They left at dawn.
The estate behind her vanished quickly in the fog, its silver towers swallowed by morning mist. 01911 didn't look back. She didn't know if she wanted to look back. The elf's estate had been cold, but it had not hurt her—not yet.
That alone made it dangerous.
She was placed in a separate carriage from the Lady. Hers had no enchantments, no padded cushions, no sigils carved into the wood. It was a servant's cart. Unmarked and unguarded, save for the grim-faced driver and the horses that snorted in the frost.
01911 huddled in the corner, clutching her knees beneath a fur-lined cloak. Not hers, of course. Just borrowed warmth. She didn't dare sleep.
They rode north for days.
The roads turned to frost, then to hard-packed ice. Villages thinned. Towns vanished. They passed only black forests and crooked mountains, sharp and spined like monstrous bones. The sky turned gray. Then white. Then something that had no color at all.
She saw no other humans.
At night, she slept on straw in roadside waystations, fed by servants who never spoke to her. Her food was plain: hard bread, dried meat, sometimes a handful of berries. Once, a bowl of thick stew—but only because the Lady was entertaining guests that evening, and the kitchen had leftovers.
01911 ate with her fingers. She didn't ask for more.
The Lady's guards were all elves, wrapped in wolf pelts and highborn sneers. They never looked directly at her, only through her. To them, she was already half-vanished, like breath on glass.
But it was the forest that unnerved her most.
Every time they passed a dark patch of trees, she felt something watching.
Not birds.
Not animals.
Something older. Hunger-shaped.
Once, the driver muttered, "Wyrwood." The name made the other servants go still. No one explained.
01911 didn't ask.
She watched frost form on the inside of the carriage windows. Listened to the creak of wood and the whisper of wind that sounded—on some nights—like howling.
By the seventh day, she was pale from cold and silence both. Her lips cracked. Her collar itched. She didn't complain.
No one would listen.
At last, on the ninth morning, the driver murmured, "We're here."
01911 blinked sleep from her eyes.
Ahead, rising from a cliff of black stone, stood the fortress.
It was not like the elf's estate. It was not made for beauty.
It was built like a threat.
Massive, dark, edged in steel and frost, it loomed over the cliffs like a beast too large for its den. Wolves stood guard at the gates—not statues, but real ones. Eyes glowing gold. Breath steaming in the cold.
They did not bark.
They didn't have to.
The gates opened.
And 01911 crossed the threshold of the North.
She had arrived.
Not as a guest.
Not as a person.
But as an offering.