Chapter Forty-Two: Embers in the Dark
"What is left when even vengeance tastes like ash?"
The Eastern Citadel didn't fall.
It shattered.
Walls melted like wax under Kael's fury. The gates exploded inward with a roar that split the sky. The Heartflame—once a whisper in his chest—now poured from him in waves of searing, living light. His soldiers couldn't keep up. They didn't need to.
Kael didn't need an army anymore.
He was the war.
Riven walked behind him, sword unsheathed, boots sinking into blood-soaked ground. He no longer winced at the heat radiating from Kael's body. The burn scars on his arms had stopped healing days ago, but he didn't care.
He would follow Kael through hell.
This was hell.
They found a General in the throne room of the Eastern Citadel—surrounded by smoke, betrayal, and the corpses of his personal guard. The man had once trained Kael in tactics and cruelty. Now he knelt before him, bleeding from the mouth.
"You were my brightest student," he rasped, coughing blood. "And my greatest failure."
Kael said nothing.
He raised his sword and brought it down.
Not clean.
Not fast.
Deliberate. Brutal. A message.
When it was done, Riven stepped forward and tossed him into the fire pit.
Kael didn't watch it .
He turned to his soldiers and said: "We're not done."
That night, after the flames had devoured the last of the loyalists, Kael stood alone in the war room. Maps scorched. Plans torn apart. Blood drying on the floorboards.
Riven entered, quiet.
Kael didn't look at him. "Do you ever wonder what kind of monsters we've become?"
Riven leaned against the doorway. "Only when I stop to breathe."
"I don't know who I am anymore," Kael said.
Riven walked closer, placed a hand on Kael's scorched cheek. "You're the man who didn't kill me. The man who knelt when they told him to strike. That's who you are."
Kael's eyes burned. "And what are you, Riven?"
Riven kissed him. Slow. Desperate. Fierce.
"The reason you didn't burn alone."
But peace did not come.
Scouts returned the next day with grim news: survivors from the Scorchborne cult had retreated underground, gathering relics, summoning things better left buried.
Worse—word spread of a boy with Kael's fire, appearing in border towns, promising to finish what the empire could not.
Riven frowned. "A pretender?"
Kael's eyes narrowed. "A curse I left behind."
The war wasn't over.
It had only changed shape.
And as the embers glowed in the dark, Kael understood something cruel and final:
Fire doesn't only burn the wicked.
It burns everything you love, too.
End of Chapter Forty-Two