What Grew In His Place

It did not look like grief. Reyna had expected grief, had spent forty years preparing herself for the exact shape of it — but what unfolded from the chains was smaller than she remembered, and colder, and it did not have his eyes.

"You are not him," she said, and it was not a question.

"No," it agreed, in a voice made of the wind that used to carry snow. "But I am what he left behind when he stopped being able to hold the winter together. Does that frighten you?"

She considered the question honestly, the way she considered everything, because honesty was the only inheritance the mountain had ever given her for free. "No," she said. "But I think it should."