It did not come like thunder. It did not strike or shatter. Itbled.
Bled into the edges of the world like ink into linen – the shapes of the square warping at the corners, the fire stretching taller than it should, the crowd blurring into silhouettes that seemed to lean too far forward, like figures in a tapestry folding themselves out of thread. And then the sound went – not all at once, but in layers, stripped away one by one until only the burning remained, low and close and terrifying.
When he blinked, he did not find the square. He found a room.
Dark-walled, low-ceilinged, and thick with the smell of iron and old fire. The air did not choke with smoke or scorch the skin; it burned with a steady heat, the flames licking violently along the edges of the floor, tracing the baseboards like veins. The heat pulsed with an unnatural rhythm, not chaotic but measured, steady, like a heartbeat somewhere just beneath the floorboards.
And at the centre of it all – a woman.
Sprawled on the stone in a thin nightgown soaked through at themiddle, her hair matted to her shoulders, her legs curled inward. One hand pressed to her belly – or what remained of it. Blood smeared across the floor in long, slow arcs where she’d tried, and failed, to crawl.
She was dying.
Or already dead.
And behind her – towering, still – the Sorcerer Queen Mowgara.
The same robes. The same crown. But she wasnotthe same. Her hands were wet and shining red to the wrists. Not trembling. Not hiding. Open. Bare.
And all around them, the fire moved like a tide pulling backward, flames running along the base of the walls in a slow, soundless rhythm, tracing the contours of a room that should not exist. The shadows thickened, the air grew dense, and the world began to pull at the edges like old cloth unravelling. The walls stretched. The corners curled inward. The woman’s body did not shift, did not breathe, but something about the scene had begun to change – not in motion, but in presence, as if the room itself were watching him now, as if it had always known he would come.
Mathias tried to speak – a prayer, a curse, a word to break the moment open – but the sound caught in his throat, swallowed by the smoke that had no scent, the heat that left no burn. His knees struck stone, though he felt it only faintly, as though through layers of wool, and his vision narrowed to a single point: the blood pooling beneath the woman’s outstretched fingers, the gleam of the circlet atop the Queen’s head, the shimmer of something just beyond language that pressed against the inside of his skull. The Queen turned slightly, not toward the body, not toward the fire, but in that slow, imperceptible pivot of the head that marked awareness – the kind that came not from seeing, but from knowing. And then the room folded in on itself, and the light collapsed, and the breath tore out of his lungs as the visionlet go.
He awoke beneath a slumped pile of grain sacks, their coarse seams pressed into his cheek, the faint sweetness of dust and husk thick in the air around him. For a long moment he did not know where he was, or when – only that the light had changed, and the silence had thickened, and his heartbeat was once again his own. The square was no longer filled with faces. The sky above had turned to ink. Somewhere, a shutter knocked gently in the wind.
He rolled onto his side, slow and aching, limbs sluggish with the weight of whatever had passed through him. The fire was long dead—no embers, no flickers—only the tall black bones of the pyre standing sentinel over the scorched stones. Whatever remained of the crowd had long since dissolved, their cheers and cries and clapping hands carried away into alleys and taverns and sleep. He had been left where he fell, unnoticed, or simply unimportant – a body beneath the ivy, another drunkard or vagrant undone by the heat.
And then he saw her.
Moving at the foot of the pyre with the quiet grace of someone who had waited until the world was done looking, the General descended the burned steps, her head slightly bowed, her sword untouched at her side. She walked with a measured gravity, each step deliberate, each movement stripped of anything but purpose. Mathias held his breath as she reached the base of the platform as she lowered herself—not reverently, not theatrically, but with something that resembled care—into the ash.
Her hand moved forward, fingers brushing against the blackened stone, pausing, then closing around something hidden there – something small, or simply forgotten – and for a moment, she simply knelt, eyes on the embers that no longer glowed, her shadow stretched long behind her by the slanting torchlight left behind.
She bowed her head, unmoving, while the wind stirred around herand lifted a thin veil of soot that danced for a moment in the air before settling back onto the stone.
He remained in the shadow of the grain sacks until she was gone, though he could not have said why – only that something in her final gesture had caught him like a burr on cloth, small and silent but impossible to ignore. The way she knelt had not been for show. There was no audience left, no courtiers watching, no soldiers standing to attention. The city had emptied, its appetite for fire and spectacle momentarily sated, and still she had come. Alone, unhurried, not to command, not to deliver an edict, but to reach into what remained – into the soot and charred splinters where a man had stood not hours before – and touch it with a care that made no sense at all.
He had expected something else. Something colder. The steel-sharp presence of the Queen’s creature, born of strategy and cruelty in equal parts. Not someone who came quietly alone and bowed her head before a dead man and his ashes.
By the time he moved, the pyre had been swallowed by dark, and the last of the torchlight had guttered low against the bones of the square. He passed like smoke along the old wall’s edge, slipping from the ruined courtyard to the crooked stair and then to the merchant’s lane that led to the lesser gate. No guards had been posted there in weeks, and the iron portcullis hung crooked in its frame, rusted open by a century of indifference. His horse, the one he had bartered for with the very last of his coin, stood waiting in the shadows beyond, a pale thing with quiet eyes and a gait light enough not to draw attention. No one stopped him. No one saw him. The city had closed its eyes, as if the act of burning had exhausted not only the crowd but the stone itself.
He followed the narrow path that wound along the base of the outer fields – not the main road, but the old trader’s spine that twisted through fallen arches and abandoned waystones, half-overgrown withcreeping vines and broken fence. The silence here was older, deeper, not the hush of sleep but the quiet of things forgotten, of gods who had not been prayed to in centuries, of stories left to rot beneath the roots.
He rode without urgency but with purpose. He’d learned little. No secrets had fallen into his hands, no hidden plans had revealed themselves, but he did not leave empty-handed. He knew the General had come with a small company, that the entire army had not followed her through the gates. He knew, too, from the whispers clinging to tavern corners and market stalls, that the troops still lingered north, beyond Haedor, waiting for the signal that would come when the smoke finally cleared and the spectacle had served its purpose.
It was not enough. But it would have to be.
And as he crossed the last boundary stone, and the city dwindled behind him, Mathias pressed a hand to his chest, steadying the beat he felt there, as if to be certain it was still his own – and let the night swallow him whole.
Chapter Fifteen: Mathias
The sky was caught in that pale, aching shade before dawn as Mathias rode beneath it. The light bled slow and reluctant across the horizon, brushing the world in muted colour. The air was sharp with pine and damp earth. Beneath the steed’s hooves, the ground gave softly, and the path ahead was little more than a thread between reeds and creeping groundmist. Mathias followed it all the same, not because it guided him, but because it was the only way available to him.
Days ago, he had left Irongate at dusk, slipping free of the city like a man finally exhaling after holding his breath for too long. But the fire had followed. Not its heat – there was no warmth left in him – only the memory of it, curled deep in his bones, rising now and then like smoke that would not clear. He had not slept, and though his eyes burned with fatigue, it was not rest he longed for, but forgetting.
He let the steed pick the pace, trusting his hooves more than his own sense of direction, and for long stretches he thought of nothing at all. Not of the Queen. Not of the General. Not even of the vision that hadnearly broken him open beneath the crumbling eaves of the old wall. But the mind can be a treacherous beast, and silence only ever invites the old ghosts to speak louder.
The tension had gathered in him like wire drawn too tight, a slow pull that crept from his spine into his jaw, into the base of his skull. Every sound made him start. Every shift in the wind made him glance over his shoulder. As if he were not just leaving something behind but being followed by it.
