Chapter 5
FIVE
FABLE
Vaela left an hour ago, her silk-over-steel voice still echoing in my ears.
I’m giving you a war.
She wasn’t lying. The Caldera Market burns below us, visible through the narrow window of the overlooking chamber where Zorath’s warriors stashed me like inconvenient cargo.
Fire paints the sky in shades of destruction.
Smoke rises in columns thick enough to blot out the stars.
And somewhere in that chaos, the prince I’ve gambled my life on is doing something I’m only beginning to understand.
I press my forehead against the cool stone of the window frame, watching figures move through the streets below.
From this height, they look like insects—scurrying, swarming, dying in the orange glow of flames that spread despite every effort to contain them.
The sounds reach me muted but unmistakable.
Screaming. The crash of breaking wood. The clash of metal on metal.
Somewhere, a child wails for a parent who may not answer.
The market sprawls across the caldera’s outer rim, a vast expanse of stalls and warehouses and trading posts that serves as the commercial heart of the orc kingdom.
On normal days, traders from across the Veillands come here to buy volcanic glass, forge-steel, the rare minerals that only the Cindermaw produces.
Tonight, three years of accumulated rage is consuming it all.
And beneath it all, a rhythm. A pattern.
The realization crawls through my gut, cold and sickening.
I have been watching for twenty minutes, my stomach turning with what I see.
The rioters aren’t moving randomly. They’re surging in specific directions, avoiding certain streets, concentrating around particular buildings. Someone is guiding them.
Someone with a strategic mind and the authority to command in chaos.
A figure breaks from the shadows near the market’s eastern edge.
Tall. Broad. Moving with a lethal grace despite the violence erupting around him.
He gestures toward a group of rioters, points at a merchant’s warehouse flying Juk’s serpent banner.
The rioters surge forward. Flames erupt minutes later.
Zorath.
I watch him work with the detached horror of someone witnessing a master craftsman employ skills she’d rather not understand.
He doesn’t fight—not directly, not unless someone gets too close.
Instead, he directs. Redirects. Appears at the edge of a clash, speaks to figures I can’t identify from this distance, and melts back into shadow while the violence reshapes itself according to his will.
He’s not stopping the violence. He’s using it.
A cluster of warriors breaks away from a guard post near the market’s center. They’re not fleeing—they’re regrouping, moving toward a position that offers tactical advantage.
I recognize the pattern from military histories I’ve studied. Classic consolidation. Pulling loyal forces out of a losing fight to establish defensible positions for the morning after.
Zorath’s warriors. Being extracted from chaos while the common folk die around them.
This is what he is. This is what I’ve allied myself with.
The thought burns. I shove it aside. The Triumvirate are murderers. Zorath is a manipulator. The choice between them isn’t good versus evil—it’s degrees of darkness, shades of grey so close to black they might as well be the same color.
But one of them is willing to use truth as a weapon. And the other has spent three years burying it.
Time crawls past. The fires spread, then begin to die as fuel runs out and rain starts to fall—thin, sulfurous precipitation that the Cindermaw’s heat produces during certain seasons. The violence ebbs. The screaming fades.
The market falls into the exhausted quiet that follows catastrophe.
Footsteps in the corridor outside. Heavy. Deliberate. The door opens without a knock.
Zorath stands in the doorway, and I understand immediately why the guards didn’t announce him. He doesn’t look like a prince anymore. He looks like what he’s been pretending to be for three years—a weapon, violence given flesh and purpose.
Blood stains his hands. Not metaphorical blood, not the abstract guilt of ordering others to fight.
Actual blood, dark and drying, crusted under his fingernails and smeared across his knuckles.
His black mourning clothes are torn at the shoulder, revealing a shallow cut that’s already stopped bleeding.
And his eyes—those eyes that I’ve been trying not to think about—they’re flat.
Empty. The eyes of someone who has done terrible things and isn’t sure he cares anymore.
He closes the door behind him. Doesn’t speak. Just stands there, waiting for me to react.
Fear would be the sensible response. It has never been my dominant one. Anger works better. Questions work better. The need to understand.
