“No.” The denial comes automatically. “No, that’s not—I would remember?—“
“Are you sure?”
I open my mouth to argue. To insist that Zyphon—that the fragments I remember—that there’s no way?—
And then the memory surfaces.
Clear as glass. Sharp as a blade. Balroth’s face, twisted in terror. His body crumpling to the ground. And Zyphon—Zyphon with blood on his hands and madness in his gaze, tearing my brother apart while I screamed and screamed and couldn’t make him stop.
I double over, gasping. The teacup shatters on the floor—I must have knocked it from the table—and shadow-flame erupts across my skin, responding to grief so fresh, it feels like dying all over again.
“I’m sorry.” Lakhu is beside me now, his hand on my shoulder, his voice dripping with sympathy. “I shouldn’t have pushed. It was cruel of me.”
I can’t respond. Can’t do anything but shake as the memory plays behind my eyelids, over and over. My brother’s death. Zyphon’s hands. The sound of my own screaming.
“He’s still alive, you know.” Lakhu’s voice cuts through the grief, sharp and deliberate. “Zyphon. He’s still out there. Living his life while your brother rots in an unmarked grave.”
Something in me goes cold. Still. The grief doesn’t disappear, but it reshapes itself into something harder. Something with edges.
Hatred.
“Where?” My voice doesn’t sound like my own. “Where is he?”
Lakhu smiles. Just a flicker, quickly hidden. But I see it.
I see it, and I file it away, and I don’t let myself think about what it means.
FOUR
NASYRA
Two weeks after resurrection
My magic remembers things my mind doesn’t.
I discover this by accident, standing in Lakhu’s training yard with shadow-flame dancing between my fingers. One of his guards—a massive dragon in human form, scarred and silent—is supposed to be teaching me to control my new abilities. Instead, he watches from a distance while I struggle to make my fire obey.
It won’t listen. Responds to emotion instead of intent, flaring when I’m angry, dying when I’m calm. The opposite of the disciplined control I remember having before.
Frustrated, I reach for one of the training dummies—a construct of straw and enchantment—and feel something shift inside me.
The enchantment. I sense it. Can feel the threads of magic woven through the straw, holding it together, making it move. More than that—I can see how to unravel it. How to pull at specific threads until the whole thing falls apart.
My shadow-flame lashes out before I consciously decide to act. Not burning—unmaking. The enchantment comes apart inmy grasp, thread by thread, until the dummy collapses into a pile of ordinary straw.
The guard makes a sound of surprise. I stare at my hands, at the dark fire that’s finally done something I meant it to do.
“I could do this before.” The words come slowly, drawn from memories I didn’t know I had. “Unravel magic. Sense enchantments.”
The guard says nothing. Just watches me with an expression I can’t read.
I spend the rest of the day practicing. Testing the limits of this rediscovered ability. By sunset, I can sense every ward in Lakhu’s stronghold—layers upon layers of protective magic, old and new, some strong enough to take my breath when I focus on them.
And beneath all of that, far to the west, I sense something else.
A signature. Dark and distinctive. Shadow-touched in ways that call to my own twisted magic.
Zyphon.
