I trail my fingers over the faint veins of red etched into the smooth black base. There’s a rhythm beneath the ash, a pattern I recognize. Brushing gently, I hold my breath and coax the soot away. And there it is. Revealed in fragments, but whole enough to understand:Naught but truth shall feed the sacred flame, and in so doing, preserve the realm it guards.
The words hum beneath my fingertips. The stone warms, almost pulsing as my hand moves over the weathered letters. The pressure in my chest intensifies—sharp, restless, hungry. It coils behind my ribs, alive with heat and wanting, burning its way to the surface, burning to be seen.
Fortune’s voice comes back to me all at once, crackling through my memory.
The Kingdom of Wands was forged in sacred flame. Its fires once stripped away illusion, burning for truth—for what was real, and only that.
Stripped away illusion.
Burned for truth.
“It wasn’t a metaphor,” I say aloud, my voice barely more than a whisper. “She meant what she said.”
Declan furrows his brow. “What who said?”
“Fortune… She knew.” I press my palm flat against my chest, trying to contain the blaze climbing beneath my skin. “The Tower—this Tower—it brought us to this place, to Towerfall. She said I had to heal the realm. That the wheel would keep turning. That true transformation asks a price, and I have to be ready to be changed—even consumed—by it.”
The words tumble out, spilling faster than I can catch them. The air around me thins. The pressure behind my ribs spikes. Flames lick the inside of my chest. I gasp. Gulp in breath after breath but can’t get enough air. My body vibrates, pulses, runs away with me.
Declan’s hands close around mine. His palms are rough and steady, and the solid strength of him grounds me to the stone beneath our feet. To this place. To this moment. To him.
“Slow down,” he says gently, thumbs brushing my knuckles. “Breathe.”
I do. One slow inhale. A long exhale. Then another. My lungs stretch, and the blaze within me cools into an ember I can hold in the hollow of my ribs.
That he keeps staying, even after everything I’ve broken, shows me who he really is. And who I’ve been too frightened to become.
“Declan, I know I’ve said it before. I’ve apologized and then made the same selfish, hurtful choices. I don’t expect you to forgive me right now, but I am sorry, and I want the chance to prove it.”
He meets my eyes. “Then show me,” he says plainly. “I’m not going anywhere.”
My next exhale leaves me in a rush as another wave of magick funnels up through the floor like heat through a grate, and everything in me tilts. There’s pressure between my temples, a hot tightness behind my sternum, a rush of images and scents and voices that shove at the edges of my mind.
I crumple, and Declan catches me.
“Breathe,” he says again.
In the thin quiet between inhales, a parade of images flips behind my eyes, snapshots that are wrong and right at the same time. A ruby-encrusted hand closes around a child’s small fingers. That same gem-studded hand presses sigils into wet clay. The hand pours oil from a pitcher into a bowl and sets it in front of an altar. They aren’t memories, exactly, but they feel like echoes of something I once was or might one day become.
Fortune’s voice rides under each image. Fragments of words at first, like someone yelling in a windstorm. Then they stack on top of one another until they’re a chorus, loud and urgent in my head.
“Slow down! I can’t understand you. I can’t—” I bury my face in Declan’s chest, cover my ears, and pinch my eyes shut against the noise.
The Tower thrums beneath my bare feet, a low metronome that steadies the noise in my skull until I can make out the shape of the words forming.
The flame eats not the prettified offering. It consumes the true thing given without costume. Present truth, and be fed.
Fortune’s voice arrives, and I can breathe again. My head is clear, and the images recede.
“I get it now,” I murmur against the hard planes of Declan’s chest. “The Tower doesn’t want perfection. It doesn’t want handpicked rituals or performative strength or some carefully crafted illusion of healing.” My throat is tight, heart thudding. “It wants what’s real.”
Declan lifts my chin, runs his thumb along my jaw. “And what’s real, Amanda?”
The moment I open my mouth to answer, the Tower groans. A sound like the earth exhaling. Wind rips through the chamber like a beast unchained, whipping sand into a spiraling column of smoke and dust.
Declan folds his arms around me, using his body as a shield. I curl into him. Sand lashes my exposed skin, and even with him holding me close, grit stings my eyes. I bury my face deeper into his chest and try to breathe, but the air is a furnace, every inhale a scrape.
He holds me tighter and presses his face in my hair. “Are you doing this?” he shouts, straining to cut through the roar.
