The chamber lit like a forge. Flames reeled outward in furious spirals, licking up the walls, across the throne, into the carvings overhead. The gold filigree cracked and blackened, burned through in a breath. Every shadow lifted and burned, consumed before they had the chance to stretch.
The fire refused to release me. With each breath I managed to pull through scorched lungs, it pressed deeper – not content to be held, not willing to be wielded, but intent on remaking. It was motion without pause, heat without limit, a force too vast for command and too ancient to reason with. What the Sisterhood had seized all those generations ago had not thinned with time, had not dulled or faded, but grown heavier with every life it passed through. Drizzna the Deceiver herself had carried it all once – long enough to divide it, long enough to survive what no one else ever had – but even the First Sister had bent beneath its force. That burden lived in me now, and it did not ask to be borne – it demanded to be survived.
I held my footing, barely, though the hall had begun to buckle beneath the weight of what filled it. Flame curled at my limbs with the insistence of tidewater forced through a narrowing shore—surrounding, binding, reshaping. I tried to gather it back into shape, to contain what was surging outward from every part of me, but there was no grip that held. The fire had no need of hands. It moved through thought, instinct, bone, nerve, and every raw conduit it could find. This was no longer an inheritance passed from one to another. It was transformation, absolute and already underway.
The first shudder came at the base of my neck, where the fabric clung wet with sweat and heat. It flared once – a narrow tongue of flame, sharp as a needle and then caught, spreading in a ribbon that traced the curve of my arm before I could move to stop it. The heat feasting onmy insides turned outward, leaping from the hollows of my throat, my chest, the bends of my elbows where the skin was thinnest. I pitched forward, limbs seizing with the strain of staying whole. The breath that left me came jagged, half-formed, too thin to cool the fire tearing through muscle and marrow. My knees scraped against the stone as my weight shifted, hands braced wide to catch what balance I could still claim. The heat surged upward, licking higher with each pulse of my heart, wrapping itself around my spine, my throat, my jaw – until even the air inside me burned.
I was no longer standing in it. I was inside it. And it inside me. My vision blurred, not from tears, but from light—fierce, searing, gold-white, too bright to belong to flesh or sky or earth. My mouth opened, and I felt the scream in my chest, but it had no sound left to carry. I burned, but did not burn away. I broke but did not fall. Somewhere behind me, the dagger fell to the ground – the same one I had carried through smoke and ruin, the same one I had driven into her throat. It landed on its side, metal hissing where it kissed the floor, steam rising in faint threads from Mowgara’s blood still clinging to its blade. But even that, in the end, was pulled from sight – as the fire claimed everything, including me.
Chapter Thirty-Three: Frejara
There was no up, no down—only motion, unmoored from form or direction, a spiral drawn inward and stretched outward all at once. The fire that had once lived in walls and torches and hands now became the world entire, swallowing stone and breath and thought, until even the memory of flesh felt distant. I drifted – or was dragged – through something vast and roaring, a place without horizon or anchor, where time was not measured in hours or heartbeats but in waves of heat that folded through me like a forge bending iron. The body I had known was gone, peeled back by a light as harsh and unveiling as the dawn; in its place was something raw and elemental – formed of flame and will alone.
Then, a shift. A deep pull. Not a place, but a presence, sudden and wide, as if the fire had turned itself inside out and left me standing in the hollow that remained. There was no falling, no landing – only the slow unravelling of motion into awareness. One moment, I was flame – the next, I was there, surrounded by a vastness that felt carved from memory that was not yet mine. The air hung thick withheatless gold, and beneath my feet – if they were still my feet – stretched a plain of scorched stone, cracked and veined with something that pulsed faintly. Above me stretched no sky, only a boundless and formless light, steady and unblinking. The fire did not rage here but hovered in still vigilance – watching, waiting – and in that endless pause I understood: this was not a dream, nor death, nor a vision.
This was the place where the fire brought those it had chosen. Or condemned.
They came as shimmer, at first – the faint impression of bodies barely held together by form, their outlines drawn in gold and ember and the shadow of old flame. No breath, no movement, and yet I felt them as one feels a storm before it breaks. Dozens, maybe hundreds – a countless amount of them. A legion without sound or shape, watching me and looking through me at the same time. Their gazes did not burn, but they held weight, and in that weight was history – not written or spoken, but endured. Theirs were the hands that once held the fire when it was raw and wild, unbound by the rites and discipline later carved into it. Theirs were the names lost beneath the mountains, the bones buried beneath cities that never knew who lit the flame that kept them warm. They stood here, in permanence instead of peace – the fires' first and final witnesses.
