Chapter Thirty-One Frejara #3
A sound shifted behind me – the soft scrape of movement, so slight it might have passed unnoticed if we had not all been so tautly strung.
Mowgara’s eyes moved past me, a slow turn of the head like a predator catching the flicker of something warm and breathing in the underbrush.
I could hear Mathias’ breath catch underneath that intimate and fiercely intimidating stare – the same one that had bent the knees of kings and warlords before.
She studied him for a beat, with the kind of intent that scraped clean through surface and bone.
And then she moved, slow and fluid, circling like someone who’d just noticed a crack in the armour and was deciding when to press.
“And this?” she said at last, her voice almost curious. “Did you bring him here for me, or was he simply too dull to know better?”
I felt Mathias halt beside me, but it wasn’t fear that held him – more the coiled precision of someone choosing every breath with care.
Mowgara circled closer, not so much approaching as drawing him into the orbit of her gaze, and I saw her expression begin to change.
The curl of her mouth slackened, thoughtful now, her brows lifting ever so slightly.
“Oh,” she breathed, and there was something darker beneath it – amusement laced with a razor’s edge.
“I know that look.” She tipped her head, just a little, considering.
“They always have it, the ones cursed with the Sight. That vacancy. That ache behind the eyes, like they’ve stared too long at something that doesn’t blink back.
” Her voice thickened with the last word, something that might have once been fascination or pity before it hardened into cruelty.
“They always find their way into places they shouldn’t, those wretched things.
Drawn to fire like insects.” She clicked her tongue, almost indulgently.
“Twisted up in their own riddles, unravelled by what they see. Cursed things, all of them. Cursed and alone.” Then she turned back to me, her gaze sharp enough to draw blood.
“And this is what you drag behind you? A broken bird to perch on your shoulder? How poetic. You’ve never been able to resist the wounded ones, have you? ”
Something in me flared – savage, searing, closer to the surface than I meant to let it.
Not yet a blaze, but a heat building beneath the skin, mounting like a furnace waking to life.
The torches along the wall dipped and strained, their flames bowing inward, as if the chamber itself had sensed what was beginning to stir within me.
Mowgara’s gaze cut back to mine, and I saw the shift into something sharper, more focused. Gone was the leisurely cruelty of a cat playing with its prey – in its place was pure intent. She had seen the tremor, tasted the heat, and in that precise, measured moment, marked it for what it was.
She moved first. No flourish, no warning – just a flick of the wrist, and the world snapped into fire.
It struck the stone beside me with the force of a god’s judgement, fracturing the floor in a jagged eruption of heat and light.
I raised my arm too late, felt the burn graze across my side, the pain sharp and clean.
The air screamed between us, thick with the taste of iron and scorched skin.
She was already moving again—her hands carving the air, every motion precise, economical, wrought from decades of mastery.
The flame that answered her call was no longer red or gold but a deep, coiling blue, the colour of something ancient turned vicious, and it obeyed her like a tightly leashed beast.
The fire in me surged in response as if by its own accord – raw and untethered – lashing through the chamber in wild, reckless lines. Whereas hers flowed in precision like purpose-forged steel, mine tore like a storm—too much, too fast, too willing to consume.
The clash came not with sound but with force, magic snarling where it met, colliding between us with a heat that split the air.
Her fire curled inward, controlled and coiling, testing mine with surgical contempt.
Mine struck back raw and unformed, but I gave it weight, gave it fury.
I met her with everything I had, and for a heartbeat, I saw her flinch.
Not from fear.
From effort.
She pressed harder. I felt it in the burn licking across my skin, in the stagger of my steps, and in the way the air itself seemed to bow to her will.
Her fire moved like a net tightening around me, each breath a little thinner, each block a little slower.
She fought like someone who had never known doubt.
I fought like someone learning how to breathe underwater.
And then - Mathias moved. His coat whipped in the heat, his arm already in motion. I didn’t see the blade until it gleamed briefly in the firelight, striking her shoulder with a clean, slicing arc. Not deep, but enough to jolt her to focus, to break the line of power she held taut like a bowstring.
It was not a blow meant to kill. It was meant to interrupt. A rhythm broken. A beat stolen.
Mowgara’s gaze snapped toward him, startled less by the threat than by the gall.
And with that flicker of attention – half a breath, no more – the weight on my chest lifted.
The tether of her power loosened, and I dragged the air into my lungs like I had been drowning and just found my way to the surface.
Mowgara turned with the calm certainty of a storm, deciding where to break – unhurried, unshaken, each step a verdict already cast. Just a flick of her fingers, quick as a whipcrack, and the air around Mathias erupted in flame.
It moved faster than thought, the lance of heat that punched clean through his chest. He didn’t even have time to scream.
His eyes met mine, wide for only a moment – and then still, filled not with fear but with a terrible peace.
