Lord of the Frozen Reach

Before the sky, there was water. Before the water, there was something else. It fell. It waited. It borrowed life from a thousand hosts, wearing their shapes, learning their ways. Then the cold came. The long sleep. Two hundred million years passed. Humanity found the Eidolon two centuries ago. They learned to integrate it. They built academies on the bones of the first vessels who didn't survive the process. Aarav Kael is fifteen. He knows exactly what the academy produces: officers, heroes, corpses. He doesn't care. Soldiers get medical priority. His sister doesn't have time for anything else. Riya's treatment works. Mostly. She walks. She talks. She dreams of a coastline she has never seen, and wakes with salt on her lips. Aarav tells himself it's a side effect. He tells himself the Frozen Reach melting is a coincidence. He tells himself the things he's learning at the academy—about integration, about rejection rates, about what happens when a body accepts something it shouldn't—have nothing to do with the sister he left behind. He is almost good at lying. Beneath the ice, an ancient cell divides for the first time in eons. It has learned patience. It remembers the shapes of beasts and men. It is looking for a host. It is looking for someone who will not reject it. Riya hasn't rejected anything in months.