He doesn’t say whether the cells will still be standing. We both know they won’t be. But the people in them—if the fire didn’t reach the lower levels, if they stayed pressed against the stone the way the trapped learn to do—they may yet be alive in the ruins. Waiting for someone to come back. The way I always waited for someone to come back.
“Keep it that way.” I face forward again. “We stop when we reach open ground. Not before.”
FIFTY
ARWEN
The burning corridor lights our way.
Embers drift through the air like crimson snow. The heat presses against my back, urging us forward, away from the monastery, away from everything that tried to destroy us. The trees groan as fire consumes them—ancient wood crackling, branches falling, centuries of growth reduced to kindling in minutes.
I don’t mourn the forest’s destruction. The Thornwood has been the monastery’s first line of defense for three hundred years—a maze of interlocking branches and trip-hazard roots, saturated with wild Bloom that disoriented escapees and made running feel impossible. Keepers knew every path through its depths. Prisoners knew only that entering the forest meant death or recapture.
But the fire has changed things.
The path Zrynok carved burns away the undergrowth, the wild vines, the spore-thick air. Where the flames have passed, the ground is clear—charred but navigable, the smoke rising behind us instead of choking our lungs. The Thornwood’s maze has become a corridor, and the corridor leads to freedom.
Some of the survivors are crying. I hear the sobs behind me—quiet, choked sounds from people who never expected to see open sky again. Others are silent, their expressions blank with shock or overwhelmed with emotions they don’t know how to process.
I understand both reactions. I’ve lived both reactions.
“Keep moving.” My voice carries through the smoky air. “We’re almost through.”
Circe’s hand tightens on mine. I tighten back.
We keep moving.
The forest edge appears through the smoke like a promise.
Beyond the last row of trees: open ground. Grassland that stretches toward distant hills, untouched by the monastery’s influence, free of the Bloom’s sweet rot. The sky above is tinged orange from the fire behind us, but I can see stars beginning to emerge through the haze. Real stars. The same ones I used to watch through my cell’s tiny grate, counting the hours until dawn.
I stop at the threshold between forest and freedom. Let the survivors stream past me, their faces illuminated by firelight, their eyes fixed on the open ground ahead.
Some of them break into runs the moment they clear the trees—stumbling, awkward runs, their bodies too weak for speed but too desperate to walk. Others stop just beyond the forest’s edge and turn back, watching the trees burn with expressions I can’t read. Relief, maybe. Or mourning for the part of themselves they’re leaving behind in the flames.
One woman—elderly, her white hair singed from the fire—drops to her knees in the grass and presses her palms flat against the earth. Just kneeling there, feeling ground that isn’t stone, breathing air that isn’t thick with incense and spores. She stays that way for a long moment before another survivor helps her up.
I watch it all. Catalogue the faces, the reactions, the small victories happening all around me.
This is what we fought for. This is why the blood and horror and loss meant something.
This moment. These people. Free.
A man pauses beside me.
Oben—forty-five years old, twenty years in captivity, one of the longest-held prisoners we freed from the cells. His face is gaunt, his eyes hollow, his body carrying the particular fragility of someone who has forgotten how to exist outside a cage. When we found him in his cell, he’d been staring at the wall, counting scratches he’d stopped making years ago.
“You came back.” His voice is rough from disuse. “You escaped, and you came back.”
“Someone had to.”
“No.” He shakes his head slowly, the movement strange on someone who has spent two decades in stillness. “No one had to. That’s why it matters.”
He doesn’t thank me. Doesn’t say anything else. Just walks past me into the open ground, his steps steadier than they were an hour ago, his shoulders straightening as if the absence of trees overhead has removed some invisible burden.
I watch him stop at the clearing’s center. Watch him tilt his head back and stare at the stars. Watch his lips move in what might be prayer or might be simple wonder.
Twenty years without stars. Twenty years without open sky.
