Chapter 49
Chapter forty-nine
“What do you mean you couldn’t break the barrier?”
Rynna crouched, easing Kaelith to the ground inside the burning circle.
Fire cracked and hissed in her peripheral vision, casting flickering light across the scorched ground beneath them.
Just beyond the wall of flame, the dead shuffled past in slow, clumsy waves, their rotten limbs twitching in rhythm with some unseen pulse.
The green glow of the barrier surged up beside them, humming like a living wound torn into the sky.
Taren slid his great sword into the sheath on his back with a heavy clack. “It’s like the remnants of power I found on the lost continent.” He frowned, studying the shifting light. “But warped. Twisted by whatever’s inside.”
He glanced toward Bran, who met his look with a tense nod. Something unspoken passed between them—worry, maybe, or fear neither was ready to say aloud.
“I don’t even understand why it’s here at all,” Kaelith muttered.
He peeled a strip of blood-soaked fabric from the ruin of his pants, revealing the mangled mess of his leg beneath.
“I thought they needed the Phoenix to complete…” His brows pulled low.
“Whatever it is they’re building. A wall like this cuts them off from exactly that. Seems counterproductive.”
Bran crossed his arms. “The dead will steal the hope of the world before whatever’s behind it comes for our souls.”
Elara turned toward him, blinking. “What?”
He shrugged. “That’s what Hika says, anyway.”
Silence rippled through the group. For a beat, no one moved.
Then Rynna stiffened, the edge of something pointed crawling across the back of her mind. An itch she couldn’t reach. Her lungs stuttered as a flash of memory sliced through her: talons raking through her body, the burn of something ancient and cruel ripping her apart.
No!
Her knees gave out beneath her, but Fenn moved fast, his arm cinching around her waist, before she dropped. As her vision swam, her gaze dropped to where Kaelith still sat, unmoving. He watched her closely, eyes narrowed, the faintest crease between his brows.
“I think I know this threat…from before,” she whispered, her hand pressing flat to her belly as if that could banish the phantom pain. “Felt it…in my dreams.”
Fenn’s grip tightened. “The nightmare that sometimes comes?”
“Yes. Maybe.” She shook her head and gripped his forearm, fingers digging in. “I don’t know. The nightmare, but… also like… after you nearly died.” Her throat closed as she croaked.
The ache had been so raw, so total, it hadn’t felt like grief—it had felt like being pulled under by it. Like dying herself.
A laugh clawed its way up from her belly. “You’ve got to stop dying on me, Fenn.” Her hand slipped up to the back of his neck, pulling him closer. “I don’t think I can handle that again.”
He didn’t say anything. Just kissed the top of her head and held her there.
“So what do we do?” Elara’s voice broke through the stillness.
She stood inside the ring of fire, eyes scanning the undead ranks on the other side.
“We can’t wait here while they swarm the Reaches, waiting for whatever’s inside to get stronger.
” Her gaze shifted to Fenn. “Did you learn anything, Commander? I assume Skarn’s dead or fled? ”
Rynna inhaled, her thoughts flashing back to the fight, trying to pin down anything useful.
“Dead. Yes,” Fenn said.
At the same time, Kaelith barked out a short, hacking laugh. “The wolf ripped his head off.”
“What?” Elara’s face snapped toward the voice, her expression only now registering the battered man lying to Rynna’s side. Her eyes tracked down the length of his ruined leg. “Great Elements, your leg!”
She dropped to her knees beside him, the click of her boots lost beneath the roar of flame. With swift hands, she pulled aside more of the shredded fabric, revealing the remnants of the previously gaping wound beneath.
“How are you still conscious?” Her mouth fell open.
Rynna watched as Elara bent over, fingers hesitating over Kaelith’s injured leg.
The skin was still shifting—knitting itself back together as sinew crawled over bone. As she watched, the final layer of dark, snake-like scales sloughed away, curling at the ends as they fell to the ground and revealed smooth, pale skin underneath.
“Not bad,” Kaelith muttered, flexing his knee with deliberate care.
The joint bent beneath his hand, but a wince broke through his carefully neutral expression.
“The bones will probably take another day or so to finish knitting, but faster than normal.” He paused, fingers pinching lightly, testing the skin.
“I’d been wondering how I’d hold up without the enhancements Skarn absorbed. ”
His eyes slid to Rynna, one brow lifting in dry amusement. “But it seems our little blood exchange unlocked more than enough to compensate.”
Elara crouched beside him, reaching to prod at the skin near the worst of it. “But your leg was barely there.”
