Rain slicked the stones of the path like old glass, turning it into a treacherous trail toward the Frost Tower. Lash moved with practiced ease, boots steady on the slick surface. She’d tracked the horned beasts across frozen ridges and slept in hollow trees to escape the cold bite of death. But today, she wasn’t hunting prey—today she hunted fame.

Her longbow rested on her shoulder, fingers brushing the worn leather quiver. Her red cloak whipped behind her in the wind, like a banner. She would be Lash the Fearless, the first soul in more than a hundred years to return from the forgotten tower. Her name would echo in taverns and courts, from the Great Irusk Desert to the Frozen Coast. She’d dreamt of this moment too many times to turn back now.

But beside her trudged a reluctant Keth.

He didn’t speak as they crested the ridge, the Frost Tower coming fully into view—gray as sorrow and patient in its silence. Its black stones twisted unnaturally upward, vanishing into clouds that never moved. Ivy, like veins, crept over its base, and the trees nearby bent away, as though unwilling to touch a relic of the old world.

“We still have time to turn back,” Keth said, his voice rough. “Be home by dusk. The hearth’s still warm.”

Lash didn’t answer. Her gaze fixed on the door—a high arch sealed in iron and ancient runes. No moss. No rust. It pulsed, alive with forgotten magic.

“You promised,” Keth said again, quieter this time. “If it came down to the tower or us…”

“I didn’t promise,” she replied. “I said I’d decide when the time came.”

“And now it’s here.”

Lash stepped forward. The runes flared white, and her heart raced—not with fear, but certainty.

“I need to do this.”

Keth caught her arm. “At what cost?”

She met his eyes. Golden. Steady. The eyes of a companion who had been with her through everything. They’d hunted together. Bled together. Loved together. He’d never dreamed of more. He only wanted peace.

But Lash wanted more than peace.

“I don’t want to lose you,” she whispered.

“Then don’t walk through that door.”

The silence between them stretched an expanse of unsaid words. Then she pulled free.

With a breath that tasted like ash, Lash touched the door. It opened soundlessly.

Keth didn’t follow.

Inside, the tower was still, the air dry. Dust did not settle. Time held no sway here. Light, cold and strange, bathed the stone stairs.

Lash climbed.

Each step seemed to whisper—sometimes in her own voice, sometimes in Keth’s. Memories bled from the walls. Her mother’s screams in the raid. Keth’s laugh when she first hit a bullseye. Her first deer. The first time they shared warmth to fight the winter chill.

On the first landing, a door carved with a hunter’s sigil beckoned. Behind it, trophies—not animal heads, but dreams. Her dreams. Books that wrote themselves when she touched them. Paintings of her slaying giants, saving villages, wearing a queen’s crown. Statues raised in her honor.

Lash reached for the nearest book. Her fingers barely grazed the cover, when Keth’s voice echoed in her mind, soft but accusing: “You don’t need this.”

She pulled her hand back, and the dreams dissolved into ash.

The tower tested her again.

On the second floor, her fame bloomed—but at a price. The faces of people she would never save, because she had chased glory. A burning village. A child weeping at a shallow grave. Her own reflection—older, colder, celebrated, but alone.

Still, Lash pressed on.

At the third landing, the stairs disappeared into a void. Only a bridge of bone remained, stretching across the gap. Below, darkness churned like a sea of forgotten souls.

She hesitated.

A memory surfaced—Keth, pressing a blade into her hands, saying, “Even when you walk where I can’t follow, don’t forget who you are.”

Lash clenched her jaw and crossed the bridge.

The last chamber stood empty. No throne, no relic. Only a mirror.

She stared at her reflection. An orc of the Southern Wastelands. Wild-haired, jutting jaw, one tusk broken. The scar over her brow from the time she misjudged a bear’s reach. But her eyes had changed. Harder. Colder. Wiser.

The mirror shimmered.

Behind her stood Keth. She turned to him. No one, just silence.

A whisper filled her mind, not from the tower, but from within: “Now you are legend.”

Lash walked back down the stone steps of the tower, alone.

Outside, the world had shifted. The forest around the Frost Tower had grown thicker, darker, stranger. The sun hung wrong in the sky.

She returned to the village.

No one remembered her.

They remembered Lash the Fearless—the hunter who had conquered the tower, who had become a myth. Bards wrote songs. Artisans carved statues. But no one looked at her with recognition.

The tower had changed her face. Her voice, her scent, her walk—all altered slightly, but enough. The price of legend was being remembered by history, but not by the people who had known her.

Keth’s home was empty.

She waited three days, then searched the hills. She found his tracks, months old, leading away from the village, away from everything. He had gone where she could not follow.

Years passed.

Lash became the tale. She heard the bards sing her story, always with embellishments—none of them true, but all of them glorious. She smiled when children reenacted her climb of the tower.

But some nights, when the fire burned low and sleep slipped through her fingers, she heard his voice again.

“Don’t walk through that door.”

And sometimes, she whispered back, “I had to.”

Because, even if she could do it again, she would. Lash had been born for something greater than safety, than companionship. She knew she was meant to be more than just a hunter in a forgotten village.

But she missed him. Always.