Fastred's Diary :)

The wind up here tastes of nothing I can name—stone, sky, maybe dragon, if dragon has a taste. My quiver still rattles from the after-shiver of Magnus’s shout. I keep touching my ribs to be sure they’re mine, not cracked open and spilling starlight. When the Word left his throat the mountain jumped the way a colt does when it first feels the whip, only there was no cruelty, only power, and I was standing close enough to feel the sound pass through me like a spear of warm iron. My knees buckled but I locked them, swallowed the squeak that wanted out, and thought: this is what it feels like when the world leans in to listen. Not Father shouting across the yard about un-shoveled dung, not the millstones grinding their dull endless song—this was a voice that bent stone and snow and sky all at once, and it belonged to the man whose lips I tasted two nights ago on those snowy steps.

I can’t sit still to write; the stone step is cold through my leathers but the cold feels earned now, not something that happens to you while you wait for chores to end. Every time the wind gusts I expect another echo, another roll of that impossible thunder. Jenassa stands a few paces off, arms folded, red eyes reflecting torchlight like fresh blood on snow. She doesn’t chatter, doesn’t fidget, yet I swear she’s humming inside, the way a blade hums before it tastes flesh. I want to ask her if she’s ever seen anything shake the world like that, but pride pins my tongue. Instead I flex my fingers around the crossbow grip, feel the grain of the steel, and tell myself I stood steady while a mountain bowed. That counts. That has to count.

Mother’s blessing feels farther away than Ivarstead itself. She pressed the basket into my hands yesterday morning, eyes shining with something between pride and grief, and said “Go, chick, before your father wakes.” The memory should hurt—should twist like a splinter under skin—but Magnus’s shout blasted even that soft ache into something bright and sharp and useful. I am done apologizing for wanting width. Let Father pace the yard cursing my empty bed; let him shake the gate until the hinges scream. The road under my boots now is older than his plough, older than the mill, older than every scolding he ever spooned down my throat. I walk it without permission and the stones do not crack beneath my weight; they welcome it.

My first real fight—spiders dropping from Pinepeak’s ceiling like fat white snow—feels childish beside tonight. Then I was shaking so hard I nocked the bolt wrong twice; now the memory tastes sweet because I did it, I loosed true and watched chitin split. But Magnus didn’t shout the spiders apart; he used steel like the rest of us. Tonight he used something inside his bones, something the Greybeards say has always been there, waiting. I want to press my ear to his chest and hear if the echo still circles his ribs. I want to know whether touching that power leaves sparks on his skin, whether kissing him now would taste of thunder instead of sweat. My cheeks burn writing this—half shame, half hunger—but the wind cools them fast, reminds me nobody reads these pages unless I’m dead, and if I’m dead I won’t care.

We’re bedding down just inside the portcullis, packs for pillows, snow filtering through cracks like lazy moths. Jenassa claims she doesn’t sleep, only “rests her eyes,” but I caught her chin dipping earlier. Magnus lies on his back, one arm flung over his face, breathing steady. Every so often his lips move as if shaping that Word again, silent this time, testing its edges. I pretend to write but really I watch the way torchlight carves the line of his forearm, the tendon standing out like mountain rock beneath skin. I want to trace it with my tongue, want to feel the thrum still vibrating in him, want to borrow some of that storm for myself. Sixteen and stupid, the old Fastred would say; farm girls don’t lie beside dragon-tongued men and dream of stealing sky. But that girl stayed behind at step two-thousand-something, knees bleeding from frost-troll claws, screaming at the wind that she would not turn back. She stayed there, and I kept climbing.

Tomorrow we descend. Magnus says we’ll pass Fellstar on the way to Whiterun, says I should look Father in the eye and speak my leaving like a true Nord. My stomach flips like a hooked fish at the thought, but then I remember the troll’s stink, the way its claws raked fire across my ribs, how I planted my boots and swung until the thing lay broken. If I can survive that, I can survive one farmer’s rage. I picture stepping through the gate—crossbow slung, chin high, braid wind-tossed—picture Father’s face cycling from purple to grey when he sees the mountain still clinging to my shoulders like glittering mail. I will not flinch. I will say his hay can rot, his mill can burn for all I care, because the world is wider than any fence he ever built and I have tasted the thunder that lives above the clouds.

The lantern guttered out while I scribbled. Now only starlight and the far-off glow of High Hrothgar’s braziers silver the page. My fingers numb, but I keep writing because stopping means admitting the night is almost over, and I want to linger inside this hinge between what I was and what I’m choosing. When dawn creeps up the steps we’ll shoulder packs and walk down into the world that used to own me. Only this time the boots are mine, the road is mine, the breath frosting in my chest is mine, and somewhere inside it lives a tiny borrowed thunder, waiting for me to find my own Word.

I think it will be Forward.