FROST

Chapter 139: To Love An Apprentice

Adeline and Mila stood in silence inside one of the chamber halls, the faint hum of arcane wards resonating faintly through the stone walls. The school grounds—normally alive with chatter and footsteps—felt eerily still, as if the building itself were holding its breath.

By East’s command, they had been ordered to remain here. No one else had questioned it—too distracted by the chaos unfolding elsewhere. No one had even realized the two apprentices were missing from the front lines.

It was both a blessing and a curse. They were safe, yes. But they were also left behind.

East’s parting words still lingered in Adeline’s ears. "Stay here. When Silvermist returns, you will help her. She will need you."

Help her? From what? And when?

Neither of them knew what had happened to Silvermist after the simulation. Neither knew why the other apprentices had been sent into the human realm to search for someone. East hadn’t told them, and they hadn’t dared to ask.

All they knew, all they hoped was that Silvermist was safe.

Mila sat slouched on one of the couches, tapping her heel against the floor in restless rhythm. Adeline stood nearby, fiddling with the clasp of her azure cloak, the nervous habit of someone trying desperately to anchor herself.

"She’ll be fine," Mila finally said, breaking the silence. Her voice was soft but carried a forced cheer, a tone meant more for herself than for Adeline. She reached over, resting a hand gently on the younger girl’s shoulder.

Adeline flinched slightly at the contact but didn’t pull away. Her fingers clenched in the fabric of her cloak. "Of course she would," she murmured then turned, eyes sharp with quiet frustration. "It’s just—so much is happening out there. And we’re here. Doing nothing. Because we’re lacking."

Mila tilted her head, puzzled.

"I should be able to do more," Adeline continued, her words quickening. "Back at Mist Island, I barely did anything when I knew I’ve got more magic than I should. I feel it. I have the soul of an eighteen-year-old in me—Tim said so. I should be stronger than this!"

The confession burst out of her like an open wound. Adeline groaned, gritting her teeth.

"Adeline—"

"—but I’m not!" Adeline’s fists trembled in her lap. "I wasn’t able to help anyone then, and I’m not able to help anyone now. Silvermist is probably fighting gods knows what and we’re—" she gestured at the room, at the empty chairs and flickering candlelight "—just here."

For a moment, the silence threatened to swallow them whole.

Mila sighed, leaning back and stretching her arms over her head. "Ah, shush. Listen to you. Talking like a true eighteen-year-old, huh?" A small, crooked grin tugged at her lips. "You’re still a kid no matter how old your soul thinks it is. Leave the problems to the adults like me." She thumped her chest proudly.

Adeline gave her a flat look. "You were knocked out and sleeping almost the whole time back there, Mila."

"That’s called a tactical coma," Mila said with faux dignity, crossing her arms. "An advanced defensive technique."

"Uh-huh. Sure." Adeline’s tone softened despite herself, a reluctant smile tugging at her lips.

Mila smirked, already inhaling to fire back with another joke about Adeline’s teen angst power-ups, when the door creaked open behind them.

It wasn’t a normal creak.

It was the sound of hinges screaming for help as if someone had wrestled a feral animal through the hallway and then lost the fight.

Theo stepped in and stopped.

The usually pristine head healer of the academy looked like he had been chewed up and spat out by fate itself. His once-silky hair now hung in uneven clumps, sticking to his sweat-streaked face like wet seaweed. His immaculate coat alway pressed, always perfect, was now in tatters, ripped at the sleeves and frayed at the hem.

And his eyes, oh gods! Red-rimmed and bloodshot. He’s staring at them like someone who had seen the end of the world, treated it with bandages, and billed it for emotional damage.

Mila blinked. "Uh... you okay there, doc? Blink twice if you fought a god and lost."

Theo didn’t answer. He just exhaled, long and slow, like a man too tired to even care about her commentary. "The Mist Guardian calls for the two of you."

Adeline frowned. "Why, what’s going on this ti—"

Theo was already walking away, leaving the door open, dragging his feet in a manner that screamed too tired to deal with teenagers right now.

Mila and Adeline exchanged a look.

"Was that really Theo, though? He looked... unfortunately ugly today," Mila muttered, face twisting into an exaggerated grimace.

Adeline gave a noncommittal shrug, though she couldn’t deny it. Normally, Theo was easily one of the prettiest she’d ever seen in the Academy—right up there with West and... well, Frost.

Actually, thinking about it, if West somehow woke up tomorrow with Frost’s silvery hair, and Frost woke up with West’s ebony hair... no one might be able to tell them apart.

