The mountains of Demuth were towering wedges of snow, capped with jagged spires of pale,

periwinkle ice. The ancient tales said the mountain’s peaks were the frozen tears of the Old Ones after the
Great Breaking. Their whispers still shuddered through the mountain’s caves while their spirits chased
themselves through snow banks in corporeal shape, as snowbird and icejackal.
The mountains and its spirits were all that kept the southern occupiers from the northernmost
tundra. It was impassible to those unaccustomed to air capable of frosting lungs. Born to ice and snow,
only the Demuthian tribes had ever made the pass.
Djavya stopped fidgeting with the harnesses of her Dire wolf to watch the lights of the sky shift
above the mountain peaks. Ribbons of green and purple laced the stars, bright against the darkest night.
She sighed, noticing the gray dots of her company in the distance, nearly disappearing into the flurries of
wind and snow. One of her wolves whined at her, a howl building in his throat. She patted his enormous
head and scuffed his ears.
“We’ll catch up,” she said and returned to struggling with the snapped leather of his harness.
Rebinding it was a near impossible task with her mink and sheepskin mitts. “It’s not like they can get far
without me,” she muttered before tugging down her frosted scarf to use her teeth for the final tug of
leather through buckle. The chill of the strap shocked her teeth, accompanied by the stiff wind that froze
the sweat above her lip. She’d live in that shiver for hours.
“All fixed, just a bit snug,” she said and patted the flank of the anxious pup who trotted nervously
in place, crunching snow beneath his feet. “We’re almost there.”
Back on her sled, a wood and metal skiff of a simple platform and railing, Djavya took hold of the
reins and braced herself as she let out a sharp whistle. All four wolves lurched into a sprint and the sled
bucked once against the snow before slashing over the mountainside in the wake of her wolves. The wind
had already overwritten the tracks of her cohort, but Djavya had ridden this path once a year since the day
she had been tall enough to grip the reins. She knew the mountain as she knew herself.
Once, when the blizzard of midwinter had overwhelmed her, on a night far colder than this, the
spirits had guided her. A great snowbird with a wingspan twice her own had flown just in front of her,
disappearing into the storm the moment she had found her path.
This night, the moon was bright against the snow, and the flurries of winter barely obscured
Djayva’s sight. They flew up the mountainside and the barren landscape soon turned to forest. Each tree
was claimed by the mountain. Trunks were spotted in sections of ice while pine needles began to droop
like icicles. The further up the slope, the more they embodied ice than wood.
 Djayva let out a low note that carried up from the base of her abdomen. The wolves obeyed her
call and began to slow. Out of the ice and trees, shapes began to form, long in the fronts and tall in the
back that slowly morphed into the shape of wolves and sleds. A portion of her company had waited, two
of them by the looks of it. The bundled, stocky shape of Reik, her oldest friend, and her mother’s tall
figure, became clear as she approached, though their wolves were more distinctive than their bundled
shapes.
Djayva let out a few low clicks with the gentle tug of her reins and her wolves pulled to a stop
alongside her companions. “Harness trouble,” she said, glad not to have to fight the wind with her voice
thanks to the shielding trees.
“I told you it wouldn’t hold,” her mother said, voice barely muffled beneath her sheep skin.
Djayva’s retort froze in her throat as she watched the snow shift in the distance.
Her companions followed her attention to witness a flurry shift into human shape. A small
whirlwind twisted up from between the trees where they were mostly shielded from the wind. A woman
made of snow and ice, began to dance. She carried through the trees in a strange, southern waltz, void of a
partner. Her hair spun behind her in trails of speckling snow and her dress swayed against her frame. With
a spin of skirts and an elegant flourish of her arm, she twirled behind a tree and was gone.
“They know you’re here,” Reik said, voice quiet as she looked to Djayva.
“And they are pleased,” mother said, “best not to keep the old ones waiting.” With a tap of her
reins, she signaled her wolves to rush the snow. Reik followed suit and Djayva tried not to make an omen
of a southern dancing woman disappearing into the dark. As though she had never been there at all.

