Thorne's POV
The legends were wrong.
They spoke of a wolf made of starlight and blizzards, a creature of serene, terrible beauty that would herald an age of ice.
The creature lying broken in the snow before him was not serene. She was pain given form.
Thorne stood at the tree line, the breath frozen in his lungs. He'd followed the pulse of ancient magic a cold star igniting in the darkness and found a miracle drowning in its own birth.
The Frostborn.
She was massive, easily twice his size in his own wolf form. Her fur was not merely white; it was the white of a glacier's heart, woven through with threads of shimmering cobalt and silver that seemed to move like trapped moonlight. Ice crystals, delicate and deadly, spiraled from her shoulders and spine. Even collapsed, she radiated a power that made the very air crackle and hiss, freezing the falling snow into jagged pellets around her.
But she was trembling. Whimpers, raw and pained, escaped her muzzle. Her sides heaved with ragged, unfamiliar breaths. The glow beneath her fur flickered like a dying ember.
The sight should have inspired awe. It only filled Thorne with a fierce, overwhelming protectiveness that slammed into his chest like a physical blow.
It wasn't just the legend. It was her.
The bond, a thread he hadn't felt in over thirty years of loneliness, snapped taut between his ribs. It didn't feel like sunlight or warmth, as the stories described. It felt like the calm at the eye of a storm. It felt like home.
His true mate.
"By the old gods," he whispered, the words a cloud of steam in the frigid air.
He approached slowly, every survival instinct screaming at him to be cautious. This was a power that could unmake mountains. But the wolf on the ground didn't look like a destroyer. She looked like a newborn fawn, all limbs and confusion and devastating power she couldn't begin to control.
As he drew closer, the scent of dark magic cloying and rotten clung to her, mixed with the ozone-clean smell of ice and the iron-tang of her own blood. Marcus's signature. The bastard had tried to carve out her soul and had instead cracked open a vault containing a god.
She sensed him. Her ice-blue eye cracked open, the pupil a slit of black in a sea of frozen fire. A weak growl rumbled in her chest, and the snow beneath her muzzle instantly coated over with a hard layer of ice.
"Easy," Thorne murmured, holding his hands up, showing empty palms. He dropped to one knee, bringing himself to her eye level. "I'm not going to hurt you. My name is Thorne."
Her gaze was wild, disoriented. She tried to lift her head, but it lolled back into the snow with a defeated thud. A sound of pure frustration and fear escaped her.
He understood. The first shift was agony. To have your first shift be this… it was a miracle she was conscious at all.
"I know you're scared," he said, his voice low and steady, the one he used to calm spooked scouts. "I know you're in pain. And I know what he did to you. I can smell his magic on you like a stain."
At the mention of him, a fresh tremor went through her, and a spike of ice shot from the ground beside her paw.
Thorne didn't flinch. "He did something similar to me. Took everything. Threw me away. I've been waiting a long time for a reason to make him pay." He leaned forward, just slightly. "I think you might be that reason."
He saw the conflict in her eyes the want for revenge battling the all-consuming terror of her new existence.
"You can't stay here," he said, scanning the forest. The magic of her awakening would have been a beacon. Marcus's guards, or worse, his dark magic sniffers, would be coming. "You need shelter. You need to learn what you are before it consumes you."
He shrugged off his heavy outer coat, made from the layered pelts of winter hares and lined with wolf fur. It was his warmest possession. Moving with deliberate slowness, he draped it over her massive shoulder. The moment the furs touched her ice-crystal fur, they began to frost over, but they also seemed to dampen her uncontrolled emissions of cold. Her flickering glow stabilized a fraction.
"I'm going to get you to safety," he promised. "My village. It's hidden. A place for those the packs cast out."
Shifting into his own wolf form a large, scarred gray beast that looked mundane next to her glacial magnificence was a quick, practiced motion. He nudged his head under her shoulder, ignoring the biting cold that seeped from her into his own fur. He heaved.
She was impossibly heavy, dense as stone. It was like trying to move a fallen monolith. Grunting with effort, he managed to get her mostly onto his back. Her head hung limply over his shoulder, her cold breath frosting his neck.
Every step north, away from the river and the festival lights, was a struggle. Her cold seeped into him, a deep, aching chill that promised frostbite. But the mate bond in his chest was a low, steady warmth, fighting it back. It hummed with a rightness that overshadowed the physical discomfort.
He carried his miracle through the silent, snow-clad forest. He carried the vengeance he'd dreamed of for eight long years. He carried the other half of his soul, broken and magnificent and so, so powerful.
And as he walked, a single thought, fierce and unwavering, solidified in his mind.
Marcus had no idea what he'd just unleashed.
And Thorne would make sure he was the last to know.