And beyond them—or beneath them—were others. Not bearers, but offerings. Those who had been fed to the flame when the gods' favourite creations still walked among men and the sky demanded sacrifice. Girls torn from bloodlines, from mothers, from mornings they had not lived to see. They did not speak or weep, but the air around them pulsed with something denser than grief – a fury ancient and unspent, etched deep into the place, like the echo of hands clawing for freedom long after hope had fled. They were not forgotten. The fire remembered. And it gathered them all here, bearers and burned alike.
And then, through thegold and ember haze, I saw them.
Not shimmer, not shadow – but form, clear and whole, as if the fire had refused to let them fade. Six figures stood apart from the rest, their shapes distinct, anchored in the heat and scorched ground beneath them. They wore no crowns, no robes, and no emblems of the power they once held—only the weight of what had been taken. I knew them by the charge in the air – taut, expectant – and by the way the fire pulled back from their steps, as if it, too, grieved for what had been stolen. These were the Sisters Mowgara had slain—a presence made manifest, drawn from the remnants of the fire they had carried in life and the wound it left behind in death.
And there – at the centre – stood Eleonora. Not imagined or conjured, but present, the air bending around her, as if the fire itself conspired to hold her together. I had never seen her face, and yet the moment my gaze found hers, something inside me gave way, deep and without sound, like a beam buckling beneath a weight it was never meant to carry.
She was not dressed in regality, not robed in flame or crowned by power – only clothed in a pale light that moved with her in quiet grace. Her hair was pale and unbound, shifting gently even though the air was still. There was an unbearable familiarity to her, something I had felt all my life – like a wound never seen, but always flinching when touched. Every part of me that had grown around her absence – the hardness, the resentment, the ache turned discipline – began to loosen and rise, like a tide that had pulled back for years, only now allowed to reach the shore.
Gliding through the strange space, she stopped right before me, close enough that I could see the faint freckles dusting her cheekbones, and the slight furrow in her brow as she looked at me. The fire cast its glow across her face, and in that light she looked neither spectral nor divine – only entirely real.
“Eleonora?” I said her name almost without meaning to, as if onlyto test my own voice in this space, and to see if she would answer to it.
“Yes,” she said, gently. “I am your mother.”
The word hung between us, until everything else faded and all I could hear was my own heart, beating like a drum. For a moment I could only stand, as if the ground beneath me had given way.
“Where are we?” My voice trembled, though there was no air to carry it—only the subtle pulse of magic woven into the cinders around us.
Eleonora leaned closer, her figure etched in that golden light, and when she spoke the sound seemed to rise out of the fire itself.
“This is the in-between of flame and fading,” she said, each word pouring out like molten metal. “We’re in the fire’s memory – the spark of every life it ever touched gathers here. It’s the magic we once held in our hands, now fixed and watchful, marking what we were, what we lost, and what endures.”
Around us, the shimmer of Sisters flickered—those who carried the fire and shaped it, and those who were offered to it and turned to ash. They lingered here in this forge of memory—neither fully alive nor gone, but witnesses to everything the flame became. There was something desperately sad about it – their souls forever bound here – and at the same time, there was something comforting in knowing the fire that made you would always hold you close.
I paused a moment as my eyes drifted, searching around us, as a haunting question formed at the edges of my mouth, then finally escaped. “Is Mowgara here then?”
The space between us seemed to contract, the plain of cracked stone humming as if anticipating the answer. Eleonora’s eyes softened, the glow in her hair dimming just enough to reveal sorrow etched into her pale brow.
“No,” she said, her soft voice a hush in the roar. “Her fire was tainted – poisoned by her own handwith slaughter and corruption. That stain can’t survive here. She’s out beyond the fire’s reach now, left to wander where its light won’t go.” A pause. “I suspect that was what she wanted all along – to be free of this place, to whatever end.”
“So… does this mean that I’m dead?” I asked, voice catching on the words.
“No.” Eleonora said, gently, but as she saw my shoulders relax a little at the reassurance, she continued, “Not yet, anyway. It’s a little more complicated than that.”
“Isn’t it bloody always,” I sighed, running my hand over my face, and suddenly realising that I even though the space around us was vast and shapeless, I was not. I was flesh and blood and so was Eleonora. As if recognising the look of realisation on my face, she laid a steady hand on my arm, but it failed to loosen the invisible noose that held me by a thread.
A subtle shift at the edge of my vision pulled my attention back to the Sisters standing around and behind her. The five who’d fallen by Mowgara’s hand were stepping forward, their outlines sharpening against the glow until I could see the tight set of their brows and the quiet resolve in their eyes clearly. They formed a loose arc around Eleonora and me, closing in just enough for their presence to press gently against us.