As if he had seen it all before. As if this pain was only a page turned at last.
He dropped to his knees, the front of his coat blackening and smoking, the fabric warping as if it too was trying to fold him away.
One hand pressed weakly to the wound, but there was nothing left to hold in.
The fire had passed cleanly through. I lunged toward him, my knees hitting the floor before I even fully realised I was moving – but it was already done.
His body sagged to the stone, the light in his eyes fading not with panic, but with acceptance.
My hands were desperately reaching for him—his shoulder, his coat, the blood-slick edge of his collarbone—anything to keep him here, to hold him in place as if that could anchor what was slipping away.
His body was burning, not with fire now but with the heat it had left behind, a feverish echo of the force that had just passed through him.
He looked at me and then past me, his gaze caught on something overhead – wide, unblinking, and unbearably calm.
I followed the line of his eyes and saw what held them: the ceiling above us, high and domed, once lacquered in ornate murals of distant days of glory, had cracked and split open.
Flames licked across the painted surface, devouring the mural in jagged bursts.
One of the seven crowns—wrapped in gold and fire—had caught.
The paint bubbled, blistered, then crumbled, the shape of the crown bending downward until it broke free altogether.
It fell past us with a roar, struck the floor beside Mathias’s outstretched arm, and shattered on the ground with a sound like thunder splitting the earth.
The crown lay beside him in fractured ruin, gold split from stone, steam rising in threads from where it had struck. His chest rose once, shallow and shuddering. Blood pooled beneath him now, thick and dark, hissing where it met the heat that still clung to the floor.
His eyes found mine – clouded, flickering, the light behind them dimming with each quivering breath.
His lips moved, slow and halting, as though even a whisper demanded more from him than his body could give.
I leaned in close, catching the faint words as they fell from his mouth like a wisp of smoke.
“If this is the last breath I take… then I’m glad it’s this one… With you.”
His hand found mine – trembling, blood-warm – and held, just long enough to make the letting go unbearable.
I bent lower, my forehead pressed against his temple, the breath in my throat jagged and useless. “Come back,” I cried, though I knew he couldn’t. “Come back to me.”
But he wasn’t looking at me anymore. The stars above, distant and sharp in the hole the crown had torn through the ceiling, watched with all the indifference of Old Gods long grown weary of the grief of their creations.
My vision blurred. Not from tears, but from heat – the kind that made metal groan in its fittings.
I rose without thought, my fingers empty of his hand now and curled into fists.
My body remembered what had been stolen from it even as something else claimed it.
The pain did not fade. It hardened. And in its place: fury.
A tremor gathered beneath my skin, rising from marrow and muscle.
The power that once only stirred now surged – no longer held back but crashing forward like floodwaters through a broken dam.
My limbs burned and lightened at once. The sword at my side seemed to call for my hand – not with gravity, but with hunger.
I turned to Mowgara. She was smiling. Not with triumph, but with anticipation. As if this was the moment she’d been waiting for.
The chamber – vast and echoing – collapsed into clarity.
Stone and shadow. Fire and flesh. Every surface trembling, close to unmaking.
What rose in me was not a flicker or tremor now, but a reckoning – merciless and boundless.
Heat surged outward from beneath my skin.
My breath scorched as it left me. The ring of flame in my eyes widened, deepened, swallowed the whites entirely, a blaze held only by the boundaries of my gaze.
And then it broke.
Flames tore from my hands, my spine, my chest – bursting from the fractures inside me – until the world around me burned in the shape of my grief.
Mowgara was no longer smiling. Whatever satisfaction she had once worn had vanished, scorched from her face by the force that surged between us now.
She took a step back, eyes wide, the fire dancing in their reflection not with triumph but disbelief.
She looked at what I was becoming – stone cracking beneath my feet, the air pulsing with heat no living thing should survive – and for the first time, I saw fear on her face.
For a moment, she stood utterly still. No spell on her tongue, no taunt on her lips – only her eyes moving, fast and calculating, taking in the chaos I was unleashing.
Whatever she had been expecting – this was not it.
She raised her hand, a glimmer of recoil in the gesture—subtle, instinctive, as if some long-held certainty had slipped through her fingers.
For a breath, she hesitated, eyes fixed not on me, but on the fire she had once bound to her will – now burning beyond her reach.
The force that struck me was not sharp but vast – like a tide wrenched from the seabed, sudden and engulfing. It did not hurt; instead, it pushed me, driving me back across the floor as the chamber itself trembled in its wake. Dust shook loose from the walls. Old banners snapped in the heat.
And Mowgara turned – one swift motion – and fled through the arch at the back of the hall, her silhouette black against the blazing inferno. The doors groaned as they closed, iron grinding against iron, until they slammed shut with a sound that rang like a death knell.