“I’m here because I choose to be.”
The words hung between us, simple and leaving nothing to doubt. The fire cracked softly at our feet, its glow casting long shadows over the water, and the air had begun to cool the way it does just before the night drops fully in. I sat with my back to the oak, knees drawn up to my chest, watching the flame flicker through the golden strands of my hair. But something had shifted – not in the camp or in Mathias, but in me.
It started low, a pulse behind the ribs. Then my wrists – the skin tightening there, burning, as if the veins beneath had turned molten. The sensation spread, slow and brutal, each beat louder than the last, until it reached my throat. I gritted my teeth, but the fire roared in my blood, wild and rising.
The campfire surged with it. Flames leapt high, too high, licking the sky as if summoned. Sparks whirled upward like fleeing birds. I clenched my fists against my knees, breathing hard, trying to hold it in – but there was no holding anything.
Mathias turned to me, quick as a lash. “Ara,” he said, but his voice came through thick, as if underwater. I saw his hands before I heard his words – one catching mine where they’d balled tight against my knees, the other rising gently to my face, thumb resting just beneath my cheekbone. My skin burned beneath his touch, but still I clung to it, to him.
“Come back,” he said again, and this time I heard it. Through the rush and hum of heat and magic, I heard him. “Come back to me.”
My breath caught, then released—sharp and broken. I met his eyes, and in them I found something fixed and real, like an anchor in a raging storm.
The fire dipped. My blood cooled, slowly, grudgingly. The wind returned. And when the flames settled again into their low, crackling rhythm, Mathias let out a breath – one I hadn’t noticed he was holding – and I finally breathed out too.
I felt his hand cool against the line of my cheek, thumb brushing once across the skin beneath my eye – a gesture so steady it made me realise just how much I was still trembling. I turned my face into the touch, as if by instinct more than thought. And then – before doubt could rise, before anything else could rise – I leaned in and kissed him.
It wasn’t soft. It wasn’t careful. There was heat in my veins still, unspent and fierce, and it met the part of him that had been starved of it. He kissed me back with the kind of intensity that felt like a drowning man’s final, desperate gasp for air.
My own hand, until now resting idle on my knee, slowly pressed against his chest, drawing a quick gasp from him. I ran my fingers up, caressing his skin, pausing only to feel his pulse at the base of his jaw – strong and swift, beckoning and bewitching. I curved my fingers behind his neck and pulled him closer, our mouths opening for each other as sparks were flying and crackling behind my closed eyes and in my veins.
Suddenly, I felt his arm circle around my waist as he lifted me over his thighs, and then he pushed me forward until my back found the ground, his hips buckling against me, eager and hungry. His fingers, which had cradled my cheek, now traced my chest, gently, knowingly, and in one smooth swoop, they looped around my trouser laces and pulled them open.
His fingers found their way to the heat between my thighs, skilfully pulling a breathless sigh, a whimper, and his name from me. His lipstrailed down my neck, then hastily returned to mine as he felt my body trembling and pulsing against him, undone and sated.
Mathias breathed heavily against my skin when we finally parted, if only for air. For a moment, he pressed his forehead against mine, our eyes locked. I could feel him against my thigh, hard and willing. I reached down, and an unintelligible sound escaped his lips before he, too, was spent.
We lay there for a beat, our limbs tangled together, our hair matted with sweat to our temples, our lips soft and swollen still, his fingers drawing slow, idle lines across the curve of my hip. I kept my head against his chest, listening to the rhythm of his breath settle, the thrum of his heart still quick beneath the skin.
“You’re actually quite good at that,” I murmured eventually, my voice still low, a little raw at the edges.
I felt the chuckle rise in him – warm and sheepish, his breath catching at the tail end of it. “Well,” he said, dragging a hand through the tangle of his hair, “the local girls wouldn’t be caught dead with the likes of me.”
“Oh?” I turned my face just enough to glance up at him. “And yet…”
He shrugged, a flicker of an embarrassed smile playing at his mouth. “There were travellers. Merchants’ daughters, sometimes. They didn’t care where I was from or what people gossiped about me. They weren’t looking for courtship or a name to take. Just… a night. And they weren’t shy about telling me what they wanted or how to give it to them.”
I raised a brow. “So you learned by instruction.”
“Strict instruction,” he said, with a mock-serious nod. “Some of them could’ve made a soldier blush.”
I laughed, the sound catching on my breath, softer than I expected. He smiled again – less self-conscious now, more certain – and the quiet that followed felt lived-in and easy. The kind that didn’t need filling.
We lay there a while longer, the heat between us mellowing into something slower, sleepier. The wind stirred the long grasses near the stream, and the fire at our feet had settled to a steady crackle, its light dancing lazily across the curve of his back, the slope of my arm.
A pair of embers lifted suddenly with the breeze, spinning gold in the air before one landed on my shoulder. I hissed, jerking slightly at the sting, and Mathias shifted upright at once, brushing at the mark with his fingers. The ember had already gone out, but it had left a sharp little welt behind – small, red, and angry.
He frowned, tracing it gently with the pad of his thumb. “I thought fire didn’t hurt you.”
I looked down at the mark, then back to the flickering flames. “I guess it’s only mine that doesn’t.”
Mathias drifted off not long after, one arm folded beneath his head, the other still loosely curled around my waist. I eased myself from his hold and reached for my tunic, pulling it back over my head with slow, deliberate movements. The night had grown cooler, the fire casting longer shadows, and I rose to take the first watch, letting him rest.
I stirred the coals with a stick, watching as the embers flared and folded in on themselves. When I held my hand closer, the heat rose up to meet me – not harsh, not biting, but warm, curious. Almost… familiar.
A faint glow spread beneath my skin, soft and slow, trailing along the line of my wrist. My veins shimmered like molten gold beneath the skin, but it wasn’t violent this time. It didn’t surge or fight to break free. It moved with me. Within me. Like something that had been waiting long to be awake and finally was.
I turned my palm to the fire, and it answered in kind – a low flicker, a gentle sway toward my hand, like a creature recognising its own.
