Chapter Twenty-Seven Frejara #3
The first light found us still seated, still dressed, still awake. It slipped through the hole in the roof in a thin straight line, brushing the top of the altar before spilling across the floor in soft gold.
I heard the horses first – slow steps over damp earth, the scrape of hooves near the doorway. Then the low murmur of voices, careful and close. The townsfolk had come. Not out of kindness, but to see it done. To be certain, we left.
Mathias shifted with a grunt, rolling one shoulder, then the other. He stood slowly, the stiffness in his limbs plain, but unbothered by it.
“Well,” he murmured, eyeing the ceiling above us, “I’ll be glad enough not to spend another night beneath that.”
He crossed the room to the bags of supplies, crouched to tie them off with swift, practised fingers.
One by one, he slung them over his shoulder, then paused at the threshold, hand resting against the old stone frame.
He glanced back once, just long enough to find me where I still sat by the altar.
His mouth lifted, not quite a smile but warm, and he tilted his head toward the door.
“No time like the present,” he said, and stepped out into the light.
The glow from the doorway reached the altar now, stretched long and thin across the floor like a path drawn only for me.
I stared at it for a moment – that line of gold cutting through dust – and without warning, I felt the weight in my chest begin to shift with a deep, curling pressure, like breath held too long in the lungs or heat pressed too long on the skin.
I reached for the edge of the altar to steady myself, but my fingers faltered in the space above the stone, held there by a tremor I couldn’t quite master.
Then the heat came – sudden and absolute – surging up through my arms with a force that seemed to unmake the air around me.
My hands flared with it, veins lit from within by a fierce brightness.
The stone floor cracked beneath me. The old rot gave way first, but then the flame caught faster than thought – hungry, alive, spilling out from under me in a burst that turned cloth to cinder and wood to screaming light.
I stumbled back, but the fire moved with me. It leapt from the altar to the rafters, raced along the beams like a hungry beast. The ivy curled inwards before it blackened. Smoke rolled low across the stone, and for a heartbeat I stood in it – shaking, burning, alive.
Outside, I could hear Mathias calling my name, and I suddenly understood that the flames were not just licking the ceiling anymore; they had broken through it, reaching for the morning sky like greedy fingers.
I felt the cloth on me turn to ash as the flames danced over every inch of my body…
but I also noticed that it did not hurt me.
Inside my veins, behind my eyes, at the back of my throat, yes—the pressure and the pulse were so painful I feared I might just collapse underneath it. But on my skin, the flames did not harm me; they more caressed me softly like a lover.
I could hear the beams overhead groaning, the timber cracking. Sparks rained down in bursts, catching the walls, the floor, and the empty packs left piled near the door.
The shouts outside had risen to panic now – voices calling my name, others shouting for help, for water that wouldn’t come fast enough.
But the heat wasn’t chasing me. It moved with me, curled along the edges of my skin like something that had no interest in harming me.
My breath came shallow from the smoke, but I wasn’t choking.
My hands were still glowing, streaked with gold that pulsed and dimmed and surged again with each beat of my heart.
And I realised that the heat still roared inside me—beneath the skin, behind the eyes, pulsing along every inch of bone.
My clothes were gone, burnt away, but my body stood untouched without a single wound or blister.
I heard the door from the entrance fall on the ground, the flames making quick work of its wood – and beyond where it had stood, I saw the faint light of the morning and the panicked frames of the men who had come to see us off…
but also Mathias. I heard him call me again, his voice strained – maybe because of the hum in my ears and the constant drumming in my veins – and I stepped towards the doorway.
One, two, three careful steps into the flames, but they just run up my thighs to meet my hips, like water rises to meet you the deeper you go.
I moved toward the doorway, the soft smoke trailing at my heels. When I crossed the threshold, the wind caught me first – sharp, salt-slick, alive with the scent of scorched wood and sea brine. The light followed a moment later, fierce and full across my face.
At first, no one moved. The flames were still at my back, roaring through the rafters, sending up sparks that scattered like stars behind me.
Smoke curled around my legs, my shoulders, my hair, my skin, but none of them bore a single mark.
I stood at the edge of the wreckage with the fire still clinging to me – not to consume, only to crown.
Mathias was the first to see me. He had been mid-step, his hand reaching toward the blaze as if he might tear it apart with fingers alone. But now his arm dropped, slack at his side, his face frozen in something that wasn’t quite fear and wasn’t quite awe either – but something caught between them.
Behind him, the others drew back. One of the Elders made a sign against his chest. A younger man turned his face away entirely. Even the horses shied, their hooves stamping the ground in restless warning.
It was Mathias who moved first. One stride, then another – the crowd parting without needing to be asked.
He reached for the nearest cloak, yanked it from where it hung across a saddle horn, and crossed the space between us as though nothing else existed.
Not the fire still blazing. Not the eyes that watched.
Not even the wind that pulled at the scorched remnants of what had once been the temple.
He said nothing, just drew the cloak up and over my shoulders in one smooth motion, gathering it closed around me with both hands. The wool was coarse, the lining still warm from the morning sun, and his grip held none of the trembling I felt in my own limbs.
I looked up at him then – searching his face because some part of me desperately feared what I might find there. Fear, maybe. Or worse – that he saw me now the way the others did. A monster dressed in flesh.
But all I found was Mathias. Steady. Certain. The line of his mouth drawn taut, his eyes bright with relief so sharp it almost looked like pain. His forehead touched mine, just for a breath, and I felt the exhale ripple through him as if he hadn’t breathed in minutes.
Then he kissed me – not with fire, but with the piercing force of someone who had waited too long, afraid it might already be too late.