The scroll burstinto flames the moment I touched it.
“Again?” I shouted, flinging the smoldering parchment across the stone floor. “That was the fifth one!”
“Seventh,” the mage beside me muttered, brushing soot from the sleeve of his once-golden robe, now more of a scorched brown with edges that curled like dried leaves.
Mistress Elarrahad lived through seven magical wars, three plagues, and the accidental banishment of a minor god. Shelooked like it. Her spine hunched with age, her hair fell in brittle wisps to her belt, and her right eye twitched whenever I so much as looked at another spell.
“I thought this was acontrolledexercise!” I said, still watching the charred remains of the scroll.
She grunted. “It was.Until you touched it.”
My hands tingled with residual magic—golden fire pulsing just under the skin, wild and untamed.
“I don’t understand why I can’t control it,” I muttered.
“Because you were born with a fire no one’s seen in five hundred years,” she said, shuffling across the room with a limp. “And because I, unfortunately, am not a Starborn.”
I stared at her.
She smiled—faint, dry, and far too cheerful considering her left eyebrow was still smoking. “Do Ilooklike someone who has any idea what they’re doing?”
“You’re the royal tutor for The Spire. You train all the Death Mages. Necromancers. Even the vampires respect you. Unless the chatter around the breakfast table was all lies.”
“I’m also two hundred and twelve years old. The last Starborn died three hundred years before I was born. Everything I know about your kind is written in tomes older than The Spire, secrets preserved from the other side of the Void.”
“From Earth? My bloodline was from Earth?” The planet was long past legend and into mythical territory. If the fae and Vampires didn’t have elders older than the stones themselves, all memory of the human home world would have long been forgotten.
“So, you reallydon’tknow what you’re doing.”
“Not a damn clue,” she said, cheerfully. “But I’ve never exploded in the same place twice, and I call that a win.”
I groaned, turning away as yet another spell fizzled uselessly in the center of the training hall. The ancient stones beneathmy boots pulsed with barely contained magic. Everything in this place was too full—too loud. My own power sparked against the walls like it wanted to fight.
I felt like I was going to explode.
Again.
I gathered my things—mostly singed scraps of parchment—and one relatively intact book on Starborn lore that I’d stolen from the restricted shelf while Mistress Elarrapretended not to notice.
“I need a break,” I muttered.
“Just don’t set anything on fire thatisn’t trying to kill you first,” she called after me.
“No promises!” I marched out of the training wing and into the cold, echoing halls of The Spire’s main tower. It smelled like magic and stone dust, centuries of secrets soaked into every brick. Tapestries lined the walls—scenes of long-dead mages standing against horrors I could barely comprehend. Some of them glowed faintly, pulsing in time with my heartbeat.
I didn’t care about old books, spells, secrets or myths about old planets. I needed Devin. I needed somethingsolid. Something that made sense.
I turned the corner—and walked straight into a nightmare.
“Lady Rathmore,” Jarrik purred, stepping from the shadows like a smirking cat. “How delightful to see you again.”
I stopped cold. The book slipped slightly from my fingers.
He looked better than he had any right to—his black and silver robes immaculate, his expression carved in smug marble. His hair was slicked back, his boots polished, and his eyes gleamed like shards of obsidian glass. He bowed low, mockingly. “You look radiant.”
“Get out of my way,” I said.
“Tsk. So cold,” he said, straightening. “Not the way a fiancée should speak to her betrothed.”
