"Try again."

"I already told you, I can't."

"I don't believe you."

"You never believe me," I said. "Why?"

A smile cracked his face in two, revealing his endearingly uneven teeth and deepening the lines beside his eyes. He took my face in his hands, palms warming my cheeks, and pressed a gentle kiss to my forehead.

"Because I believe in you."

I closed my eyes and clamped my mouth shut. I didn't belong in his world—didn't want to belong in his world—but god, my heart beat for him. And I didn't know if it would keep beating in his absence.

"I'm going to light a fire in you," he murmured against my hair. His hands turned frigid, fingers chilling my skin, and as I pulled back I looked into eyes the color of ice over the clearest blue pond. "One way or another."

___________________

"One way or another."

Years. Years had passed, and those words still echoed in my head. They lingered in my bones like winter, an eternal shiver under my skin. They marked my body, scars long healed but never forgotten.

I stared over the edge of the cliff, not at the castle that rose out of the misty fog like a stone mammoth, but at the forest that surrounded it. The trees, their leaves gently fluttering in the mild breeze. The ivy that curled around their bark. The bushes surrounding their bases.

Everything flammable.

"I can't," the old me had said.

Things changed.

People changed.

Things changed people.

People changed people.

I imagined it all ablaze beneath me, thick, acrid smoke rising to fill my lungs as flames blackened the sleek walls of the fortress below. Just like he'd set me on fire all those years ago.

I hadn't stopped burning since.

My fingers twitched toward the solitary tree that stood far too close to the cliff's edge. Beneath my skin, the ever-present itch—almost like a sizzle—begged that I move.

"I always knew you could do it."

With a gasp, I whirled around at the familiar voice. Like a ghost, he stood among the rocks, picking his way closer in that silent, gazelle-like way of his. Even from feet away, his eyes glinted pale blue, the color of the cloudless sky behind him.

But he was different now. Paler. Lips tinted blue, too, a hollow echo of his eyes. The hunger in his gaze was feral, desperation tugging his lips into a thin line.

I lifted my chin. "Congratulations." My voice dull, I stared him down. "You made me."

His shoulders dropped an inch. "It wasn't like that."

"It was always like that."

He didn't even try to keep arguing.

"I loved you," I said. "I think I really loved you. And I thought you might love me back if I was what you wanted."

I extended my hand into the space between us, facing toward the sky, and a flame burst to life there.

"Is this what you wanted?"

The hunger pooled in his eyes as they zeroed on that single spit of fire, flickering in the slight breeze but never dying. So inviting, so warm. It looked like hope.

But it blistered my palm, the sting starting to radiate up my wrist. It would have sunk into my veins and traveled straight to my heart if I let it.

Maybe it already had.

I waited. For something, anything—an attempt to explain, or a protest, a feat of logic to tell me how wrong I was and that he had, he really had, at some pointed, loved me back.

Nothing moved except the bob of his throat as he swallowed like a parched man in a desert and the clench of his fists as he fought to keep them at his side. I saw how badly he wanted to reach out, grab my hand like a starving beggar.

I let the flame die. That simple motion might as well have snatched all the air from the cliff. I watched the life drain from his face, leaving a hopeless specter in his place.

And then, the faintest crackle split the air. In the utter silence, it rang louder than a gunshot. From the rocks beneath his feet, a hint of fog rose and twisted around his ankles.

Then I saw it—a thin sheet of ice slithering over the rocks, encasing them as it formed a slowly-growing circle around him. It didn't sparkle in the sun; its surface frosted, it only thickened into a dull, blue-white layer.

It was the color of his eyes.

"Look at me," he murmured, so weakly that I couldn't help but obey.

He looked an inch from succumbing to hypothermia, and I remembered the chill of his fingers pressing into my own skin all those years ago. At first I had reveled in it—in him. But as it turned colder, cold enough to leave blackened marks on my arms, my hips, my neck—as he had laid down beside me and wrapped his arms around me and enveloped me with it, and murmured soothing words in my ears as I shivered and begged him to let go—as it had evolved, so had I.

So had we.

His eyebrows drew up in the center, an earnest plea. "I just wanted to know what it felt like to be warm again."

"You used me." A flash of heat seared my spine, and I had to fight it back as sweat sprouted on my neck. "You told me I could do it, that you believed in me. I believed you."

A roiling rage swept through my gut, like boiling-hot water. My teeth tore into my bottom lip, my fingernails biting into the palms of my hands as I tried to hold it all in.

"It was all just what I wanted to hear," I whispered. "Whatever it took to get what you needed."

I backed away, toward the edge of the cliff, and reached for the tree.

"Wait!" He took a hasty step forward, but stopped when I matched it with one closer to the edge. His feet slipped on the ice, but he hardly noticed. "I did this. Burn me to the ground. But spare the kingdom."

"The kingdom!" I laughed. "I'm not here to destroy your kingdom."

And finally, my fingers closed around the nearest limb of the tree. I watched him through an orange haze now, a vignette that crept further and further over my vision. Something unstoppable built behind my navel, clawing its way up my throat, burning with every inch.

"Do you remember this place?" I asked through gritted teeth. "The first time we met. It was here. This tree. I was just a villager. You were supposed to be a king. But you were just a lie."

My fingers tightened against the rough bark, my knuckles turning white. Under my palm, acrid smoke began to rise.

"This is where I fell in love with you."

Sweat poured into my eyes as the tree withered under my touch. As I finally pulled my hand away, a flame took its place. Small at first, but steadily growing, and before long I felt its warmth caressing my back as I stood panting and watched him stare hungrily at the heat.

"Are you happy now?"

As the words tore from my throat, I coughed. Everything sizzled with an unbearable vengeance. My skin, my lungs, my veins—every single one of them branded by what he'd created. And still, I wished I could go back in time and love him all over again. I wished he could love me back, for real. Not for what I could someday be. For who I was.

I wanted to kiss his lips until they were pink and thawed again. I wanted to hold his hand until his eyes lost their frigid edge and deepened into that oceanic blue I remembered.

But it was too late. The fire in my blood rose into a conflagration, my vision disappearing under a burst of violent oranges and yellows and fierce reds. Passionate colors, colors I no longer felt in my heart, but only as physical pain.

A scream exploded from my lungs, and for a moment everything around me was one giant, roaring inferno. I smoldered—I stung—every nerve felt like it might burst as it all boiled over—

—and then, nothing.

Silence so pure that it pressed painfully on my ears. Gradually, muffled at first and then stronger, my own heartbeat became audible, and then my own heavy breaths.

The sweat froze on my skin, forming ice crystals like tiny diamonds.

I shivered and straightened, ready to look him in the eyes for the last time and tell him it was over, but the fear I found there stopped me.

And then another crack split the silence, the telltale slither of ice—but when I looked down, I found it spreading from under my own feet this time.