[Intro]
[Nyckelharpa plays the Frostheart motif backwards over five-beat tom patterns.]

[Verse 1]
[Female Lead]
She slept with one eye turned toward the door,
One ear to the gale, one paw on the floor.
A silver scar crossed the amber flame
Of the eye that watched when I spoke my name.
She knew where the healers had hidden thread,
She dragged it out from beneath the bed.
Then circled twice by the altar stone,
The rite my mother performed alone.

[Pre-Chorus]
[Female Lead]
I asked, “Who taught you the court’s old sign?”
She struck the ground in a count of nine.
Nine queens were carved on the shrine’s north wall—
Nine weathered faces, watching all.

[Chorus]
[Female Lead]
Scar-eyed wolf, what lives behind your gaze?
Who taught your feet the vanished palace ways?
Scar-eyed wolf, why bow before my name,
Then bare your teeth when I speak of royal claim?
You carry no collar, no chain, no sign—
Yet something in your silence remembers mine.

[Verse 2]
[Female Lead]
At dusk she led me beyond the spring,
Past stones where frozen blue flowers cling.
She stopped at a cleft in the mountain’s side,
Where childhood treasure had once been tied.
I found the knife that my mother wore,
Its bone-white hilt and its runes of war.
I lost it there when I still was ten;
No living witness had seen me then.

[Pre-Chorus]
[Female Lead]
She touched the blade with her wounded brow,
And winter folded around us now.
I heard my mother hum low and clear—
A cradle song for a child in fear.

[Chorus]
[Female Lead]
Scar-eyed wolf, what lives behind your gaze?
Who taught your feet the vanished palace ways?
Scar-eyed wolf, why bow before my name,
Then bare your teeth when I speak of royal claim?
You carry no collar, no chain, no sign—
Yet something in your silence remembers mine.

[Instrumental Break]
[Five-beat drums alternate with silent bars while guitar and nyckelharpa exchange short questions.]

[Bridge]
[Female Lead]
My mother’s last words returned through the cold:
“Do not mistake fear for command.”
The wolf turned away from my reaching hand,
Then faced the north like a queen of the land.

[Chorus]
[Female Lead]
Scar-eyed wolf, what lives behind your gaze?
Who taught your feet the vanished palace ways?
Scar-eyed wolf, when I speak, you weigh each claim—
As though you once had worn my house and name.
You carry no sceptre, no crown, no shrine—
Yet something in your silence remembers mine.

[Build-up]
[The five-beat rhythm straightens into a forceful four-beat march.]

[Female Lead]
No beast should know where my lost knife lay.
No beast should hum in my mother’s way.
No beast should kneel at the ninth queen’s stone—
Unless the blood in the pack is my own.

[Final Chorus]
[Female Lead]
Scar-eyed wolf, I know behind your gaze
A buried road winds through our family days.
Scar-eyed wolf, I will not force your name;
Trust is not a collar, and love is not a claim.
Walk at my shoulder, neither slave nor sign—
Until you choose to show what remembers mine.

[Outro]
[The wolf’s reversed motif and the queen’s original motif resolve into the same three notes.]

[Female Lead]
She closed her scarred eye.
I lowered the knife.
Two guarded creatures
Choosing life.
