The Winter Bride and the Fallen King

Into the Woods

Chapter 4

The next morning, Ariel woke to soft gray light seeping through the cabin window like spilled ash. Outside, snow lay untouched—a pristine blanket stretched tight over pines and the frozen fjord, so still it felt as if the world itself were holding its breath. She rubbed her eyes, but the chill from the night before clung to her bones, settling deep in her chest. Today, she told herself, pressing her palms to her cheeks.

Today, focus. Her assignment waited, sharp and unyielding as the ice beyond the glass.

After a quick breakfast of cold toast and bitter coffee, she spread her work across the small wooden table by the window: papers fanned in chaotic stacks, notebooks with dog-eared pages, pens scattered like forgotten bones. She didn’t mind the mess, it felt alive, like the thoughts crowding her head. The fjord shimmered as early sunlight hit its surface, and she found herself glancing away every few minutes, drawn to its quiet grandeur. There was a loneliness to it that pulled at something deep inside her.

In theory, her assignment was simple: document local life, then explore the castle and the legend of the fallen king. She wanted to weave nature and landscape into her winter project, to capture more than just facts. But reality was a tangle of unknowns. She didn’t know this land—its paths, its people, its unspoken rules—and the locals were few, scattered like stones across the vastness. She would have to rely on her eyes, her questions, and the careful notes she’d scribble down as she went.

Ariel opened her laptop and typed a few lines, but her mind drifted like smoke. She noted the way snow clung to pine needles in perfect white tufts, how ice crystals glinted like crushed diamonds in the sun, how the trees swayed with a slow, heavy grace despite the frost. She snapped photo after photo through the glass, framing details she felt mattered—a bird’s nest tucked under a branch, a frozen puddle etched with cracks like a spider’s web. This project wasn’t just about what was true; it was about what the place felt like the winter wrapped around isolation, sharp and clear as a blade.

After an hour, she knew she had to go outside. The cabin walls felt too close, too quiet. Bundling into her coat, scarf, and gloves, she stepped into the air so crisp it made her teeth ache. The sun was higher now, and the cold was slightly gentler, though it still bit at her cheeks and fingertips. She wandered along the fjord’s edge, bringing her notebook tucked under her arm, jotting down every small thing that caught her eye.The faint crack of ice beneath the snow, the way her breath hung in the air like ghostly silk, the distant gurgle of water moving somewhere beneath the frozen surface.

She paused where the forest met the fjord. Here, silence was absolutely broken only by the soft creak of branches and the lonely caw of a raven far overhead. She knelt, her knees sinking into the snow, and traced small tracks winding toward the trees with her finger. Her pen moved fast across the page.

Tracks of a small mammal-fox, maybe hare. Movement is sporadic, cautious. Paws light as air, as if it knows the land is watching. Nature doesn’t just survive here beacuse it hides. It waits...

Hours slipped by as she walked, watched, and wrote.

By late afternoon, her fingers were numb blocks of ice, her cheeks flushed raw, and her notebook was nearly full. She stumbled back to the cabin, snow melting off her boots in dark puddles on the wooden floor, and collapsed into her chair by the window. The fjord was bathed in pale gold now, the sky streaked with pink and violet like a bruise healing in slow motion.

She opened her notebook again, adding her final words for the day:

The fjords are alive in their stillness. Cold sharpens everything—sound, sight, even thought. Every detail tells a story: of survival, of waiting, of beauty that doesn’t ask to be seen.

As she closed the book, a flicker of movement caught her eye.She gasped!

Nikolai was walking along the fjord’s edge, his dark coat a stark s***h against the endless white. He moved with unhurried purpose and his boots crunching softly over ice and snow. For one heart-stopping moment, he looked up and his gaze found hers across the frozen distance.Ariel swallowed her own saliva to ease her nervousness.

Then, without a single change of expression, without so much as a nod, he kept walking. He vanished behind the trees as if the forest had reached out and pulled him in, leaving no trace but the memory of his shape against the snow.

A strange flutter stirred in Ariel’s chest, light and sharp, like a bird beating its wings against her ribs. She forced her eyes back to her laptop, gripping her pen so hard her knuckles blazed white. The assignment matters, she told herself, over and over. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that Nikolai’s sudden appearance yesterday, his silent pass today, had unsettled something in her—something she didn’t yet understand.

Her pen slipped from her fingers, clattering against the desk. She glanced back at the window.

