Chapter 3 Alerie
THREE
ALERIE
Iwake to silence.
Not true silence—that doesn’t exist in places built to contain witches.
This is the half-silence of dampened magic, the suffocating hush that presses against my blood and whispers you are less here.
My power sits behind a barrier I can sense but can’t break, responding to my intent but unable to push through into actual effect.
I know this feeling. I’ve known it most of my life.
The cell materializes around me as my eyes adjust. Eight feet square, maybe less.
Gray walls, gray floor, gray ceiling—ash-mortar pressed into every surface, creating a textureless void that absorbs light and sound equally.
A stone bench rests beneath me, cold despite my body heat.
An iron door has only a viewing slot. A drain in the floor for waste.
No windows. No natural light. No way to mark time’s passage.
The Ash Cells. Every witch has heard of them—the Cinder Flight’s solution for problems too valuable to execute. Containment without elimination. Survival without living.
I sit up slowly, cataloging my body. Wrists bruised from the binding cuffs, now removed. My throat is dry. My stomach empty. My magic muted but present, pressing against the dampening field with the persistence of water against stone.
The Enforcer’s face keeps surfacing in my mind. Those eyes that tracked my every movement—not calculating, but intent. The way he said the witch comes with me as if the alternative had never been an option.
So why am I still breathing?
Time passes. I can’t tell how much.
I use the hours—minutes? days?—to inventory my resources. My knowledge: extensive, dangerous, potentially valuable enough to keep me alive. My willingness to trade it: carefully rationed.
The viewing slot scrapes open. I don’t flinch. Don’t look up. Movement draws attention, and attention in places like this is rarely good.
“Food.” A guard’s voice, bored and distant. “Eat it or don’t.”
A tray slides through a gap at the bottom of the door. Bread, hard but not stale. A cup of water, lukewarm. A chunk of dried meat that could be anything.
I wait until the viewing slot closes before I move. Then I eat methodically, forcing myself to chew slowly despite my hunger. Survival isn’t about staying alive—it’s about staying strong enough to keep staying alive. Every calorie matters. Every drop of water.
The meal sits heavy in my stomach. I lean back against the ash-mortared wall and wait.
For interrogation. For judgment. For whatever the enforcer has planned.
Because he will come. I saw it in his face when they led me away—that intensity that went beyond tactical assessment, beyond professional interest. He’ll come because he can’t stay away, and he doesn’t understand why, and that lack of understanding will drive him mad until he gets answers.
I need to be ready with the right ones.
The door opens without warning.
He fills the doorway. The cell is small, designed to make prisoners feel contained, and he makes it smaller still.
Tall. Broad-shouldered. Ash-black hair loose around a face carved from violence held in check.
Different clothes than before—clean, dark, unremarkable—but the intensity in his gaze hasn’t changed.
Watching me with the focus of a predator who’s found an unexpected challenge.
I don’t stand. Don’t cower. Don’t give him anything to work with.
“Enforcer Sulien.” Steady—good. “I was wondering when you’d visit.”
He steps into the cell. The door closes behind him—not slammed, shut with the quiet certainty of someone who doesn’t need dramatic gestures.
The space between us shrinks to nothing.
Six feet. Five. He stops out of arm’s reach, looming over me on my stone bench, and I have to tilt my head back to meet his gaze.
The position is deliberate. Designed to make me feel small, vulnerable, contained. Standard interrogation practice.
I let him think it’s working.
“You’re going to tell me everything.” Not a question. His voice is low, rough, carrying the weight of absolute authority. “Who you work for. How you found the ritual site. What you know about the Blood Regent’s network.”
“I work for myself.” True. “I found the site by tracking the network’s resonance.” Also true. “And I know more about the Blood Regent’s network than anyone else in this city.” Definitely true, though probably not wise to admit.
A muscle jumps in his jaw. Around us, the cell’s silence deepens.
“You expect me to believe you’re operating independently? A Vireth witch, alone, against a network that spans half the city?”