The cave of rituals was sacred. It required passage first through the stone cavern, where the
company hitched their sleds and loosed the wolves. They built fires to warm by and laid their furs over
boulders to dry. The party would soon split into factions. The group of hunters would mind the supplies
and care for the wolves while Djayva, her mother, and the elders would ascend to the upper caves.
Unsheathed from the bundles of animal skin, Djayva huddled beside Reik at the fire, hands
outstretched to catch the heat. Reik passed her a leather satchel full of water still hot from the boiling.
Djayva drank as Reik stared into the fire, her features pulled taught, and her violet eyes shadowed.
 They sat uncharacteristically quiet. All that had needed saying had been whispered in the dark of
the previous night.

“Are you afraid?” Reik asked as she lay facing Djayva on their sleeping mats, set up near the
hearth in Reik’s home. In the firelight, Reik’s violet eyes were bright with fear, reminding Djayva that she
would soon step into a cave and emerge as someone new. Someone she did not want to be.
“No one would fault you if you were,” Reik said when Djayva leaned onto her back to watch the
firelight combat shadows on the wooden ceiling.
“Yes,” Djayva said, closing her eyes against the visions of the monster she would become, “they
would.”
Reik shifted beside her, her breath hitching before she asked in the smallest whisper, “Will you
forget me, when you change?”
Djayva turned to her friend, close enough to touch noses. As children, they had huddled together
like this on the coldest nights when their parents had set off into the arms of the tundra, in search of food
and wood. They had grown accustomed to sharing warmth on nights such as this. Against the heat of the
hearth, and the chill of the air, something more had bloomed between them like a single ice lily stretching
up from the snow. In some ways, Reik’s limbs were more familiar than her own.
“I will never forget,” Djayva said. “You are in my blood.”
Reik watched her, eyebrows pinched in her uneasiness. “Do you,” she hesitated. Her voice faded
before she whispered so quietly, Djayva barely heard her over the crackle of the hearth. “Is this your
choice?”
The violet of Reik’s gaze was steady and waiting as Djayva blinked against the question. “Yes,”
she said, wondering at the hollow tension of her chest. She shifted, turning her mind away from the
question to offer one of her own. “Will you make me a promise?”

The elder women stood one at a time from the fire and eyes shifted expectantly to Djayva. All the
flame in the world couldn’t stop the chill that scrapped her spine. Slowly, she stood and beside her, Reik
gathered her own feet. They embraced as though they would never see the other again. Which, in part,
was true. Djayva, once they had pulled apart, held her friend’s hands and whispered, “Will you keep your
promise?”
Remember me as I am.
 Reik nodded, her expression fierce as she was loyal. “As you are,” she said, squeezing Djayva’s
fingers tight enough to numb them.
Djayva raised Reik’s hands and kissed them fiercely, struggling to imprint the woman’s scent of
leathers and cedarwood into her mind. When she released her, she turned immediately away to avoid the
tears that brimmed her eyes. She blinked them aside as she walked past the crew that would finish setting
camp.
She had grown alongside, or been taught by each of them, learned to train dire wolves, and steer
them through the ice, learned to fish through frozen lakes, and scout the snow for tracks. They each
clasped her forearm or wrapped her in the occasional hug, offering her nods of gratitude, respect, or
sympathy. Small whispers were exchanged, things of honor and of courage.
Djayva followed the elders to the back of the cave. They stepped into a tunnel of ice with a
carved staircase leading to the cave of rituals. In only a tunic and leather wrap, she was bare to the cold
air. All the women around her, grey haired and old boned, seemed impervious to the chill and so Djayva
suppressed her own shiver.
They took the stairs slowly, boots scuffing ice, when a great whisper surged through the walls.
The party paused, eyes shifting about as the whisper trickled past, unintelligible. At the front of the group,
elder Veina, the former chieftain before mother’s charge, motioned for them to continue.
