He dropped to his knees, the front of his coat blackening and smoking, the fabric warping as if it too was trying to fold him away. One hand pressed weakly to the wound, but there was nothing left to hold in. The fire had passed cleanly through. I lunged toward him, my knees hitting the floor before I even fully realised I was moving – but it was already done. His body sagged to the stone, the light in his eyes fading not with panic, but with acceptance.
My hands were desperately reaching for him—his shoulder, his coat, the blood-slick edge of his collarbone—anything to keep him here, to hold him in place as if that could anchor what was slipping away. His body was burning, not with fire now but with the heat it had left behind, a feverish echo of the force that had just passed through him. He looked at me and then past me, his gaze caught on something overhead – wide, unblinking, and unbearably calm.
I followed the line of his eyes and saw what held them: the ceiling above us, high and domed, once lacquered in ornate murals of distant days of glory, had cracked and split open. Flames licked across the painted surface, devouring the mural in jagged bursts. One of the seven crowns—wrapped in gold and fire—had caught. The paint bubbled, blistered, then crumbled, the shape of the crown bending downward until it broke free altogether. It fell past us with a roar, struck the floor beside Mathias’s outstretched arm, and shattered on the ground with a sound like thunder splitting the earth.
The crown lay beside him in fractured ruin, gold split from stone, steam rising in threads from where it had struck. His chest rose once, shallow and shuddering. Blood pooled beneath him now, thick and dark, hissing where it met the heat that still clung to the floor.
His eyes found mine – clouded, flickering, the light behind them dimming with each quivering breath. His lips moved, slow and halting, as though even a whisper demanded more from him than his body could give. I leaned in close, catching the faint words as they fell from his mouth like a wisp of smoke.
“If this is the last breath I take… then I’m glad it’s this one… With you.”
His hand found mine – trembling, blood-warm – and held, just long enough to make the letting go unbearable.
I bent lower, my forehead pressed against his temple, the breath in my throat jagged and useless. “Come back,” I cried, though I knew he couldn’t. “Come back to me.”
But he wasn’t looking at me anymore. The stars above, distant and sharp in the hole the crown had torn through the ceiling, watched with all the indifference of Old Gods long grown weary of the grief of their creations.
My vision blurred. Not from tears, but from heat – the kind that made metal groan in its fittings. I rose without thought, my fingersempty of his hand now and curled into fists. My body remembered what had been stolen from it even as something else claimed it. The pain did not fade. It hardened. And in its place: fury.
A tremor gathered beneath my skin, rising from marrow and muscle. The power that once only stirred now surged – no longer held back but crashing forward like floodwaters through a broken dam. My limbs burned and lightened at once. The sword at my side seemed to call for my hand – not with gravity, but with hunger.
I turned to Mowgara. She was smiling. Not with triumph, but with anticipation. As if this was the moment she’d been waiting for.
The chamber – vast and echoing – collapsed into clarity. Stone and shadow. Fire and flesh. Every surface trembling, close to unmaking. What rose in me was not a flicker or tremor now, but a reckoning – merciless and boundless. Heat surged outward from beneath my skin. My breath scorched as it left me. The ring of flame in my eyes widened, deepened, swallowed the whites entirely, a blaze held only by the boundaries of my gaze.
And then it broke.
Flames tore from my hands, my spine, my chest – bursting from the fractures inside me – until the world around me burned in the shape of my grief.
Mowgara was no longer smiling. Whatever satisfaction she had once worn had vanished, scorched from her face by the force that surged between us now. She took a step back, eyes wide, the fire dancing in their reflection not with triumph but disbelief. She looked at what I was becoming – stone cracking beneath my feet, the air pulsing with heat no living thing should survive – and for the first time, I saw fear on her face.
For a moment, she stood utterly still. No spell on her tongue, no taunt on her lips – only her eyes moving, fast and calculating, taking in the chaos I was unleashing. Whatever she had been expecting – thiswas not it. She raised her hand, a glimmer of recoil in the gesture—subtle, instinctive, as if some long-held certainty had slipped through her fingers. For a breath, she hesitated, eyes fixed not on me, but on the fire she had once bound to her will – now burning beyond her reach.
