Page 93 of She Who Was Severed

My jaw locks. I don’t stop walking, but I don’t walk right either. My body tilts like my balance just shifted by degrees. I veer toward the old stone alcove behind the archivist’s arch, hand brushing the wall for no reason I admit. The heat’s already rising under my skin.

Another voice—calm, bored, deadly.

“Seal verified?”

“Imprinted. Fully valid. Her name’s on the slate.”

Her.

The word doesn’t echo. It detonates behind my eyes.

I hold still because if I move right now, the floor might not survive it. I exhale through my nose. The breath doesn’t cool me. It doesn’t even leave clean. I taste heat. Taste iron.

A third voice enters—older, clipped. Cold with control. “She’s unstable. The field team is already en route. By now, they’ll have eyes on her.”

The dragon coils so tightly inside my ribs I feel my heartbeat thud against bone. Pressure blooms beneath my sternum. Not fear. Not even rage. Certainty. That this is real. That they’ve done it. That it’s my name they dressed it in.

I move. I don’t remember choosing to. I’m already down the west stairwell before the decision catches up.

I don’t bother with caution. Every step hits too hard. The air warps faintly as I pass—the kind of shimmer that usually comes before a flare. I don’t flare. Not yet. I hold it.

Barely.

The northern study door resists the first pulse of my sigil. I override it with heat. Wood groans. Metal softens. The latch clicks because it doesn’t want to melt.

The room’s dim. No spelllight. No airflow. I don’t need either.

I cross to the locked drawer. Break the outer ward with a touch and rip it open. The folder is where it should be. So is the seal. The ink. The signature.

But the location isn’t.

Ashmere.

Not the decoy path I sent them down. Not the ghost-traced ruin I marked to keep them off her trail.

Ashmere.

They used my real signature. My seal. My penstroke. They forged nothing. Just changed the destination and let the truth do the damage.

She’ll see it.

She’ll believe it.

She’ll think I sold her out to save my rank. My reputation. My name.

The dragon snarls. This time, I don’t push it down.

Heat pulses outward in tight, irregular bursts—sharp as muscle strain, but deeper. My skin goes tight across my shoulders, then burns, then tighter still. My breath scalds on the way out. Not figuratively. I feel it catch in my throat like steam off boiling iron. My vision blurs at the edges, not from rage but from internal compression—like there’s no more space inside me to hold this.

I grab the edge of the desk. Not to steady myself. To keep from tearing something else apart.

The wood warms under my grip in seconds. Then hot. Then dangerous. Smoke lifts in a slow curl from beneath my palm, thin and steady. I feel the lacquer bubble. The grain cracks beneath my fingers. I don’t move.

I don’t pull away.

Let it burn.

This wasn’t a clerical error.