The Assassin and the Ice Portal - Part II

Storytime

“The one who stands at the threshold and executes the ending”

For part I: The Assassin and the Ice Portal — IloveInspiration.nl by Haus of Healing

I did not sleep.

Not really.

My body lay still beneath the blankets.

I remained awake and listened.

Watched… and waited…

I sat up slowly.

The sheets were dry now.

No trace of the water.

No sign of what had happened.

I got up, took a shower, and zoned out in front of my window. My skin still carried the cold. It felt as if a frost had settled in my bones.

I meditated for a while. The warmth gradually came back in my body.

After a while, I needed to get up. Get dressed. Just start my day.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed and stood. The room tilted for a moment, then steadied. It felt weird. I had to balance myself until the dizziness stopped.

I dressed slowly, and combed my hair. Something had happened to my body.
I just didn’t know what. It always felt like a dream going through the portal, yet my body remembered everything. The ache. The cold. Being deep underwater… coming up through a frozen lake.

I walked into the kitchen to make some tea.

That’s when I saw it.

The kitchen wall was frosted, like winter had crept inside the house. Within seconds it became a full-blown ice wall. I sensed a subtle distortion, like heat rising from asphalt… except this was cold… coming from the wall.

In shock I stepped back. The air shifted. A crack echoed through the room. My breath caught.

“No…” I whispered. I hadn’t called it. I hadn’t spoken the words. But the portal was forming anyway.

A thin line of white light, traced itself across the air. It pulsed once… then spread, fracturing outward like ice crawling over glass.

Thick clouds of freezing breath surged out of the pulsing white line of light. The temperature dropped instantly. My hands trembled. This wasn’t the blade. This wasn’t me either.

The line widened into a doorway. Then it flickered uncontrollably.
And through it… I saw movement.

My hand found a kitchen knife.

The movement consisted of memory flashes. The coastline, palm trees, the castle ruins, the dead old man. Just flashes of them in milliseconds, combined with something darker… Something watching back.

A hand reached through first.

Not fully human. Not entirely strange either. Just… altered. As if it had been stretched across many worlds and forgot which shape it belonged to.

It gripped the edge of the portal.

Pulled.

And then…

He stepped through.

The man in the black suit. Untouched.

As if nothing had happened. As if I hadn’t eliminated his boss.

“You opened it,” he said calmly, adjusting his sleeve while looking at it.

“I didn’t,” I answered.

His eyes lifted to my forehead. “You did.”

A pause.

Then, softer.

“You just don’t know how yet.”

My pulse slowed. I wondered how he got here in my world, and what he knew.

I hadn’t done anything.
And yet, the portal had opened.

I have never opened the portal without the blade. Except the last time when I escaped. I had used my finger to trace a portal underwater. I never expected it to work. It just did.

Now the blade is lost underwater.

I looked at him to read answers, but he was blocking my attempt.

Meanwhile I felt a sense of being watched.

“Hey, let me know something. Why that old man?”

He looked at my forehead and said: “Assignment”.

“If the boss is dead,” I said, “why are you here?”

He almost gave a smile.

“Dead?” he repeated.

“You think that was enough?”

My hand tightened around the knife. Then he stepped closer.

The air between us dropped another degree.

“You think men like him die from a blade?” he whispered.

My stomach tightened.

I straightened myself, even though my body felt off balance. The silence that followed was heavy. The man in black exhaled softly, almost amused.

He looked at my hair, then looked at the ice wall and asked in a whisper: “What name do you go by?”

“Ilka Thecae” I answered.

He practically rolled his eyes. “Thecae”, “The Ace”, he is quite the joker, he said with a stern face.

The warlord took me in 18 years ago. He gave me this name. I did not know who I was. My head was injured badly from an accident. No further details.

Suddenly, he whispered: “The one who stands at the threshold and executes the ending”.

“What do you mean”? I asked.

“You are Hecate and Kali” in one person.

To him, you’re his Ace, apart from the last fuckup. That was not the assignment. Plus, trying to send him to hell will not get you a raise.

Although, the name he gave you, matches quite well…
I see you differently.

For the first time he looked straight at me.

The portal flickered violently.

Something moved behind the ice wall…. Closer. Pressing against it.

The surface of the portal warped, like something on the other side was testing its edges… learning its shape.

I didn’t move. Kept myself as calm as I could.

The man in black faced the portal unbothered.

“You feel it now,” he said quietly.

It wasn’t a question.

My eyes stayed on the distortion. The way it responded.

“I didn’t open this,” I said.

But the words felt thinner now. Less certain.

He took a small step back, giving the portal more space. Or giving me more space.

“You didn’t mean to,” he said, while staring around the kitchen.

A pause.

Then…

“But you did.”

“…What did I actually do?”

