Chapter 1
Falsified; Chapter 1
Nieve stood beneath the ruins of an old palace.
It was a cold night.
Snowflakes began to fall from the inky blue sky, yet not one touched her.
Her beloved held an umbrella over her head, his figure bearing the snow as frost gathered on his shoulders.
Tears burned her eyes. Perhaps the cold was to blame.
She stepped away from beneath the umbrella.
The snowflakes could not hurt her more than his words did.
Nothing could.
Cruel. Unimaginable coming from him.
How could he even dare to think that?
Her palm struck his blurred face in sheer anger, hard enough to leave her hand burning red.
A feeling of falling jolted her awake.
Her heart beat so violently she feared it might escape her. Peeking through her lashes, her blue eyes were immediately stung by the brightness of the day.
She was falling again...
Nieve opened her eyes and blinked continuously, catching the culprit for her falling!
Her usual tormentor stood crowding the table with her companions, eager to humiliate her. After all, she had been hiding from them ever since she recovered and returned to work.
Closing her eyes, she grimaced inwardly. Not again!
“Whoring in your sleep again?” One of them asked, laughter erupting after the question.
Nieve said nothing. She had learned that silence unsettled them more than retaliation ever could.
But her silence was not peaceful.
Her head had begun to ring, white light crossing her vision as fragments of the dream forced themselves forward— the ruins, the snow that refused to touch her, the blurred face of the man she had struck. Her palm still stung as if she had truly done it.
Only then did she notice the tears drying on her cheeks.
The stinging on her palm.
The coolness of frost spreading across her back.
It was summer.
She pressed her fingers against the cold patch on her spine, confusion and dread twisting together in her stomach. Before she could make sense of it, two fingers seized her chin with the intention of snapping it.
“The Winter Man possesses terrible taste in women, though,” Shevil mocked. Her companions circled like they had been waiting all morning for this.
The Winter Man. The name they had given him—the faceless man who haunted her sleep, who Shevil's spies had overheard Nieve worrying about to Elisa.
A name born from mockery. Yet something about hearing it spoken aloud made her chest tighten in a way she could not explain.
She had never seen him.
His appearance resembled nothing more than a rough outline carved onto a wooden toy.
After all, the man might be a mere fabrication of her mind as Elisa had insisted.
That the sickness had stolen six months of her winter, and had left her mind grasping for memories that did not exist, filling the void with invented ones.
It was a kind explanation.
Nieve tried very hard to believe it.
“Careful,” Shevil released her chin and stepped back with the unhurried ease of someone who had already won. Her smile changed and thinned into something colder.
“A wolf might bite you if you keep daydreaming,” She smirked as if she knew something Nieve doesn't.
The words landed strangely. Not like a taunt but like a warning from someone who already knew the answer to the question Nieve had not heard yet.
Before she could turn the sentence over in her mind, a shout rang across the palace backyard.
“Elisaline is coming!”
The small group of girls hurriedly walked away and took seats at tables far from her while Shevil followed them calmly as if she couldn't care less about Elisaline.
“Nieve!” Elisa exclaimed, rushing over to her with a basket in hand.
Relief did not flood her as it should have.
“What happened? You look pale.”
Elisa set the basket down and immediately began inspecting her face and hands with the focused concern of someone who had done this too many times before.
“I am well. You worry too much,” She tried to brush her off. However Elisa was too clever to be fooled by her poor attempt at hiding the truth.
“They hurt you again—did you not?” Elisa asked, walking over to the retreating form of Shevil, before Nieve even opened her mouth.
Elisa grabbed Shevil's hair and yanked her head back, snarling.
Shevil only smiled with an eerie glint in her eyes, as though Elisa's hands in her hair were nothing more than a minor inconvenience she had already accounted for.
Nieve stood quickly and pulled Elisa away before she could do something that could not be undone.
Elisa was a witch, powerful enough to reduce Shevil to something unrecognisable, but that power was precisely the problem. The head maids would send her to the dungeons. Or worse - back to the witch kingdom permanently. Shevil knew this and her smile said she knew it.
“They did nothing,” she assured her friend, sitting down at one of the empty tables.
