“It seems he intends to send most of his army after you.”
My body goes very still.
“He doesn't realize he's already lost,” says Malachi. “That Mouren's control over dragons is merely the stuff of history books now—and when I make those dragons turn their fire back toward him, it won't matter how many soldiers he sends my way. Of course, he'll find this out the hard way, if you insist on forcing me to meet him on the battlefield.”
Breathe, I command myself.
“You could end this right now. All you have to do is willingly agree to pick up where you and I left off, and then we can return to Dralsk in peace. We don't have to fight.”
It sounds tempting, but we both know that such a peace wouldn't last. It would only be a matter of time before he continued to scheme his revenge against Mouren.
So I turn away, fixing my gaze on a bit of water trickling down the cave wall.
“Suit yourself.” He starts toward the exit but leaves the canteen on the ground, within my reach, as if to tell me his offer is still on the table.
As I glance at it, a sudden, bold rush of defiance shoots through me. “It doesn't matter if I go with you.”
Malachi pauses.
“He would come for me, either way. With or without dragons, he would still go to war for me.”
There is nothing left of the man I once loved when he turns back to look at me. I see only dark appraisal in his eyes and cold calculation in his smile. Or maybe that’s how healwayslooked at me; he hasn’t changed, but I have—enough that I can finally see things clearly.
“You said you heard the rumors about us, didn't you?” My voice is quiet but steady. “A love story for the ages.”
“And?”
“And it's true.”
He chuckles. “Is it now?”
I’m honestly still unsure. I still feel like a fool, like there’s a chance I’ve misread Reave as disastrously as I misread Malachi.
But I don’t take my words back.
“It’s more true than anything you ever gave me,” I tell him, lifting my chin.
A rigid uncertainty settles into his posture—barely visible, there and gone in an instant—even as his smile holds and his voice stays chillingly even. “Well. I can't wait to see how this love story ends. Luckily, that ending is swiftly approaching, and I won't be kept in suspense for long.”
With that, he turns and walks away again.
I exhale slowly once he’s out of sight, trying to ease my pulse back into something manageable.
Every nerve in my body is humming, wound tight. My heart takes longer to settle than I'd like. My hands are trembling, so I press them flat against the cold stone until they stop.
Outside, the wind is picking up, dragging sparks from the nearest campfire across what little I can see of the dark grey canvas of morning.
“Still here,” I whisper to myself, watching one floating,burning fragment after another until something loosens in my chest—another lie I believed, unraveling. And then another realization, more powerful than any before it, rises slowly in its place.
Only embers.
I'd taken those words as a verdict. Proof of what I'd believed for so, so long: that I was a shell of something that had burned, someone who survived Emberfall, but only just. Still standing, but hollowed out, not worth the effort of salvaging. Alive but fading, flickering down to something too small and scattered to matter.
Somehow, I forgot that embers still hold heat. Light. Possibility. And as I watch the sunrise fighting its way through the overcast sky, I begin to think…maybe that's what Sesca saw in me. Not the wreckage or the ruin. Not the loss.
The part that hadn't gone out—the sparks that burned on in spite of everything.
And given the right conditions, embers can reignite.
