They regrouped for all of an hour.
That was all Vyrn got.
One hour of not being shelled, not being tested, not watching the horizon.
One hour where the ward dome hummed at a low, steady pitch instead of screaming in Fia's bones.
She spent most of it sitting on a crate in Commander Hadrien's cramped quarters, armor loosened, Mira crouched in front of her like a very judgmental cat.
"Breathe," Mira ordered.
Fia did.
In.
Out.
Her lungs wheezed, but less than earlier.
The dragon coil under her ribs thrummed like a banked forge, more pleased than strained.
"I've seen worse," Mira conceded. "You haven't set anything important on fire internally. Your hearts are overworked, but no more than I expected."
Her hands slid over Fia's sternum, warmth pooling under her fingers.
She was healing, but in small nudges—not trying to erase the cost, just smoothing the edges so Fia's body didn't fall apart mid-step.
"Translation?" Fia asked.
"Translation," Mira said, "you can stand, walk, and yell at people. You cannot fly around pretending to be a siege engine for the rest of the day."
Fia grimaced.
"I wasn't—"
Mira raised a brow.
Fia deflated.
"Okay, I was," she admitted. "But it worked."
Elira, sprawled backwards on Hadrien's narrow cot like she owned it, propped herself up on her elbows.
"It was glorious," she said. "You looked like divine vengeance in a dress you haven't worn yet."
"I wasn't wearing a dress," Fia said.
"You were wearing the idea of one," Elira countered.
Lyriel sat on the floor, back against the wall, ward diagrams spread around her like an untidy halo. She tapped the parchment nearest her.
"From a purely technical standpoint," she said, "you achieved the objective without triggering catastrophic feedback. That's the good news."
"And the bad?" Seraphine asked quietly from the doorway.
Lyriel's lips twisted.
"The bad news," she said, "is that they responded. Fast. They adjusted sigils on the remaining towers even as they retreated. Whoever's running that side isn't a complete fool."
"That tracks," Fia muttered. "Lysa didn't look stupid."
Mira frowned.
"The general?" she asked. "You saw her again?"
"Not clearly," Fia said. "More…impression. From the last time. She thinks too much. It leaks."
Ardentis stirred.
She is not like the others, he agreed. Her fear tastes…different.
Seraphine stepped fully into the room, door clicking shut behind her.
"They've pulled back beyond immediate artillery range," she said. "But scouts report they're not camping. They're building."
Fia's skin prickled.
"Building what?" she asked.
Seraphine's mouth went flat.
"More," she said. "More towers. More machines. More something. You and Lyriel need to see the sketches."
Hadrien's adjutant unfolded a case on the table—a rough, charcoal-scribbled set of drawings done by fast hands and good eyes.
Fia leaned forward.
The first sketches showed familiar shapes: the heavy siege towers she'd already fought, the distinctive bracing, the sigil bands around the base.
The next sheet made her stomach drop.
These towers were bigger.
Squatter.
Their bases were loaded with…something else.
Circles.
Spikes.
In the margins, the scout had written in a cramped hand:
"These ones hum. Could feel it in teeth."
Lyriel tugged the sketch closer.
"That's a channel spiral," she muttered. "They've reinforced the pylons. These new ones aren't just meant to crack wards. They're meant to drink them."
Fia's fingers tightened on the parchment.
"So the more I feed Vyrn," she said slowly, "the more these things will try to siphon off."
"Yes," Lyriel said flatly. "Whoever is designing them has decided to use your own strength as a crowbar."
Mira's jaw set.
"Over my dead body," she said.
Elira swung her legs off the cot.
"I thought that was over her alive body," she said.
"Both," Mira snapped.
Seraphine's eyes were on Fia.
"Can you tell from here," she asked, "if those…things…will affect you directly, or just the dome?"
Fia shut her eyes.
Reached.
Not full relay.
Just enough to taste the distant hum.
The first towers—broken or stuck in mud—still glowed faintly at the edge of her awareness, leaking spent heat.
The new ones…
She hissed under her breath.
They felt like pits.
Sinkholes in the lattice.
Not strong yet.
Still under construction.
But hungry.
"It's not just the dome," she said. "If those get close enough, anything dragon-touched in range is going to feel it. Including me. They're built to gnaw on whatever's stirring the ward web."
Lyriel swore softly.
"Then we can't let them get close," Seraphine said. "Can we?"
Fia exhaled.
