I peered through, watching the woman’s chest intently. “She’s not breathing.”

“You can’t tell that for sure.” Sabine picked up a brick and smashed it against the ice. Cracks radiated out from the impact, but seconds later, they retreated as though the ice were healing itself. She hit it again and again, but the result was the same. I caught her wrist and shook my head.

From our position on the steps, we could see that the ice walls filled with darkness snaked through Trianon to the castle, but that was not the limit of the city’s transformation. It was now a fantasyland of glittering towers and spires that defied logic and the laws of nature in their height and design. It was beautiful, but utterly horrifying, because it was entirely devoid of life.

“Everyone in the castle was alive when we left.” As always, Tristan was present in my mind, but as I concentrated on him, I noticed a strangeness to his emotions. They seemed static… Frozen.

“If he was frozen, he’d be dead and you’d know it,” I muttered at myself, and then to Sabine, “If we’re alive, then there’s no reason to believe others aren’t, too.” I shook my head. “Either way, we’ve come this far…” I didn’t finish the statement, because if everyone on the Isle was dead, hadn’t we already lost?

Hand in hand, we made our way down the steps and over to those leading up to the open door of my home. “Hello?” My breath made little misty clouds as I stepped inside. “Is anyone here?”

Brushing snow off the lamp that mysteriously still burned on the front table, I tried to turn up the flame, but my efforts were ineffective. It remained static. Unchanged. Strange. “Hello?”

We inched our way into the great room, both of us instinctively going to the fireplace where the banked coals glowed cherry red. Sabine held her hands out to them, then jerked her fingers back. “No heat,” she said, bending and blowing on the charred wood in a failed attempt to draw up the flames. “Something about this isn’t right.” She reached a gloved hand for an iron poker, seeming intent on rectifying this one trivial thing in the face of all the many things that weren’t right. I turned my back on the process and called out again. “Hello?”

No response. Nothing but silence.

I shouted, “Well? We’re here. And given you owe your freedom to me, perhaps you might show somewhat more courtesy.”

An unearthly chuckle filled the room, and I stumbled into Sabine as the air in front of me tore like a panel of silk. The opening spread wide, revealing a throne carved of solid ice, which would’ve been unremarkable if not for countless eyes of all shapes and colors frozen into its depths. Eyes, which judging from the bloody veins and tissue tangling from them, had been torn from their owners’ heads by force. To either side of the throne sat two immense lupine creatures, fangs as long as my hand protruding from black lips. But it was the creature sitting on the throne that stole my attention.