And at the far end, the Sorcerer Queen was waiting.
Mowgara stood before the throne room doors, robes dark against the iron, her posture composed, almost ceremonial, as though the room itself were reverent to her presence. Her hands were clasped in front of her, the long sleeves falling just so, every inch of her controlled, deliberate, impossible to unseat. Her gaze met mine with the full force of knowing, steady and bare of performance, as if the moment were already hers, and we had simply arrived to play our part. The torches barely reached her face, but I didn’t need the light to know the set of that jaw, the weight behind those eyes. She commanded the space as if it were her own body – every whit within it bent to her will.
I stepped forward, Mathias just a breath behind me, his light footfalls a steady tether against the pervasive weight. Each deliberate pace brought us closer, the space in between shrinking inch by inch and growing denser with every move. My fingers found the hilt at my hip, its familiar grip cool beneath my hand. I drew the blade slow and careful, letting the steel catch the torchlight as it cleared the scabbard. It wasn’t a threat but a grounding heft of something forged for purpose – steady where the fire inside me was anything but.
Mowgara regarded me silently, her gaze steady, unreadable, as if she had already counted the pieces on the board and knew how the game would end. The corners of her mouth lifted, not quite a smile, more a scarred curve – worn thin and sharpened by cold, cutting pragmatism.
“So,” she said, the words sharp and searing, “my daughter finds her way home after all.”
“Mother,” I replied, making no attempt to hide the poison in my voice. “Queen. The Last Sister. You choose your titles like you choose your lies – whatever serves you best.”
Mowgara’s expression didn’t shift, but something in her bearing curled tighter – satisfaction, perhaps, drawn from a thread she’d been tugging on for years.
“Predictable,” she spat, as if her own words were a foul taste in her mouth. “All that posturing. All that running. And still, you find your way back to the foot of the throne – tail tucked like a lame dog, teeth bared for show.” She paused a moment, regarding me as though she were observing something faintly disappointing. “There is a gravity to power, Frejara. You may thrash against it. You may flee to your ragged little corners of this continent. But in the end, everything comes back to heel. Even you.”
“Shouldn’t you be proud?” I asked, the words low, bitter. “You made me what I am. Hardened me. Sharpened me. Burned out everything that didn’t serve your cause.” My fingers curled tighter around the hilt. “So I’ll let you claim every stained and ruined part forged by your hand. Everything I lost to become what you needed. But nothing else. Not anymore.”
Mowgara tilted her head, just slightly, like she was examining a piece of glass for cracks she already knew were there. “Is that so?” she purred, her voice like honey – and poison. “You wear them in every breath, every choice you think is yours. You walk in here dressed in defiance and call it freedom, but I see the tremor beneath it. The shape of my hand, still ghosting your spine.” She took a step forward – not close enough to crowd, just enough to let the next words land where she meant them to. “Even the things you gave up to spite me… weren’t yours to lose.”
I could feel anger rise in my belly, but Mowgara wasn’t done. No, on her face was now a sickeningly sweet smile. “But if ownership and agency is what you so desperately crave, I am happy to share it with you. You were right to be afraid of the things your bleeding little heart wanted. You must have always known it—the stain and the shame of it. I may have handed you the knife, but you were the one who pressed it to your own skin.” Her voice softened, but the steel was in the tone now—honed, cruel, and cold. “Yours were never clean hands, Frejara. They would rot everything they touch. And that filth is all your own doing.”
My grip on the hilt stayed firm, though the blade felt heavier in my hand. I looked at her – her cursed composure and detachment – and felt the ache beneath the fury in that old, hollow place, where the wounds had never quite closed.
“Because you fed me the poison that tainted everything I loved.” I said, each word drawn slow, steady, the way you speak when the ground beneath you is shifting and you refuse to fall with it. “But I lived with that. I carried it. I made room for it because I had no choice.” I shook my head slowly, my gaze fixed on her eyes. “So whatever filth you planted – it ends here. Itdieshere.”
A sound shifted behind me – the soft scrape of movement, so slight it might have passed unnoticed if we had not all been so tautly strung. Mowgara’s eyes moved past me, a slow turn of the head like a predator catching the flicker of something warm and breathing in the underbrush. I could hear Mathias’ breath catch underneath that intimate and fiercely intimidating stare – the same one that had bent the knees of kings and warlords before. She studied him for a beat, with the kind of intent that scraped clean through surface and bone. And then she moved, slow and fluid, circling like someone who’d just noticed a crack in the armour and was deciding when to press.
