Chapter 14
AMARIA
I found him in a corner of the cavern where the passage narrowed to bare rock—no torch brackets, no tool marks on the walls. The kind of place people went to either meditate or bury bodies. With Dreadscale, it could go either way.
Dreadscale sat cross-legged on the bare stone. His eyes were open but fixed on nothing, and the tattoos on his body undulated with a slow, living rhythm. The dragon inked across his back seemed to breathe.
I stopped three paces away—near enough to speak, far enough to run.
He didn't acknowledge me. Just sat there, a statue with a pulse, while I stood in the cold and tried to remember why I'd come.
Because my Marks nearly split the ring in half. Because the Nullatheon is still swallowing villages. Because the alternative is hurting everyone sleeping in these walls.
None of it felt like enough.
"You're late," Dreadscale said. His voice scraped like gravel over stone. He still hadn't looked at me.
"I'm here now."
"Your body is." His gaze lifted then—slow, deliberate—and found mine. "The rest of you is still running."
He rose in a single fluid motion, crossing the distance until he stood inches away. The individual dragon scales shifted on his tattoo.
"You're still flinching from what was meant to free you," he said. The same words he'd spoken that first day, but quieter now. Almost gentle, if gentle was something he knew how to be.
"My Shadowmark is the Mirrorheart," he said. "I don't choose what it shows you. I only reflect what you've buried. The wounds you've refused to let heal."
I clenched my fists. "And I'm supposed to just—let you dig around in my head?"
"I don't dig." His dark eyes held mine, patient and pitiless. "I hold up the glass. You're the one who's been running from what's in it."
"So what do I do?"
"You bring it to light." The corner of his mouth twitched at one corner. "Appropriate, no? The only way to unite your marks is to stop hiding from what lives in the dark. Face it. Name it. And then—only then—will the Shadow stop clawing at its cage."
He stepped closer, and that pressure returned—a restless heave on my skin.
"This will not be comfortable," he warned. "The mirror shows what you've buried deepest. But you cannot master what you refuse to see."
His Mark flared and the dragon blazed silver-white. And in its brilliance, my pain and fear reflected back to me in blinding clarity.
The priests called it a cleansing.
I was small again, eight years old, crouched beneath the roots of the old prayer tree.
The roots were thick as my arm and I'd shoved myself between them, bark digging into my back, dirt packed so far under my nails it burned.
The ground smelled like sap and the rain that had come through the night before.
Above me, the world ended. The Enforcers had come at dawn. Punishment for living in the wilds, they said. Punishment for existing outside the King's neat, ordered boxes.
I heard the screams first. Then the clash of steel. My mother's voice, desperate, calling a name I couldn't—
He was just twelve years old and already taller than our father. He'd sworn he would protect me. Sworn it on the old gods, on the roots of the prayer tree, on everything sacred and secret we'd shared.
The night before, we'd sat with our backs against the trunk, and he'd hummed the old lullaby—the one our mother sang when the dark pressed close. "But pain too vast will crack the glass, and love can break the brave." I'd fallen asleep to it. The last time I ever would.
I heard him call out. Once. And then silence.
And me—eight years old with my nails already bloody from clawing at the first soldier who'd grabbed for us. I would've fought them all. Would've torn their throats out with my teeth if my mother hadn't —
The river. Her hands on my chest. The shove.
She chose for me. Threw me into that black water like I was something to be saved instead of something that could fight. The cold hit first—so brutal it locked my lungs before the current dragged me under.
I was screaming his name when the river filled my mouth, grit and ice and the taste of silted rock, and the last thing I saw was her turning back toward the blades—not running. Never running. Walking into it like she'd already made peace with what it would cost.
She got to die protecting us. She got to choose that.
I got the river. And the silence after.
My knees hit the stone and a cry tore out of me. The Shadowmark surged in response—feeding on the shame, drinking the memory I had starved it of for years. It snapped awake with a dark, panicked power that shattered my control.
"I can't." The words scraped past my lips like broken glass. "Not like this. Not yet."
I stumbled backward. One step. Two. Dreadscale watched me go, his primeval eyes reflecting the one truth I couldn't bear to see.
Myself.
"I can do this on my own," I lied. "I just need more time. I can figure it out—"
I was already turning. Already fleeing.
I made it ten steps before my legs remembered how to run, and then I was gone—bolting through the tunnels, past rebels who flattened against the walls to let me pass, past torchlight and the echoing drip of water on stone.
I didn't know where I was going. Anywhere. Everywhere. Away from the corner where Dreadscale sat like a mirror I couldn't stop looking into.
I'd barely slept. Every time I shut my eyes, I was back in that frigid corner of the cavern. The door in my chest swinging open. The memories flooding up like black water, drowning me before I could—
I'd run. Like a coward. Like a child.
I can do this on my own. The lie I'd told him. The lie I was still telling myself.