The force that struck me was not sharp but vast – like a tide wrenched from the seabed, sudden and engulfing. It did not hurt; instead, it pushed me, driving me back across the floor as the chamber itself trembled in its wake. Dust shook loose from the walls. Old banners snapped in the heat.
And Mowgara turned – one swift motion – and fled through the arch at the back of the hall, her silhouette black against the blazing inferno. The doors groaned as they closed, iron grinding against iron, until they slammed shut with a sound that rang like a death knell.
Chapter Thirty-Two: Frejara
The iron began to tremble. A long, guttural groan reverberated through the stone beneath my feet – low and dragging, as if the doors themselves were pleading against what came next. Heat pulsed in thick, uneven waves – rising from the cracks in the floor, from the seams of my skin, from the place inside me that had been broken open and would not close again. Something in the air buckled. The torches along the walls guttered toward the floor as if cowed, their flames bending under the weight of what gathered between me and the door. But still the iron held, groaning low beneath the force pressed against it, resisting not with strength but with the slow, reluctant strain of something ancient refusing to yield.
When it gave, it did so all at once – a scream of metal, ragged and savage, tearing through the antechamber. The doors split inward with a thundering violence, iron cracking at the hinges, stone splintering as the Queen’s wards flared and failed in the same instant. I watched them burn out mid-glow, their power undone by the breaking of the tether that had bound my fire to hers, and now turned against her.
The smoke curled around my ankles as I crossed the threshold, and the Throne Room pulled me in. Heat rose in thick waves, rolling forward as I passed through, the air folding around me in staggered gusts. It caught in my throat and clung to my skin, thick as smoke, filling each breath until drawing air felt like bearing weight. Flame spilled from my hands before I knew I’d raised them – brutal, lashing streams that caught the low tapestries and dragged fire across the walls in long, uneven strokes. The carvings above the arch split in their mortar. Gold flaked from the high reliefs and fell in shining scraps to the floor.
The fire roared louder with each step I took, building up behind me. I felt it echo through the stone, pushing back against me as it spread, folding into itself and surging outward again, drawing as much from within me as from the blaze already licking up the walls. Something had opened, and there would be no closing it now. My blood ran too hot, too fast. The fire moved ahead of me in sharp bursts, pulled by the same fury that drove my steps, racing towards the throne at the base of the Hall.
The Sorcerer Queen stood atop the dais, framed by flame and shadow – tall, unyielding, carved into the hall like a curse. The throne rose behind her, a ruin made regal, its surface split by fissures that caught the firelight and held it like veins in volcanic stone. Three steps lifted it from the floor, wide and uneven, gouged by time and by those who had once knelt and burned.
Mowgara remained unmoving, unyielding, as though the stone itself might bend before she would. Her posture had stiffened—not out of fear, but in the manner of someone reevaluating the odds. Her hands no longer hung at her sides. One hovered, deliberate, fingers curled as though tasting the magic in the air – the other near her waist, fingers loose, almost idle, a gesture that might’ve seemed careless, if not for the coil of tension braided through her shoulders and the way her gazenarrowed, sharp and measuring. She watched the fire arc behind me, then returned her gaze to mine – a tilt of the chin, a slow breath, as if she had made up her mind that what came next would not be beneath her.
“So, you didn’t come here for the crown after all,” she said, voice even, lips barely parted – but the words struck with precision, like daggers placed, not thrown. “You came to bite the hand, little dog. Thinking, perhaps, you could slip the leash and forge your own.”
I kept walking, drawn by the fire surging ahead, by her pull, and by the reckoning that waited at the foot of those jagged steps. The fire moved with me now, woven into the air, my blade in one hand and the weight of flame burning in the other.
“You thought I wanted your seat?” My voice tasted of heat and iron. “You thought I came here to reign?”
She smiled, but her eyes did not soften. “You came here thinking you had a choice,” she said. “That power could be taken like a trophy. That fire obeys whoever dares to hold it.” Her fingers flicked, slow, deliberate, as if brushing away something not worth her notice. “You’ve no idea what it costs to wield power, child. What it demands. What it asks of you, again and again, until there’s nothing left but the shape it requires. Only what you must become to hold it.” She scoffed in disappointment, disgust. “But you were always predictable, child. All fury. No vision.”
