Chapter Three
Is there, truly, a way to forgive someone who has done terrible things? Can even the deepest wounds be mended, the darkest acts softened by time or remorse? Or is there, somewhere in the quiet architecture of morality, a line that once crossed can never be stepped back over?
And if such a boundary exists… who draws it?
For what one soul deems unforgivable, another may excuse, or even understand. We measure wrongdoing with uneven scales, shaped by our own histories, our own fears, our own quiet justifications. Evil, then, is not a fixed thing, but a shifting shadow.
So perhaps redemption is not a universal truth, but a fragile, subjective grace.
Tabitha Wysteria
Hagan paced with a slow, imperious calm along the towering stone battlements of the keep—a grim military school where the Red Guard were forged—perched on the northernmost fringe of the Kingdom of Fire.
They had swept through the land like wildfire; this wretched city was the final ember that would make whole their claim upon dragon-haunted lands and relentless flame.
He paused to peer down into the square inner courtyard, where a dozen or so young men knelt in the dust—the few survivors of the day’s slaughter.
His eye lingered on the scarlet of their uniforms, the very red he himself had once worn for years.
He noted their drakonian horns, burnished like beaten gold, and the brown eyes that stared up with fierce, bitter hatred.
He would remove that hatred swiftly.
Many witches and warlocks had infiltrated the Red Guard years ago with the finality of ending the royal family.
But not all who wore the red uniform were witches, for the Red Guard was a vast elite group of warriors.
Impenetrable, some would have claimed. Now, now what was left of them were the scattered remains of what once had been mighty—leaves swept away by the breeze, the empty branches the only reminder of their existence. Of their greatness.
Hagan closed his eyes for a moment and breathed in the acrid smoke curling from the distance, letting the last, ragged screams of his enemies fall into the wind like dying flares.
‘Shall we take them prisoner?’ Theodora’s voice came beside him; she moved with the quiet efficiency of a shadow.
His most faithful servant, she was unremarkable to look upon—pale, milky skin and an ordinary sort of face which, in a trifling way, suited him well; had she been fairer, perhaps he might have required her company by day as well.
She made amends for any plainness at night, tending to him with a devotion that left him sated. He could afford to be indulgent.
‘Kill them,’ Hagan said, his tone final.
His gaze drifted to a young drakonian woman at the periphery of the kneeling group—a split lip, one eye slightly swollen, clearly the evidence of some earlier scuffle.
She may have been a servant of the keep; but her face struck him with an unnerving familiarity, calling up Alina’s likeness.
‘Bring me that one,’ he added, pointing with a casual cruelty towards the girl.
Theodora’s frown was fleeting, quickly smoothed into a nod of compliance.
Before turning to leave, Hagan fixed his attention once more upon the young men in the scarlet of the Red Guard. He snorted, contempt curling his lip.
‘Burn them,’ he commanded.
Witches answered without delay, their palms alight with an unholy green until witchfire leapt from their hands and engulfed the prisoners. Fire, they said, could not truly fell a drakonian; witchfire was another matter entirely, a cruelty that seemed pulled from the very pits of Hell.
Hagan watched with a thin smile as men writhed and cried beneath the flames, their screams snatched up by the wind. He remained unmoved as the light consumed them until, one by one, only blackened ash was left upon the paving stones.
A moment later he spun on his heel and strode back inside. He had little patience for protracted spectacle; there were only two deaths he truly hungered to see.
Ash and Alina’s.
At night the thought visited him like a fevered dream: not merely conquest, but the delicious choreography of their downfall.
He pictured confronting Alina, striking with a blade, watching her collapse and feeling the cold satisfaction of revenge fulfilled.
He could scarcely imagine the things he would do to Ash.
‘Bring the drakonian girl to my chambers,’ Hagan ordered.
They had settled in the keep more than a week ago, rooting out the last remnants of the city that still dared to stand.
The keep itself was a stern square edifice of red stone, perched high upon a hill that commanded the city of Maar.
During one of his many sleepless nights, Hagan had discovered the small library the scholars had abandoned in their haste to flee.
By candlelight he had lingered there, poring over brittle scrolls and forgotten histories.
The legends spoke of the first descent of the Sun God upon mortal soil.
It was said that he had arrived precisely where Maar now lay, and that the force of his presence tore the earth apart, leaving a vast chasm that later brimmed with rainwater spilling down from the lands of Fae.
For centuries the lake had glimmered in reverence until it dried away, and in its place rose the city of Maar, built in homage to the divine visitation.
The chamber doors creaked open. Reclining in a wooden chair by the window, Hagan watched in silence as the drakonian woman was thrust into the room. Two witches hovered in her shadow, awaiting his word. He dismissed them with a casual flick of his hand.
