7. Chapter 7
AMARIA
The lake water was clear. After tossing all my weapons on the rocks, I knelt at the edge, and ash bled off me, turning the water black. I scrubbed. The ash didn't lift; it smeared. It had settled into every crease and pore, a second skin of soot that refused to leave me.
"Easy," Maxx said softly. "You're going to take the skin off.
" He was sitting on the bank, peeling an orange.
He was clean. They all were. Somewhere in the last two days, while I was unconscious, they had washed the Dead Zone off their skin.
Their hair was shiny. Their clothes were shaken out. They looked like fae again.
I looked like a ghost that had followed them out of the grave.
"It's not coming off," I rasped, scrubbing harder. The water swirling around my wrists was ink-dark.
Maxx set the orange down. He pulled a flask from his coat and offered it to me. "It takes time, Flameheart," he said. "The ash... it stains."
I ignored the flask. I dug my nails into my forearm, scraping until the water turned pink.
"That was..." I trailed off. My voice cracked.
"A failure," Serenya finished for me. She was sitting on a rock nearby, braiding a fresh ribbon into her clean hair. She didn't look up, but her voice was tight. "We know. We've had two days to talk about it."
"A massacre," I whispered.
"An education." Maxx's mouth twisted. The old smirk tried to surface, but it didn't quite reach his eyes. "Remind me never to trust a revolutionary with nice cheekbones again."
Kaelen. The name alone made bile rise up my throat.
"He was right about one thing," I said and stopped scrubbing. "The system was rotten."
"So he decided to burn the house down with everyone inside?" Maxx took a drink from the flask himself. "Funny how that works. They always forget to mention the part where fire doesn't discriminate."
"He didn't forget." Serenya finally looked up. She looked at Eryndor, who was standing by the tree line, watching the perimeter. "He knew exactly what the cost would be. He just decided we were acceptable currency."
The cost. Brannick's face flashed through my mind. The way he'd smiled when he handed me the knife.
Kill false hope before it kills you.
"Amaria." Serenya's voice. Soft. "Stop."
I looked down. I had scrubbed the skin on my hand until it bled. The blood looked bright and shocking against the matte soot.
"You're shaking," she said.
"I'm fine."
"You're grey."
"I know." I stopped scrubbing. Watched the blood swirl pink into the black water. "Maybe it's not coming off because it's not supposed to."
No one argued. Maxx didn't even try to make a joke; he just screwed the cap back onto his flask, his smile vanishing, while Serenya looked away.
The golden sunlight was still warm on my face, but the weight of everything we'd left behind was settling back into place.
We were alive. We were out.
And the world was still ending.
"So." Serenya pulled the Codex from her pack, settling it across her knees. The Codex—she'd been guarding it like a feral cat with a stolen fish since we fled the ritual site. "We need to talk about what comes next."
"Next?" Maxx stretched out on the grass, ankles crossed. "Next is wine. A bath. Possibly a week of sleep. In that order."
"Next is fixing what we broke." Serenya's voice was gentle, but firm. She opened the Codex, fingers tracing lines of text I couldn't read from where I stood. "We went to heal the Veil. We made the fracture worse. And we created a Void that's eating everything it touches—magic, color, life."
Her fingers stilled on the page.
"That Void isn't sitting still. It's growing. We have two disasters now instead of one."
I heard Eryndor's weight shift on the stones behind me.
"Went to heal the Veil. Made the wound worse. Created a Void. Almost killed the Crownforged." I ticked them off on my fingers. "I really am the gift that keeps giving."
"To be fair," Maxx said, drawing one of his daggers and turning it lazily in his hand, "Kaelen did most of the actual world-ending.
You just provided the spark." He tilted the knife, watching light slide along the edge.
"And the Crownforged isn't dead yet, so let's not add that to the tally until we've earned it. "
Maxx glanced up from the blade. When he spoke again, his tone had softened. "Besides, if we're assigning blame, I'd like credit for not noticing our fearless leader was a raving nihilist until he had you strapped to an altar. Really feel like that one's on the group."