"Not intact," she said. "But we also can't just go back to 'nuke them from the sky.' My lungs have opinions."
Mira squeezed her shoulder.
"We share those opinions," she said.
Ardentis coiled tighter.
They are trying to collar the sky, he growled. Little pits. Little thieves.
"Can we hit them before they're fully awake?" Fia thought.
Yes, he said. But not alone. Not again.
She opened her eyes.
"All right," she said. "If they want to drag siege engines from the ends of the earth, we'll show them what happens when you build towers in a dragon's reach."
Elira grinned.
"Now that's the villainess voice," she said approvingly.
Mira groaned.
"I am surrounded by pyromaniacs," she muttered.
Lyriel smirked.
"You love us," she said.
"I do," Mira grumbled. "And I hate it."
They went back to the wall.
This time, Fia did not step through the dome alone.
She stood beneath it, palms braced on the stone, watching as the enemy's new machines took shape.
From this height, the camp was a shifting pattern of color and motion—crimson uniforms, dun tents, the dark spines of towers rising like rotten teeth.
She could feel the towers' sigils being laid as the Iron Circle workers carved them into the frames.
Each stroke made the air around them thinner, harsher.
Like licking a knife.
"It's not just suppression," Lyriel said, squinting through a spyglass. "Those spirals will recirculate stolen energy. Once they start feeding, they'll be able to shoot your own power back at you. Twisted, but efficient."
"So if I pour flame into the lattice and they'll use it to spit fire in our faces," Fia said.
"More or less," Lyriel said.
Elira scowled.
"Can't we just…blow them up in transit?" she asked. "Send a saboteur."
Hadrien grimaced.
"We barely have men to hold the walls," he said. "Sending a team into seventy thousand enemies is a good way to feed their casualty count, not stop it."
Seraphine tapped the hilt of her sword.
"If we can't reach them physically yet," she said, "what about above?"
Fia blinked.
"You want me to fly over an army that's specifically building toys to rip me out of the sky," she said. "Bold."
"Not you," Seraphine said.
Fia stared at her.
Seraphine's mouth twitched.
"Not only you," she amended.
She pointed toward the sky beyond the dome.
Two specks were circling there—small, quick shapes riding thermal currents.
Gunships.
Not the giant troop-barges.
Fast, maneuverable skimmers with rotating spell-cannons strapped under their frames.
Currently being wasted on patrol patterns because the wards could handle most incoming.
"Hadrien," Seraphine said, "how many fast skimmers do we still have in working order?"
"Six," he said. "Four if you want the good ones with full runes and pilots who don't panic under fire."
Seraphine glanced at Lyriel.
"Can you rig their cannon arrays to channel Fia's fire without burning the pilots?" she asked.
Lyriel's eyes lit up.
"Oh," she breathed. "Yes. Yes, I absolutely can. I've been wanting to try something like that since I was twelve."
"Should I be concerned?" Mira asked.
"Yes," Lyriel and Elira said together.
Fia squinted down at the siege yard.
"Even with buffed cannons, we can't take out all of those before they get close," she said. "They're building at least…a dozen? Two dozen?"
"Twenty-three," Lyriel said absently.
Fia stared.
"How—"
"Pattern," Lyriel said. "Foundation footprint, supply lines, angle of the ground. There's space for exactly twenty-three without overcrowding the ritual field. Anyone who's ever tried to cram too many arrays in one place knows better."
Elira nudged Fia with her shoulder.
"Just say 'witch math,'" she advised. "It's easier."
Fia huffed.
"So we can't kill them all," she said. "But we don't need to. We just need to keep them from converging."
She traced patterns in the air, thinking.
"If we can destroy or disable every third tower, their formation breaks," she said. "The spirals won't be able to reinforce each other. They'll start stealing from their neighbors instead of our wards."
Lyriel's eyes narrowed, calculating.
"That could work," she said slowly. "If we can keep the disruption asymmetrical enough, their own reinforcement field will turn cannibalistic."
"Cannibalistic wards," Mira muttered. "Wonderful. Why did I not become a baker."
"Then we aim for odd numbers," Seraphine said. "Fia, can you feed the skimmers from inside the dome?"
Fia considered.
The thought of pushing that much fire again made her lungs twitch in preemptive protest.
"I can give them bursts," she said. "Not a constant stream. Think…charges. I light their cannons, they fire, the lattice catches the overflow and spreads it to the dome and our own batteries."
"Like priming a pump," Elira said.