For a long while he said nothing, merely studying her with a quiet, calculating interest. His hand drifted over the smooth dome of his shaved head before his gaze slid to the table, to the scattered papers he had left there.
‘Undress.’
Her fingers shook as she obeyed. Hagan did not look up at once, absorbed again in the lines of the scrolls, though he knew when she had completed the command. He despised how easily she yielded.
At last he raised his eyes. She had a pleasing enough form, though thin, the mark of servitude. Yet when he studied her face again, disappointment flickered through him. She was not Alina. Not even close.
‘Get on the bed.’
Her lip trembled; she shook her head once, a fragile denial, but the instant his purple eyes pinched inwards she hurried forward and lay down, the sound of her submission small in the hush of the chamber.
Hagan returned to his scrolls and read as if the world outside could wait.
Nearly an hour passed; the drakonian lay pale and still beneath the candlelight, every slight tremor of her body a private entertainment to him.
He struck a bell for his supper and ate with deliberate calm, barely glancing up.
Her shaking pleased him, so small a thing to provoke such satisfaction.
When he pushed back his chair at last he moved to the bed with the measured ease of a man who never hurried.
She had not wet herself, to his mild surprise; many did, and he had come to expect the vulgar spectacle.
He found himself bored, bored with the ritual of cruelty, bored with practising on unwilling girls while the woman he truly desired remained stubbornly beyond his reach.
He wanted this to be Alina. He wanted, more than anything, to trail his fingers along her jaw one last time.
He took up the blade he had left upon the table and crossed the room. The girl’s eyes widened; she attempted to scramble away, but Hagan’s blood-magic tightened about her like iron, locking her limbs as if winter had seized them.
He would not drag this out.
Before a cry could escape her lips, the blade struck with merciless precision, pinning her head back against the bed. Silence claimed the chamber in an instant—the thrashing ceased, the breathless struggle ended.
Hagan’s brow furrowed. Already gone?
Cursing under his breath, he wrenched the blade free and set it once more to her lifeless form.
This time he lingered, slow and deliberate, tracing cruel lines as though the body were nothing more than parchment for his knife.
He worked with cold precision, desecrating what remained until his grim art was complete.
‘Hang her from the wall,’ Hagan ordered when Theodora returned to clear away the ruin. ‘Let any fool who still dares set foot in this blasted place see what becomes of those who defy us.’
He paid little mind to the quick flash of pleasure that crossed Theodora’s face as she glanced at the corpse. A small part of him approved, though in truth, Hagan liked little and trusted less.
‘We have news,’ she said before he could stride off in a fury. He waited, deliberately. ‘Your sister Vera has fallen. The northern covens await your command.’
He found, with a mild surprise, that the report stirred no grief. Vera had been a vessel for Eris; when a god left a mortal frame, the flesh followed. By his hand two sisters were dead, and the hollowness that should have been sorrow was absence instead.
No, not quite absence.
Beneath the cold, there was a faint ember of satisfaction. They had never loved him, never made room for him in their quiet circles; they had been the triumvirate that smothered him, the household that took the mother he had loved. He would answer their contempt with fire.
‘Send a message,’ Hagan said, voice smooth as a blade. ‘Keep the northern witches in place for now. We shall use them. The Fae lands are cradled between our forces; their position will serve us well.’
Theodora inclined her head. A thin green light kindled on her palm; at its bidding the body lifted, obedient as a dark marionette, and followed her from Hagan’s chamber into the corridors beyond.
Hagan drifted back towards the desk, then altered his course, drawn instead to the window.
Lowering himself onto the stone ledge, he let his gaze wander to the far side, picturing Ash seated opposite.
It was always that way between them—two friends on either side of the same frame, looking outward as they spoke of everything and nothing.
He could see him as clearly as if he still breathed. The golden boy, sunlight in his hair, turning to him with that effortless, careless smile as though the world were whole and unbroken, as though nothing could ever fall apart.
‘You were the worst of them all, brother,’ Hagan murmured to the phantom of memory. ‘You made me love you. You made me feel. And then you shattered me.’
His purple eyes locked upon those imagined golden ones, and in the vision fire began to spread, consuming, until Ash’s cheerful countenance warped into something darker. Something unrecognisable.
Evil. Twisted.
Wrong.
The Ash he had once known dissolved, and in his place sat another—a stranger wearing his friend’s face, regarding him with loathing and disdain.
Hagan’s hands curled into fists.
‘I shall never forgive you,’ he spat.
And in the shadow of his mind, Ash smiled back. A wicked, perilous smile.
‘Good,’ replied the Fire King.