So I'd tried. Before dawn, alone in the empty ring—Light first, then Shadow, the way Dreadscale showed me. Three attempts. Three times I slammed the door shut before my body learned to flinch faster than my mind.
I threw myself into drills instead. Thrust. Parry. Reset. The rhythm my body knew when my mind had nothing left to give.
The hours bled past. The cavern filled around me—bodies trickling in with the light, voices and boot-scuffs and the clank of gear replacing the silence I'd been hiding in.
Serenya slipped in with the rest. She didn't interrupt—just caught my eye, held up an apple like a peace offering, and settled on a crate near the wall. She set a second apple beside her and drew her ceremonial blade across her lap, working the edge with a cloth in long, unhurried strokes.
"Well, well." Maxx sauntered into the training room, twirling a practice sword between his fingers like a bored musician with a drumstick. "The Flameheart is still smoldering. How delightful."
"I'm not in the mood."
"You're never in the mood. That's what makes this fun." He stepped into the ring, that infuriating smirk already in place. "Drills are good for building muscle. But muscle won't save you when someone's messing with your head." The weapon stopped twirling. His eyes sharpened. "That's my department."
The air in front of me rippled. A wall of fire erupted between us—roaring, crackling, heat searing my face. I stumbled back, steel coming up, every instinct screaming threat threat threat—
The flames vanished. Maxx stood exactly where he'd been, grinning.
"Lesson one," he said. "Your eyes are liars. Trust them at your own risk."
I lunged at him. He wasn't there.
The Maxx I'd attacked dissolved into shimmering nothing, and the real one tapped my shoulder with the flat of his blade.
"Lesson two. I'm always lying."
The training that followed was nothing like footwork and forms. This was chaos given form—Maxx throwing illusion after illusion at me, forcing me to fight through a world that kept shifting.
Clones that attacked in perfect sync with the real thing, and I had a split-second each time to guess which sword would actually connect.
I guessed wrong. Often.
My muscles burned. My breath came in ragged gasps. But lurking with the exhaustion, a fierce, unfamiliar heat kindled—satisfaction, maybe. Or just the relief of facing a problem I could hit.
"Better," Maxx admitted, dancing back from a strike that actually grazed his sleeve. "You're starting to feel the difference. The real ones have weight. Presence." He waggled his eyebrows. "I do have a certain… undeniable presence."
"You're undeniably annoying."
"Synonyms, darling."
Serenya sat a few paces from the ring, perched on a fallen column with her ceremonial dagger balanced across her knees.
Her braid had come loose, dark strands sticking to her neck.
She'd been polishing that blade for the better part of an hour—slow, meditative strokes, her copper eyes tracking the sparring over the top of the steel every few passes.
Everyone assumed she was watching for fun. I knew better. She was cataloguing every fighter's weakness and filing it behind that serene face, the way she'd always done.
Maxx's gaze snagged on her. Again.
I saw the calculation behind his grin. Saw him weigh the moment, decide it was worth the risk.
"Let the priestess bless the blades while the rest of us bleed, huh?
" His voice dripped with mocking sweetness.
He spun one of his daggers in a lazy arc, then sent it flying with a careless flick.
It buried itself with a meaty thunk in the apple she'd set aside for later—six inches from her thigh, the steel still quivering.
She didn't even pause her polishing.
Then she spoke.
The words weren't in the common tongue. They weren't in any language I recognized—words that clung to the air like a plucked string.
Her hand drifted to the small mirrored token she kept tucked in her robes. It caught the light—reflected it—and the air shifted.
The dagger in the apple jerked. Then yanked out.
It spun once, twice, then rose like a puppet finding its strings.
And attacked him.
Maxx stumbled back, eyes going wide—shock cracking his perfect little face. He parried on instinct, steel ringing against steel, but the blade kept coming. It danced around his guard, anticipated his movements, forced him to fight himself.
I laughed. It was edged with a tinge of hysteria. Watching Maxx fight his own blade was the first thing that had felt right all day.
Then it hit me.
She wasn't controlling the steel. She was remembering it—every strike Maxx had ever made, reversed and turned against him.
He was fighting his own history. And losing.
Maxx lasted maybe ten seconds before Serenya lowered her hand.
The dagger froze mid-strike. Hung suspended for a heartbeat. Then clattered to the dirt, lifeless again.
His face had gone pale under the perpetual smirk, and when he looked at Serenya, the mockery had drained out of his eyes entirely.
She met his gaze. Held it.
"I could resurrect every battle you've ever fought from that blade." She went back to working the edge of her dagger, serene. "I choose not to. That's not weakness, Maxx. That's restraint."
The silence that followed was thick enough to choke on.
Maxx opened his mouth. Closed it.
"Well." Maxx's voice was rougher than usual. "Remind me never to piss off the priestess again."
Serenya hummed pleasantly, as if she hadn't just demonstrated that she could unmake any warrior in this camp using nothing but their own past.