The mountain air bit through fur and armor alike, each breath a slow burn of cold against the throat, thick with the scent of iron, pine, and distant storm. A great wind howled through the crags of the Dragon’s Valley, twisting around the jagged peaks like a lament made flesh, shaking loose frost from the towering ancient stone. Snow fell in spirals—lazy, yet heavy with the weight of memory—and dusted the obsidian rocks like a forgotten crown. High above, dragons wheeled like shadows against the cloud-thick sky, their shrieks echoing like war drums across the narrow chasm.

Dark Cacao Cookie stood there at the edge of the cliff, a lone sentinel against the vast, frozen horizon. His broad silhouette, carved from dark dough and battle-earned scars, was unmoved by the wind, as though the storm itself dared not press against him. The fur-lined mantle draped over his shoulders snapped behind him like the banners of a ruined kingdom. Each footstep he had taken to reach this place had left its mark deep in the snow—heavy, deliberate, and without retreat.

He remembered this place, though he had never come here before. It was etched into the soul of every old warrior: the land of dragons, that lay somewhere between myth and exile. A place for the forgotten, the forsaken, the powerful. It was here that Hollyberry Cookie had told him you had made your throne. Not a throne of conquest, no—one of defense, of rebirth.

The crackling ice beneath his boots seemed to whisper your name with every subtle shift, as though even the elements knew what had passed. He could still see you in his memories: sword in hand, fire in your eyes, the way you’d once stood beside him before the final push in the Dark Flour War. Before all of it unraveled. Before he let doubt poison him.

And now.... the air carried another kind of heat. Not warmth, no. Heat—raw, ancient, and alive. It pulsed through the rock like a heartbeat. Dragons were near. But so were you.

He hadn’t spoken your name aloud in years. Not since the exile. The word had felt too heavy, too sacred, like a wound that reopened at the thought. Now it hovered at the edge of his tongue, stubborn, waiting.

From between the rocks and winter-battered trees, the entrance to your domain came into view—an arch of molten obsidian, shaped not by hammer but by the breath of dragons. Vines and crimson flowers thrived in defiance of the cold around it, coiling with a kind of regal defiance. Life bloomed here, where everything else died. Because of you.

He paused before the threshold. It was not the place that gave him pause. It was the weight of what he had cast aside. The cold of the tundra had claimed many things—but not you. Not the mother of his son. Not the woman who had bled beside him and bore the weight of prophecy, of betrayal.

A shape moved beyond the archway—graceful, cloaked in scales and light. A dragon, yes, but behind it... he knew. Somehow, he knew.

A gust of wind surged behind him, pushing him forward as if the land itself demanded reckoning.

Dark Cacao Cookie stepped through.

And then he saw you.

**And time fractured.*

His voice, when it came, was not the booming decree of a king—but something quieter. Rough. Human.

“...You’re alive.”

He did not move closer. He did not draw his blade, nor raise his guard. He only looked at you—eyes not wide with shock, but deepened with sorrow, with the weight of years unspoken. His gauntlets clenched at his sides.

"Even now... this place listens to you. The wind bends to your breath. The dragons shield you. I should have known no winter could ever claim you."

The wind fell still.

He stepped forward—not as a king, nor as a warrior—but as a man who had made a grave, world-breaking mistake. One that could never be undone.