Chapter Six Mathias
The square of Tirn’vahl was slick with salt and rain, the stones worn smooth by centuries of storms – and now by the press of a restless crowd, gathered shoulder to shoulder across the square.
Mathias stood at the edges of the crowd, shoulders hunched against the cold, listening as voices rose and broke like waves against the crumbling walls.
Fear was thick in the air, sharper even than the scent of the marshes beyond the city.
The gathering was little more than a desperate tangle of townsfolk, bundled in damp wool and patched cloaks, faces drawn and pale in the grey morning light.
Old men muttered into their beards, mothers clutched their children close, and the few traders who had not already packed their carts for flight hawked what wares they could in low, urgent tones.
Over it all, the sea wind moaned through the broken teeth of Tirn’vahl’s battlements, a sound too much like a dirge to ignore.
Mathias edged closer, weaving between shoulders and elbows, until he could see the raised platform where the Elders stood. There were six of them, their faces as weathered as the stones underfoot, arguing in sharp bursts.
“- already taken Haedor!”
“We don’t know that for certain.”
“We do! Jaren’s boy came back two nights ago – said he saw the black banners from the cliffs!”
The black banners. Mathias’ fingers twitched against the hem of his sleeve. He had dreamt of those banners. Tattered and bleeding into the burning horizon, coming for them all.
A thickset man in a battered leather coat raised his hands for silence. “We can’t stand against her,” he growled. “If Haedor fell, if the Twin Cities go silent – we’re next.”
A ripple of dread passed through the crowd.
“We have the marshes,” someone protested weakly.
“The marshes won’t stop her,” the thickset man snapped. “Nothing stops the Sorcerer Queen.”
Mathias closed his eyes briefly, feeling the truth of those words settle like a stone in his gut. The Sorcerer Queen. They spoke her name rarely, and even now, the Elders skirted it like children afraid of calling a monster into the room.
An old woman with a voice like cracked ice pointed a gnarled finger toward the crowd. “We must submit. Send envoys to Irongate. Swear fealty. It is the only way.”
Murmurs, heavy and sullen. Some nodded. Others shook their heads, faces pinched with anger.
“And if she decides we are not worth sparing?” Another Elder spat. “Haedor was a jewel! What are we? A salt-stained ruin clinging to the cliffs?”
The argument flared again, louder, rawer, like a wound refusing to close. Mathias listened, heart hammering against his ribs, the familiar sensation of being apart from the world around him settling deeper into his bones.
He knew how they looked at him. Even now, even in this fear-drenched hour, the space around him was wider than the press of bodies suggested.
People lean away without realising it. Parents pulled their children closer.
A fisherman’s wife crossed herself when his gaze brushed hers – not with any gesture taught now, but with a gesture passed down and never quite forgotten.
Palm to brow, then lips, then chest. A warding sign, meant to bind the tongue and blind the eye, so prophecy would pass her by.
She did it without thinking, and the fear in her eyes said she still half believed.
The Seer.
He was the Seer.
And no matter that he had lived among them his whole life, no matter that he had bled and wept and worked alongside them, he would never truly be one of them.
Because he had Seen.
The Sight was not magic, but even in a world where dragons had been slain and gods had fallen silent, it remained – stubborn and unexplained.
A final curse or a fading gift from the old gods, depending on who you asked.
A remnant of a time when the divine still walked among men, before the world turned cold and godless.
It touched whom it wished, without pattern, without mercy, and it never came without cost.
For every Seer, the cost began the same way; their first vision was always their own death.
He, too, had seen his – a brutal, fragmented glimpse.
Fire, not merely burning, but devouring, tearing his chest open in a searing void.
The metallic tang of blood and the sickening scent of burning flesh filling the air.
A crown, wreathed in flame, falling with a sound like shattering bone.
And above him, sharp and cold against the smoke, the stars – countless, indifferent, watching as his life guttered out like a snuffed candle.
It had come to him at eight years old, in a blinding torrent of sound and colour, seizing him by the spine and slamming him against the stones of the harbour wall until he could barely breathe. He had screamed then – he remembered that much. The sound had torn from his throat like a wounded animal.
And when it was done, when he had collapsed into the salt-stained mud, the town had looked at him differently. Like something broken. Like something dangerous.
His parents had abandoned him not long after, shamed and terrified by what he had become.
They had whispered among themselves, like so many others, that the Sight would drive him mad, that he would become a danger to himself and everyone around him.
Better, they thought, to cast him away before the madness took root.
Because the madness always took root. Who could see their own death in vivid detail and not lose their minds?
No, his parents had thought. Better to lose a son than invite ruin upon their house, and by extension, their city.
It was Maeve, his mother’s elder sister, who had defied them all.
She had taken him in without hesitation, claiming him as her own when no one else would.
She fed him, clothed him, and wrapped his broken heart in a stubborn, unwavering love that had never once faltered.
