The Hemlock Oath
MatureYour oath binds your tongue, but the glacier ahead is ready to swallow everyone you lead—unless you break it and face a fate worse than death.
You are a scout bound by a geas that will kill you if you reveal its terms. The expedition you guide is marching into a trap you're forbidden to warn them about. The only way to save their lives is to break your oath—and risk a death worse than the one waiting in the glacier ahead. Will you keep your word and watch them die, or break it and face the curse?
The story begins
The wind screamed over the Serpent's Jaw like a living thing, and you pressed your body flat against the ice, fingers numb inside your gloves. Below, the crevasse gaped—a blue-black maw that swallowed the light. Kaelen's voice cut through the gale, sharp with impatience.
"Scout. What do you see?"
You'd seen it a dozen times since dawn: the way the snow drifted in unnatural spirals over the ice, the faint shimmer that no blizzard could explain. The Whisperer's hand. Your throat tightened as the geas coiled like a cold snake around your tongue—the words you couldn't say, the warning that would damn you.
"Nothing," you called back. "Clear passage ahead."
The lie tasted like ash.
Mira glanced at you from her map, her eyes narrowing behind frost-crusted lashes. She knew something. She always knew. But she said nothing, folding the parchment with deliberate care as Kaelen gestured the team forward.
Then the ice beneath your boots groaned—a sound like a dying beast.
What happens next is up to you.
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