Chapter 11
ELARA
Aeliana walked beside me without footsteps.
“You’re breathing wrong,” she said.
I tried to inhale and only ash filled my lungs. Thick. Wet. Heavy.
I coughed and my throat scraped raw, and when I looked down, my hands were rimmed in ice.
Aeliana leaned close enough that her hair brushed my cheek.
“You can’t keep fire out forever,” she whispered. “And you can’t keep me in.”
I woke to Seraphine’s voice and the unmistakable scrape of shutters flung open. Ashenveil’s breath rolled in—sulfur, salt, and a hint of scorched copper that clung to my tongue like regret.
“Up,” she said. “We start earlier today.”
I groaned, dragging the blanket over my head. Muscles screamed from yesterday’s training.
“Is Isolde going to beat me again with that damn practice blade?”
Seraphine grinned. “Even better. Firewasps.”
That earned a groan of a different kind. I sat up, hair sticking to my cheek. The bruise along my ribs ached when I moved.
“This is ridiculous,” I muttered, swinging my legs over the edge of the bed. “First dragon fire, then some murderous assassin, now bugs.” I was starting to feel less braced around Seraphine.
We still hated each other, yes. But I was beginning to understand the shape of her threats. She could snap and snarl all she wanted, but when it came to me, she was leashed by the same thing everyone was.
Valen wanted me alive.
And that meant Seraphine’s hands were not as free as her mouth.
It helped that I’d been getting better at keeping the cryomancy down, locking it behind my ribs before it could reach my skin. The more control I had, the less she could justify. The less she could take.
It was a thin kind of safety.
But it was something.
“Not bugs. Firewasps.” Seraphine dropped my training leathers onto the mattress. “They sting through armor, drink fear like nectar, and swarm when you falter. You’ll thank me when you survive them.”
I pulled the leathers on with more violence than grace, wincing when the straps pressed sore skin. “And if I don’t?”
“Then you die interesting.” She crossed her arms. “But I’d rather not clean up the mess.”
When I was dressed, she handed me a strip of pressed fruit and grain, tough and sustaining, with a faint taste of smoke and iron.
“Eat. You’ll need the fuel. Today we start the real work.”
“Real work,” I echoed around the chew. “What exactly did yesterday count as?”
“A disaster.” She ticked points off on her fingers with ruthless precision.
“Your footwork was sloppy. Your balance is nonexistent. You breathe like prey. You’ve no endurance to speak of, and you rely on instinct that doesn’t exist. “Therefore”—she jerked her chin toward the door—“we go to the Teeth.”
“The what now?”
“You’ll see.” Her mouth crooked, not a smile so much as a promise.
We ate in silence in the Queen’s quarters, heat pressing up from the obsidian beneath us. The strip of dried fruit was dense, smoky, faintly metallic on my tongue. Functional. Not comforting. I forced it down anyway. Small bites. Steady. Survival first. Suspicion later.
Seraphine didn’t eat like someone who needed fuel. She ate like someone completing a task. Two bites. A swallow. Done.
Then she stood.
The glimmer around her sharpened for a breath, and the space between her and the table seemed to… tighten. Compress. Like the distance had been folded smaller without either of us moving through it.
I stopped with the strip halfway to my mouth.
I watched her. Watched the air react to her presence the way flame reacts to oxygen.
“What is your power?” I asked, trying to sound careless and failing.
Seraphine glanced over her shoulder, unimpressed. “You’re bold for someone who’s still chewing.”
“I like to know what can kill me.”
That got a faint shift in her expression, not amusement, not quite. Recognition, maybe.
“Drift,” she said.
I frowned. “Drift?”
“It means space listens,” she replied evenly. “If I tell it to.”
The words settled cold in my stomach, cutting through the warmth of the meal.
I swallowed slowly. “So you can… move without moving.”
Seraphine’s gaze narrowed. “Finish eating,” she said. “Then walk.”
I swallowed the last bite and forced myself to follow her through the outer doors.
Ashenveil dropped away behind us in a wall of black stone and heat. Outside, the air warped so violently it looked alive, rippling above the obsidian ledge where the fortress ended and the mountain began.
The world beyond was all jagged angles and harsh light. Basalt fangs jutted from the slope in a crooked procession, tearing sky from stone. A path ran between the fangs, so narrow it barely deserved the name, slick with black glass and pocked with vents that breathed heat in slow, steady pulses.
The Path of Teeth.
My stomach tightened. “That looks like suicide.”
“Correction,” Seraphine said. “That looks like training.”
She pointed down the line where faint shapes flitted through the haze, quick as sparks.
Firewasps.