"Exactly," Fia said. "But we have to time it. If I overdo it, the new towers will grab the spillover."
Lyriel's fingers flew over her parchments.
"I'll tune the skimmer arrays to resonate at slightly off phase from the new pylons," she said. "If we get the rhythm right, your fire will 'skip' their sinkfield for the first few volleys."
"And when they adjust?" Seraphine asked.
Lyriel smiled, thin and sharp.
"Then we adjust harder," she said.
Mira pinched the bridge of her nose.
"Define 'harder,'" she said.
Lyriel's smile softened.
"Not by wringing Fia dry," she said. "By being more precise. Smaller burns. Sharper hits."
Fia's hearts beat a little faster.
Not from fear.
From the strange, heady sense of finally using this power like a tool, not a blunt instrument.
"Let's do it," she said.
Mira's hand squeezed her shoulder.
"Carefully," Mira said.
"Carefully," Fia agreed.
The skimmer pads were a flurry of activity.
Ground crew ran between the sleek little ships like ants, checking runes, tightening straps, shouting to one another over the whine of pre-charged elemental arrays.
The pilots looked up as Fia approached.
Some had seen her fight before.
Some hadn't.
All of them straightened instinctively.
She hated that.
She also kind of liked it.
Villainess instincts were complicated.
"You're sure about this, my lady?" the squadron leader asked, helmet tucked under his arm. He looked to be in his thirties, hair streaked gray at the temples, eyes too old for his face.
"No," Fia said. "But we're doing it anyway."
He barked an unexpected laugh.
"Good answer," he said.
Lyriel moved down the row of skimmers, pressing her palms to their cannon arrays one by one.
Rings of runes flared and shifted under her fingers, the glow changing from steady blue to a more complex weave of red and gold.
"I've set them to draw from a sympathetic link," she explained. "Fia will mark you; your cannons will briefly share a 'taste' of her fire. Enough to catch a charge, not enough to cook you from the inside out."
One of the younger pilots swallowed audibly.
"And if it…goes wrong?" he asked.
"Then you'll know," Lyriel said.
He paled.
"She's joking," Mira lied.
"She might be joking," Elira amended.
Fia exhaled.
"Look," she said, raising her voice just enough to carry. "I'm not going to pretend this is safe. Nothing about this siege is. But I'm not handing you a mystery bomb and hoping for the best."
She held up her hands.
Small licks of flame danced between her fingers—not wild, not roaring. Tight, focused.
The pilots watched, wide-eyed.
"This doesn't work without you," she said. "I can knock over a tower or two. You can shred their formation. I'll give you what I can. You give me something to aim at that isn't my own bloody lungs. Fair?"
The squadron leader's jaw clenched.
He nodded once.
"Fair," he said. "We've flown for worse odds."
"Good," Fia said. "Let's make their engineers regret staying up late."
Elira snorted.
Mira rolled her eyes, but the corner of her mouth twitched.
Lyriel finished the last adjustments.
"Touch them," she told Fia.
Fia moved down the line, laying a hand briefly on each skimmer's hull.
Her dragon coil stirred with each contact, sending a thin thread of fire into the rune-weave Lyriel had prepared.
It felt…intimate, in a strange way.
Like sharing breath.
The skimmers hummed a little lower after each touch, their arrays syncing to the new cadence.
"Pain?" Mira asked quietly when Fia reached the last one.
"Annoying," Fia said. "Not more."
Mira studied her for a beat.
"Stay with that," she said. "If it spikes, you stop. I don't care if the perfect shot is lined up, you stop."
Fia nodded.
Seraphine stepped up beside her, helmet under one arm, cloak snapping in the wind.
"I'm not flying," she said before Fia could protest. "My job is to keep the command table from panicking while you play with fire."
"That sounds very boring," Fia said.
Seraphine smiled.
"Then you'll just have to give them something dramatic to watch," she said.
She lifted Fia's hand and, in front of the entire skimmer crew, pressed a kiss to her knuckles.
It was slow.
Deliberate.
Possessive.
More than one pilot looked away, ears red.
"Come back," Seraphine murmured against her skin.
Fia's cheeks burned.
"I intend to," she said.
Elira hopped into the nearest skimmer like she was born there.
"Hey, Calamity," she called. "You want a ride, or are you flapping solo?"
"Grounded," Mira snapped immediately.
"I meant later," Elira said, smirking.
Mira glared.
Fia laughed, breathless.
