Page 149 of Embers of Ruin

It’s her.

She stands there as though this world belongs to her. Then her eyes meet mine and something inside me... remembers. The ember. The light. The part of me I’ve spent my entire life trying to understand.

It knows her.

Somehow, I move with her hand. I don’t remember pushing myself from the floor, don’t remember telling my body to move, but suddenly I’m sitting up. The world was dim—then it went black—and now I feel like I’ve woken from a centuries-old sleep. I look down at myself, at the golden glow illuminating every inch of my skin.

“Illurine,” Thorin breathes. The name echoes around us but the Goddess doesn’t look at him. She looks at me.

I wish she wouldn't. There’s something unbearable in her expression, something too gentle to be mercy and too sorrowful to be judgment. I want fury from her. I want wrath. I want some great divine anger to make sense of the pain ripping through me. Instead, she looks at me the way my mother did in that memory, with grief and love woven so tightly together I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.

Then her gaze shifts to Thorin.

He lowers his head before she speaks. That alone terrifies me. The Shadow King, the cursed ruler of Andell, the man who terrifies men into silence with one glance, kneels before her as if the weight of her attention is too much to bear.

“You loved her,” Illurine says. Her voice is gentle, but there’s something eternal beneath it, something that has spoken worlds into existence and watched them turn to dust.

Thorin flinches.

“I love her, Goddess,” he says, then falters, as though no title feels worthy in the presence of the divine. “She is the one thing I have ever wanted for myself.”

“You loved her,” she says again, “and still you let the darkness reach through you for what was not freely given.”

His throat works as if he is trying to swallow a blade. “I couldn't control it—I don’t…” His eyes go wide, panic etched across his perfectly crafted face, and I realize I’ve never seen Thorin at a loss for words before. He looks utterly devastated.

“I saw the light and the darkness inside... the darkness called to me—I reacted—I did not mean to, and now I—” His voice drops as he hangs his head.

“I know.”

“I thought the prophecy meant—I—I let it consume me…”

“You did not think,” Illurine interrupts gently. “You let the darkness use you as a vessel, and in doing so, you gave it the chance to act through you.”

The words settle over us, quiet and absolute.

Thorin looks at me then, and I see the exact moment he understands. Not understands that he hurt me—he already knew that. Not understands that the magic went wrong—he knew that too. This is deeper. Older. A truth finally sinking into the part of him that has spent centuries building walls around everything soft enough to break.

The First King stole because he was afraid. Thorin reached because he let the darkness consume him. Different men. Different centuries. The same wound wearing different faces.

“I never wanted power,” he says, voice rough enough to barely be sound. “I never wanted the curse.”

Illurine’s expression softens, and somehow that is the cruelest thing she could have done. “I know.”

His shoulders bow. “And yet,” he whispers, “I became him anyway.”

The silence that follows is so heavy it feels alive. I want to speak but I don’t know what I’d say. The pain in my chest has become something stranger now, less sharp and more hollow, as if the attempted theft carved a space inside me and left me to feel the shape of it. I look down at my hands and find gold still flickering beneath the skin, but it is threaded with black where Thorin’s shadows touched it. Not consumed. Not destroyed. Changed.

A sound tears out of me. Not quite a laugh. Not quite a sob. Of course I am changed again. Why wouldn’t I be?

A memory stolen. A family lost. A king blamed. A cage built. A prophecy sharpened. A kiss turned into a wound. Everyone has taken something from me and called it necessary, and now even my own magic looks back at me with scars.

Illurine kneels beside me. In her palm, a small ember appears, no larger than a heartbeat. It floats above her skin, gold at its center and dark around the edges, pulsing with a rhythm I recognize before I understand why. It feels like warmth. Like breath. Like every flower I have ever coaxed from dead soil and every awful, beautiful thing I have survived.

Mine.

The word moves through me with such force that my fingers tremble. Illurine places the ember into my hands. Heat pours into me, but it doesn’t burn. It fills the hollow place in my chest, returning what had nearly been torn free. The shadows inside me recoil from it, not vanishing, not defeated, but reminded of something they cannot own.

“It was never his to take,” Illurine says.