“And this?” she said at last, her voice almost curious. “Did you bringhim here for me, or was he simply too dull to know better?”
I felt Mathias halt beside me, but it wasn’t fear that held him – more the coiled precision of someone choosing every breath with care. Mowgara circled closer, not so much approaching as drawing him into the orbit of her gaze, and I saw her expression begin to change. The curl of her mouth slackened, thoughtful now, her brows lifting ever so slightly.
“Oh,” she breathed, and there was something darker beneath it – amusement laced with a razor’s edge. “I know that look.” She tipped her head, just a little, considering. “They always have it, the ones cursed with the Sight. That vacancy. That ache behind the eyes, like they’ve stared too long at something that doesn’t blink back.” Her voice thickened with the last word, something that might have once been fascination or pity before it hardened into cruelty. “They always find their way into places they shouldn’t, those wretched things. Drawn to fire like insects.” She clicked her tongue, almost indulgently. “Twisted up in their own riddles, unravelled by what they see. Cursed things, all of them. Cursed and alone.” Then she turned back to me, her gaze sharp enough to draw blood. “And this is what you drag behind you? A broken bird to perch on your shoulder? How poetic. You’ve never been able to resist the wounded ones, have you?”
Something in me flared – savage, searing, closer to the surface than I meant to let it. Not yet a blaze, but a heat building beneath the skin, mounting like a furnace waking to life. The torches along the wall dipped and strained, their flames bowing inward, as if the chamber itself had sensed what was beginning to stir within me.
Mowgara’s gaze cut back to mine, and I saw the shift into something sharper, more focused. Gone was the leisurely cruelty of a cat playing with its prey – in its place was pure intent. She had seen the tremor, tasted the heat, and in that precise, measured moment, marked it for what it was.
She moved first. No flourish, no warning – just a flick of the wrist, and the world snapped into fire. It struck the stone beside me with the force of a god’s judgement, fracturing the floor in a jagged eruption of heat and light. I raised my arm too late, felt the burn graze across my side, the pain sharp and clean. The air screamed between us, thick with the taste of iron and scorched skin.
She was already moving again—her hands carving the air, every motion precise, economical, wrought from decades of mastery. The flame that answered her call was no longer red or gold but a deep, coiling blue, the colour of something ancient turned vicious, and it obeyed her like a tightly leashed beast.
The fire in me surged in response as if by its own accord – raw and untethered – lashing through the chamber in wild, reckless lines. Whereas hers flowed in precision like purpose-forged steel, mine tore like a storm—too much, too fast, too willing to consume.
The clash came not with sound but with force, magic snarling where it met, colliding between us with a heat that split the air. Her fire curled inward, controlled and coiling, testing mine with surgical contempt. Mine struck back raw and unformed, but I gave it weight, gave it fury. I met her with everything I had, and for a heartbeat, I saw her flinch.
Not from fear.
From effort.
She pressed harder. I felt it in the burn licking across my skin, in the stagger of my steps, and in the way the air itself seemed to bow to her will. Her fire moved like a net tightening around me, each breath a little thinner, each block a little slower. She fought like someone who had never known doubt. I fought like someone learning how to breathe underwater.
And then - Mathias moved. His coat whipped in the heat, his arm already in motion. I didn’t see the blade until it gleamed briefly in the firelight, striking her shoulder with a clean, slicing arc. Not deep, butenough to jolt her to focus, to break the line of power she held taut like a bowstring.
It was not a blow meant to kill. It was meant to interrupt. A rhythm broken. A beat stolen.
Mowgara’s gaze snapped toward him, startled less by the threat than by the gall. And with that flicker of attention – half a breath, no more – the weight on my chest lifted. The tether of her power loosened, and I dragged the air into my lungs like I had been drowning and just found my way to the surface.
Mowgara turned with the calm certainty of a storm, deciding where to break – unhurried, unshaken, each step a verdict already cast. Just a flick of her fingers, quick as a whipcrack, and the air around Mathias erupted in flame. It moved faster than thought, the lance of heat that punched clean through his chest. He didn’t even have time to scream. His eyes met mine, wide for only a moment – and then still, filled not with fear but with a terrible peace. As if he had seen it all before. As if this pain was only a page turned at last.
