The Foxfire Saga

It began in silence. No wind. No breath. No heartbeat. Just the soft hush of falling snow where there should have been steel and the hum of atmospheric systems.

Skadi stood in the center of her childhood home, though she knew it had long since been consumed, the walls caved in during the collapse, ash scattered across half-frozen concrete.

But here it stood again. Whole. Intact. Familiar. Wrong. She knew that too.

The lights hummed with power they shouldn't have. The air smelled faintly of rot. The room was too still, the way ice sometimes settled after a deep crack, waiting to break again.

Skadi moved through the house, steps muffled against warped floor panels. The lights flickered. Ice cracked beneath her boots.

She tried to call out. For Fenrik, for anyone. Her voice left her lips in vapor, but no sound.

She turned toward the old comms terminal on the wall. The screen was lit. Flickering.

Her fingers reached for it. A familiar motion etched into muscle memory. But before she could touch it, a spiderweb of frost bloomed across the display. Cracks etched themselves outward, soundless and beautiful in a way that belied its lethality. The keys iced over in an instant.

A shadow moved behind her, and her breath caught in her throat.

She turned, and Yrsa stood there. Tall and broad, wrapped in her old environmental suit, smile soft with sorrow.

"Skadi," Yrsa said. Her voice was warm, distant, like a voice remembered underwater.

Skadi took a step forward.

"I'm sorry," she whispered, though she didn't know what for.

Yrsa opened her arms, and Skadi moved into them. Her mother's arms closed around her, real and strong and full of things she had forgotten she missed.

But something was wrong. The warmth didn't last. Yrsa's skin began to pale. Her arms stiffened.

Skadi pulled back. Her mother's face was already glassy with frost. Cracks formed across her cheeks, spiraling outward. Her lips parted in a whisper Skadi couldn't hear, couldn't bear to hear.

Skadi reached to stop it. Too slow. Yrsa froze solid, a perfect statue. Ice spread from her feet to her chest to her eyes. The last thing to vanish was her smile.

Skadi staggered back.

The snow outside was rising. The ceiling creaked under frost. Every surface shimmered with thin white crystal.

She turned… and Akiko stood in the center of the room. No frost touched her. Her presence bled heat. Vapor curled around her shoulders, soft and flickering. Her eyes burned like foxfire. One hand was outstretched.

"Skadi," she said. The name cracked the air like a whip.

Skadi stared at her. At the fire that didn't burn her. At the calm that didn't break.

"I don't need your help," she whispered.

Akiko didn't answer. She just waited.

Skadi looked back at Yrsa. Frozen. Fragile.

She turned again. Reached out. Their hands touched, and everything vanished in white. The ice exploded into vapor. The walls peeled away. The frost shattered, and with it, Yrsa, reduced to light and ash and breathless wind.

Skadi woke with a gasp.

The light above her flickered, dimmed.

She was curled on the workshop's grated floor, breath fogging in ragged bursts. Her back was damp with sweat. Her hands hurt. She'd clenched them so tight her knuckles burned.

Frost spidered out from beneath her in delicate, branching lines. A thin web of ice crawling over the metal, reaching for the edges of the room.

She drew her knees in close. Held her breath. The echo of what she'd felt just before waking kept her still. That fierce, consuming burn still coiled behind her eyes.

For a long moment she didn't move. Each exhale cracked thin clouds into the air. When she finally braced a hand against the floor, frost splintered beneath her fingers, sharp lines racing outward like tiny fractures in glass.

Her gaze drifted to the nearest workbench. Frost had climbed one of the legs in a delicate spiral. A faint curve of condensation marked the edge of how far the cold had reached. Like it had bled from her in a perfect, hungry ring.

A soft scuff broke the quiet. Then a slow crunch, boot against brittle ice.

Skadi's head snapped up.

Tala stood just beyond the frost's edge, head tipped, studying her like she was a fresh crack in a pressure line. One of her slender calibration tools lay trapped in a shard of frozen coolant.

With a small frown, she nudged it with the toe of her boot. The tool snapped, shards skittering across the floor.

She stared down at the ruined slivers, then looked up and met Skadi's eyes.

"Is this how you react when you're cornered?" Her voice was quiet.

Skadi pushed herself upright, movements deliberate. Kept her tone flat. "It was a dream."