I didn’t have the energy to argue. But when I glanced at Serenya, her whole expression had changed. Her eyes sharpened. She looked down at the Codex, then back at me, and a new light crossed her face. Not confusion this time. Curiosity.
"Amaria." Her voice was steadier now. "I remember something. From before."
I tensed. "Before what?"
"When we first met." She tilted her head. Eyes narrowing. "I hadn't cast anything yet. I was just thinking about reaching for a memory, and you flinched. You knew what I was going to do before I did it."
My mouth opened. Closed.
"How did you know?" she pressed. "Memory-Weaving isn't taught outside the temples. You shouldn't have recognized it."
The question unlocked something.
Summer light through canopy leaves. The village elders with their hands laid against ancient trees, whispering in a language that made the air shimmer. A female merging two flames into one with a Mark that had nothing to do with flame. A male singing to the roots and watching them answer.
My mother's voice, soft in my ear: We don't use the Marks, little star. We use what the Marks forgot.
"My people." The words felt strange in my mouth. Too big for what little I could hold. "They could do things. Things that didn't need Marks." I reached for more. It slipped away.
"I was young when I ran. When I had to hide." I shook my head. "I don't remember the how. Just the feeling. Magic that wasn't as limited as what we do with Marks.”
"A different system?" Serenya leaned forward.
"I don't know." I looked at my hands. Still stained with what I'd done. "I just know the elders could do things the Crown called impossible. And if anyone remembers how..."
Maxx turned the dagger through his fingers with practiced ease.
"Hold on." The drawl sharpened. "Abilities the Marks forgot?" He tested the blade against his thumb, eyes bright. "Because Flameheart, I have built my entire mystique around being aesthetically threatening. Decorative menace at best."
The spinning stopped. His smile went somewhere darker.
"And decorative menace is fun, darling. But I could stand to be devastating. So, please. Carry on."
I shook my head. "I barely remember any of it. Just... fragments."
The admission hung in the air; it was too fragile to push further, because it felt too much like hope.
But Serenya heard what I wasn't saying.
"Then maybe we're not as helpless as we think," she said quietly. "Maybe there are answers we haven't found yet. About the Veil. About the Void. About—" She gestured vaguely between me and Eryndor. "All of it."
Maybe.
Dreadscale stepped into the circle from the tree line, pine-shadow clinging to his shoulders. "Magic that predates the fracture may hold the key to healing it."
The pieces were clicking together now. Not a solution—not yet—but a direction.
"We can't fix the Void from here," I said. "We can't fix the Veil. We can't even figure out what the hell this tether is doing to us. But Liraeth—"
"Might have prophecy texts," Serenya said hopefully.
"Has elders who might know more about the veil," Dreadscale added.
"Has ancestral magic that might be powerful enough to fix this disaster I made."
"We made," Maxx corrected. "Group effort, remember? I'm claiming at least fifteen percent of this catastrophe."
I sighed. "Generous of you."
"I'm a generous man."
Serenya closed the Codex. "Liraeth first. Answers second. World-saving third." She looked at me. "In that order."
I nodded. Took a breath that tasted like pine and the faint, lingering soot I couldn't quite scrub away.
Liraeth. The ancestral homeland I hardly remembered and was now stupid enough to pin all my hopes on.
"The route." Eryndor's voice cut through my thoughts. "How do we get there?"
He'd moved closer without me noticing—still at the edge of the tether's radius, but angled toward the group now instead of watching the trees.
Dreadscale's expression shifted.
"The shortest path is through the Sensorium Wood."
Maxx sat up straighter. "The Wildling territory? The place where reality is..." He waved a hand vaguely. "Optional?"
"Yes."
"Wonderful." Maxx flopped back onto the grass. "Love that for us."
"The Wood responds to intention," Dreadscale continued, ignoring him. "It will test you. Show you things. Some true, some not. Stay focused on the path, and it will let you pass."
"And if we don't stay focused?" I ventured.
Dreadscale didn't answer. Which was answer enough.
"Perfect," I muttered. "A magic forest that plays mind games. Just what we needed."