I tried to scream. Nothing came. My breath had already been stolen. Smoke surged into me, thick and bitter, filling my throat, my lungs, my skull. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t breathe. Blood and ash filled my mouth and my nerves lit up like strikes of lightning. Everything burned. Inside. Out. Gone.
It wasn’t pain. It was obliteration.
Unraveling.
Splintering.
Worse than dying.
Worse than anything.
And through it all, I still heard him.
Will.
Screaming for me.
His voice cracked. Fractured. It cut deeper than the fire ever could.
I couldn’t let them kill my friends.
I wouldn’t.
And then, something shifted.
The fire wasn’t killing me. It was moving into me. Past skin. Past muscle. Deeper. Into my veins. Into my bones. Into the hollow place behind my ribs where everything else had already burned away.
I should’ve been ash. But I wasn’t. I was still there.
Still me.
My heart beat. Steady. Defiant. And the fire pulsed with it.
It wasn’t consuming me anymore. It was becoming a part of me. I pressed my hands against the burning wood and coal beneath me and pushed myself upright.
I rose.
And the fire rose with me.
Will lay on the ground, his eyes were wide and unfocused, the horror still etched into every part of him. As if someone had stolen the life from his body and left the rest behind.
He thought I was gone.
He had watched me burn alive.
And the man who’d done it, the one who had thrown me into that fire, was walking toward him. Slowly. Knife in hand.
He wasn’t in a hurry. He thought he had all the time in the world.
My eyes locked on Will, on that knife, and something broke in me.
“NO!”
I didn’t just scream it. I unleashed it. A sound that cracked the air, tearing from my throat. It wasn’t just a word, it was a command. A cry of rage and grief and something deeper. It ripped through the trees, sent birds scattering from the canopy above. It shook the earth beneath us, and made every last one of them stop and look at me.
The man froze mid-step, knife still raised, and I stepped forward.
My bare feet pressed into the ground, embers still glowing beneath me. The fire clung to my skin, wrapped around my arms, but it didn’t burn. Not me.