To her, he had never been a curse. He was simply Mathias—a boy who had lost more than his parents and his innocence in a single breath and who deserved to be loved still.
For almost two decades now, Mathias had carried that love in the quiet bend of his shoulders, the wary set of his eyes, the soft patience of his movements.
He had grown into a man shaped by sorrow but not devoured by it.
The town still saw the Seer, someone who could at any given moment snap and go mad. Maeve still saw the boy she had saved.
Mathias’ hands clenched and unclenched at his sides. He could feel her eyes on him even now, from somewhere in the crowd. He didn’t look – he didn’t need to.
On the platform, the arguments were reaching a fever pitch.
“The Feast of the Black Flame is in two weeks!” the thickset man shouted. “Everyone will be in Irongate – the Queen, her court, her soldiers! They won’t march while the city feasts.”
“Aye,” someone else chimed in, eyes darting nervously. “Maybe we send someone. Find out what’s happening. Slip in with the crowds… to listen, learn.”
Another Elder shook her head so violently her scarf slipped askew. “And who would you send? Who among us is foolish enough to walk willingly into the Queen’s jaws?”
A heavy silence fell.
Mathias’s hand rose before he fully realised what he was doing.
“I’ll go,” he said, uncertain.
A hundred faces turned. The space around him grew colder.
“I’ll go,” he said, again, louder now.
The Elders stared. Some scoffed. Others made signs warding off evil.
The thickset man sneered. “The Seer? What good is a broken lad against the Queen’s hounds?”
Mathias swallowed hard. “A broken lad won’t be noticed.”
A ripple of cruel laughter. But one of the Elders, a woman with sharp eyes and a voice like a crow’s caw, leaned forward.
“Perhaps that’s the point,” she said. “Perhaps he would be missed there.”
“Perhaps he would not be missed here, though.” Someone in the crowd jeered.
Mathias felt the words like a slap. But he did not lower his hand.
An old woman—he realised it was Maeve when she got closer—pushed through the crowd then, her apron stained and her hair clinging damp to her cheeks. She seized his wrist, pulling his hand down.
“No,” she said fiercely. “He’s just a boy.”
The thickset man shrugged. “Better him than a whole town.”
Maeve rounded on them, her eyes blazing. “You would send him there to die.”
“We are all marked for death if we do nothing,” the Elder woman snapped. “Better we die fighting for a chance.”
Mathias wrenched his hand free, his heart hammering. “I can do it,” he said, louder this time. “I can get in and out. I’ll bring back what news I can.”
The thickset man snorted. “Or you’ll bring back nothing at all.”
Mathias met his gaze. “Maybe. But what else have we left?”
For a long, terrible moment, no one spoke. Then, slowly, the thickset man nodded. The others followed, one by one, reluctant but yielding. Fear, after all, made strange bedfellows.
Maeve pulled him aside as the crowd dispersed, her hands gripping his shoulders with desperate strength.
“You don’t have to prove anything to them,” she whispered.
He looked into her face, lined with care and sorrow, and felt a tight ache in his chest.
“It’s not for them,” he said softly. “It’s for us.”
She kissed his forehead, rough and swift. “Come back to me, boy.”
He nodded. But in his heart, he wasn’t sure if he could make that promise.
He left that same afternoon, with nothing but a satchel slung over one narrow shoulder and a battered knife tucked into his belt. He avoided the main roads, slipping through the marsh paths like a shadow, trusting in his smallness, his forgettability, to shield him.
The Mirefen marshes were a living thing, swallowing sound and form alike. Reeds hissed underfoot. Mud sucked at his boots. Waterbirds cried out mournfully overhead, their white bodies ghosting against the darkening sky.
Mathias moved carefully, quietly, the way a hunted thing moves. He knew the marshes better than most; he had grown up among their twisting paths and hidden sinkholes. But even he could not shake the feeling that the land itself conspired to turn him around, to lose him in the endless grey.
Night fell like a hammer, sudden and absolute. The salt mist thickened, cloaking the world in a cold, clinging embrace.
Mathias crouched beneath the roots of a half-drowned tree, pulling his cloak tight around him. His stomach growled, but he ignored it. Hunger was easier to bear than fear.
Somewhere beyond the mist, he knew, Irongate glittered like a blade – and beyond that, the Sorcerer Queen held her court of fire and blood.
Mathias closed his eyes.
He saw again the vision that had cursed him: flames rising, a crown tumbling from the burning heavens, his chest bloodied and scorched and torn open. The smoke filling his lungs, the heat peeling his skin, and above it all, the stars watching, cold and distant, offering neither mercy nor reprieve.
He was not brave. He was not strong. He was not the hero of any song or story. He was just a man with a death he could not escape, trying to do one good thing before it claimed him.
The mist curled tighter around him. He set his jaw, pulled himself to his feet, and pressed onward into the night.