The tunnel eventually opened to a wide cave, far larger than Djayva had expected. The stone floor
was smooth, and pockets of clear water opened in perfect circles. Each pool surged with a luminous light
that filled the cave along with quiet, omnipresent whispers. Djayva stood a breath from the entrance, her
eyes trickling up to the ceiling of ice.
Far above, was the bottom of the mountain’s periwinkle spires, said to be made of the old one’s
tears. {Beads of water dripped slowly on long icicles into the pools of water}. The light shimmered off
the ice, giving the impression of stars.
The elders began to unclothe Djayva. Though she had been warned, she receded from their touch
until elder Veina gave her a hard lavender stare and she relented to their cold hands. They hummed as
they worked, stripping her of her last layer of leathers, and then her tunic until she was laid bare. Water
was drawn from one of the sacred pools and she was washed. When she was clean, she was dressed in a
simple linen dress and seated beside a pool to have her hair combed and braided while they each set to
their own wash and redressing.
 Elder Ayna, a small woman with delicate features that signaled great beauty in her youth, took to
the braiding. She was an elder of the neighboring tribe who had often visited Djayva as a girl, bringing
her small trinkets from the west of fox fur scarves and little figurines carved from ashwood. Each visit,
the elder had patted her head and watched her play with eyes of the saddest periwinkle.
The five tribes of Demuth speckled the Northern tundra, shielded from the southern occupiers by
unyielding mountains, frozen seas, and the ever-shifting climate. They traded often, those on the East
providing the salt and large fish of the coast, while the central and westward tribes offered wood, game,
and metals, each tribe determined to etch their existence from the frozen wasteland. And so they did,
together.
Ayna offered Djayva a wooden cup of sharp scented tea. Djayva hesitantly took the cup, sniffing
the vapor of valerian root, juniper, and sage. “Drink,” Ayna said, her normally pleasant expression
unyielding in this. “It will help.”
Djayva held the cup in her hands and watched as her reflection rippled from the tremble in her
bones. If her tremor were the cold, or the uncertainty of what she would soon become, Djayva would
never know. She hesitated before she drew the tea to her mouth and drank. The bitterness was overlain
with a floral aroma that remained long after the nastier tastes had left. Behind her, Ayna began to brush
her hair, detangling the knots accrued from her furs and leathers.
When that job was done, and the cup sat empty at Djayva’s side, Ayna trailed her fingers through
Djayva’s long, dark locks and let out a sad sigh. She parted Djayva’s hair in a perfect circle at the crown
of her head before making quick and nimble work of the braid. The fronts and temples of her hair were
braided into two long strings that crossed one behind the other at the back of her head. The main cord fell
at her back, winding down to her waist.
When Ayna finished, Djayva could feel her stroke the central braid and whisper, “Shame.” The
woman twisted the braid over Djayva’s shoulder. “You have such beautiful hair.”
Ayna gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze and the cold of her fingers harbored an edge of guilt.
Djayva stroked the long, dark cord of her braid, mourning what she would lose this night.
Washed and dressed in similar linen garments, Djayva’s mother walked deeper into the cave.
While she was not distinctly beautiful, she carried a stern confidence in her features and frame that
Djayva strove to emulate. They were both sculpted from the same ice, dark waving manes, skin the color
of ashwood, and coal dark eyes. Southerner eyes.
 Born to the last great warrior queen of the northern reach, Djayva’s mother had been birthed
several months after the warrior queen’s harrowing escape from southern capture. Her conception was a
method of torture. A lost queendom and her maternal degradation were her inheritance, passed to Djayva
like an heirloom in the shape of a dagger.
“All that was taken from us can be replaced,” her mother once said as they sat before the hearth
of their home, guarded against the drafty chill with furs lined in wool. “We can build new cities and
castles, carve our existence from any formidable landscape, but we cannot forget what was done. There
are wounds too deep to heal, old and festered from time. Try as we might, we cannot lay our grief to rest.
And they cannot rob us of our right to vengeance.”
