Chapter Thirty-Two Frejara #2
But it wasn’t just flame I wielded. The sword steady in my hand, its weight familiar and unbending beneath my fingers.
Smaller and quieter than the fire she commanded, it carried its own weight—steel forged by hard-earned skill and the discipline of the barracks, where I had found purpose and comradery when the flame I expected never came.
I gripped the hilt deliberately, the metal unyielding in my palm, as if reminding me of every choice I’d made, every step taken without the promise of power.
This blade was mine not by birthright, but by the calluses earned in wielding it and the years that had tempered me as surely as the steel itself.
I held it close, a steady tether to the parts of myself that refused to fracture, even as the blaze within sought to unravel everything else.
Flames collided with a fury that shook the very bones of the hall, wild and relentless, tearing at the stone until cracks splintered and pillars gave way with groans that echoed like distant thunder.
The air thickened, choking with smoke and the bitter scent of burning banners, their woven stories reduced to ash before they could even fall.
Amid this chaos, I moved – less a force of control and more a thunderstorm, driven by every sore memory lodged in my chest. My fire lashed out with ragged abandon, a surge of grief and wrath tangled in every burst, while the blade in my hand cut through the maelstrom, slighter but no less fierce, a shard of unyielding steel borne of necessity and hard-won resolve.
I saw it first in the way her stance shifted—not broken, not faltering, but a fraction too slow to answer the fire that spiralled past her left shoulder, a beat late to draw the heat back under her hand.
Her expression held, but the discipline beneath it wavered – one misstep, half a breath, where her reach fell short.
Perhaps it was arrogance, or the pull of a spell not fully formed.
Or perhaps the flame itself, once hers alone, had begun to resist her will.
Whatever the cause, it left a space between one strike and the next, a gap in her mastery wide enough for me to step through.
I moved fast, not by plan but by impulse.
My blade cut through the surge of her flame, in a burst of heat that seared the air between us, but she recovered faster than I expected.
Her magic surged again – hardened, sudden, cruel.
A burst of force struck my arm at the elbow, another at my wrist, snapping through nerve and bone with precision meant not to kill but to disarm.
Pain rushed through me, raw and bright – a streak of heat so violent it sent the world lurching sideways.
The blade slipped from my grasp, metal scraping stone as it spun out of reach, severed from my hand by the force of her strike.
I reeled, breath knocked loose, the ground no longer where it had been.
One knee buckled, and the ground rose too fast to meet me, catching hard against my shin as I fought to keep upright.
The fire swelled around us, deafening, wild – but all I could feel was the dull throb of blood from my arm and the disorienting lightness of a hand left empty.
My other hand caught against my coat, fingers digging for balance – and there, in the charred fold of the pocket, I felt it.
Not the long grip of the sword I had trained with, not the familiar steel I had carried into war – but something smaller, its weight finer, more intimate – shaped for a different kind of reckoning.
My fingers closed around the hilt, pearl-smooth and blackened at the base, warm from the heat of my skin and whatever strange fire lived inside it still.
The cloth I had once wrapped it in had burned away long ago, but the blade endured – unchanged, unbroken.
As if it had always known I would come to this. As if it had waited.
The dagger slid free, the hilt fitting firm against my palm as I rose.
Heat licked across my shoulder where the last strike had landed, pain throbbing in a bright rhythm, but I moved through it, each step steadied by the fire still surging around me.
The Queen stood at the top of the steps, her hand drawn back to strike again, but the flames no longer leapt toward her call.
They faltered, swayed, pulled sideways in the air – as if torn between two commands and unsure now which one to obey.
I reached her as the fire broke rank. My arm drove forward, swift and sure, and the dagger struck just beneath her jaw.
The angle was deliberate – upward and hard, through muscle and into the place where breath thickens and stops.
Her body jerked once beneath the force, a sound catching in her throat as the blade sank deeper.
Magic flared bright at her skin, then fractured, skidding off the hilt in a crackling burst that scorched the stone underfoot.
The flames coiled, reeled, then pulled inward – not toward her hand, but toward the wound, as if drawn to the rupture now splitting through her flesh.
Her eyes locked on mine, bewildered, and for the space of a breath, there was no fire, no throne, no crown.
Only her eyes, wide and unblinking, as whatever held her upright began to give.
Her mouth opened, slack, the beginning of a word catching on her lips – but instead, she smiled.
Lips, blood-wet and trembling, peeled back over her teeth in a gruesome curl.
It held there – crooked and strange – as she clawed at my hand still holding the dagger in place, until all strength fell away from her and whatever light was left in her eyes dimmed.
