Chapter 34
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The throne room smells of tar and death.
The heavy doors scream shut behind me. My boots echo on the marble floor, dark with soot and cracked like a scorched desert.
The banners are gone, and the vaulted ceiling is laced with smoke.
Only the fire remains—burning in braziers along the walls, coiling around the throne like a serpent guarding its hoard.
He sits atop it like he belongs there. Robes scorched, crown gleaming.
One hand rests on the carved armrest, the other curls lazily around the hilt of a sword propped at his side.
That sword was never meant to be seen clean.
I remember the stain it left on the nursery tiles.
I remember the way it hummed, like it wanted to speak.
And behind him, hidden half in shadow, are the nobles he called loyal. The ones who drank his wine, smiled at his jokes, and sent their sons to taunt me. Now they cower. Not from me. Not yet.
No one moves. The fire crackles softly, like it’s holding its breath.
My heartbeat isn’t loud, but it’s steady—like a drum before a charge. I don’t feel brave. Only sharpened—like a weapon honed by its maker, ready to be tested.
I take a step and then another.
“You came,” he says, voice low, warm, intimate.
The sound stops me. My chest tightens.
“I wasn’t sure you would.” His eyes find mine. Flame-cast and gleaming. “I thought that boy might have to drag your corpse back to me.”
“I left him behind,” I say.
I don’t tell him Mallen tried to stop me, that he would have died for me. That he might still die for me.
“Good,” my father says. “This is between you and me.”
“And the men who died because you invented the Reaping,” I say. “You turned my choice into a blood pageant to keep your throne. You starved Larksbind of hope and fed the sand with bodies so the magic would crawl back to your hand.”
He smiles thinly. “Order costs. Power costs more.”
“And you never paid any of it. You feared my choice and made others bleed for it.”
He rises and the room inhales.
The fire surges—leaping from the braziers to the pillars, racing up the walls like veins gone to rot. It spills across the floor in molten rivulets, and curls behind him like wings spun from ash and vengeance.
He towers above the throne now, crowned in flame, silhouetted like the god he always pretended to be.
“They’ve been waiting for this moment.” He gestures toward the nobles. “They are bored of waiting for my magic to return, bored of a girl playing at a choice that was never hers. They want a reminder of what power is.”
I don’t look at them. I don’t need to.
“They respect me,” he says, stepping down from the dais. “But now they need reminding of what happens to those who don’t.”
Another step. Another coil of fire at his heel.
“You were supposed to die.”
The smile that curls his mouth is so tender it burns.
“It wasn’t supposed to be her.”
He doesn’t move. Just watches me, like he’s already won. Like this is a game he’s been playing for years, and now I’ve finally arrived to lose it.
“But she betrayed me.” His fingers stroke the pommel of his sword with reverent care, as if it’s a memory he treasures. “For you.”
The air thins. The world narrows. I can’t breathe.
My mother’s face flashes before my eyes. It’s not real. I never saw it long enough to remember. I’ve only seen it in paintings, in portraits he once had hung like relics. I don’t even have fragments of memory. No lullabies. No bedtime stories. No silk shawl stained with her perfume.
I look at him—and I see.
“She was going to leave. Killing you would have kept her mine.”
“You poisoned her,” I say, voice rising, cracking.
A pause. A single flicker of silence.
The flames rise higher and fade back down.
“I tried to save her. But she wouldn’t stop fighting. For you.”
I take a step forward, and the shadow ripples with me.
“Her death looked like childbirth. You let them blame me.”
He spreads his arms. “Starsfall needed someone to mourn.”
And now the fire wraps him again, searing the marble at his feet. The nobles flinch deeper into the shadows.
“She screamed for you,” I say, and I don’t know if it’s true, but I want it to be. I need it to be. “While you watched her die.”
His sword scrapes free of its sheath.
I raise mine to meet it.
“Once I’d hoped you’d be a worthy heir,” he says. “Now I know you’re a blight sent to ruin me.”
I breathe, and the darkness coils through my fingers and dances up the blade like frost on steel. “Not a blight. Your ruin anyway.”
He strikes.
I block and then vanish.
The darkness swallows me, draws me into its fold.
I am night. I am death. I am the thing he tried to kill in the cradle—the afterbirth of ruin and miracle.
Not daughter. Not shadow. Not girl. I reappear behind him, the edge of my blade slicing for his spine—but he turns, too fast, too practiced.
Flame bursts from his hand and sends me flying back, slamming against the blackened pillar.
