Chapter 37 #2
“No.” My fingers curl at my side. “I wanted to earn the truth. But you—you’re just fear in a mask. And I see you now. There is nothing you can give me. Nothing I want.” My heartbeat steadies as I press a palm against the aching burn on my leg. “You’re not him.”
Caz—the thing pretending to be him—tilts his head.
“You could’ve fooled me,” he says with a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes.
“No,” I whisper. “He’d never say that. Even if he doubted me. Even if he wanted to give up on me, he wouldn’t tear me down like this. He protects people.”
The fake Caz’s face twists. The laugh that leaves his lips makes me shudder. I rise slowly to my feet.
“This was the trial the whole time,” I murmur. “And I see the truth now. Also, my Caziel doesn’t speak in contractions. You should have studied him better.”
The world tears apart like paper. The crowd, the sky, even the stones beneath my feet split, splintering into sharp, spinning shards of unreality. One blink, and the whole illusion collapses in on itself. Gone. The illusion breaks.
One moment I am on my knees in the arena, the echo of Caz’s voice—not his voice—still twisting in my ears.
The next, I’m flat on my back in a hospital bed.
The air smells like antiseptic. The lights overhead are white, sterile, real.
A heart monitor beeps beside me. My limbs feel heavy.
Panic builds slow and sharp, like glass in my throat. I blink at the stained ceiling tiles.
“What…?”
A nurse appears, smiling kindly, her scrubs the soft shade of cornflower blue. “You’re awake. That’s good.”
I try to sit up. Pain lances down my spine, dull but jarring. My head threatens to crack open like an egg.
“Where am I?”
“You’re at County General. You’ve been out for a while. After the elevator collapsed—well, it’s no wonder your brain needed some time to make sense of it.”
I freeze. “The…elevator?” No that was ages ago. The arena. The trial. I was in—
“Yes,” she says gently. “Do you remember it?”
Something’s wrong. Something is deeply wrong.
“Where—where’s George?” My voice shakes. “And Caziel?”
The nurse tilts her head. “I’m not familiar with those names. Do you want us to call someone for you?”
My heart punches against my ribs. Okay, play along. The elevator. The hotel. The conference.
“There were other people with me. In the elevator. A man, long coat, black eyes. He—he marked me—”
“Sweetheart,” the nurse cuts in, soft and pitying, “you hit your head. Badly. It’s not uncommon to confuse dreams with reality when you come out of something traumatic. That’s all it was.”
No. No, no, no. I can feel the pendant under my gown, warm and pulsing against my skin like a second heartbeat.
“I want to talk to the others,” I say. “The other people in the elevator. You said there were others, right?”
Her smile falters. Maybe she didn’t say it, but I press harder.
“I know there were other people with me. Men? Three of them? Maybe four?”
“I’m not sure,” she says. Too quickly to be true. “It’s probably best you don’t dwell—”
“Then bring me someone who does know,” I snap.
There’s a flicker. Not in her expression, in the lights. A pulse like before the power cuts out. Like a glitch in a screen. The beeping of the heart monitor marches on, in a soothing rhythm. Steady. Familiar. Human.
The nurse speaks gently, with that kind of trained calm they teach in grief training and psych wards.
I was found alone. That I survived something no one should’ve.
That my brain did what brains do: it invented a world, a narrative, a coping mechanism.
One with glowing threads and fire that knew my name.
I’m quite creative. Maybe when I’m back on my feet I can write it all down.
Publish a book. Fantasy is popular. Especially romantic fantasy. Tell her about the Demon prince again?
I should argue. Demand proof. Rip off the covers and scream at them for being wrong.
But my body’s heavy. And my mind—my mind is so tired.
What if she’s right? What if it’s true? What if everything in Crimson was just a dream stitched from adrenaline and trauma?
My way of making sense of the elevator crash, of the pain and confusion and fear?
Wasn’t that my first thought too? I was dreaming. Or dead. Or something. Comatose, maybe. Concussed. People don’t just wake up in new worlds. That is not a thing. Especially not worlds that seem to be built off rainbows, feelings, magic, and demons. Right?
What if there is no Kay of the Rite, no Daemari, no Flame? What if there’s no Caziel?
