Chapter 6
Ellaryn hadn’t had time to react when the fires first started—no time to warn her family about the blaze she’d seen through the kitchen window before the explosion tore through the house, blowing the glass outward.
Her vision blurred as she took in the room, her ears ringing. When she tried to push herself up, broken glass bit into her palms, sharp enough to steal her breath.
The first person she saw through the rubble and smoke was her brother, sprawled on the floor. The angle of his neck was wrong—unnatural—and his skin had already gone pale. Even at the young age of nine, she knew he was dead.
Still, she shook him, hands slick with blood and glass, begging him to move.
Footsteps ricocheted down the hall, and Ellaryn’s head pounded as her mother dragged her away from her brother.
“Go and hide, Ellaryn. Don’t come out—not until you’re sure it’s safe.” Her mother pressed a knife into her hand, fear trembling in her voice.
Ellaryn noticed the blood dripping from her mother’s fingers as she took the weapon.
“No, you can’t make me,” Ellaryn whimpered, her voice breaking as tears streamed down her cheeks. “I want to stay with you.”
“Listen to me, baby. You have to go upstairs. It’s going to be okay.
” Her hands braced on Ellaryn’s shoulders.
“We’ll come get you when it’s over.” She reassured her as she kissed her forehead and turned toward her father, who seemed to be going through the cabinets and pocketing knives and other utensils that could be used as weapons. “Right, Elias?”
“Yes, baby. We’ll come get you; it’s like that game we always play, hide and go seek.” He crouched to hug Ellaryn briefly, his knife already raised toward the door, before gesturing for her to go.
Ellaryn reluctantly obliged and ran to her wardrobe to hide, breath ragged and unsteady. Darkness swallowed everything; she couldn’t even see the sharp kitchen knife in her hand, though her grip threatened to slip with the sweat beading on her palm.
She heard her parents shouting and fought the urge to run to them. Every part of her wanted to move, but fear locked her in place.
Eyes squeezed shut, she stayed where she was, whispering to herself that everything was going to be okay—over and over—just like her mother had said.
When the shouting stopped, she waited a minute, then pushed the door just enough to peer into her room. It seemed quiet.
She slid the door open a little further and stepped forward, her feet crunching under broken glass. Each step made her knees tremble. The stillness wasn’t calm—it carried the weight of an aftershock, like the deafening silence that followed an earthquake.
The voices had stopped all too suddenly.
Then there was the red, dark and sticky, clinging to her shoes as she waded through.
Blood. Her mother’s eyes stared glassy and unmoving.
A dagger sank between her father’s ribs as he lay slumped over the kitchen table.
She couldn’t tell exactly where their wounds were or how many were inflicted upon them; the red spread like wet ink, drenching their clothes, until it just looked like one big stain.
Ellaryn couldn’t cry. She couldn’t think, move, or scream.
A cold hand yanked her shoulder.
“Do you know what happens to families that conspire against the king?”
He asked, looming over her. It was a knight.
His sneers tormented her as his grip tightened on her shoulder. Ellaryn shook her little head, heart pounding in her ears as she retreated a step, hand still clutched tightly on the knife behind her back.
“They pay in blood.” He hissed, footsteps approaching her with calculated precision.
Her vision blurred as tears formed in her eyes, her throat closing. She couldn’t hear herself over the drumming in her ears, but she knew she was begging him. Begging him to spare her. Begging him to keep the red water from spilling out of her.
“Sorry, kid.” The knight shrugged unapologetically, his heavy boots crunching on the glass that littered the floor. “Dark King’s orders.”
Ellaryn’s back hit the cabinet, and she knew there was no way out. She thought herself as good as dead, vision folding in on her, walls swaying as the panic took hold of her until it was all black.
And then she woke, her knife inside the knight’s neck, slicing it apart as he writhed on the floor.
She didn’t know what had happened, only that he was dying.
He scrambled and choked and crawled along the floor, crimson liquid trailing him like a leash. She liked that he suffered for what he had done and found the corners of her mouth upturned as she stared at the scene.
After his final breath, she sat for a long while, hands murky with blood, her blue dress soaked red. Between her parents, her brother, and the slain guard, numbness took hold of her—a fragile flower surrounded by decay.
“You are spectacular—” The King’s silver hair gleamed amidst the blood. “Come on, girl. Don’t be shy now.”
