The cold here is ancient. Not the kind born from air or altitude, but memory. It clings to the marrow of the world—where her body once fell, and from it, the tree rose.
Icladreaf. The World Tree. My failure, given bark and breath.
I came to Crosela for Felotl.
It was, as always, a disturbance. He had been dragged in by the local guard after a night of shouting poetry to a statue of a frost giant and throwing snowballs at an envoy of priests. Drunk, disheveled, muttering about “the sins of warmth,” and how laughter was just the soul escaping through the teeth. They’d locked him up for the night. An old habit, this—chasing him down across cities he didn’t belong in, finding him sleeping off the weight of his own chaos.
But when I arrived at the holding cells, it wasn’t Felotl that silenced me...it was her.
She was seated near the back of the cell, draped in a wool blanket embroidered with ice and time. Her companions—an enormous bugbear with a missing tusk, a half-orc woman with a scar over her left eye, and a miniature treant no taller than a grown man—all kept their heads low and their words quieter. There had been a misunderstanding, I gathered. A night of mistaken identities and loud retorts. Nothing that warranted what followed.
They did not know who she was. She didn’t know who she was. But I did.
When I stepped into the corridor, she looked up. Our eyes met. There was no divine spark. No echo of the battlefield. No whisper of war cries or angelic hymns. There was just a smile.
“You’re beautiful,” she said, as though naming a star. “All the colors of the cosmos… like you’re made of stardust.”
Her voice was human. So painfully human. And yet it cracked open something inside me.
I asked her name, though I didn’t need to. I knew the truth she had lost.
“Angelina,” she replied.
A name chosen. Not remembered. A name without history, without myth. But not without meaning. I had never heard it before. And I cherished it.
Felotl groaned from a corner bunk, interrupting my silence. “Are you going to let me rot or what? These idiots gave me watered ale.”
I sighed. He could have leveled this entire city in an instant but continues to play mortal games.
With a gesture, I reached into the threads of arcana woven through the walls and cast Somnial Shroud—a quiet, ancient spell of my own making. The guards on watch sank gently into dreams as the air folded over their minds like velvet.
The locks, old but stubborn, clicked softly under the influence of the arcane weave.
I turned to Felotl. “Get out.”
He snorted, muttering something about mortal incompetence, and slung his pack over his shoulder.
The others rose, surprised but wise enough not to question a sudden, inexplicable release. The bugbear offered a respectful grunt. The treant tilted its leafy crown in thanks. The half-orc woman nodded, suspicious but grateful.
Angelina lingered.
“I’m sorry if we caused trouble,” she said. “We didn’t mean to.”
“No trouble,” I replied.
She studied my face.
“Will we meet again?”
“If the stars are kind.”
She smiled. “Then I’ll look up more often.”
As they disappeared into the cold night, Felotl trailed behind them, already spinning some lie about how he’d broken out with nothing but a spoon and a smirk and how the faith of light will always shine down upon those worthy of it.
I remained in that corridor, listening to the silence where their warmth had just been.
She’s alive and she walks the world once more; no longer confined to a cage of her own divinity and sadness.
She knows not her name, her past, her divinity. And that is well.
The gods do not weep, but tonight, I marked her new name upon the walls of my soul.
Angelina.
Let it be hers forever and I will scribe that name over every text I have ever written as the War Goddess's name for all eternity written in the stars.
—Hydall
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