Chapter 8
EIGHT
TAMSIN
Time loses meaning.
Minutes or hours—I can’t tell. My fire burns endlessly, fed by adrenaline and desperation and the fierce determination not to let these things destroy the only sanctuary I have left.
Shadow constructs fall before me in waves.
I burn through wards that resist the other Fire-Bringers’ flames.
I carve paths for Brotherhood warriors to advance, destroy creatures that have pinned down their comrades, turn the tide in a dozen small skirmishes across the fortress walls.
The brothers fight above us, massive forms wheeling through the sky.
Drayke’s bronze bulk crashes through shadow dragon formations with devastating force.
Rurik’s wild flames consume everything in his path—enemy and construct alike, though he’s careful to avoid the fortress itself.
Zyphon appears and disappears through shadows, killing with silent efficiency.
And Auren.
I keep finding him in the chaos. My awareness tracks him even when I’m not consciously looking—the flash of gold-white scales, the precise arc of his fire, the controlled devastation he brings to every engagement.
He fights the way he trains: methodical, strategic, never a wasted motion.
Where Rurik is a wildfire and Zyphon is an assassin’s blade, Auren is a surgeon’s scalpel, cutting exactly where it will do the most damage.
Something about watching him fight makes my fire burn hotter.
I don’t have time to examine that. A twisted creature—one of Morrigan’s abominations—breaks through the ward line and lands on the rampart ahead of me.
Up close, it’s even more horrifying. I can see what it used to be, traces of dragon features warped beyond recognition.
Its mouth opens. Its wings have too many joints. And its eyes—
Its eyes are human.
The realization nearly breaks my concentration. Someone is still in there. Someone aware, trapped in a body that’s been twisted into a nightmare.
“I’m sorry.” The words slip out as I raise my hands. “I’m so sorry.”
My fire takes it, and the creature that used to be a person ceases to exist. I tell myself it was mercy. I’m not sure I believe it.
More are coming. The assault is relentless, wave after wave of shadow magic and twisted creatures and dragons who’ve given their allegiance to darkness. I burn until my reserves ache. Burn until my arms shake. Burn until my vision starts to blur at the edges.
I’m not the only one flagging. The battle has gone on too long.
Brotherhood warriors are showing fatigue, their movements slower, their flames dimmer.
Selene’s gold fire is paler than it was.
Aisling has retreated to a defensive position, conserving energy.
Even Nasyra’s shadow-flame gutters occasionally.
But the enemy keeps coming.
This isn’t a real assault, I realize suddenly. It’s not meant to breach the fortress. The Shadow Clan doesn’t have the numbers for that, not without committing far more forces than this. This is something else.
A test. A message.
Morrigan wants me to know she can reach me here.
The thought sends ice through my veins, colder than any frost Auren has ever produced. She planned this. Sent her forces to die, sacrificed twisted creatures and shadow dragons, just to prove a point.
That’s when I see it.
Auren is fighting three shadow dragons simultaneously, his gold-white form wheeling and diving with devastating precision. He’s magnificent—every strike calculated, every burst of fire placed exactly where it needs to be. The shadow dragons are outmatched. He’s going to win.
He doesn’t see the construct forming behind him.
It’s not coming from the sky. It’s rising from the shadow of the fortress itself, coalescing from darkness that’s pooled along the eastern wall. Bigger than the others. Denser. This isn’t a random construct—it’s targeted, designed, aimed specifically at the dragon whose back is turned.
I’m too far away. I’m on the rampart and he’s in the sky and the construct is already reaching, tendrils of pure shadow extending toward his exposed flank—
I don’t think.
I vault over the rampart edge.
For one crystalline moment, I’m falling—wind tearing at my hair, stone walls rushing past, the ground impossibly far below.
Then my fire erupts, not from my hands but from my entire body, a corona of white flame that catches the air and pushes against gravity.
It’s not flight. It’s barely controlled falling. But it’s enough.
I angle toward the construct, drawing every scrap of power I have left, pulling fire from reserves I didn’t know I possessed. The world narrows to a single point: the shadow reaching for Auren’s unprotected side.
I hit the construct at the same moment my fire does.
White flame meets concentrated darkness, and for an instant, reality itself seems to shudder. The construct is massive, dense, designed to kill a dragon. My fire tears through it anyway. Burns through layers of accumulated shadow. Annihilates the core of dark magic that holds it together.
The construct dissolves into nothing, and I’m left hanging in empty air with no fire left to hold me up.
I fall.
Something massive catches me.
Gold-white scales beneath my body. Wings beating powerful strokes. Cold radiating from dragon hide that should be warm, that particular frost I’ve come to recognize as distinctly his.
Auren.
He caught me. He was fighting those dragons, and he still saw me fall, still turned, still caught me before I could hit the ground.
His wings carry us upward, away from the battle, toward the rampart where the other Fire-Bringers are gathered. I should say something. Thank him, maybe. Explain why I threw myself off a wall without a plan beyond “don’t let him die.”
No words come. I’m too drained, too shaken, too aware of the scales beneath my palms and the impossible strength keeping me aloft.
He deposits me on the rampart with surprising gentleness for a creature his size. Then he shifts—that moment of blurring impossibility—and he’s a man again, standing before me in armor that appeared with the transformation.
The battle is ending around us. I can hear it—the sounds of combat fading, the shadow dragons retreating, the twisted creatures falling as their animating magic disperses. The brothers are chasing the remnants. The other Fire-Bringers are catching their breath.
But Auren isn’t watching any of that.
He’s watching me.
His expression is something I can’t read—not the cold mask he usually wears, not the analytical assessment I’ve grown used to during training. Something else. Something that makes my exhausted heart beat faster despite the drain on my reserves.
