Chapter 246
They said peace would feel like freedom.
It didn’t.
It felt like waiting.
Westeroz had gone eerily quiet in the days following the Bone King’s fall. No alarms. No cries. No burning. Only rebuilding — the sound of stone on stone, hammers on steel, voices low and tired but still moving forward.
But in the silence, I could feel something else.
Like a heartbeat beneath the floor.
Something the fire hadn’t touched.
Yet.
The Council met every third day now in the Flame Chamber, a great hall of scorched obsidian and dragon-carved columns that looked more like a shrine than a strategy room. The dragons attended in human form, regal and still dangerous. Kyral sat beside me always, her presence an unspoken reminder that I was not just queen by blood, but by bond.
Lilah leaned over the map at the center of the table, her eyes flicking between supply routes and burned-out towns. “The eastern settlements are still without water. Zaerion’s riders can bring crystals from the spring wells, but we’ll need a gate spell to move the bulk.”
I nodded. “I’ll write it tonight.”
“We also need to address the Orlyn border,” the Alpha said. “They’re claiming the lands left behind by the Bone King’s army.”
“They can claim what they like,” I said coldly. “Those lands belong to no one until they’ve been healed.”
Kyral’s gold eyes gleamed. “Do not let diplomacy dull your fire, Aria.”
“I won’t,” I said. “But we can’t afford another war—not yet.”
“War will come,” Zaerion murmured. “Peace is always temporary. Especially when you’re holding power no one else understands.”
He was looking at me when he said it.
I didn’t flinch.
That night, I couldn’t sleep.
I sat on the balcony of the Queen’s Wing, the city stretching out beneath me like a tapestry — domes patched with moss, crumbled towers laced with light, children running where soldiers used to stand.
The stars were unusually bright. The kind of brightness that felt watchful.
Kyral joined me in silence. She never asked when I grew quiet like this. She just stayed close.
“Do you hear it?” I asked softly.
“Hear what?”
“The fire… it’s still talking.”
She tilted her head. “What does it say?”
I swallowed hard. “That it’s not over.”
Kyral was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, “Flame never truly ends. It sleeps. Shifts. Waits.”
And something in me shivered.
Two days later, the boy arrived.
Dust-caked, no older than twelve, with eyes too old for his face. He didn’t speak when the guards found him wandering the outer gate. He simply held out a charred piece of parchment.
It bore my name.
When they brought him to me, he collapsed at my feet.
His voice was barely a whisper: “The dead are walking again. But they don’t look like him. They look like you.”
We followed the boy’s path two days east, past the blackened woods and the cliffs of Mire’s Edge, to the ruins of a temple older than Westeroz itself.
Kyral flew above, watching. Lilah rode at my side. The Alpha insisted on joining us, despite his healing wound. He didn’t say much, but I could feel his worry brewing like thunder.
The temple wasn’t empty.
It was cold.
I stepped through the shattered archway, my breath misting. Something moved along the edge of the stones — not a person. A shape.
Then I saw them.
Statues.
At least, I thought they were.
Five figures in cloaks of ash. Eyes hollow. Skin flaked. But they breathed.
And one of them turned to me.
“You wear the fire,” she rasped. “But it does not burn you.”
Kyral’s voice echoed through my mind. Be careful. This is old magic. Older than dragons.
I stepped forward slowly. “Who are you?”
The woman’s face cracked as she smiled. “Forgotten. Like the first queens. Like the gods before your flame.”
The others began to murmur, voices like wind in dry leaves.
“We were left here by your bloodline. Trapped by Thalara’s ward. You broke the chain.”
“What chain?” I demanded.
“Your battle with the Bone King shattered more than bone.”
She lifted her hand, revealing a small, glowing shard — black and red, humming like a heartbeat.
It pulsed when I looked at it.
My knees buckled.
It was a piece of the seal.
From the rift.
“Impossible,” I whispered. “I closed it. I sealed it again—”
“No,” she said. “You burned him. But the crack… remains.”
I reached out for the shard.
She jerked it away.
And suddenly—her eyes flared white.
“You will see them again. All of them. Even the ones you burned. Because fire consumes. But it never forgets.”
I staggered backward.
The world spun.
Then the stone beneath the woman's feet split.
Kyral roared above us.
The entire temple began to collapse.
The ash figures vanished.
And the shard?
Gone.
Back in Westeroz, the Council demanded answers.
“I’m not going to lie to them,” I said to Kyral. “They deserve the truth.”
“They do,” she agreed. “But be careful. Truth and panic are sisters.”
I stood before the Council, crown off, fire dimmed.
“We’ve learned the seal that held the rift wasn’t fully restored,” I said. “A fragment survived. And there are… things… beneath the world that want it open again.”
Zaerion stood. “Do you believe they’ll succeed?”
I didn’t answer right away.
Then: “They won’t. Because this time, I’ll find them before they rise.”
Lilah frowned. “But how? Where do we even look?”
The Alpha’s voice was quiet. “We start where the fire died first.”
The room stilled.
He looked at me.
“The Sea Citadel. Where your mother first raised her guard. Where your line began.”
I blinked. “But it was destroyed—”
“Exactly. Which means they think we won’t go back.”
I stared at the flame in the hearth, feeling it twist slightly.
The past wasn’t buried.
It was waiting.
That night, I wrote three letters.
One to the borderlands, summoning the flame scouts.
One to Zaerion, requesting maps of the broken coast.
And one… to no one.
A message to myself.
“You are the fire. But you are not invincible. You will burn again. And when you do… burn with purpose.”
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