Veina, as Northern as they came, was a tall, broad woman of thick grey hair. Her ochre skin, and
lavender eyes signaled the truest of Northern blood. She had been a warrior in the great rebellion. A
friend of Djayva’s grandmother, and in some whispers, a lover. The elder came to help Djayva stand and
held the brunt of the younger woman’s weight while she struggled to find her numbed feet. The tea had
brought a haze to Djayva’s vision, and a strange warmth to her body, as though she did not entirely reside
within her skin.
Djayva swayed, feeling as though the ground shifted beneath her. Veina steadied her with a strong
grip and guided Djayva in her mother’s footsteps, towards the largest and central most pool. The rest of
the women followed, taking their places at its rim. Her mother waited at its edge, and held out a hand,
helping Djayva step into the pool.
Braced for a chill, Djayva found herself surprised at the warmth. She stepped deeper into the
water, watching as the light pulsed gently with her presence. She was beginning to feel weightless, as
though the air would take her from the water at any moment.
Around her, the elder women began to sing, their song as ancient as the mountain that housed
them. They each held spools of thread in various colors, a blue of the deepest sea, violet as the old one’s
eye, green as the pines of summer, and the scarlet of blood.
Djayva’s mother stepped into the pool, setting aside her own spool of thread, a periwinkle, pale
and vibrant as the mountain spires.
She first took elder Veina’s loop of blue thread as the women continued to sing, voices mixing in
deep and crystalline crescendos. Mother began to unravel the spool, letting it submerge into the water as
she turned about Djayva. The dark blue spiraled around her, hovering on the surface of the pool. And the
water grew warmer against her skin.
 “For courage,” mother said as she let the end of the blue string fall into the pool, “to be relentless
in the face of our enemies.”
Next came the green, a deeper shade than all the forests, slipping over the blue. “Let the threads
of luck weave in your favor.” And the water grew warmer still.
The red thread wound through the water. “For resilience. Let not your mind fatigue, nor your
body succumb to illness.”
The water grew hot against Djayva’s skin, bringing a flush to her cheeks as her mother took the
violet spool from elder Ayna’s hands. A strip of deep purple tangled with the rest of the colors until her
mother reached the end of the thread and let it dip below the surface. “The old ones bless you with
strength. Let your skin grow thick and your body strong as the ice that birthed you.”
With the last of the thread curling slowly around her, Djayva could feel the water prickling her
skin, increasing in heat as her mother, unaffected, laid the last of the thread into the pool. “And let the
wisdom of the old ones guide you. Their knowledge yours, and your eyes for them to see.”
The heat vanished from the water, leaving it stripped and chilled as frost crawled over the edges
of the pool. Djayva took a breath as she gathered handfuls of thread and submerged herself. When she
resurfaced, thread clinging to her body, her breath met the air in a white cloud. Her mother stood at the
edge of the pool, holding a gently hooked needle.
“Choose your first blessing,” she said as Djayva shivered against the water. She found the color
tangled over her shoulder and she plucked it from the damp fabric of her dress. Djayva held it out to her
mother who nodded. A note of pride and approval glinted in her eyes that spread warmth through
Djayva’s chest.
Mother hooked a finger around the thread of pale glacial ice. “Wisdom it is.”
Untangled from the thread and perched between her mother’s legs at the edge of the pool, Djayva
ironically reconsidered the wisdom in her choice. Her mother pulled her head back into her lap to steady
her and prepared to bestow the blessing.
The elder’s song turned to the humming of a harmony. Mother took up the melody, her voice a
low alto to the ancient words of rite. All around the cave, the whispers of the ice grew louder until they
began to match mother’s song, singing a quiet soprano with unintelligible words that fit timely into the
gaps of mother’s song. As though she had received permission, mother pressed the cold needle into
Djayva’s scalp.
 Pain blossomed through her skull, its bite dull against the effects of the tea. As her head balanced
against her mother’s chest, Djayva stared at the ceiling above where great icicles peered down at her,
shimmering against the pool of light. The song of her mother and the old ones looped around her, cradling
her against the pain.