They could be twins. The kind of twins that ruined your peace of mind and your ability to focus on exams.

"Silvemist, that lucky gal," Adeline mumbled, giggling.

It wasn’t certain—nothing ever was—but with Adeline’s skeptical gaze, she didn’t even need to touch them and peer into their futures to know. Silvermist was doomed to have a hard time choosing between those two if it ever came to that.

Adeline immediately shook her head, banishing the thought before it grew roots. Nope. There wasn’t even a chance for a love triangle. Guardians weren’t allowed to have romantic relationships with their apprentices.

At least, that’s what she had read in one of the dustier volumes tucked into the academy’s library—a book she was ninety percent sure had been written by an apprentice trying to talk themselves out of heartbreak. The tone had been way too dramatic to be official doctrine.

"Not the right time, Ade," she mumbled once again and followed Mila outside.

As they trailed, Theo shrugged off his shredded coat a little too dramatic that it landed on the floor with a wet slap—was that blood? sweat? tears?—and Mila wrinkled her nose.

Up close, the damage was worse: scorch marks, slash tears, and suspicious black smudges that might’ve been soot... or ash.

Adeline leaned closer to Mila and whispered, "Do healers usually... look like this?"

"Perhaps. Or," Mila smirked, "he might’ve tried healing a dragon."

"Well, I did," Theo suddenly groaned, side-eyeing them without breaking his stride. His disheveled hair clung to his temples, and his tone was a strange mix of exhaustion and sarcasm. "But I won’t call it heal. More like an exorcism."

Mila and Adeline blinked at him in unison.

"You mean... Silvermist?" Mila asked, cautiously hopeful.

Theo exhaled sharply, almost like a growl. "I don’t even know if that’s her or some lost, furious soul," he muttered, shoulders tense. "But I’ve no right to question the Princes. Miss Evemore... her entirety has changed completely. So I advise you to brace yourselves."

Confusion swirled in Mila and Adeline’s chests, but neither spoke further. They hadn’t even realized when the familiar stone corridors of the academy gave way to... this.

The hallway they stepped into was unlike anything they’d seen before—long, narrow, and eerily empty. No windows, no portraits, no sconces. Just smooth, pale walls stretching endlessly ahead, their silence almost oppressive. The air was colder here, each exhale forming faint clouds that lingered longer than they should. Their footsteps echoed strangely—too loud, too hollow—as if the corridor itself were swallowing the sound.

A chill ran down Adeline’s spine. This part of the academy felt... abandoned. Forgotten.

"Why do I feel like we just stepped into a horror novel?" Mila muttered under her breath, hugging her cloak tighter.

The air thickened with every step they took. The further they followed Theo, the heavier it became—not just cold, it’s seeping into their lungs like icy breath and burning faintly on the way out. A creeping mist curled at their ankles, swirling lazily yet carefully, as though it were guiding them forward.

By the time they reached the end of the corridor, the mist had risen almost to their knees. There, looming before them, was a massive metal door unlike anything they had seen within the academy.

It wasn’t just built—it was forged.

Dark steel panels intertwined with veins of glowing azure and violet, pulsating faintly as if in rhythm with a heartbeat deep inside. Ancient glyphs crawled across its surface in concentric circles, shifting and rearranging themselves like living creatures. At its center, a large sigil—an interlocking pattern of crescents and eyes—burned faintly, releasing a low hum that resonated in their chests.

As they stepped closer, the oppressive mana hit them—cold and warm all at once. A paradoxical sensation: like standing in snow while fire licked at your skin. It was suffocating yet oddly hypnotic. Mila staggered a little, her hand instinctively going to her chest.

"Whose mana... is this?" Mila whispered.

Neither Theo nor Adeline answered.

Theo raised a hand, pressing his palm against the central sigil. The moment his skin met the metal, the glyphs flared brilliantly, lines of light racing outward like cracks in glass. The hum deepened, pulsing louder, faster.

The door groaned open with a deep, resonant hum, spilling blinding light into the corridor. Adeline and Mila raised their arms against the glow, squinting as their vision adjusted.

When the glare subsided, their breaths hitched.

The chamber was immense—its vaulted ceilings lost somewhere above in the shadows, runes carved deep into the stone walls pulsing faintly, like veins carrying a living heartbeat through the structure itself. Every pulse illuminated the mist that blanketed the floor, rolling in cold waves around the feet of the robed sorcerers stationed in a perfect circle at the room’s center. Their breaths fogged with every exhale, their faces pale and tense under the weight of the spell they sustained.

