Glaciana Frostcall's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Glaciana Frostcall sang from the edge of the ice shelf, and the wind swallowed every note before it reached the sea. She had sung for three nights now. Three nights, and no sail had turned toward her. The fabled captain she meant to claim was somewhere past the black water, and her voice could not cross the wall of ice at her back. She was the Ice Siren Queen. Her crown had never failed her before. Tonight it felt like glass. She stopped singing and listened. Only the crack of shifting floes answered. Beyond the shelf, the open ocean lay flat and empty under a bruised sky. Somewhere out there, a man steered a ship she had heard sailors whisper about in every port her ice had ever crushed. She wanted him. She wanted his hands cold in hers, his breath frosting against her mouth, forever. But want was not reach. The shelf broke her song. The song was how sirens took men. Without the song crossing water, she was only a woman in a frozen dress, watching the horizon. She turned inland. A cluster of crystal plants grew from the snow near her feet, their petals thin as knife glass. She had passed them a hundred times. Tonight she looked at them properly. When the wind moved through the sharp clusters, they rang. A small, pure sound. Not loud enough to matter. But the shape of the sound was hers. She knelt and pressed her palm to the largest stem. Frost bloomed under her hand. The plant answered — every petal caught her breath and held it, humming her note back to her, sharper and farther than her own throat could throw it. Not enough. One plant could not carry a song to a ship. She stood and walked the ridge until she reached the cave where her dragon slept. He filled the hollow, scales pale as milk, horns bound in worked gold. He opened one eye when her boots touched the ice. She did not need to speak. He had carried her before. "Take me above the shelf," she said. "High. I need the wind under me." He rose. She climbed between the ridged plates of his neck, and he pushed off the cliff. The shelf dropped away. The open sea spread beneath them, wide and grey and finally within reach of her voice. She sang. The note left her mouth and did not die. It rode the wind her dragon made. It carried past the ice, past the first mile of black water, past the second. Far below, on the dark line where sky met sea, a single lantern turned. A ship's lantern. It swung, hesitated, and came about. Glaciana smiled. She had her road to him now. But a lantern turning meant a man was already listening — and a listening man was a man who would arrive.