“Out there,” she continued, “you’ll learn footwork, balance, and breath. You’ll learn to tell glass from stone, and stone from quicksand. You’ll climb until your legs stop trembling, and keep climbing until they start again.”
“That sounds like torture.”
“Good.” She drew a knife, spun it once in her hand, then slid it back into her belt. “Every day, until you stop being terrible.”
I swallowed, throat dry. The Teeth stretched ahead, black and cruel, waiting.
Seraphine stepped onto the first stone, easy as if the mountain had been built for her. She glanced back once, eyes like dark steel. “Come along, Elara. The mountain won’t wait.”
My boots crunched over fused stone. The air warped with heat and gas, bending the horizon above the path. Every breath tasted of rust and salt, like drinking blood from a forge.
“This is miserable,” I muttered.
“Good,” Seraphine said. “Misery teaches.”
We wove between the spires, their black points stabbing sky. The hum of firewasps pulsed ahead, a high, constant vibration that lodged in my skull. I tried not to look at the hives hollowed into the stone, their vents glowing faintly orange.
To distract myself, I asked, “Tell me more about your power?”
“Drift is rare,” Seraphine said, her tone clipped. “And I don’t share my gifts with my enemies.”
I frowned. “I’ve never heard of it.”
Heat rolled up from the path, and the air bent around her like the world itself was trying to decide where she belonged. Drift. Space listening. The idea made my skin prickle. It wasn’t like cryomancy or flame. It wasn’t element. It was control.
I should have kept my mouth shut.
But the curiosity slipped out anyway, as stubborn and doomed as everything else about me.
“Back in Emberfall,” I said slowly, “I met a scholar. Therynne.”
The name brought an unexpected softness to my chest.
Therynne had been gentle in the way people sometimes were, all quiet eyes and careful questions, kindness layered over intelligence. She never spoke down to anyone. Never wasted words. She listened like it mattered.
She would have devoured this place.
Ashenveil would have fascinated her, the mountain’s pulse beneath the stone, the lava veins like living arteries, the way fire was treated less like a tool and more like a language.
She would have walked these corridors with ink-stained fingers and bright hunger in her gaze, thrilled by the danger because it meant there was something real to learn.
“She was… kind,” I added, almost reluctantly. “But brilliant.”
I glanced at Seraphine, then back to the path like it might swallow me if I looked away too long.
“She’d love to document a rare power like that,” I admitted. “Drift. She’d want to understand how it works. Where it comes from. What it costs.”
Her eyes narrowed, like I’d handed her something she could use.
“Keep your scholar,” she said. “Out here, knowledge won’t keep you alive.”
Her gaze slid down the Path of Teeth.
“Walking will.”
I opened my mouth for something clever—then the ground shifted.
My boot slid over a slick crust of glass, and the stone gave. A seam split under me, heat snarling up. For a heartbeat I saw living red glaring beneath like the throat of the mountain opening wide.
Seraphine’s hand shot out, fisting my collar and yanking me back so hard my knees slammed stone. The crack widened where I would have fallen, glowing bright as blood.
“Ancestors,” I gasped. “Thank you?—”
“Don’t thank me.” Her eyes were merciless. “Focus on saving yourself. Or next time I won’t.”
We pressed on. My legs shook; my lungs scraped raw. The Teeth were unending, with switchbacks, vents sighing sulfur, and seams that threatened to swallow me whole. Seraphine barked small corrections as we moved:
“Weight forward.”
“Left shorter than right again—fix it.”
“Heel-ball-toe.”
By the time the hum of firewasps thickened into a chorus, I was drenched in sweat. They emerged from the haze, black motes with furnace-lit abdomens pulsing faint light, wings slicing the air. They gathered in lazy circles, dozens of them, waiting.
“Stay still,” Seraphine ordered. Knives flashed into her hands. “Breathe like the mountain… slow, inevitable.”
I tried, but my chest heaved. The mountain’s hum pressed against my eardrums until my skull felt hollow. A firewasp skimmed my neck, heat brushing the vein there, and my whole body locked.
Then another dropped low, darting straight for my face.
Instinct betrayed me. I flinched, arm jerking up.
The swarm screamed, turning violent at once.
A blade cut the air.
So fast it looked like a flash of sunlight tearing through smoke.
Heat kissed my cheek, close enough to singe the fine hairs along my skin. The wasp’s corpse hit the stone in twitching halves, its white-hot abdomen leaking fire that hissed against obsidian.
Another strike.
Then another.
Each one precise. Controlled. Not frantic.
Like whoever was cutting them down had decided I would not be touched.
The swarm scattered, spiraling back into the haze.
And then he was there.