Then, the Sister with the fire in her hair, raised her voice: “There are no windows in Dragna’toch, but you will see inside, sister.”
The voices of all the six Sisters, now in unison, were rising and falling, and the space around me started to grow smaller, and I felt something pulling at me, clawing at my sides. “Let us know you,sister, and we will welcome you home.”
It had never been a song. It had always been directions – a map that would let the Sisters find it.
The space around grew tighter still, and I could feel myself being pulled away from it.
“Wait – wait, mother!” I reached out to Eleonora but she was beyond my grasp already. “Will I see you again, in this place? When it’s time?”
“No, child. The fire holds its own, but you are called elsewhere.” The voice was just an echo in an emptiness I was circling in. “Someone else has a stronger claim to your heart and soul than this place, and not even death can unmake it.”
The world returned in fragments—not sound, not sight, but sensation, jagged and slow. Pain surged first, sharp and immediate, a chorus of it ringing through every part of me that still drew breath. The stone beneath my back was cold again, slick with blood and soot, and the air I dragged into my lungs came laced with smoke. My eyes opened to ruin – the high arch of the throne room sundered by flame, its carved pillars blackened, its banners collapsed into ash. And there, crumpled near the scorched steps of the dais, lay the husk of what had once been Mowgara. Her limbs bent at angles no body should hold, her hair scorched to the scalp, her eyes wide and lifeless. Whatever power she had once stolen, twisted, hoarded – it had fled her. Left behind was only the wreckage of a woman who had taken too much, ruled too long, and paid too heavy a price.
I turned away from her, shuddering at the thought that if not for some strange mercy, I might be lying there instead – torn, burned, and bloody. It took more strength than I had to spare, but I pushed myself upright, my arms shaking with the effort. My shoulder screamed, ribs grinding against muscle and lungs with each breath, but I forced my legs beneath me, one at a time, until I was upright – not steady, butstanding.
The sword was still near the foot of the dais, the hilt blackened, the blade streaked with blood both hers and mine. I reached for it, fingers curling tight around the grip, and used it as a crutch to cross the wreckage. At the edge of my vision, something flickered – the scrying mirrors that lined the far wall, half-melted, half-whole, their surfaces alive with faint, dying light. It wasn’t reflection; it pulsed, soft as breath, as if catching a reflection that was no longer there.
Debris crunched beneath my boots, broken glass glinting like frost across the stones, and smoke stung my eyes as I limped forward, past shattered columns and burnt benches, until the balcony’s light broke over me, fresh air hitting my cut and bloodied face like a flurry of blows. I took it in my lungs with abandon, ignoring the bloody cough it forced out of me.
Below, the courtyard lay bruised in the blue hush of dawn, its paving stones washed pale by the night’s frost and the first stirrings of light that caught in the high corners of the walls. I gripped the iron rail so hard that blood welled from my knuckles, leaving them numb and pale as I clung on. A few figures moved along the periphery – servants preparing the fires for morning, city guards posted at intervals, standing a little too watchful, with an uneasy stillness left over from the night.
But my eyes were drawn past them to the Dragonstone that loomed at the centre like a wound that had never fully closed. It stood unmarked, untouched, as if the fire that had consumed my father had left no trace, as if the man who had been chained there, mouth sealed in iron and eyes fixed on mine until the final breath, had never existed at all. My vision blurred, blood and smoke stinging the raw rims of my eyes. The rage rose so suddenly it startled even me – with a torrent, vast and rising, torn free with wanton fury.
It burst from me in a single, breathless surge – wild, searing,uncontained. Flame lanced down from the balcony so fierce it split the morning air with a sound like thunder. It struck the altar in a blaze of gold and white, and the Dragonstone cracked on impact, splintering through its dark veins with a groan that echoed through the courtyard like a death rattle. Fire poured over it in waves, turning chain and stone alike to molten ruin. What had stood there – the pyre, the place where they had made a spectacle of his death – vanished beneath the flame until there was nothing left but slag and cinder, shining dully in the wake of destruction.
The fire died as suddenly as it had come, but the sound of it lingered – a low, smouldering echo that seemed to hang in the air itself. Below, the Dragonstone still steamed, its surface cracked wide open, a ruinous scar spreading outward from the place where he had burned.
And then, slowly, they came: from alleys and upper tiers, from the crooked mouths of stairwells and narrow archways – the people began to gather. Servants clutching coal bags. Guards without their helmets. Courtiers wrapped in last night’s finery, their paint streaked from sleep. One by one, drawn by the noise, by the light, by the scent of smoke that was not wood – they looked up toward the broken keep, and saw me.
I saw Astrid first, elbowing her way through a knot of soldiers, her copper braid tangled and her face scraped raw, one sleeve torn and her blade sheathed at her back. Then Daen, slower, limping, blood streaked down the side of his leg and his gaze locked on me as if trying to decide if I was real. More figures gathered behind them, some whispering, others watching in stunned silence. I stood above them, blood drying on my face, my body bruised to the bone.
“General!” Shouted a soldier, I couldn’t place the voice or the face. It was lost in the crowd. “Where is the Queen?
I blinked down at them, my gaze dragging across a sea of upturned faces – some stunned, some straining for a clearer view, somealready whispering my name as if it might explain what they had seen. The voice came again, rising from somewhere beneath the balcony, unplaceable but clear enough for me to hear it.
“General,” it called, hoarse and urgent. “Where is the Queen?”
My fingers curled tighter around the sword hilt, blood sticky in the grooves, and I lifted the blade above my head – slow, deliberate, as though the motion itself were heavier than the steel. My breath caught in my throat, thick with smoke and iron and exhaustion, but I forced the words out anyway, rough and sharp and unyielding.
“The Queen is dead!”
For a moment, no one moved. The world beneath me held its breath. Then a cry broke free—not joyous, not grief-stricken, but inevitable.
“Long live the Queen!”
It was shouted from somewhere near the altar ruins, the words torn free as if they had been waiting, coiled beneath the skin of the city. Another voice took it up. Then another. And then a hundred more.
“Long live the Queen!”
The cry surged, echoing against the stone and rising until it became a ravenous tide. I stood unmoving as it rolled toward me, not a wave of devotion, but of relief, of desperation, of need. They had been waiting for the weight to shift. And now they were choosing—not knowing what they had chosen—only that someone had to stand in the fire’s wake.
I lowered the sword. My arm ached from holding it, my shoulder burning down to the bone, and still I did not look away from the place where the pyre had stood. The altar was gone. Mowgara was dead. The fire lived in me now. And the city was looking to me not as soldier, not as daughter, not even as survivor – but as sovereign.
The word coiled in my throat, sharp and bitter. I had never wanted it, had never reached for it, had never even let myself imagine what that power would feel like in my hands. And now, as their voices echoedup to me, ragged with need, the title hung above me like a sentence passed. Not a crown, but a noose.
This was not victory. It was an inheritance—not of glory, but of rot.
I thought of the cities I had taken in her name, the walls breached, the banners raised, the governors appointed. I thought of the oaths sworn beneath her shadow, the courtyards stained with blood that should never have been spilled. And now they looked to me, expecting the shape of rule to remain the same – only the name at its helm replaced.