Nothing and no shadow. No footprints marring the snow. Only the fjord stretching out in quiet emptiness, as if he had never been there at all. But his image burned in her mind: tall and striking, with a sharp, ancient beauty that reminded her of marble statues carved for kings long dead. A man who seemed to belong not to this time, but to the land itself.

She shook her head, scolding herself. Focus. Work first.

She brewed another cup of coffee, holding the mug tight as warmth seeped into her palms. Outside, wind swept across the fjord with a low, hungry howl, carrying the distant crack of shifting ice and the hollow murmur of water moving beneath its skin. Ariel shivered—not from cold, but from a deep, uneasy sense that the land was watching her. That it was guarding its secrets with a patience as old as the mountains.

This place had stories.

And she would uncover every last one.

She revised her outline, reading and rereading until the words blurred together. Marcus needed something solid for his report and she couldn’t send him half-formed thoughts. After one final check, she hit send and waited. The silence stretched on, heavy and thick. She toasted another slice of bread, took a few distracted bites, then turned back to her laptop.

Her search led her to the abandoned castle Marcus kept telling her.

Records were fragmented, almost deliberately vague—as if someone had gone through them and scrubbed away the parts that mattered. What she pieced together made her skin prickle.

The castle was built in the late 1950s by King Silvester Blackfrost, once beloved by the people of the fjords. In its early years, its gates stood open to all; halls rang with laughter, music, and tradition as generations of Blackfrosts tended to their land and people.

Then, in 1995, everything ended.

The queen was found dead within its walls. Official reports offered nothing but silence, but rumors took root and grew like weeds. Some whispered the king himself had killed her, enraged by her affair with a palace guard. Others insisted the truth was darker still, something the records refused to name.

Ariel stared at the glowing screen, her pulse hammering against her ribs. Now she understood why they called it the Fallen King’s Castle.

She searched for paths through the dense forest that surrounded it, but every result ended the same way:

PROHIBITED AREA.

DANGER ZONE.

ACCESS FORBIDDEN.

She leaned back in her chair, unease settling in her gut like cold stone. If even the locals were kept away, what was the forest hiding? What had been locked away in those walls—and why?

Her fingers drifted across the desk, pausing over her coat. She didn’t have an answer, not really, but something inside her burned with a restless fire—an almost painful need to see the castle for herself. To stand where the king had stood, to breathe the air that had held his secrets.

Just one look, she told herself. Just to see it.

The moment she stepped outside, cold wrapped around her like a living thing sharp, unforgiving, pressing in from all sides. She pulled her coat tighter and switched on her flashlight, its narrow beam cutting a thin path through the darkness as she followed a faint trail into the trees.

The night was alive. Leaves rustled with soft, secret sounds. Branches snapped somewhere in the distance, loud as a gunshot. Strange, low cries echoed between the pines and no animal she’d ever heard before. Her breath fogged the air in thick white clouds, and with every step, her heart beat faster, a wild drum against her ribs.

Then she heard it.

A violent rush of wings, slicing through the air like a blade.

Her grip on the flashlight tightened until her hand throbbed. Fear crawled up her spine, cold and slick as oil, but she forced her feet forward. Turning back would mean admitting she was scared—and she wasn’t ready for that. Not yet.

She stopped when something moved.

It passed her in a blur, too fast to see, too big to be a bird.

A gasp tore from her throat as she dropped to the ground, panic exploding in her chest like a firework. The flashlight slipped from her grasp, clattering away into the dark. Its beam spun wildly across the trees, then vanished into blackness.

“No—!” she murmured.

She scrambled after it, and her fingers digging into damp, cold soil, breath coming in ragged sobs. Her hand brushed against something rough, twisted vine, tangled around a root. She grabbed it without thinking, and the wood snapped clean in two.

The ground vanished beneath her.

She screamed as her body tumbled forward, sliding down a steep slope she hadn’t seen. Darkness swallowed her whole. She couldn’t tell where she was falling but only that there was no stopping it. Branches scraped her face and arms, tearing at her coat. Stones slammed into her legs and sides, sending jolts of pain through her body.

This was a mistake!

Pain ripped through her as her back slammed into something solid. A rock, or the thick trunk of a tree? The impact knocked the air from her lungs, leaving her gasping on the cold ground while her vision spinning. A broken groan escaped her lips as she curled into a ball, every muscle screaming in protest.

For a moment, there was only silence.