. "A void. How... curious."
He lifted a hand, and I flinched, expecting a blow. But his fingers, encased in a black leather glove, were surprisingly gentle as they brushed a stray strand of hair from my face. His touch was cold, the leather doing little to warm it.
"You have the eyes of a cornered animal," he said, his thumb brushing lightly against my cheekbone. "But you are not an animal, are you? They can all be scented. They can all be understood. But you..."
He fell silent, his gaze fixed on mine. I met it, channeling every ounce of defiance I had left into my stare. Let him see that I was not some whimpering pup. I was a weapon. A broken one, perhaps, but a weapon nonetheless.
A long moment passed. I expected the end to come in a flash of claws, a snap of teeth. I expected to be discarded, another failed experiment of the conspirators who had created me.
I did not expect the words he spoke next.
"I was told to expect a monster," King Jorvik said, his voice dropping to a near-inaudible murmur, a chilling note of possessive discovery entering his tone. "But you are simply an anomaly. And I, little Null, have a fondness for collecting rare things."
He stood, turning his back on me as he walked back toward his throne. The promise in that statement was infinitely more terrifying than a threat of death.
"Take her to the Onyx Wing," he commanded to the empty room, knowing his guards were listening just beyond the doors. "See that she is cleaned and fed. She is to be... studied."