Chapter 12
TWELVE
ZORATH
The upper forges glow with hellish light.
I move through corridors that radiate heat, the stone beneath my boots warm enough to sear through lesser leather.
Lava flows in carved channels along both walls, rivers of liquid fire that cast everything in shades of orange and red.
The air shimmers with distortion, making distances impossible to judge.
Sweat runs down my spine, soaks through my shirt, evaporates almost as quickly as it forms.
Behind me, six of Gravik’s best warriors match my pace. They’re veterans, every one of them—survivors of the assassination night, loyalists who’ve been waiting years for this moment. They know the forge levels. They know what we’re walking into.
The taste of Fable still lingers on my lips. The memory of her body beneath mine, around mine, crying my name in that borrowed cavern. The command in her voice.
Come back to me.
I intend to.
“Movement ahead.” Gravik’s low voice snaps me back to the present. The old captain has positioned himself at my right shoulder, his blade already drawn. “Kreth’s men. Four, maybe five.”
I see them a moment later—guards in Triumvirate colors, positioned at a junction where three tunnels meet. They’re watching the wrong direction, expecting threats from the main passages rather than the service routes we’ve been using.
I don’t slow down.
My hammer catches the first guard before he fully turns.
The volcanic-glass head caves his skull inward, spraying brain matter across the heated stone.
His body hasn’t finished falling before I’m past him, driving into the second guard with my shoulder, sending him stumbling backward into the lava channel.
His screams last three seconds. The smell of burning flesh joins the sulfur already thick in the air.
The remaining guards die quickly—Gravik’s blade opening one throat while my warriors handle the others. Professional. Efficient. The kind of violence that’s become routine after years of preparing for exactly this moment.
“The weapon stores are ahead.” Gravik wipes his blade on a dead man’s cloak. “Through the main forge chamber.”
I nod. Keep moving. The rage is building in my chest, that familiar pressure that wants to explode outward and destroy everything in its path. I’ve been banking this fury for years. Tonight, I finally get to spend it.
The main forge chamber. The cathedral of fire. Kreth stands at its center.
He’s pushing a cart toward the largest lava pool—a cart loaded with finished weapons. Swords, spears, axes. Months of work, enough steel to arm a small army. He’s going to dump it all into the fire rather than let me have it.
“Couldn’t let you have them.” He doesn’t look surprised to see me as he turns, the massive cleaver already in his hand. “Couldn’t let you win.”
“You already lost.” I advance, hammer at the ready. “The moment the truth came out. The moment the nobles saw what you really are.”
“The truth.” He spits the word like poison. “I’ve killed more men than you’ve met, princeling. Killed your father with my bare hands while he begged for your life.” The cleaver rises, catching the firelight. “He died weak. Crying. Calling for a son who never came.”
The rage detonates.
I throw myself at him without strategy, without control—pure fury given physical form.
The hammer swings in a killing arc, and he barely gets the cleaver up in time to deflect.
The impact sends shockwaves up my arms, staggers us both, but I don’t stop.
Can’t stop. My father begged, and this man watched him die.
My second swing catches his shoulder. Bone cracks beneath the blow, the joint separating with a wet crunch that should be satisfying but isn’t. He staggers but doesn’t fall, using the momentum to spin away, creating distance.
“There he is.” Blood runs from his damaged arm, dripping onto stone hot enough to make it sizzle. “The monster they all whispered about. The beast pretending to be a prince.”
He comes at me fast—faster than a man his size should move, experience compensating for age and injury. The cleaver whistles past my face, close enough to feel the displaced air. I dodge left, and his knee drives into my gut, folding me over, driving the air from my lungs.
A fist cracks across my jaw. Stars explode behind my eyes. I stumble backward, nearly step into a lava channel, catch myself at the last instant on a forge station that burns my palm through the leather glove.
Kreth presses the advantage. His cleaver opens a cut across my chest—shallow, the armor taking the worst of it, but blood wells immediately. The heated air makes the wound burn worse than it should.
I swing wild. Miss. He laughs.
“Your father swung wild, too. At the end. When he finally realized I wasn’t there to talk.” His blade scores my arm, another shallow cut, more blood. “He was pathetic, you know. All that mercy, all that justice—and when the poison started working, he cried like a child.”
