Kyla’s cottage smelled of smoke and dried herbs, a herb-scented sanctuary hewn out of the mountain’s ribcage. Bunches of roots and bundles of sage swung from low rafters, catching the weak light and throwing crooked shadows across the stone. The hearth breathed a thin, steady glow, its embers a white-gold, as if the room itself tried to warm something that had burned raw.Ragnar carried Freya across the threshold like a relic: careful, reverent, hands iron but gentle. Ash dusted her hair; a crimson smear stained the corner of her mouth. Up close, she was too warm, an inner heat humming under her skin that no poultice could wholly quell. She smelled of smoke and iron and something softer beneath it, a faint memory of rain against hot stone.Kyla moved with the slow certainty of someone who had mended worse wounds. Her fingers were steady as she laid warm poultices of crushed shadow-herbs against Freya’s scorched skin. Nyra worked the edges of the fever with quiet incantations, her brea
The silence after Skyrana’s death was suffocating.Not the silence of peace, but the silence of a mountain that had just borne witness to a god’s unraveling. The Chamber of Echoes, once thrumming with whispers of the dead, lay hollow. No voices. No curses. Only the thunder of Freya’s heartbeat in her ears, louder than the settling of stone and the hiss of molten veins running through fractured rock.Her fingers still clutched the Sword of Flame. It pulsed faintly, its fire no longer scorching, no longer something she borrowed, it was hers. It hummed in time with her blood, as natural and inevitable as breath. Less a weapon now, more an extension of herself.The silence pressed closer. Heavy. Watchful.“Freya!”Ragnar’s voice tore through it.She turned, sluggish, just as he came into view, racing down the fractured stone steps, his figure a blur of silver and shadow. Dust streaked his dark hair, blood traced a sharp line from his temple, and yet he didn’t falter. He didn’t slow. Not f
The Chamber was collapsing.Stone shrieked like a living thing as fractures tore through the mountain’s bones. Molten rivers bled from fissures in the floor, fire spilling upward as if the earth itself were hemorrhaging. Runes cracked and shattered, their chains of light dissolving into sparks that rained down like falling stars.At the center, two flames clashed, one silver, one gold-red, locked in a storm so violent the void itself screamed.Freya staggered, her knees buckling beneath the crushing weight of power. Her own fire flickered at the edges, guttering, dimming. Her breath came ragged, each inhale cut by the searing tide that pressed her toward the breaking point.Across from her, Skyrana surged forward, radiant and terrible, her silver fire blooming like a tidal wave of ruin. Laughter spilled from her lips, cruel and echoing, a sound like glass shattering.“You are breaking, child,” the goddess taunted, her voice a whip. “The fire bends. The vessel cracks. Soon there will b
The mountain screamed.Stone cracked like thunder, veins of fire splitting through the Chamber as gold and silver clashed in an endless storm. Every rune carved into the black floor shattered one by one, their chains of light snapping like broken bones beneath the weight of two flames that had never been meant to coexist.The void was a chaos of light and shadow ripping against each other, fire transforming the air into a living furnace.Freya staggered, her body a vessel of pain. Every nerve screamed, every breath was torn from her lungs as if the fire itself tried to claim her. The Sword of Flame seared her palms, its hilt glowing as though it had been reforged in her grip, pulsing with a heartbeat not entirely her own. Her aura swirled around her, golden-red, alive and defiant, snapping like a storm wind against the void.Across from her, Skyrana loomed.The Flame-Born Queen radiated silver fire in endless waves, her body a silhouette of molten ruin. Her voice, when it split the ai
The void shivered, trembling like the surface of water struck by a stone.Freya staggered back, every nerve alive with the sense that something greater than time itself had stirred. Skyrana was no longer a shadow of whispers or a fractured reflection in the Chamber’s illusions. She stepped forward as flesh made from fire, her presence a living storm. Her form shimmered, woven from molten threads of light and shadow, every line of her body crackling with untamed, ancient power. Her hair was a river of liquid silver, blazing like molten metal spilled from the core of the earth, and her eyes… they were not eyes at all, but endless pits of flame, burning with a ruin older than kingdoms.She was beauty sharpened into terror. A goddess of destruction, reborn.And she smiled, cruel and calm, as though the void itself bent beneath her.“So… the child dares to bare her teeth.” Her voice rippled through the air, heavy as iron, smooth as velvet, carrying centuries of dominance. It coiled around
The fire tore her apart.Freya’s scream was soundless, ripped from her throat as the Chamber devoured the first vision and spun her into another. Her knees buckled, her fingers scraping against unseen ground, yet there was no ground, only a shifting abyss of shadow and flame.“Still standing,” Skyrana’s voice lilted, echoing in every direction. “How stubborn you are. How deliciously fragile.”Freya tried to answer, but her lungs filled with heat, not air. And then, sudden silence.When the fire cleared, she stood in the middle of the great hall of Ragnar’s palace. It was whole, untouched, lit with the golden glow of torches. Yet the silence was wrong. Too still. Too waiting.She turned slowly. Her breath froze.Bodies lay sprawled across the stone floor. Wolves. Servants. Nyra. Kyla. All lifeless, their eyes empty, their faces twisted in terror.And at the center of it all, her own hands.They were dripping with blood, fingers scorched with flame. The Sword of Flame hung loosely in he