Kaelith snorted. “Please.” He tucked his good leg beneath him and pushed upright with a grunt, wobbling as he reached out, catching Rynna’s shoulder for balance. “Rynna’s done worse during any number of…vigorous evenings…before she met you children.”
Elara’s mouth dropped open. She mouthed the word vigorous, eyes slowly rising to Rynna, then darting to Kaelith and back again. “It seems there’s more to the story than you ever said,” the girl mumbled as crimson flushed up her neck and she scrambled to her feet.
“Training!” Rynna choked, swatting at Kaelith’s shoulder with the back of her hand. “Vigorous training sessions.”
Kaelith shifted back with a laugh as Taren raised a fist to his mouth, shoulders hunched like he was swallowing something bitter.
“Please.” The young man’s eyes darted to Fenn, forcing the words around his knuckles. “Please tell me I can kill him again when this is all over.”
Fenn’s only reply was a low, warning growl, rumbling through his frame.
“Enough.” Rynna shoved gently away from both men, ignoring the heat of Fenn’s hand and Kaelith’s smirk as she crossed to Bran.
“As much fun as this is,” she said, sweeping a hand toward the swirling chaos of firelight, rot, and unspoken tension around them, “we still need a plan. The barrier’s still up.
The dead are still moving. And clearly, killing Skarn wasn’t the win condition we hoped for.
” She gave Bran a light punch to the shoulder. “Right?”
“Uhh...yeah.” He was still glancing between her and Kaelith, clearly trying to piece together whatever the hell that was. His fingers rose to scratch at the side of his head, his brows knitting. “We still need a plan.”
She arched a brow. “What does Hika think?”
“Hika?” He scratched harder. “Why’s everyone looking so weird?”
“No reason!” Rynna blurted, voice shooting a little too high. “What do we do now?”
“Oh. Uhhh…” He dragged his gaze away from Kaelith with visible effort, shaking his head like clearing water from his ears. “She says…we have to protect the world. Destroy the source of the infection before it festers. Before it spreads further.”
A beat passed.
“Illuminating,” Kaelith muttered. “If only all of this had happened back when Mira still had the bird.”
Rynna’s lips parted around the word. Mira?
Then, her eyes went wide as they shot to Kaelith’s face. Heat flushed up the back of her neck, and a strange weight settled in her chest as pieces she hadn’t realized were missing began to slot into place.
“The Mistress of the Hearth was…” she whispered, her voice just barely audible over the crackle of the flames. Her gaze cut back to Bran.
“Hey—that’s one of Hika’s names,” Bran said, his brow wrinkling as he glanced between them.
Rynna turned fully toward him then, studying his face as if seeing him for the first time. The line of his jaw. The shape of his eyes. That fierce, defiant tilt to his chin when he was confused or challenged.
If she swapped the unruly red hair for black, he would have been the exact image of the boy she used to train nearly sixty years ago.
“Ben,” she gasped, turning on Kaelith as anger flared through her.
Bran, alone and unloved in Ember Reach. Treated like something broken. Hidden, blamed, shamed.
“Kaelith.” Her fists clenched at her sides as she advanced. “What did you do?”
Every whisper of his crimes across every Reach echoed in her mind—the betrayals, the bodies, the experiments, the disappearances. She could see them now, stacking one over another until they blurred into something monstrous.
“If you stole that boy from his mother—”
“What boy?” Bran had moved beside her. “Rynna, what’s going on?”
Fenn stepped up on her other side, his presence a focused wall of gravity. “I assumed you knew.” She felt his hand come to rest on her shoulder. “It was before my time, but Kaelith showed up at the end of the last war. Dropped off a child. Then disappeared.”
She couldn’t tear her eyes from Kaelith. “A boy with dark hair. And fire in his eyes.”
Kaelith didn’t answer. He just watched her, his expression carved from stone.
“You’re saying—” Bran’s voice faltered. “He…my father…was one of the children he stole?”
The flames encircling them sputtered, and the groaning undead stilled beyond the wall of fire, heads tilting toward the sudden silence inside the ring.
Then, slowly, the fire rose again—hotter, taller—casting long shadows across the ground.
Bran’s hair caught alight in elemental fire, shimmering along each strand like a crown. His hand rose, palm open, fingers trembling as he stared at the man they all knew was a monster.
“It’s your fault?” His voice was nearly a whisper, but it carried like thunder. “That I grew up with no family. In a village that hated me?”
Fire crawled from beneath Bran’s boots, snaking outward in a glowing path. As it closed on Kaelith, the ground beneath it began to melt, stone liquefying into molten trails of lava.