“I expect you to believe evidence.” I gesture at the space between us—a small movement, contained, nothing that could be mistaken for aggression. “You found me severing a blood-oath. Not creating one. Not maintaining one. If I worked for the Regent, why would I be destroying his assets?”
The logic is sound. I watch him process it, watch the flicker of acknowledgment in his eyes before his expression locks down again. He doesn’t want to believe me. Belief would complicate things.
“The Vireth bloodline has been hunted for months.” He shifts his weight, the movement bringing him a half-step closer. My pulse kicks up. I force it down. “The Regent wants your kind. Needs you for something. Why aren’t you dead or captured?”
“Because I’m better at hiding than the others were.” The words taste bitter. My sisters. My aunts. The cousins I never met because they were taken before I was born. “And because I stopped running three weeks ago.”
“Stopped running.”
“To fight back.” I hold his gaze, refusing to look away even as the heat from his body makes sweat prickle along my hairline.
The silence stretches between us. He’s close enough that I can smell him—smoke and metal and an undertone of heat that isn’t quite human.
Wrong. This is wrong. Dragons are threats, not attractions. His fire could unmake me as easily as it unmade that merchant on the dais—I watched that execution, from the crowd, hours before everything went to hell. I saw what he does to people who cross him.
But my magic keeps pressing toward him anyway.
“The ritual site.” His voice drops lower. “You knew exactly what you were doing. The technique was precise—cleaner than anything our scholars have managed. Where did you learn it?”
“My grandmother taught me. Before she died.” The memory surfaces unbidden—scarred hands guiding mine, a voice rough with age explaining the patterns that lived in our blood. “The Vireth line has been severing bonds for a thousand years. We know them better than the people who create them.”
“And the Blood Regent’s network specifically?”
“I’ve been studying it for months. Watching the signatures spread, mapping the nodes, learning how he’s adapted traditional blood magic with stolen dragon blood.” I pause, weighing the risk. “I can tell you things your Flight’s intelligence network hasn’t figured out yet. If you want to hear them.”
I let the offer land. A gambit. A calculated risk.
His eyes narrow. Good. Narrowed is better than dismissive. Narrowed means he’s considering.
“Why would you help us?”
“Because the Regent is hunting my bloodline to extinction, and I can’t stop him alone.
” Simple truth. “Because your Flight has resources I need—information, protection, access. Because the alternative is staying in this cell until someone decides I’m more trouble than I’m worth, and we both know how that ends. ”
He doesn’t respond. I feel stripped bare under his attention—not physically, but deeper. As if he’s trying to see through my survival masks to whatever exists beneath.
Don’t let him. Give him what he needs to see. Nothing more.
“The network operates on a cascade system.” I start talking, offering information before he can press harder.
“Each ritual node connects to three others, creating redundancy. Destroy one node, the connected ones compensate. The Regent learned from watching your raids—he adapted his infrastructure to survive exactly the kind of strikes you’ve been running. ”
Interest flickers in his expression. He doesn’t want to show it, but I catch it anyway—a slight shift in his stance, a barely-perceptible lean forward.
“Keep talking.”
“The blood-oath bindings aren’t simple compulsion.
They’re enhanced with processed dragon blood—stolen, I assume, though I don’t know from where.
That’s why the bound citizens are stronger than they should be.
The dragon blood amplifies the oath’s hold while giving the hosts access to fire-adjacent abilities. ”
“We know that much.”
“But you didn’t know this.” I lean forward slightly, matching his intensity.
“The dragon blood component creates a weakness. The oaths are stronger than traditional bindings, yes. But they’re also more vulnerable to authority-based severance.
True dragon authority—not stolen, not processed, but actual—can override the bindings without backlash.
My Vireth magic does the same thing through a different mechanism. ”
His expression shifts. I’ve surprised him. Good.
“You’re saying my fire could break the oaths.”
“Your fire does break the oaths. I saw it during the riots—you burned the blood-oath enhancement before consuming the hosts. Clean destruction. No cascade failures.” I hold his gaze. “The question is whether you can do it without killing the bound citizens in the process.”