Elisa's reddish ginger hair, curled for the day, bounced as she slipped into the chair beside her, huffing. “They better do none!” her friend exclaimed, making Nieve sigh in relief.
A moment passed. Then, as she always did, Elisa found her brightness again and leaned forward with a mischievous gleam. “You would not believe what I found in our library.”
She lifted the cloth inside the basket. Beneath the bread sat novels. Romance ones, worn at the spines.
“Heavens bless me. I had to use my powers,” Elisa smiled with mischief burning in her eyes, her orange hair seeming to be set ablaze by the bright rays of the sky.
“You must love me, Elisa. For you are my blessed sister indeed.” Nieve whispered, a shiver running across her spine.
Elisa felt different.
Nieve could not name it. Only feel it, the way one feels weather changing before the sky shows any sign.
Elisaline scoffed, smacked her lightly on the head and handed her the few novels, mumbling something under her breath as she did so.
When the head maid arrived and assigned their posts, Nieve was sent to the berry fields. Elisa gathered her basket and stood.
“Goodbye” Elisa hugged her. Too tightly and too long, her arms pressing like she was trying to memorise the shape of her.
Why did it feel like a farewell?
Nieve stood stiffly as her friend hugged her tightly.
“Enough goodbyes, I have berries to pick before dark”
Elisa released her slowly and said nothing else.
Nieve did not look back as she walked away, because something told her that if she did, she would find Elisa watching her with an expression she was not ready to see.
The berry fields were quieter than the palace gardens, filled only with the soft singing of the other maids and the warm press of late afternoon light. Nieve picked methodically, her hands moving while her mind turned the morning over and over.
The frost. In summer. On her own back.
The sickness Elisa described had ravaged the entire kingdom.
Yet Nieve could not recall a single other person she had seen fall ill. Not even one.
She forced herself to stop thinking. Pondering it only made it feel more impossible.
The song around her shifted. Familiar, though she could not place where she knew it from. She had begun to hum along without realising, which drew the attention of the young maid working beside her.
“Your stay at the Lykos kingdom was pleasant, I hope,” the girl said, smiling kindly.
“My stay at the Lykos kingdom?” Nieve was baffled by the girl's question.
The Lykos kingdom. The wolf kingdom. But she failed to recall ever leaving the Glycon Kingdom in her entire life.
“The previous winter,” the girl continued, her kind smile abandoning her face as Nieve turned sour and failed to show even traces of pleasantry.
“Yes, of course. It was indeed lovely. Who had revealed my visit?” Nieve seized the smile that was straining to abandon her face and questioned the younger maid in a kind tone.
“Elisaline told me. Was it supposed to be a secret?” the girl inquired curiously, no trace of wickedness in her query, however.
“Not at all. Just gossip waiting to happen” Nieve told the young girl with a pretence of mirth.
“Oh, I could imagine,”
The girl laughed and was called away moments later, leaving Nieve alone with her shaking fingers and a berry basket she no longer cared about.
How could Elisa do this?
She knew how much Nieve had been disturbed by the presence of her dreams, but she had lied to her.
Not once.
But every single time.
Which meant the lie had been prepared in advance. Which meant Elisa had known there would be something to lie about.
Something had happened during that winter. Something Elisa had gone to considerable lengths to make sure Nieve never remembered.
The Winter Man might be real.
And Elisa knew exactly who he was.
Nieve found the treehouse empty.
She had been so certain Elisa would be there.
So certain that she had already rehearsed the confrontation, the accusations, the specific words she would use.
Instead there was only the creak of old wood and the last grey light coming through the trees.
The quiet stretched too long.
Even the trees seemed to be listening.
A single piece of paper on the table beneath a lantern glowed, like it was calling her to read the words it contains.
“I will be gone for a while. Make no attempts to search for me; it will be futile.”
-𝓔
Nieve read it twice.
Then the panic came instinctively,
Not for herself but for Elisa, because no matter how furious she was, she loved her. Then reason reasserted itself. The signature was voluntary, the familiar looping E.
Elisa had not been taken. She had chosen to leave.
Her eyes dropped to the line below.
“The Winter Man happened to be more than a mere imagination.”
