Page 258 of House Ignis

My mother and her sister, Jasmine, had once been legends of court beauty and destruction.

They were twins who danced through festival flames without being burned, laughing as sparks clung to their gowns like living stars.

The older nobles still whispered stories of how those two turned celebrations into riots of magic and reckless joy, wielding their power like a challenge to the gods themselves.

My father had fallen for my mother the moment he saw her.

Fated mates—a bond blessed by divine fire.

But Ember had never been given a story like that.

Her mother had died screaming.

I was young when it happened—too young to understand political strategy or the quiet terror that lived beneath royal smiles.

I only remembered smoke swallowing the sky and the taste of ash on my tongue.

I remembered the sound of people running through corridors that burned like funeral pyres.

Now, I understood the truth. Jasmine Varrow had been killed during an attack most courts preferred to pretend had never happened—an uprising that history tried to bury.

The Ravagers.

They were not a kingdom or a noble house.

Fae and humans alike choose to become Ravagers, abandoning divine order for wild, lawless freedom.

They rejected the monoliths and the Ring system that chained elemental magic into hierarchy and control.

They rejected the belief that gods had the right to decide a soul's destiny.

They believed magic should be untamed. Free. Dangerous.

They lived in tribal clans beyond the protection of the monoliths, in the outer forests where ancient roots twisted into the sea cliffs.

They were a warrior people, wild-born and ocean-hardened, forging weapons beneath open skies and stormlight.

And they hunted noble blood. Systematically. Brutally.

The massacre of House Ember had been one of their bloodiest.

I still remembered Ember standing beside her mother’s funeral pyre—silent, unmoving, and dry-eyed while the world collapsed around her.

My father had answered that slaughter with fire.

Real fire. He had led a campaign into the wildlands himself, burning Ravager strongholds and breaking clan after clan until the rebellion fractured. Court songs glorified it as victory—as divine justice.

Ember stiffened slightly when my mother finally pulled her into an embrace, the amber silk of her dress rustling.

“My fierce girl,” my mother murmured, her voice thick with emotion as she brushed a curl from Ember’s cheek with trembling affection.

Then my father stepped forward, something rare and vulnerable softening the hard edges of his gaze.

After Jasmine’s death, Ember had been left without either of her parents. Her mother was gone, and there had never been a father waiting in the wings to claim her.

Her father had never been part of the picture—not before the massacre, and certainly not after.

There was no name, no stories, and no grave. Some whispered he had died years earlier; others claimed he was a wandering sellsword, a nobody who vanished before Ember could even speak.