The man in black tilted his head slightly.

“You started something.”

Another step closer.

“Now you have to finish it.”

He extended his hand toward me. “Come back,” he said. “He is waiting for you.”

I looked at his hand. Then at the portal. Then I placed my hand on my chest where the cold still lived.

“I’ll think about it,” I said quietly.

His eyes sharpened. Suddenly, behind him, something broke through the ice…

My breath stopped…

To be continued…

Till the next storytime,

Love, Gloria

The Assassin and the Ice Portal

Storytime

In a secluded corner of an ancient city tucked between towering trees, wrapped in silence, and invisible to wandering eyes, I lived a life no one questioned. Solitude suited me. It kept my secrets close.

My origins are a haze, a riddle with no beginning. I cannot tell you who raised me, where I first learned my name, or how I ended up in that forgotten town.

But I carried one thing with me always: a carved, marked blade that whispered when I spoke to it. It answered questions no human could. It opened places no map dared to record.

On a night drenched in moonlight, when the veil between worlds thinned to a breath, I stepped outside beneath a sky littered with stars. With my blade in hand, I murmured old words. Words I had no memory of learning.

With my blade I traced a doorway into the air. Its edges flashed white, cold as the walls of a glacier. Frost bit into my fingertips as I stepped through.

The first breath inside the passage was ice-cold. The second was a warm, tropical breeze.

I opened my eyes to a sun-soaked coastline. Palm trees, heat shimmering off ancient stone, and a frail old man, stumbling toward me with a concerned expression.

He lifted a hand to speak to me, but a sudden crack split the air. He dropped to the ground, struck from behind. Blood flowed from the back of his head. He was dead.

His attacker stepped forward: a man in a black suit, his face unnervingly perfect. He did not even look at me when he said: “Turn back. You’re not welcome here. He’s furious.”

My pulse quickened. The dead old man at my feet… the familiar heat of the sun… The handsome man in a black suit. Something shifted inside me.

I knew this place.
I knew who he meant.
And I remembered our story.

My warlord - the one waiting for me - wasn’t just dangerous. He was a terror, a plague in human skin. I had been bound to him by contract, by seduction, by lies sharp enough to cut bone. I had killed for him when I was was barely more than a child. But today I would send him to hell. And if he refused to go, I would accompany him there to make sure he did not draw another breath.

The man in the black suit didn’t wait for my answer. He simply turned toward the ruins rising above the mountain path, and started walking. I followed him. He did not look back at me. Each step up the crumbling stone felt like walking toward a version of myself I had tried to forget.

We arrived at the top and the man in the black suit walked on towards the entrance of the place. In front of the entrance stood a big bodyguard with face tattoos, staring straight ahead.

There was a large patio with a lounge area with cushioned seating and a firepit in the middle.

There he was. He stood near the firepit, wearing a white linen suit, immaculate against the dust and heat. His gaze didn’t observe me; it cut through me. I walked slowly toward him, keeping my eyes fixated on him; if he tasted any fear, I would be food.

“What you did,” he said in his quiet raspy voice, “was not my assignment.”

“Do it again, and I’ll end you myself,” he whispered. He grabbed my chin, then with his thumb he traced the line of my neck. He pressed it against the hollow between my collarbones, then kissed me hard, punishing, possessive.

I gasped for air. I kept my hands still at my sides; wiping my mouth would have been an insult he wouldn’t tolerate. I waited for the fraction of a second he turned away. That was enough.

In that second I drew my blade, pushed it into his chest and yanked it back out.

He staggered, clutching the blooming stain of red across his white suit. His expression was not anger, nor pain, but disbelief. He wanted to speak, but couldn’t.

Behind me, heavy footsteps scraped stone.
The massive bodyguard with his tattooed face ran toward us. No time to climb down the ruins. I sprinted towards the edge as stones crumbled beneath my feet. A gunshot cracked behind me. A bullet sliced fabric near my ribs. I didn’t look back. I jumped.

The fall lasted only a few seconds, while my blade slipped from my coat, clattering against rock before disappearing. Then: impact. Cold water swallowed me whole.

In the dark water beneath the surface, I kept my eyes closed and pressed a finger to my chest.
I whispered the same ancient words I once spoke to the blade; words that now lived in my bones.

In the dark waters, a light flared beneath, shaping itself into a door of ice, the water grew even colder. I swam towards it and went through the ice portal, feeling immense coldness.

The blade remained behind in that world, like the last bone of a life I refused to keep living.

And just like that, the tropical heat had vanished.

I wound up home in my bed, clothes drenched, body feeling like ice, shivering while my heart was still pounding with the echo of gunfire and my betrayal.

It ended with survival, and the certainty that the doorway could open again at any time. I didn’t need the blade. I was the blade.

Till the next storytime,

Love, Gloria