As her mother’s stitches worked around the crown of her scalp, Djayva felt a chill crawl over her
skull and descend her spine. It felt as though an old one had placed their hand upon her head, fingers of
ice and snow.
When her mother had consigned her last stitch where it joined the other in a perfect circle, she
placed a gentle kiss to the top of Djayva’s head. “Choose your next blessing,” she whispered as she
tucked Djayva’s braid over her shoulder. Where the dark cord of hair had been, was instead a braid
streaked with frosted lilac.
Disoriented, Djayva slipped back into the pool and selected the violet thread that lay untangled
below its bestower. Elder Ayna nodded to Djayva as she accepted the needle from mother. She washed
away the blood in the pool and held out her hand. Djayva offered her wrists and with nimble fingers, the
older woman threaded the needle, and set it to skin. She picked up the melody of the song, her voice a
high and light tenor that blended seamlessly with the song of the ice.
With a gentle brush of fingers over Djayva’s skin, she stitched the ancient emblem of strength
into both wrists. It was a pattern only Ayna’s fingers could sew, a circle of crosses and swirls that bound
into a knot at each side, skillfully skipping over veins.
Djayva felt again the chill of an old one grasping her by the wrists and the frost of it ricocheted up
her arms. She felt it under the careful stitching of elder Olyn’s blessing of resilience, as though hands of
ice pushed against the stitching beneath her shoulder blades. The mark of fortune at her feet and the
blessing of courage beneath her breasts gave the same shock of frost.
As Djayva staggered from the pool, blood dripping from her blessings, she could feel the ice of
the old ones in her blood.
The elders continued to sing as they wrapped her in furs. Each of them took turns placing a kiss
on her forehead, solidifying her blessings as ice coursed through her body. She could feel herself
transforming. Even as they dried her and changed her into a fresh linen dress, and she descended from the
cave to the waiting friends she had left behind, she felt herself becoming the cold.
Like the forest of the mountainside, she was claimed by the frost, limbs glossy slabs of ice, hair of
the softest snow. Djayva was molting from her body, pieces of her drifting away as she became what the
old ones and the elders wished her to be. Uncertain of what that was, she re-entered the cavern as nothing
more than a girl. New.
She swayed into the cavern and each of her companions stood at her arrival. Blood stained the
front of her dress and trickled slowly down her scalp. It trailed her as she walked, dripping from the tops
of her feet. Elder Veina stood at one side, while her mother stood at the other.
“The old ones have blessed us all,” Veina said as she untangled the girl’s hair to let it fall in
streaked lavender blue ripples. She motioned to the girl’s wrists, where the thread was absorbing into skin,
staining her a bright violet.
“The old ones have sanctioned our cause.” Veina’s voice was strong, lifting through the cave to
show the great warrior and chieftain she once had been. Her voice was a war cry and the company found
themselves stomping boots to ground as she spoke. Veina stepped away from the girl. “One of our
children has forsaken herself into the arms of the old ones and come to us new. She is no longer Djayva of
the Demuthian tribes. She will join the Southern court. She will dress like them. Speak their tongue. But
her heart carries the ice of the North.”
Veina tilted her head, arm outstretched as she called to the mountain, “She is in need of a name.”
The old woman paused and a whisper, louder than any before, cascaded through the cavern, carrying with
it a name. It was the ancient language, hard consonants and staccato vowels, that when softened to the
Sourthern tongue became,
Elania.
And the girl knew the ancient meaning as clearly as she knew what the mountain had made her.
Spear of ice.
“Elania,” the group whispered, clapping fists to chest as they stomped against stone and chanted
this new name. She found the name on her own lips, becoming her. But once a name was forsaken, it
would never find its home with her again.
She swayed in place, feeling the ice within her swell with the stomping rhythm of her tribesmen.
Tears froze on her cheeks as she mourned the death of Djayva. Blood dripping over the bridge of her
nose, she found herself saying, “I am the north. It’s shield and spear.”
And she whispered, “I am Elania.” And the name lay over her tongue, tasting of copper and
blood.