I bowed my head slightly, the motion automatic. “As you commanded, my Queen. I present to you your prize.”
The chains dragged against the stone with a brutal weight as Alaric was pulled forward, each jolt of metal striking the floor in a hard, unforgiving rhythm. He stumbled as the links drew taut, the weight of them pulling him down to one knee. The Acolyte on his left gave an impatient tug, another reached for his shoulder, and together they dragged rather than led, the scrape of metal against stone rasping through the hall.
I stepped in before I could think better of it, my hand closing around the nearest Acolyte’s arm and pushing him aside with more force than grace. The creature staggered back into the shadows, its hood slippingaskew, and I caught Alaric beneath the elbow, steadying him as I would a soldier who had lost his footing on the field. “Mercy is a hard habit to break,” he said, his voice quiet, gentle, and out of place in a room built on fear and made for spectacle. He looked at me then, a glimmer of warmth in eyes too steady for what waited ahead.
“And your hands,” he added softly, “were not made for chains.”
I looked up, a small furrow drawing between my brows, one lifting in question. But whatever hid behind those words slipped from reach as his eyes turned upward, fixed now on my Mother, the calm defiance in them making my stomach twist.
“Well,” Mowgara purred, her eyes narrowing as they fixed on Alaric, her gaze like a hawk circling its prey. “What do we have here? Another broken fool, clinging to the idea that fate can be bargained with?” Her lips curled into a mocking smile, the kind that made the air around her grow colder.
She stepped forward, circling him like a predator, the sound of her heels echoing in the otherwise still room. “I thought I’d enjoy watching you beg,” she mused, her tone casual, almost playful. “But it seems there’s no taste in that anymore. How tedious.”
Alaric’s face, pale and drawn with exhaustion, remained calm despite the venom in her words. His lips twitched, and for a moment, I thought he might not speak. But then he lifted his gaze, meeting her eyes with an unsettling clarity.
“Begging? That’s what you want now?” His voice was quiet, but there was no tremor in it. “I thought you preferred quieter victories – in the dead of night, a blade when no one’s looking. Claiming victory over bodies already bleeding to death. Now you want an audience?” A pause. “The great, last Sister.”
The words hung in the air like a challenge, and I could feel the shift in the room. Mowgara’s smile faltered, her sharp eyes narrowing dangerously, and the temperature in the room seemed to rise severaldegrees. The tension between them thickened, the silence that followed more deafening than any sound.
Mowgara’s lips twisted, her voice dropping to a venomous hiss. “You dare mock me?” she asked, the words slow and deliberate, each one a razor-sharp edge. “You, of all the broken fools I have brought to heel?”
Alaric drew breath as if he was about to respond, but he was already too late. She raised a hand, the air around it shimmering with dark energy. A pulse of power shot out from her fingertips, an invisible force that curled around Alaric’s throat, squeezing. He gasped, his mouth opening in a futile attempt to speak, but no sound came. Mowgara’s smile widened as she twisted her fingers, and a whip of fire, sharp and cruel, lashed out from the air, striking him across the mouth.
The sound of his skin burning was sickening, a crackling sound that filled the room, followed by the sickly-sweet scent of singed flesh. Alaric recoiled, his body trembling, but he did not cry out. His lips had been burned shut, a wound so deep that even his breath caught in ragged gasps, stifled by the searing pain.
Mowgara stepped back, eyes still locked on him, her chest heaving with the heat of anger. “Let that be a lesson in humility,” she spat, her voice low and dangerous.
I felt a flicker of something – not quite pity, not quite guilt – but it passed before I let it take hold. Alaric wasn’t here to be pitied. He was a piece in my Mother’s endless game, a tool to be used and discarded, like everything else she controlled. As much as I disliked the spectacle of it, I understood its purpose. It wasn’t about justice. It was about power.
“Take him,” Mowgara said then, her voice now cold and precise, the fire in her eyes dimmed to a smouldering ember. “He will await his place at the Feast in the dungeons.”
The Acolytes obeyed immediately, pulling Alaric away, his feetscraping across the stone floor with a hollow sound. I watched them retreat toward the far end of the throne room, where the antechamber yawned beyond – its domed ceiling just visible before the doors. Once, it had been lacquered in murals of glory: seven crowns painted high above, each wreathed in gold and fire. Time had dulled them to spectres of what they were, but even now, they flared faintly in the torchlight, like relics too proud to fade.
The old man’s eyes never left mine, his gaze sharp, searching, unreadable, as if he had something to say, as if there were words caught behind his sealed lips that he was dying to share. But he was silent. The fire had taken his voice, and I knew that whatever he had hoped to say had burned away with it. Then, the iron doors groaned shut, severing the last of the light, and he was gone.
I turned away, my body stiff with a tension I couldn’t shake, and walked back toward my Mother, the sound of my boots a steady rhythm in the quiet. The room had returned to its stillness, but something lingered, a heaviness that settled between us.
“Now then, daughter. I suppose I should thank you for bringing me my prize.” She said. Her gaze never wavered, her eyes sharp and calculating as she studied me, her lips curling ever so slightly into a smile that was colder than the stone beneath our feet. “What’s the matter? Did you think this task was beneath you?”
I could barely contain the poison in my answer. “I only live to serve, my Queen.”
Her smile deepened, but there was no warmth in it – only the quiet assurance of someone who knew the world bent to her will. “Good. Because this offering to the Flame will be more important than any of the ones you’ve witnessed before, as we burn the final hopes of the insolent free cities to ashes.”
Her bearing was suffocating, pressing down on me like the weight of the earth itself. “You should be honoured. Grateful, even, that youget to witness it. Few are given such a privilege.”
The words scraped against the inside of my chest, the bitter taste of them rising in my throat. I clenched my jaw, fighting the urge to roll my eyes at the absurdity of it all. “ “A privilege? You call watching this rambling fool who talks in riddles and spits nonsense burna privilege?”
Mowgara raised her hand, and I snapped back whatever it was I was about to say next.
“What did he say, daughter?” Despite the abrupt interruption, her voice was smooth and controlled, the edge of it cutting through the stillness like a blade drawn from its sheath. “What riddles did he speak?”
The room held its breath as I stood there, the pressure mounting in the silence. And in that silence, with something sharp and unsettled turning in my chest, for the first time since I was a child, I lied to my Mother.
“Something about how he is but ash for a flame beginning to remember its true shape.”
Mowgara said nothing, but I could feel her eyes on me, dark and deep and searching every inch of my being for any sign of treachery.
“I told you, riddles and nonsense.”