He outstretched his hand. She took it.
Still, no tears fell.
Just blood rolling down her cheeks, staining her skin.
Harsh, laboured breaths pulled her into consciousness as droplets of sweat rolled down her forehead. Another memory. Another nightmare.
Ellaryn often dreamt of that day, and no matter how hard she tried to bury the memory, it always surfaced again, gasping for air.
She walked to her en suite and splashed cool water over her flushed skin. It was still dark; she didn’t need to be up yet, but after her dream, she knew sleep wouldn’t return.
How many times would this nightmare plague her?
Begging her to choose a different ending—to refuse the King’s hand, to lie at rest with her family instead.
If she hadn’t hidden. If she had stayed and fought beside them. Maybe they would have had a chance. Maybe her life would have been different.
The memory weighed her down, tying stones to her feet whenever she tried to rise above it. It was a cage, keeping her guilt raw and her longing fixed on a life she would never have. A mistake she would always repeat.
As she gazed over the city from her balcony, the embers shone like golden stars. By day, smoke and ash smothered the streets like fog, but at night—from up here—it was like looking at living constellations.
A hundred different shapes. A hundred different stories woven through disaster, each ember carrying its own tragic ending.
If it were any other day, Ellaryn would’ve sat and watched them—maybe even wished upon them—but today she had other things on her mind. Things that, if given enough rope, would be sure to hang.
The expansion, the rumours, Selcrose.
And then… Magnus.
Only now did her mind seem to dwell on the ordeal she’d witnessed. The King did not hesitate when it came to death. He never had. Secrets were usually ripped free in seconds, souls peeled open and discarded like husks.
But Magnus still lived. Bruised, broken—yet alive.
That alone was out of the ordinary.
If the King had chosen imprisonment over execution, it meant one thing: whatever Magnus knew could not be torn from him so easily.
Or worse—it could not be risked.
Before she could talk herself out of it, before she could second-guess, she slipped her cloak over her shoulders, opened the door and tiptoed into the corridor with one thought on her mind.
She had to know what Magnus knew.
Before the dungeon broke him.
Or before the King decided he no longer needed him alive.
The thought lodged itself deep and dangerously in her chest, pulsing with every step she took across the cold stone floor.
She moved through the shadowed halls unnoticed, swallowed by the darkness as she tiptoed.
Until she reached the large double doors to the courtyard.
She peered through the glass, only moving through when she was sure there would be no surprises.
Defiers watched her as she passed. They lined the stairway in their eternal vigil, dark and motionless, looping around the outer edge of the castle like a ring of severed sentinels.
Their stares did not bother her. She knew they would not stop her.
As far as they were concerned, she was untouchable.
The King’s toy they didn’t want to play with.
Ellaryn slowed, letting the rhythm of her steps match the steady thud of her heart when she reached the rear passage, where the stone narrowed and the walls pressed closer, as if the castle itself wished to turn her back.
There, half-hidden behind a drape of crumbling mortar and ivy, yawned the narrow hole in the wall—a scar rather than a doorway.
The entrance to the dungeons.
Cold breathed out from it, damp and sour, carrying the weight of rot, rust, and old despair. Ellaryn paused only long enough to steady her grip, then stepped forward, letting the darkness swallow her whole.
The steps coiled downward, tighter with every turn, as if the dungeon were retreating from the world above. It felt deeper than she remembered—far deeper.
Ellaryn counted the stairs without meaning to, her breath growing shallow as the air thickened. Two hundred and nine uneven, jutted-out bricks met the soles of her boots. Years had passed since she was last forced to descend this far, and she had avoided it ever since.
Some places stained you simply by being remembered.
Defiers stood along the descent, their unmoving forms fused to the stone like grotesque carvings. Ellaryn did not lower her gaze. She walked with purpose, spine straight, expression carved into indifference.
Authority was a costume—wear it well enough, and no one dared question whether it fit.
At the bottom, the stench hit her full force—stale flesh. Rot. Something old and wet that had learned how to linger.
The dungeon was almost entirely dark, the gloom broken only by torches nailed to the walls at uneven intervals, their flames guttering as though even fire resented being there. Shadows crawled and stretched across the stone, warping the space into something unreal.
Set into the floor were the drains.