“That was reckless.” His voice is rough. Unsteady in a way I’ve never heard from him.
“It was going to kill you.”
“You threw yourself off a rampart. Without wings. Without a plan.”
“I had a plan.” I’m too tired to argue properly, but I try anyway. “The plan was ‘don’t let the shadow construct murder you.’”
“That’s not a plan. That’s a death wish with extra steps.”
“I’m not dead.” I gesture at my very-much-alive body. “You caught me.”
Something shifts in his expression. That unreadable thing becomes something else—still impossible to decipher, but warmer somehow. More raw.
“You saved my life.” The words seem to cost him. “A witch princess from Valdoria just saved my life.”
“I’m also a Fire-Bringer.” I don’t know why I’m deflecting. Maybe because the intensity in his gaze is too much, too sharp, too overwhelming when I’m this drained. “And a generally reckless person, apparently. According to you.”
He doesn’t smile. But something in his face softens—a crack in the ice, a fissure in walls built over decades.
“Tamsin.” My name in his voice. It sounds different than it did yesterday, than it did during training. Less like a designation and more like... something else. “Thank you.”
Before I can respond, Selene’s arm wraps around my shoulders, steadying me against a swaying I hadn’t realized I was doing.
“That was incredible.” Her voice is bright despite her exhaustion. “Your fire just—I’ve never seen anything like it. You annihilated those things.”
“She burned through defenses that would have taken us hours to breach.” Aisling appears at my other side, her healer’s gaze assessing me even as she speaks. “And then she threw herself off a wall. You need to sit down before you fall down.”
“She threw herself off a wall to save a dragon who should have been watching his own back.” Nasyra’s voice is dry, but there’s something warm in it. “I approve.”
Auren doesn’t respond to any of them. He’s still watching me with that expression I can’t name, even as his brothers land on the rampart around us, even as the sounds of the battle’s aftermath fill the air.
Then Drayke’s voice cuts through the moment, grim and hard: “We have a problem.”
The smoke is wrong.
I see it now that the immediate chaos has faded—dark tendrils rising from specific points around the fortress, coiling into patterns that have nothing to do with natural combustion. The smoke isn’t dispersing. It’s gathering, forming shapes, spelling something in the air.
Magic. Witch magic. My stomach drops even before the voice emerges.
“Hello, little sister.”
Morrigan.
Her voice echoes from the smoke itself, spelled into the darkness, carried on currents of shadow magic. I’d know that voice anywhere—have heard it in nightmares, in memories, in the moments between waking and sleep when I let myself remember what she used to be.
“Did you really think stone walls could keep me from what’s mine?”
The smoke coalesces into a face—her face, rendered in shadow and malice. Same bone structure I see in my mirror. Same regal bearing. But the eyes that look down at me are wrong, shifting colors that speak to dark magic and darker choices.
“I’ve been watching you, Tamsin. Training with the ice dragon. Playing house with the Fire-Bringers. Did you think I wouldn’t notice? Did you think I couldn’t reach you here?”
The smoke-face smiles, and it’s the smile I remember from childhood—the one she wore when she was about to teach me something, help me with something, be the big sister I adored.
The memory makes me want to vomit.
“This was just a taste, little sister. A reminder of what’s coming. You have something that belongs to me—the Crown that should have been mine, the power that should have been mine, the blood that runs in your veins.”
I find my voice. It comes out steadier than I expect, fueled by anger that burns hotter than my fire.
“Come and take it, if you think you can.”
The smoke-face laughs. The sound echoes across the ramparts, across the walls, across every corner of the fortress. Brotherhood warriors flinch. The Fire-Bringers go still beside me.
“Oh, I will. But not yet. First, I want you to know what’s coming.
I want you to lie awake at night, imagining it.
Every friend you make in that fortress—I’ll take them from you, the way you took everything from me.
Every dragon who protects you—I’ll turn them to ash.
And when you’re finally alone, when everyone who thought they could keep you safe is dead. ..”
The smile widens, predatory and cold.
“Then I’ll come for you, little sister. And I’ll take what’s mine.”
The smoke disperses, the magic spent, and Morrigan’s presence fades from the air. But her words hang in the silence that follows—a promise, a threat, a declaration of war that makes everything that came before feel like prelude.
No one speaks. The Fire-Bringers are still at my sides. The brothers stand in a loose semicircle, their expressions ranging from grim to murderous. And Auren—
Auren is watching me with that same unreadable expression, but now I think I understand it better.
Not confusion. Not calculation.
Concern. Actual, genuine concern for the witch princess he should by all rights despise.
“She’s trying to scare you.” His voice is quiet enough that only I can hear it. “To isolate you. Make you think you’re alone.”
“I know what she’s doing.” I meet his gaze. Hold it. “She’s very good at mind games. Always has been.”
“You’re not alone.” The words seem to surprise him as much as they surprise me. He looks away, jaw tight, but he doesn’t take them back. “Whatever else is between us—you’re not alone here. She can’t have you.”
I don’t know what to say. Don’t know how to process this—the dragon who hated me days ago, standing in front of me, telling me I’m not alone. Telling me she can’t have me, as if he has any personal stake in my survival beyond his duty.
But his frost still lingers on my skin from where he caught me. And his eyes, when they finally meet mine again, hold something that looks almost like hope.
“Okay.” My voice is rough. Exhausted. But I manage a small smile—barely a curve of my lips. “Then I guess we’d better figure out how to stop her. Before she kills everyone I’ve started to care about.”
Including you, I don’t add.
But from the way his expression shifts, I think he hears it anyway.