"Uh-huh." Tala's gaze didn't waver. "And you frostbit half my workspace in your sleep."

"I didn't mean to."

"I know." Tala crouched, swept the fragments aside with a quick swipe of her glove. "Intent doesn't fix microcircuitry."

Silence stretched between them.

"You weren't awake," Tala continued, rising again. "That's what's dangerous. This isn't about losing control during a fight. This is ambient instability. Something's bleeding out of you."

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Skadi's jaw tightened. "I'm managing it."

Tala huffed out a humorless breath. "Right. I just peeled half-frozen wiring off my floor. You're not managing, you're suppressing. Poorly."

"Then what?" Skadi's hands curled into fists. "Lock me in some freezer and wait it out?"

"No. Figure out what's setting it off. Emotional triggers. Stress fractures. Whatever it is, it's slipping through."

Skadi's breath flared white. "Didn't ask for your help."

"Didn't need to." Tala turned, brushing her fingertips over a cluster of diagnostic slates, scanning their faint glow. "If you want to stay useful, you'll learn to exist in this space without icing the walls."

Skadi folded her arms tight. "So that's it? Can't keep my shit together, I'm out?"

"If you can't keep it in check," Tala said, still not looking at her, "you're a liability. Don't expect other people to take care of you if you can't take care of yourself."

The silence stretched.

Tala's hand hovered over a datapad, thumb grazing the edge, then stilled.

"But," she said, voice light in a way that felt almost mocking, "if you can control it…"

She keyed in a note, the tap of her finger sharp against the screen.

"These machines overheat like mad under load. Most of my builds have to be throttled. But with localized cold-flow…" Her eyes flicked sideways. "I could push them to full tilt."

Skadi blinked.

"You're saying I'm only worth keeping if I'm convenient."

"I'm saying you're not worthless." Tala's thumb paused on the datapad again. "But the difference between 'useful' and 'dangerous' is precision. Figure out where your edges are, before I have to."

She turned back to her monitors, posture loose, already halfway into the next task.

Skadi stood there, ice bleeding out from under her boots, melting in strange, broken rivulets.

"I'll work on it," she managed.

Tala didn't nod. Didn't look back. "Good."

Settling in, Skadi focused inward and the world faded in layers.

First, the hum of the workshop. Then the weight of Tala's words. Then the ache in her chest that never quite left, just settled deeper with time.

Skadi let her eyes close.

It was slower than sleep. Heavier. She sank into a stillness that pressed down on her. Buried her under its weight.

Her inner vision shifted. Ice stretched in all directions. Endless in a way that defied perception.

A smooth white wasteland beneath a starless sky, horizon vanished into pale mist. Each step of her boots pressed into the surface echoed faintly before vanishing, the sound swallowed by the stillness.

Above, a tiny sun, brittle and pale, hung impossibly high in a starless void. Something relating to her magic, its core perhaps. Its light fell across everything, cold and sharp, offering no warmth at all.

Powerful, constant. But unfeeling, unreachable.

She tipped her head back, breath catching. In the days since it had been forced upon her, she'd never touched it. Never drawn close. It shaped her world like a star shapes tides, distant and inevitable. But it was not hers. It simply was, and she orbited it, forever held at a distance.

She looked down.

The ice beneath her feet was thick and impossibly smooth. Beneath it, shadow rippled. Something deeper. Something alive.

An ocean buried beneath the depths.

She crouched and pressed her palm to the surface. Cold licked up her wrist. Faint movement stirred below. Pressure shifting, like a giant exhale. There was depth here. Memory. Power. Self.

But the ice was thicker than it had been. She could feel it.

Where once there had been hairline cracks, fault lines where emotion or will had broken through, there was now solidity.

No fracture. No softness. Only silence.

She curled her fingers against the ice. Her reflection stared back, pale and still, her eyes twin mirrors of the core above.

What are you sealing away?

The question didn't come in words. It came in the weight of the silence. In the absence of warmth. In the way even the deep beneath had grown still.

This was wrong. The cold had never burrowed so deep into her before.

She stood. Looked again at the frozen ocean, at the star above. At the untouched horizon.

And then she walked. Along the ice, tracing the perimeter of herself, searching for a fault line she could remember.

Something would have to break. If she was going to move forward, something would have to crack.

