I close my eyes and try to sleep. Tomorrow comes whether I’m ready or not.
Dawn arrives like a blade—sharp, cold, inevitable.
I dress in my fighting leathers, the familiar weight of worn leather and steel settling around me like armor againsteverything I’m feeling. These clothes have seen me through eight years of battles. Have been mended and patched and stained with blood—mine and others’. They smell like the forge, like home, like the woman I’ve been since I was sixteen years old.
After today, I might never wear them again.
I push the thought away and check my weapons. Sword at my hip, knife in my boot, throwing blade against my forearm. The movements are automatic, ritual, a way of grounding myself in something familiar before I walk into the unknown.
The escort captain meets me in the corridor, his expression unchanged from yesterday. “The arena awaits. Do you require anything before the trial?”
“Information.” I keep my voice level, warrior-flat. “The Guardian—what can you tell me about his fighting style?”
Something flickers in his bronze eyes—surprise, maybe, that I’m still thinking tactically. Most challengers probably spend their last night weeping or praying, not planning.
“Guardian Karax fights like the mountain itself,” he says after a moment. “Patient. Immovable. He lets opponents exhaust themselves against his defense, then ends them with a single strike.” A pause, weighted with something that might be respect. “Most challengers don’t survive thirty seconds.”
“And the ones who last longer?”
“There haven’t been any.”
The words land like stones in still water, rippling outward into silence. Thirty seconds. Seven centuries of combat, and no one has lasted more than thirty seconds.
I have to last long enough to find an opening. Long enough to land a single blow.
“This way,” the captain says, and I follow him into the mountain’s heart.
The passages twist deeper into the stone, lit by crystals that pulse with soft golden light. The air grows warmer as we descend, heated by the same thermal springs that filled my bath last night. I can hear sounds now—voices, movement, the particular hum of a crowd gathering for spectacle.
They’re excited. The whole fortress is buzzing with anticipation, eager to watch their Guardian crush another foolish human who dared to challenge him.
I wonder how many of them will be disappointed when he doesn’t kill me. When I draw his blood and become something other than a corpse—something more useful, more entertaining, more thoroughly destroyed.
The passage opens into light, and I stop breathing.
The arena is vast—a perfect circle carved into the mountain’s heart, surrounded by tiered seating that rises toward a ceiling lost in shadow. Thousands of Fae fill those seats, their bronze skin gleaming in the light of massive crystals suspended overhead. The air smells of stone dust and ozone and something else, something sharp and electric that makes my skin prickle.
Magic. The whole space is saturated with it.
And standing at the center of the arena, waiting for me, is the Guardian of Stone Court.
I’ve heard the stories. I’ve imagined what he might look like based on the descriptions traders and refugees whispered when they thought no one was listening. I thought I was prepared.
I wasn’t.
He’smassive—eight feet tall at least, his bronze skin traced with silver veins that catch the light like precious metal embedded in living flesh. His shoulders are broad enough to blot out the sun, his arms thick as the oak beams that hold up Ironhold’s great hall. He wears simple training leathers that do nothing to hide the sheer overwhelmingscaleof him—muscle layered on muscle, a body built for violence and honed by seven centuries of practice.
His face is carved from the same brutal beauty as the mountains around us. Sharp cheekbones, a jaw that could have been chiseled from granite, lips that look like they’ve forgotten how to smile. His hair is dark as obsidian, pulled back from his face to reveal the full impact of features that are too perfect, too still, tooinhumanto be anything but terrifying.
And his eyes.
His eyes are molten gold, ancient and knowing, and when they fix on me, something happens that I don’t understand and can’t control.
Heat floods through me—sudden, overwhelming, completely divorced from anything I’m feeling emotionally. My pulse jumps. My skin flushes. Low in my belly, something clenches with a want so sharp it almost hurts, and between my legs I feel myself grow slick with an arousal that makes no sense, that I didn’t ask for, that Idon’t want—
No.
I force myself to keep walking, to keep my face neutral, to not let him see what’s happening inside my body. This is wrong. This is some kind of Fae magic, some trick to weaken me before the fight even begins. I’m not attracted to him. Ican’tbe attracted to him. He’s a monster, my enemy, the creature who’s about to own me—