"I'll stay inside the dome," she said. "For now. They're building toys specifically for my wings. It'd be rude to give them a live demo."
Lyriel clapped her hands.
"All right," she said. "Listen up. When Fia says 'mark,' you hold your fire. She'll push. Your cannons will glow. When she says 'burn,' you shoot. Together. You miss the rhythm, you get a sputter instead of a blast. Or nothing. Or some interesting side effects we don't have time to catalog."
The squadron leader grimaced.
"Comforting," he said.
Lyriel smiled almost sweetly.
"I did get my certification," she said. "Mostly."
The pilots strapped in.
Engines whined higher.
The skimmers lifted off the pad, one by one, gliding up toward the inside of the ward dome.
Fia stepped back to the battlement.
The dome skin shimmered above, thin as soap from inside, thick as stone from out.
The enemy camp beyond was a hive.
Towers rising.
Sigils glowing.
chains being rewound.
"Ready?" Mira asked.
Fia nodded.
She grabbed the coil.
It rose.
Hot.
Eager.
Not as much as before.
Enough.
She inhaled.
Exhaled.
A thin stream of fire spilled from her mouth, curling up toward the dome.
It hit Lyriel's newly woven lattice and split into six branches, streaking toward the circling skimmers.
Their cannons flared as the fire sank into them, runes shifting from dull gold to bright, sharp orange.
"Mark," Fia said, voice low but carried along the magical channels to the pilot's ears.
Above, the skimmers banked, forming a rough crescent over the battlefield.
The new siege row was fully visible now—twenty-three half-completed towers in a staggered arc, pylons quivering faintly as their spirals drank in ambient magic.
The skimmers leveled out.
"Targets?" the squadron leader called.
"Odd numbers," Fia said. "Third from the left first. Aim for the base spiral."
"Got it," he said.
The crimson army below was still adjusting.
Engineers shouted.
Mages hustled between towers, checking sigils.
Commanders pointed, trying to guess what the little ships were doing.
Fia felt the moment.
The weight.
The breath before violence.
"Burn," she whispered.
The skimmers fired.
Their cannons spat concentrated beams of Fia's fire, refined by Lyriel's arrays—narrow, focused lances rather than wide sprays.
The beams stabbed down into the valley, converging on the designated tower.
The first impact lit its base spiral like a flare.
The second overloaded it.
The third and fourth shattered the sigil-etched plates.
Energy howled as it had nowhere to go.
The tower's lower half detonated in a burst of warped light and heat, the blast contained mostly within the spiral by Lyriel's clever lattice.
The top half crumpled.
Men scattered.
The nearest neighboring towers flickered as their own spirals tried to slurp up the excess and got more than they could handle.
Fia gasped.
The rebound slammed into the ward network.
Lyriel grunted, catching it, shunting it into the dome.
Fia felt it pass through her—not a tearing this time, but a jolt, like being yanked sharply on a rope.
Her ribs twinged.
Her heart skipped.
"Seven," Mira warned. "Hold."
Fia swallowed.
"Again," she said.
"Already?" Lyriel asked, breathing a little harder.
"Before they reorient," Fia said. "Next odd. Fifth from the left."
She breathed.
Fire.
"Mark."
The skimmers banked.
"Burn."
The second tower went up like the first, its spiral going from greedy glow to screaming white to dead black in seconds.
Fia's lungs burned.
The tether to Vyrn hummed alarmingly.
She coughed, a sharp bark that left a streak of red on her lip.
Mira must have seen it.
"Stop," Mira hissed. "Enough. Stabilize. Now."
Fia braced her hands on the battlement.
Forced her breaths to slow.
In.
Out.
The dragon coil writhed, wanting more.
There are still pits, Ardentis growled. They gnaw. They insult.
"We're coming back," Fia thought. "You want me alive or not?"
The dragon grumbled.
Relented.
The pain scaled down from a ringing eight to a hard-but-steady seven.
"Again later," Lyriel said through her teeth. "We've started the cascade. We don't need you to finish it alone."
On the field, the effect was spreading.
The gutted spirals of the destroyed towers dragged at the surrounding magic like broken snares.
The remaining pylons tried to compensate.
Their synchronizing net flickered, then knotted.
Some began pulling from each other instead of the ward dome.
A handful of mages in crimson cloaks realized what was happening and started frantically re-inking sigils.
Too late.
The formation's elegant theft system was collapsing into a messy brawl.
