Then she’s walking away, and I’m alone at the forest edge, watching the monastery burn and waiting for the man I’ve claimed to emerge from the flames.
Zrynok finds me at the threshold.
He emerges from the smoke like something born from fire—covered in soot and blood, his armor scorched in a dozen places, his sword notched and dulled from the night’s violence.Burns mark his forearms where flying sparks found gaps in his protection.
But his eyes are clear. And when he sees me, something in them shifts—a softening I’ve come to recognize, a vulnerability he only shows when we’re close enough to touch.
“The monastery?” I ask.
“Burning.” He stops beside me, close enough that his arm brushes mine. The contact sends heat through me that has nothing to do with the fire behind us. “I made sure. Every building, every garden, every hidden chamber. No one will rebuild what was there. The stone itself will be cleansed.”
“The records?”
“Marceline has them. Everything she could carry.” A pause. The firelight plays across his features, and the exhaustion he’s been carrying all night shows through—in the set of his jaw, in the way the burns on his forearms have finally started to register on his face. “There are names on those documents. Powerful names. This isn’t over.”
“No.” I reach for his hand. Find it. Our fingers intertwine—natural now, instinctive, the kind of contact that no longer requires thought. “But tonight, it’s enough.”
We stand there, watching the monastery burn, while the last of the survivors stream past us into whatever new lives await.
Some of them pause to thank us.
A young woman—barely twenty, taken only months ago—presses her hands to my cheeks and whispers gratitude I don’t know how to accept. Her fingers are cold, trembling, but her eyes hold something fierce. Something that might survive.
An older man—one of the prisoners we freed from the cells—grips Zrynok’s forearm in a warrior’s salute and says something in a dialect I don’t recognize. Zrynok responds in kind, his voice rough but respectful.
Others don’t stop. Too focused on escape, on freedom, on putting as much distance as possible between themselves and their prison. I understand that too. I remember my own first hours of freedom—the desperate need to run, to keep running, to never stop until the monastery was nothing but a memory.
The last survivor disappears into the grassland. The burning corridor continues to consume the forest behind us, its flames reaching higher now, its smoke obscuring the stars we worked so hard to reach.
We’re alone.
Just me and Zrynok and the fire and the night.
“What do you need?” His voice is quiet. Careful. The voice of someone who has spent a lifetime asking the wrong questions, and is finally learning the right ones.
“Right now?” I look out at the grassland, at the distant shapes of the survivors still moving toward whatever waits beyond. “Somewhere safe for them. Towns that will take refugees. Healers who understand Bloom exposure. Families, for those who have them left.”
“And then?”
FIFTY-TWO
ARWEN
Iturn to face him.
The fire paints his features in orange and shadow—the crooked line of his broken nose, the permanent squint from his damaged eye, the tusks he’s filed down to practical points. The infection’s marks thread beneath his skin, a dark lattice that will never fully clear. He’ll carry the Bloom in his blood for the rest of his life. We both will.
But carrying something isn’t the same as being controlled by it.
“Then I have some names to investigate.” My voice is steady despite the emotions threatening to break through. “Nobles who funded this place. Officials who protected it. People who need to face consequences.”
“That sounds like dangerous work.”
“It is.”
“The kind of work that gets people killed.”
“Probably.”
