“Perhaps.” He moves toward the door. “Then perhaps you’ll survive this.”
He’s gone before I can respond.
I sink onto the edge of my bed and stare at the door he’s left ajar.
Leverage. Vulnerability. Weakness.
I’ve never been someone’s weakness. I’ve never had the power to ruin simply by existing.
The realization should terrify me. Instead, it sits in my gut with an intensity that feels almost like responsibility.
TWELVE
ALERIE
Ifind the passage on the fifth day.
I’m not looking for it—or maybe I am, in the way that the instinct to survive never truly sleeps. My feet carry me through the stronghold’s corridors during one of Izan’s absences, mapping routes, counting guards, cataloging the rhythms of a fortress I never asked to inhabit.
The servant’s passage is tucked behind a tapestry in a corridor no one uses. A narrow doorway, barely wider than my shoulders, leading into darkness that smells of dust and disuse. The wards that should seal it are frayed, weakened, either forgotten or deliberately neglected.
I step through.
The passage winds downward, carved through volcanic rock, illuminated by faint phosphorescence from lichen clinging to the walls. It’s old—older than the stronghold proper, perhaps. A relic from whatever structure existed here before Izan claimed this cliff face as his own.
Twenty minutes of careful descent bring me to its end.
Cool air hits my face. The passage opens onto a ledge overlooking Pyraeth’s middle districts, hidden from view by an overhang of black stone. Below me, the city spreads in tiersof orange light and shadow—the market wards, the merchant quarters, the maze of alleys where someone with enough cunning could disappear for years.
My power rises the moment I step into the open air. Full and immediate, the way it hasn’t been inside the stronghold’s wards.
There’s something else with it. Something I don’t have a name for. The wards suppress my magic cleanly, like a hand pressing down — but out here, uncontained, my power reaches in a direction I don’t recognize. Not toward the blood-oath threads I can feel in the city below, not toward bindings to cut. Toward something older. The ash residue coating the stones, the volcanic particulate in the air, the deep geological pressure beneath my feet. As if the power wants to negotiate with the world itself, not just the bindings people have layered over it.
I don’t know what to do with that. So I file it the same way I file most things I don’t understand—carefully, in a mental drawer I’ll examine later when I’m not balancing on a ledge deciding whether to run.
I could run.
The thought crystallizes with sudden clarity. I have the route. I have the power. I have knowledge I could trade for protection—information about dragon operations, about the Blood Regent’s network, about the war being waged above and below the streets of this volcanic city. Any number of factions would shelter a Vireth witch willing to share what she knows.
The city glows below me. The wind carries the distant sounds of forge-hammers and market-cries and the ever-present rumble of volcanic activity. I could walk into that chaos and never look back. Could become another anonymous survivor in a city full of them. Could forget the dragon who burned a man alive for cutting my arm, who checks on me three times a day with increasingly transparent excuses, who built these chambers decades ago and never let anyone occupy them until me.
Why?
The question echoes through my skull, demanding an answer I don’t have.
I’m not staying because I’m afraid. Fear would send me running, not keep me rooted to this ledge. I’m not staying because I lack options—I’ve survived with less, escaped from worse, rebuilt myself from rubble too many times to count.
I’m not staying because of strategy or calculation or any of the cold logic that has kept me breathing for twenty-three years.
I’m staying because I want to.
The admission rises through me like a sickness. I want to stay. I want to go back to those chambers and wait for him to find another excuse to check on me. I want to stand too close and trade barbed words and watch his iron restraint fracture inch by inch. I want to know what happens when it finally breaks—when he crosses the distance between us and shows me exactly what he’s been fighting.
I want a dragon. A monster.
I’m losing my mind.
I turn away from the city. Away from freedom, from options, from the cold logic that should be guiding my every step. The passage stretches before me, leading back into darkness, back into captivity, back into the arms of whatever disaster I’m choosing.