The ice didn't speak in words. It just was. Smooth, unbroken, extending outward into silence. Skadi stood in the center of it, still and small beneath the distant glow of her mana core.

But the pressure beneath her feet shifted.

She could feel it now, the weight of what lay below.

Kneeling, her hand hovered just above the surface, not touching yet. Just watched her breath fog in front of her lips, then vanish, consumed by the cold.

For a long moment, she didn't speak. Even inside her own mind, silence felt easier.

Why did it grow so thick?

She placed her hand against the ice. It held her, firm and familiar, but unyielding.

Distance.

That was the first word that came.

She remembered the crew at the water maintenance station. The way she'd kept her head down, done her work, avoided the side-channel arguments. The protests had started, but someone else would deal with it. That wasn't her fight.

She remembered the shouting in the streets. People demanding to know where the water had gone. The shortages. The rationing. She hadn't lied. She didn't know the full picture. But she hadn't looked, either. Not until it was too late.

Too busy. Too tired. Too detached.

Then came Fenrik. All charisma and recklessness, mouth full of ideals and fists full of kindling. He'd thrown himself into the movement like he was trying to burn down the world just to see who stepped out of the ashes.

She'd pulled away. She told herself it was for his safety. That if she stayed distant, she couldn't be used against him.

But the truth was simpler. She didn't understand what he was becoming, and she hadn't wanted to try.

Then came Yrsa. Their mother hadn't stopped him. Hadn't pushed back. Hadn't chosen her. Or maybe she had, and Skadi had just never asked.

She stared into the ice. Not just distance. Walls.

Layers upon layers of frost between herself and everyone she hadn't known how to reach. The colder it got, the easier it was to move without thinking. Without feeling.

But she hadn't been avoiding pain. She'd been avoiding responsibility. The kind that came from being seen. The kind that required choice.

Her fingers pressed into the surface, just enough to feel the pressure of it against her palm, not enough to crack. The cold didn't burn, it just held her.

She exhaled.

Ice could be a wall. A coffin. A prison. But it wasn't always. Sometimes, ice was structure. Form. It held lakes in place. It bore weight. It preserved.

She looked up again at the core, distant and radiant. Still too far to touch.

That was fine. She wasn't ready to reach it yet. But she didn't need to bury the ocean to survive. Not anymore.

She looked back down, and the ice beneath her hand was changing. Thinning.

The pressure below still pulsed, low and slow, like a heartbeat she'd forgotten to listen for. But now the surface didn't press down against it.

She could feel it now, not just beneath her hand but beneath her weight, flexing imperceptibly with every heartbeat. The pressure below had changed. It wasn't pushing against her. It was pulling.

Something moved beneath her. A shadow. Human-shaped, maybe. Just on the edge of perception. It drifted just below the surface, indistinct, but there.

Skadi leaned closer.

The ice cracked. A slow, crystalline split, the surface parting like breath on glass. And then the world dropped. The ice gave way, and Skadi fell through.

Cold enveloped her. Her first instinct was to breathe. A sharp, terrified gasp. But there was no breath. No need.

The water pressed against her like a second skin, dense and smooth, cool and infinite. Her eyes opened wide. Light filtered through from the ice above, rippling in pale ribbons across her limbs.

The water held her. A riptide tugged at her chest. Not physical, but familiar. A pull in her soul. She twisted in the current, searching.

Then she felt it. Nothing so clear as a voice, not even a shape. But warmth, familiar and devastating.

Her mother, embedded in the water like a current that never stopped flowing.

Skadi curled her arms in slowly, her limbs weightless, heart thudding once, then easing.

Yrsa had always been the water. Calm when Skadi burned with questions, strong when Fenrik fought the current. She wasn't a force that pushed, but one that carried. That held. That endured.

The pressure wrapped around her. It was comforting. Immense. A silence that said: I am still with you.

Skadi closed her eyes.

And for the first time since the world shattered, she didn't brace herself. She simply let the water move through her. Her magic wasn't screaming for release. It didn't burn with its frost. It simply was. Like the cold sun overhead. Like the slow pulse in the deep.

She drifted there, suspended. And wept quiet tears that vanished into the water, gentle as a mother's hand brushing her cheek.

The water took them all, every trace. And gave nothing back.

Except peace.