The Winter That Never Ended
Fantasy
With every step Kailin took, she could feel the crush of snow beneath her boots. A fog of air puffed out of her mouth with each breath she took. Even the fur cloak she wore did little to keep the chill from trying to creep into her bones. But the sun still filtered through the gaps in the tree branches, laden heavy with the last snowfall.
It had been many moons since Kailin had even seen sprouts of life dot the forest floor. The debris of fallen branches from past storms made walking boldly through the forest the kind of challenge only a Champion from the kingdom might have been able to overcome. Even as lithe as Kailin was, she couldn’t imagine traversing the entire forest in a single day.
But the forest was still home in many ways, an imprint from her childhood when she walked side by side with the King’s Men, of which her father had once been a part. On such journeys, the men had regaled her with tales of underground courts run by spindly-fingered women whose hair ran as white as fallen snow. But those were just stories, weren’t they? None of that could be real.
Or so all of them thought before magic had run rampant and made the passing of seasons obsolete. Spring, summer, autumn — all of them had vanished without a trace, as if some secret war had obliterated them from the face of human understanding.