“Fourteen dead.” My voice comes out steadier than I expected. “That’s what one of the warriors said. Fourteen people died tonight.”
He crosses to the room’s small basin, begins washing the blood from his hands. The water turns red, then pink, then clear. His movements are methodical. Practiced. This isn’t the first time he’s scrubbed evidence of violence from his skin.
“Three of Kreth’s enforcers.” He doesn’t look at me. “Five merchants who supported Juk’s new taxes. Six citizens caught in the crossfire.”
The clinical recitation makes my stomach clench. He’s counted them. Categorized them. Filed them away under acceptable losses.
“You planned this.”
Not a question. The accusation hangs between us, sharp-edged and undeniable.
“I used opportunity.” He turns from the basin, drying his hands on a cloth that he then discards like contaminated evidence. “Vaela started the fires. Vaela organized the rioters. I simply…redirected their anger toward targets that served my interests.”
“Your interests.” I hear my voice rising, feel my hands starting to gesture despite my efforts to stay calm. “Fourteen people are dead because you saw an opportunity to weaken your enemies.”
“The Triumvirate will respond with force.” He meets my gaze now, and there’s something in his expression—not shame, not quite, but something adjacent.
An awareness that he’s being judged and a refusal to flinch from the verdict.
“Mass arrests. Public executions. They’ll make examples of anyone they can catch, and by morning, the common folk will hate them even more. ”
“So you’re counting on brutality. Their brutality, feeding the hatred that feeds your cause.”
“Yes.”
The admission is stark. Unvarnished. He doesn’t try to justify it with noble intentions or lesser evils. He simply acknowledges the truth of what he’s done.
I want to hate him for it. Part of me does hate him—the idealistic part that still believes truth and justice should be enough, that good people shouldn’t have to wade through blood to reach better futures.
But another part of me, the part that’s spent two years in orc archives studying seventeen generations of Flamebound succession, understands something worse.
He’s not wrong.
“Every riot they respond to with brutality pushes the people closer to my side.” He’s pacing now, long strides eating up the small chamber, his mind clearly working through strategies I can only glimpse.
“Every execution they order makes them look like tyrants rather than regents. By the time I take the throne, I won’t just have legal legitimacy.
I’ll have the love of the common folk who’ve watched me become their only hope. ”
“Love built on blood you’ve manipulated them into spilling.”
The words crack between us. He stops pacing. Turns.
“Love that keeps them alive when I’m king.
” His voice has gone quiet. Controlled. Somewhere beyond anger—stripped bare, certain.
“My father loved his people, archivist. My father tried to rule with mercy and justice. My father is dead because he trusted people who smiled while they plotted his murder.”
He steps closer. I hold my ground.
“Tell me.” His voice drops lower still. “How do you propose I take my throne without blood?”
The question strikes with surgical precision. I open my mouth to answer—to cite historical precedent, to invoke peaceful transitions, to argue for wisdom over violence.
Nothing comes out.
Because I’ve spent two years in these archives. I’ve read every succession record, every transfer of power, every coronation and deposition in Flamebound history. And the truth is ugly and undeniable.
The throne has never been taken without blood. Not once in seventeen generations.
Silence stretches between us. The sounds of the dying riot filter through the window—distant now, almost peaceful compared to the chaos of an hour ago. I watch firelight flicker across his features, painting shadows and planes, transforming his face into something harsh and beautiful and terrible.
Beautiful.
The awareness hits before I can stop it.
I’ve been fighting it for hours—since the archives, since the crypts, since he caught me when I stumbled and his arm felt like safety despite everything I know about what he is.
He shouldn’t be beautiful. Not covered in blood, not standing in the wreckage of a riot he helped orchestrate, not looking at me with eyes that have seen too much violence to remember how to be soft.
But he is. And I can’t pretend otherwise.
“Then make the blood mean something.”
The words escape before I can censor them. He goes still—a sudden, complete arrest of motion, as if the words have reached somewhere the violence couldn’t.
I press forward. My hands are moving now, gestures shaping arguments I’m building in real time. “The evidence I’ve found—let me help you build a case so overwhelming that even wavering nobles have to choose your side.”
“You think truth can compete with violence?”