Freedom tasted like iron.
Not honey. Not wine. Not air.
Just blood and ash.
The chains had been her first memory.
The cell, her cradle.
The screams of others like her young, burning, broken had been the lullaby that sang her to sleep for decades beneath the Sanctum.
Now, her lullaby was gone.
Replaced by silence.
Not peace.
Preparation.
The world above didn't know her name anymore.
But they would.
She moved through the mountains like a storm.
Not the screaming, sky-splitting kind.
No.
The quiet kind, the one that turns the air to ice and buries villages before the first flake is even seen.
She walked barefoot, the earth hardening beneath each step. Her skin glowed faintly in the dark, etched with runes she didn't remember carving. Her hair was wild, wind-kissed, streaked with silver from decades of burning thoughts into the void.
And her eyes
Her eyes had changed.
Once gray.
Now molten.
Furnaces in her skull.
Eyes that had seen death… and chosen to wait.
She'd learned patience in the dark.
Patience... and hate.
Not the wild, screaming kind.
The kind that whispers.
That sharpens.
That listens.
Hate that plans.
When the Obsidian Order buried her, they thought she would rot.
But fire doesn't rot.
Fire waits.
They called her failure.
A flaw in their perfect weapon designs.
Too defiant. Too loud. Too full of questions.
They carved into her spine.
They bled her over runes.
They told her her power was a gift they could take.
But it wasn't.
It had always been hers.
And now it had no leash.
The first outpost didn't burn immediately.
She walked in wearing nothing but the dusk-colored cloak scavenged from a fallen knight. Eyes down. Hands empty.
They asked questions.
She smiled.
They didn't scream.
She didn't let them.
Not out of mercy.
Out of discipline.
Their ashes fed her next fire.
Every soul she touched gave her fragments.
Not memories.
Echoes.
Names.
Places.
Kael.
His name always burned the hottest.
The boy who had sat beside her in that cell.
The boy who had listened.
The boy who had stabbed her to earn his fire.
She didn't hate him.
Not in the way they expected.
He had been made by the same system.
Another orphan offered to the flame.
He had just believed more than she did.
He believed in rules.
She believed in freedom.
And now?
Now she believed in reckoning.
The winds howled higher as she climbed the next ridge.
Snow drifted down in soft waves, gathering on her shoulders like a shroud.
But it didn't melt.
It couldn't.
Her body no longer bled heat like a mortal. It held bound it, used it. She was no longer fire given form.
She was form given fire.
A crucible in a woman's shape.
She paused at the edge of a crag, gazing down at the valley below.
Smoke.
Campfires.
And beyond that, a ripple in the flame that ran deep , too deep.
Not Kael.
Not Sarya.
Something older.
Watching.
Waiting.
She knew the scent of that hunger.
The Harbinger was near.
A grin tugged at her lips.
Not fear.
Recognition.
He had been the first to strike her chains.
Not to free her.
To bind her deeper.
A brother in the forge.
A betrayer in the dark.
She had loved him once.
Not romantically.
Ritually.
Two souls burned side by side.
Two pyres meant to consume kingdoms.
Only he had submitted.
He had let the Order turn him into a shadow in a man's skin.
She had chosen pain instead.
And now… he would feel it too.
She descended the ridge in silence.
A storm at her back.
Flame underfoot.
And thoughts, always thoughts, swirling like embers.
Kael is close.
Sarya is with him.
And something ancient waits in the dark between them.
She could feel their flame patterns now.
Kael, steady and rigid like a blade honed too often.
Sarya, wild and splintered flame not yet chosen, not yet trusted.
And somewhere in her heart, a memory surfaced.
A softer one.
A flash of Kael's hands trembling as he bandaged her wrists in that obsidian cell.
A whisper
"I won't let them hurt you again."
He had lied.
But maybe he hadn't wanted to.
She paused in a frozen grove, reaching for the flame around her.
It came easily now.
The forest pulsed.
The trees twisted.
Heat bled into the sky.
She opened her hand and a flower bloomed there.
Not red.
Not gold.
Black.
Fire shaped like grief.
A token for Kael.
A warning.
The night deepened.
Ahead, the land would shift out of the mountains, into the Dead Marches.
The edge of the world.
The last place she had felt human.
And the last place Kael had seen her alive.
She would meet him there.
She would return what was broken.
And if he begged?
She didn't know what she'd do.
Forgive?
Destroy?
Embrace?
Maybe all three.
Maybe none.
But one thing she did know:
She would not go back in chains.
Far behind her, a lone scout stumbled through the snow, shivering and afraid, tracking the heat trail she left behind like a comet.
He didn't see her when she turned.
He didn't scream when she stepped from the fire and took his fear into her palms.
She let him live.
Just long enough to whisper:
"Tell them I'm coming."
Then she disappeared into smoke.
And the mountains burned behind her.