A flicker of grief pulses behind my ribs.
It shouldn’t ache like that, not if he was imaginary, but I feel it.
Deep and carved in. I reach up, fingers scrambling for the glass pendant at my throat.
It’s not there. And yet I can still feel it humming against my chest. Not physically.
But in the same way you can feel someone staring at you.
In the way you know your name before someone says it. Like the prickles in a phantom limb.
I look down toward my ankle tucked under a starchy hospital blanket. I can’t see the thread in my boot, I can’t see a boot with the blanket, but there’s a throb there. A warmth. Like something waiting, watching.
The nurse is still trying to converse with me. Her voice is kind. Gentle.
“You don’t have to go back to that place,” she says. “You can stay. You’re safe now.”
I want to believe her, but there’s a pulse in my blood that I can’t ignore, and a weight in my chest that knows fire.
This isn’t real. And fuck the Rite for bringing me to another hospital. I’ve had enough of these places to last a lifetime, thank you. The nurse lays a hand on my arm.
“Kay. You’re safe now. That place you dreamed about doesn’t exist. You don’t have to carry any of that anymore. The pain, the fear. You can let it go.”
But it’s not a dream. I know pain. I know memory. I know grief. What I lived through in Obsidian… I did not make that up. That wasn’t fantasy, it was truth. And I’ve heard these words before. The lights in the hospital flicker. The nurse’s smile sharpens, like it’s been painted on.
“What were their names?” I ask. My voice is steadier than I feel. “The others. In the elevator. I wasn’t alone.”
She tilts her head, that same fake smile in place, but she doesn’t answer.
She can’t. There’s the break. I just have to press my fingers to it and pry it open.
The thread in my boot pulses. I reach for it without touching, hold it like an anchor in my mind.
And then, under my breath, I whisper the words Sarai gave me. The translation as simple as breathing.
“By ash and breath and blood unburned,
what’s false shall fade, what’s true returned.”
The world shatters. Everything peels away, walls, light, the illusion of comfort.
I’m not in a hospital. I never was. I’m in the trial ring.
Pain arches up from my thighs to my spine.
The nurse’s face begins to dissolve. Her features smear like wet paint, dripping down her jaw.
Behind her, the hospital walls shudder. The window shatters inwards, like gravity inverting.
The bed disappears beneath me. And I fall. Again.
This time the crowd is silent.
I’m on the stone again, the grit of the arena floor biting into my skin.
The flame that rims the arena moves like it’s alive.
It doesn’t roar, but leans. It stretches, curious and deliberate, crimson threaded with cobalt.
It sways toward me, but it does not burn.
It seems to be checking me over, listening to the thud of my heart.
My pendant pulses in time. I am still here.
I can’t push up off my knees. Not out of weakness, but because I’m so tired. It feels like something inside me has been cracked wide open and my soft squishy bits are bleeding out into the dust. Everything hurts. But I’m still here.
“She has endured,” a voice announces.
The herald’s voice echoes across the stone. “Contender Thirteen has completed the Cobalt Trial.”
Stillness. Then a ripple of noise threads through the stands. Whispers and murmurs and disbelief.
“She made it.”
“What did she see?”
“Why is the flame—”
“It’s reacting—look—”
And then—
“Mrrrrowwww”
“GEORGE?!”
An angry orange blur bursts across the arena.
George. He dodges past a guard, his fluffy tail bouncing like he owns the place, and launches himself at me.
I gasp, arms wrapping around him, burying my face in his thick fur.
He smells like dust and home and magic. I laugh.
It comes out choked and shaky, but it’s real.
I look up and everything else falls away because Caziel is there, standing at the edge of the arena, arms folded tight across his chest, jaw locked.
His eyes are molten. Focused on me like I’m the only thing that exists.
The air around him wavers—just enough to catch a hint of something else beneath the glamor.
The faint shimmer of a horn. The way his Embermark might trail up his throat, but I ignore it all because it’s the look in his eyes that breaks me wide open.
Pride. Relief. Something tender I don’t have a name for.
He nods. Once. And I nod back. I’m still shaking. Still scraped raw, but I see him. And I know he sees me. And for the first time since the Rite began, I believe I can do this.