Pain bursts open in my ribs, red and bright and ringing, like a bell struck from the inside. I can’t tell if they’re broken. It doesn’t matter.
He stalks forward, fire rolling at his heels. The shadows flee before it, but they’re not gone. They’re circling. Watching.
“You always knew to fear me,” he says. “Even when you were small. You’d scream when I came near.”
“I knew what you were,” I gasp.
He raises his hand, and the fire lashes out—but I’m already moving.
I dive into another shadow, and the floor buckles beneath me.
The world warps, bends, shifts. My body snaps into nothingness and back again, not where I meant to go as I move through the dark, but close enough.
I stumble out of the shade, disoriented, barely catching my balance. I swing my sword on instinct.
And this time, it catches flesh.
Blood arcs through the air. His left shoulder splits open beneath the slice, and he roars—half fury, half pain.
I fall back, breathing hard. My chest sears with every breath. He turns, haloed in flame, a man sculpted from greed and hunger.
“You think death will save you?” he spits. “You think that’s power?”
“I don’t need saving.”
The shadows rise at my back.
He lifts both hands now, and the fire explodes.
I shield my face as the inferno crashes into me, heat licking past my guard. My hair scorches at the ends. The embroidered hem of my tunic blackens, curls, smokes. Heat claws at my throat and my chest, blistering skin where the fabric is too thin. I bite down on the scream.
My sword burns hot in my grip.
But my magic answers louder now. It doesn’t recoil from the fire—it devours it.
It floods me—ancient and bone-deep, cold as untouched graves, certain as every last breath. Death, in its first language. Pure. Inevitable. And I relive the moment that she died, her soul twisting from her body and into mine, a final gift he never meant me to keep.
Her grief is my birthright. Her last breath, my first.
Not a curse.
Not a wound.
A weapon.
He doesn’t know what he’s made.
But he’s always feared it. Always understood he would reap what he sowed.
We meet in the center of the room—fire against death, steel against shadow. His blade crashes against mine, heat flaring from the impact. I twist, parry, drop low, and slice for his legs. He leaps back, flame trailing behind him, and scorches the air between us.
We circle.
“She promised me an heir,” he snarls. “For a while, I tried to make you worthy.”
“I am.”
I charge.
The darkness wraps my limbs like armor, stiffens my spine, sharpens my edge. He blocks again, and the force of it sends tremors up my arms—but I’m stronger now. Faster. My blade sings with fury.
I see every scar on his face.
I remember every word he used to cage me.
I let go of the girl who bowed her head and tried to be good.
And I let the night in.
My sword meets his again. Steel shrieks. Sparks fly. I push—harder than I should be able to—and he staggers back, mouth curling in something like surprise.
“You’ve learned,” he says, panting.
He snarls and thrusts his blade forward, a brutal jab meant to pierce my ribs, but I’m already moving. My feet slide over ash-slick stone. The shadow draws me sideways, slipping me into darkness and out again. I strike at his flank.
But he’s waiting for it.
His elbow cracks into my jaw. My head snaps sideways. Pain detonates behind my eyes, and the sword slips from my grasp. My knees hit stone. Fire blazes above me—too fast.
I roll.
His blade punches into the ground where my chest had been, molten sparks spraying my side.
“Power doesn’t belong to you,” he says, voice raw now, broken by rage. “It belongs to those who claim it. It belongs to me.”
He snarls and lunges, blade high.
I lift mine to meet it. Our swords lock, and I hold—for a breath. Another. Then my knees buckle. He shoves harder as fire pours down his blade, scorching the steel and searing the skin of my hands.
My grip slips.
My sword clatters to the ground, and fire slams into me.
I scream.
It’s not just heat. It’s pain—raw, endless, hungry. It claws through my chest, ripping flesh from bone. I fall, but I don’t feel myself hit the ground. I’m unraveling—not dying, but liquefying into flame. A girl dissolving into cinders. The fire of death consumed by another flame.
My body stops obeying. I can’t move. I can’t breathe.
This is it.
He steps over me, sword gleaming.
“You should have died before you were born,” he whispers.
He raises his blade for the final strike.
And then—
I hear a scream that’s not mine. Not in this room.
Mallen.
Not in flesh—but in soul. It breaks through me like a symphony—his anguish, his devotion, sharp as glass and soft as a prayer. I feel it through the tether forged between us, blood-sworn and sealed with devotion. A shatter made of love.