Ryophlira POV

The click of my bedroom door should have been the sound of safety. Instead, it felt like the closing of a tomb.

I leaned my back against the wood, my knees trembling beneath the weight of my obsidian silk skirts. My chest was tight, my ribs still aching from the corset, but my heart was doing something entirely different. It was hammering with a terrifying mix of pride and pure, soul-crushing exhaustion.

I had just sold myself to a wolf .I barely had time to kick off my heels when the door didn’t just open it exploded inward.

Aiyolistra stormed in, a whirlwind of red silk and violet fury. Before I could even gasp, she lunged, her fingers digging into my shoulders like talons as she spun me around to face her.

"What was that back there?" she hissed. Her violet eyes weren’t just angry; they were pulsing with a sickly light.

I looked down. At her feet, the vase of fresh white lilies on my vanity began to shrivel. The petals turned brown and curled into themselves, the water in the glass turning stagnant and black.

"Why didn’t you reject it?" she demanded, her voice cracking.

"Why didn’t you say no?"

"Mother and Father already decided, Aiyolistra," I whispered, trying to pry her hands off me. My skin felt like it was burning where she touched me.

"There was no saying no. The North chose. It’s over."

"Of course you could have said no!" she shrieked, the sound echoing off the stone walls.

"Look, I need you to calm down," I said, my own temper beginning to flicker like a candle in a gale. I turned away from her, walking toward my bed.

"Get out of my room. We can talk when you aren’t trying to kill each other ."

The air behind me grew heavy and humid. The dead flowers in the vase didn’t just rot they began to distort. The stems thickened, turning into black, thorny vines that crawled across the wood of the vanity, growing at an unnatural, sickening speed.

"Answer me, Ryophlira!"

I whirled back, my own eyes snapping into a glow one eye blue and the other gold "What do you want me to say? That I’m sorry I saved you from a life in the frost? That I’m sorry I’m the one being sold?"

Riegthar skidded into the room, breathless, his face pale. "Both of you, stop it! Now!"

But the dam had already broken. Aiyolistra’s face twisted into something unrecognizable something cruel.

"This all started with you," her voice trembling with years of buried resentment.

"It started with that pathetic, fucking pet fox of yours. I’m glad it’s dead. I’m glad it burned."

She stepped closer, the black vines following her like a loyal pack of snakes.

"I wish it had been you, Ryophlira. I wish you had stayed in that fire."

The air didn’t just get hot it turned into a vacuum. The vines lunged toward me, thorns aimed at my throat, but the moment they reached within three feet of my skin, they didn’t just stop.They ignited.

A wall of red-hot flame roared into existence between us, incinerating the plants into ash before they could touch a single thread of my dress.

"Enough!" Riegthar roared.

His eyes began to glow a deep, purple. He slammed his hands together in a deafening clap. The floorboards didn’t just shake they rolled like a wave at sea.

The ground buckled beneath me, a pillar of stone rising and shoving me hard onto my bed. The earth beneath Aiyolistra rose up and slammed her back into a velvet armchair, pinning her there.The silence that followed was deafening.

"ENOUGH!"

Father’s voice thundered from the doorway.

The glow died instantly. The heat vanished. The earth settled.

We all turned, frozen in our spots. My mother and father stood in the doorway, framed by the shadows of the corridor. I had seen my father in battle, and I had seen my mother roar at the sky, but I had never seen them look at us like this.

It wasn’t just rage. It was disbelief. It was the look of two parents realizing they weren’t raising children, they were raising monsters.