The hammer catches his face.
I don’t remember swinging. Don’t remember aiming. But suddenly his left eye socket is caving inward, the orb bursting in a spray of vitreous fluid, and he’s screaming—finally screaming, the pain breaking through whatever fortress of cruelty he’s built around himself.
He doesn’t stop fighting.
Even half-blinded, even bleeding from a dozen wounds, he keeps coming. His cleaver takes a chunk from my shoulder, deep enough to scrape bone. I repay him with a strike to his ribs that I feel break under the impact. We’re both slowing now, blood loss and heat taking their toll.
“Show me.” His empty socket weeps fluid down his cheek. “Show them all what you really are. A killer. A monster. No better than me.”
I want to prove him right.
The rage demands it. My father’s face behind my eyes, the memory of his body on the pyre, the years of helpless fury that have been building toward this exact moment. Kill him. Tear him apart. Let the monster have its due.
But Fable’s voice surfaces in my skull. Not words exactly—her face. The way she looked at me in the archives, in the crypts, across every moment since. As though she could already see what I might choose to be, and was simply waiting for me to see it, too.
I stop.
The hammer stays raised, trembling with the effort of holding back. Kreth blinks at me with his remaining eye, confusion breaking through the battle-madness. This isn’t how these fights end. This isn’t what he expected.
“Regent Kreth.” My voice comes out cold.
Controlled. The voice of a king, not a berserker.
“You are charged with the murder of King Morvak Flamebound. You are charged with the murder of Queen Seraphel Flamebound. You are charged with treason against the Crown.” I lower the hammer slightly, forcing my breath to steady. “Do you deny these charges?”
“What is this?” His confusion is almost comical—the butcher who never expected to face anything but rage.
“A trial.” I gesture with the hammer toward the forge workers who have gathered at the chamber’s edges, watching from safe distances. They came to see violence. They’re getting something else. “Do you deny these charges?”
He stares at me. Blood drips from his wounds, hissing where it hits hot stone. The grin slowly returns—defiant, triumphant in its own twisted way.
“I deny nothing.” His voice carries through the forge chamber. “I killed them both. Held your father down while the poison worked. Arranged your mother’s accident when she got too close to Juk’s secrets.” The grin widens. “I did it all. And I’d do it again.”
“Witnessed.” I look at the forge workers—common folk who’ve never had a stake in noble politics, who’ve watched the Triumvirate destroy everything from the safety of their forges. “The accused confesses. The sentence is death.”
I don’t give him time to respond. The hammer swings low, taking out his knee, dropping him to the stone floor. He tries to rise. I kick the cleaver from his hand, grab the collar of his armor, drag him toward the execution platform that extends over the largest lava pool.
He fights every step of the way. Clawing at my arm, kicking at my legs, thrashing with the desperation of a man who finally understands that he’s not getting out of this alive. None of it matters. I’m stronger, less wounded, and I have years of rage lending power to my muscles.
I force him to his knees at the platform’s edge. The lava churns below—twenty feet of empty air between the stone and the liquid fire, close enough to feel the heat rising in waves that make my exposed wounds sing with pain.
“You don’t have the right.” His voice has lost its arrogance. He sounds almost petulant. “Only the king can execute a Regent.”
“I am the king.” I tighten my grip on his collar. “I was born the king. You just convinced yourself otherwise.”
“Borak—”
“Is a puppet whose crown means nothing. The lords know it. The people know it. And now—” I lean close, letting him see every ounce of contempt in my gaze. “You know it, too.”
Recognition flashes between us. Not understanding—Kreth has never understood anything beyond violence and power. But acknowledgment, maybe. The realization that we’ve reached the end of whatever game he thought he was playing.
“May the mountain that bore us judge you truly.”
I throw him into the lava.
The fall is short. The impact is terrible—his body hitting the molten stone with a sound like a thunderclap, the immediate ignition of flesh and hair and bone creating a pillar of flame that reaches toward the distant ceiling.
The screaming starts immediately, high and raw, and lasts far longer than it should.
Far longer than any scream has a right to last.
I watch. Don’t look away. This is what I ordered. This is what justice looks like in a kingdom built on fire.
The screaming stops. The pillar of flame subsides. There’s nothing left of Regent Kreth but ash and the fading echo of his agony.