Her hands dropped slowly, as though the will that had once commanded empires had unspooled at the root.
Behind her, the air seemed to shift – the faintest tremor, like light refracting through glass.
For a heartbeat, the mirrored surfaces along the throne room’s far wall rippled with the colour of flame, catching her final breath as if the glass itself remembered her.
Then it was gone, the shimmer fading with her last exhale, and the fire around us guttered sideways, unmoored, unravelling without the force that had kept it bound.
Then she fell. Not with majesty, not with grace – but forward, folding in on herself as her legs buckled and her body slumped against mine.
I staggered under her, knees hitting stone, the force of her collapse dragging me down with her.
Her head rolled against my shoulder, heavy and hot.
I didn’t and couldn’t let go. My arms locked around her by instinct, not mercy, and the scream tore its way out before I knew I was making it – raw, wordless, something pulled from my very marrow, thick with rage and loss, and all the things I had buried to make room for war.
The breath had barely left her when something tore loose.
It began as a tremor, subtle at first – a strange tautness in the air, as though every ember in the hall had drawn breath at once and would not release it.
Then came the pull, deep and insistent, a current moving beneath the floor, through the stone, and then through me.
The heat changed – thickened. The fire Mowgara had wielded did not die with her body – it twisted free, wrenched from her bones like smoke forced through a narrow crack, and for a moment it hung there, suspended between us, caught in the space where her chest met mine.
And then it struck.
It drove through me in a rush that broke thought and sense and breath.
My back arched hard against the stone, mouth wrenched open in a cry that blistered as it left me.
Light seared down my spine, poured behind my eyes, split across my ribs in jagged lines, and there was only the raw force of something long contained, now unleashed, searching for a vessel and finding mine.
My hands clawed at the ground, at her shoulders, at nothing.
The scream returned, a guttural sound, shaped by pain, awe, and terror.
The chamber lit like a forge. Flames reeled outward in furious spirals, licking up the walls, across the throne, into the carvings overhead. The gold filigree cracked and blackened, burned through in a breath. Every shadow lifted and burned, consumed before they had the chance to stretch.
The fire refused to release me. With each breath I managed to pull through scorched lungs, it pressed deeper – not content to be held, not willing to be wielded, but intent on remaking.
It was motion without pause, heat without limit, a force too vast for command and too ancient to reason with.
What the Sisterhood had seized all those generations ago had not thinned with time, had not dulled or faded, but grown heavier with every life it passed through.
Drizzna the Deceiver herself had carried it all once – long enough to divide it, long enough to survive what no one else ever had – but even the First Sister had bent beneath its force.
That burden lived in me now, and it did not ask to be borne – it demanded to be survived.
I held my footing, barely, though the hall had begun to buckle beneath the weight of what filled it.
Flame curled at my limbs with the insistence of tidewater forced through a narrowing shore—surrounding, binding, reshaping.
I tried to gather it back into shape, to contain what was surging outward from every part of me, but there was no grip that held.
The fire had no need of hands. It moved through thought, instinct, bone, nerve, and every raw conduit it could find.
This was no longer an inheritance passed from one to another.
It was transformation, absolute and already underway.
The first shudder came at the base of my neck, where the fabric clung wet with sweat and heat.
It flared once – a narrow tongue of flame, sharp as a needle and then caught, spreading in a ribbon that traced the curve of my arm before I could move to stop it.
The heat feasting on my insides turned outward, leaping from the hollows of my throat, my chest, the bends of my elbows where the skin was thinnest. I pitched forward, limbs seizing with the strain of staying whole.
The breath that left me came jagged, half-formed, too thin to cool the fire tearing through muscle and marrow.
My knees scraped against the stone as my weight shifted, hands braced wide to catch what balance I could still claim.
The heat surged upward, licking higher with each pulse of my heart, wrapping itself around my spine, my throat, my jaw – until even the air inside me burned.
I was no longer standing in it. I was inside it.
And it inside me. My vision blurred, not from tears, but from light—fierce, searing, gold-white, too bright to belong to flesh or sky or earth.
My mouth opened, and I felt the scream in my chest, but it had no sound left to carry.
I burned, but did not burn away. I broke but did not fall.
Somewhere behind me, the dagger fell to the ground – the same one I had carried through smoke and ruin, the same one I had driven into her throat.
It landed on its side, metal hissing where it kissed the floor, steam rising in faint threads from Mowgara’s blood still clinging to its blade.
But even that, in the end, was pulled from sight – as the fire claimed everything, including me.