At the heart of the circle stood a woman.

Her arms were raised, moving in deliberate arcs—each gesture graceful yet heavy with power. Fingers carved patterns into the air, trailing ribbons of frost and mist that clung to her motions like loyal companions. With every sweep of her hand, sigils bloomed into existence—intricate, frost-laced maps of constellations and runes that hovered and shimmered before dissolving into vapor.

The sorcerers followed her movements in eerie synchrony, their own spells tethered to hers like echoes, amplifying the resonance of her magic until the entire chamber hummed.

But Mila and Adeline’s eyes weren’t on the spell. They were on her.

Silvermist—yet not the Silvermist they had known.

The woman suspended before them bore none of the warm, human softness they remembered. Her once-brown hair, familiar and unassuming, now cascaded in sheets of snow-white silk, luminous under the blue light of the runes. Where brown eyes had once gazed with gentle curiosity, there now burned piercing glacial blue—cold, ethereal, and unsettlingly similar to Frost’s.

A perfect mirror. A complete woman’s reflection of Frost himself.

"She’s—" Mila gasped, words strangled in her throat. "She’s... completely different."

Adeline’s fingers curled into her cloak, jaw tight. She couldn’t look away—not from Silvermist’s face, not from the way the frost threaded through her hair, not from the realization clawing at her chest.

She had seen flashes of this in her visions the first time she touched her. It was only for a split second, but she had seen it—the moment Silvermist’s humanity would begin to blur, reshaped by something larger than herself. But seeing it now, so vivid, so absolute, was another wound entirely.

Cold air curled sharper around them, biting into their cheeks.

"Isn’t she beautiful..."

Cloud’s voice cut through their silence, low and startling. He materialized between them as though the mist had birthed him, his presence commanding yet strangely softened.

Both girls startled, Mila’s hand flying to Adeline’s arm.

Adeline’s voice wavered as she forced words past the lump in her throat. "T-That’s... Silvermist, isn’t it, Your Majesty?"

Cloud’s ivory eyes softened, gazing at the transformed figure with something unreadable—admiration, sorrow, perhaps both. He inclined his head in a slow nod.

"Yes," he murmured, reverence threading through his tone. "Perhaps this is the woman Frost saw in her... from the very beginning."

Mila swallowed hard. She didn’t know what to say exactly—what could anyone say after witnessing such a transformation? But she had to ask, voice wavering with hesitant urgency.

"W-What happened to her, Your Grace? H-How are we supposed to help?"

Cloud’s sigh came deep, heavy, as though the weight of centuries sat behind it. His gaze lingered on Silvermist—on the woman suspended above them, her body rigid yet serene, threads of frost and mist spiraling endlessly from her fingertips.

"Miss Evermore has unlocked another version of herself," he said quietly, every word measured. "And I believe it is not yet complete. But by unlocking it... she lost a part of her human self."

His tone carried no judgment—only a quiet sadness, as if he’d seen this before and mourned its inevitability.

He turned his head, eyes flicking to Theo, who stood tense beside the circle of sorcerers. The healer met his gaze and nodded once, grim but understanding.

Cloud faced the apprentices again. "Now, I need the two of you to assist her. Help her find the Winter Guardian."

Adeline and Mila stiffened, eyes widening in unison. The words hit like a crack of thunder.

"S-So, Master Frost was truly... gone?" Mila whispered, unable to mask the tremor in her voice.

"I wouldn’t say gone, actually." Cloud’s tone softened strangely—almost playful—as he raised a hand to scratch his cheek. "I believe he’s hiding. He wanted to help Miss Evermore so much, he’d rather disappear than make her life miserable."

Mila’s brows knitted in confusion, while Adeline’s heart gave an uncomfortable twist.

Cloud’s gaze drifted back to Silvermist, his lips quirking upward in a smile—half fond, half bittersweet. "He wanted to free her," he murmured, "but Silvermist... refused to let him go." A quiet chuckle escaped him. "And now look what it got us all. I wouldn’t say it’s their fault though. These things are bound to happen anyway."

The soft humor did little to ease Adeline’s confusion. Her forehead creased, her voice slipping free before she could stop herself.

"Can Guardians... love their apprentices, Your Majesty?"

The chamber stilled for a heartbeat.

Cloud’s brows rose, caught off guard. For the briefest moment, something raw flickered in his ivory eyes—an echo of memory, an old wound. His lips parted, but no answer came.