Rain hissed on stone, a soft whisper against the silence of the ruined capital. The once-great city of Rhiannon now lay in charred ruin ash piled where statues once stood, blood darkening the cobblestones like spilled ink. Smoke still curled from shattered towers.
Lenara crouched behind the broken column of the palace gate, breath shallow, cloak soaked through. Her fingers twitched at her side, heat simmering just beneath her skin. She hadn't summoned flame since her mother's death.
She swore she wouldn't.
And yet here she was, hiding among the ashes, heart beating like a drum of war.
The king was dead. The crown shattered. And the old bloodlines,the ones that carried magic were being hunted to extinction.
She should have kept running.
But something had called her back. Not vengeance. Not madness.
Something older.
A whisper in her bones.
Footsteps echoed soft, deliberate. She tensed, hand creeping toward the dagger at her thigh.
"You shouldn't be here," said a voice behind her.
Lenara spun, fire bursting to her fingertips.
The man who stood in the rain didn't flinch. Cloaked in black, hood low over his face, he leaned against a scorched pillar as if the ruins were his throne. His voice was calm. Low. Like the quiet before a firestorm.
"Who are you?" she demanded.
He tilted his head. "A shadow. Like you."
"You don't know me."
"I do." His eyes met hers dark, unreadable. "Lenara Flameborn."
The world tilted.
No one had called her that in years. The name had been buried the day her mother's body burned, along with the rest of House Raethwyn. She'd lived in hiding ever since, just another orphan with soot on her face and a fake name.
She drew her dagger, flame crackling in her palm. "Say that name again, and I'll carve it from your throat."
"If I wanted you dead," he said, stepping forward, "I'd have let the hounds reach you."
A horn sounded in the distance deep, mournful.
Her blood chilled.
"They're tracking you," he continued. "The Ash Guard. The kind that doesn't stop until your bones are dust."
She hesitated.
"Why warn me?"
"Because I started this war."
Lenara narrowed her eyes. The pendant beneath her cloak pulsed a ruby glow that matched the heat in her veins. She looked at the man again, noting the runes along his neck, the obsidian ring on his hand.
The ring bore the mark of her house.
"I was sent to kill your mother," he said quietly. "And I didn't."
Lightning split the sky.
Another horn closer.
"Come with me," he said. "Or die here. But if you come, I'll show you who you were meant to be."
Lenara stared at him.
A traitor. A murderer. A man of secrets.
And possibly, her only chance.
She sheathed her dagger, flame fading from her hand.
"Then lead the way."