"Beautiful," Lyriel breathed. "They rushed the design. I knew it. I knew it."
Elira laughed aloud.
"Look at them panic," she said. "Someone is getting screamed at in that command tent tonight."
Fia leaned more of her weight into the stone.
Every breath was work.
"This buy us another week?" she asked, voice rough.
Hadrien shook his head.
"It buys us more," he said. "This isn't just a setback. This is expensive. They won't be able to replace those quickly."
He squinted at the distant chaos.
"Unless they cheat," he added.
Fia frowned.
"Cheat how?" she asked.
Lyriel's crystals pulse dimmer now.
"Towers like that take materials," she said. "Iron. Ink. Flesh to lift them. If they're willing to throw lives into the forge, they could speed it up. But even Iron Circle has limits."
Fia opened her mouth to answer.
Stopped.
Something…shifted.
She felt it before anyone else did.
Not in the siege yard.
Not in the ward lines.
In the air.
Magic shuddered.
Not the familiar, clean hum of the kingdom's lattice or the hungry tug of Iron Circle sigils.
This was deeper.
Older.
It rolled across the valley like a pressure wave.
The wind stilled.
Men on both sides looked up.
The half-built towers trembled as if something enormous had just leaned on the world.
"What was that?" Hadrien whispered.
Lyriel's face went bloodless.
"Oh no," she said quietly.
Mira's hand tightened on Fia's shoulder.
"What?" Mira demanded.
Lyriel licked dry lips.
"That wasn't their engineers," she said. "That was a ritual."
"Whose?" Seraphine asked.
Lyriel didn't answer.
She pointed.
Far beyond the siege lines, on a distant ridge where command tents clustered like ticks around a central pavilion, a new shape rose into the air.
Not a tower.
Not a beast.
A structure that hadn't been there a minute before—thin and tall, made of joined, blackened bones and banded in iron.
At its peak, something burned.
Fia squinted.
Then wished she hadn't.
It wasn't fire.
Not like hers.
It was a knot of too-bright, too-dark energy, swirling in on itself.
The air around it seethed.
"That," Lyriel said hoarsely, "is a war altar."
Mira's voice dropped.
"They're consecrating the battlefield."
"Desecrating," Lyriel corrected.
Fia's dragon coil recoiled.
Old tricks, Ardentis snarled. Blood-anchors. Slaver magic. I burned altars like that when your stars were still children.
Fia's stomach churned.
"What does it do?" she asked.
Lyriel's fingers trembled as she traced imagined lines in the air.
"It…links," she said. "It ties every death in its radius into a single reservoir. Every drop of blood, every scream, every breaking bone, all of it gets siphoned into that knot. Then they can spend it."
"On what?" Elira asked quietly.
Lyriel swallowed.
"On whatever their king wants badly enough," she said. "More towers. Stronger chains. A spell to reach through the ward dome and punch you in the chest."
Mira went very, very still.
"No," she said. "Absolutely not. We're not feeding that thing."
Seraphine's gaze was like stone.
"Options," she said.
"Retreat would be nice," Hadrien muttered.
"We're not leaving Vyrn," Seraphine said.
Fia forced herself to breathe.
Her lungs burned.
Her hearts hammered.
She could feel the altar's pull now—a subtle suction at the edges of the battlefield's magic.
Not strong yet.
But growing.
"Can we destroy it?" she asked.
Lyriel hesitated.
"Yes," she said. "If we get close enough. But it's anchored in blood and pact. Anything big enough to smash it will trigger a backlash."
"How big?" Elira asked.
Lyriel's eyes slid to Fia.
"A dragon," she said.
Silence.
Fia's skin crawled.
"That thing would…what, drink me?" she asked.
"Drink through you," Ardentis growled. They would try to taste me. They are not ready for that.
Mira's grip bruised her shoulder.
"No," Mira said again. "No. You're not diving into a cursed altar to see which of you blinks first."
Fia wanted to agree.
Every reasonable part of her wanted to nod and back away, let someone else handle this.
But the battlefield had gone from ugly to worse in the space of a heartbeat.
If that altar finished charging, every loss on either side would be fuel for the next wave. Every time she knocked down a tower, they'd just birth two more from the altar's reservoir.
A treadmill of blood.
"I can't destroy it yet," Fia said slowly. "Not without it tearing me apart. But I can…sour it."
Lyriel blinked.
"What?"
Fia lifted one shaking hand.
"This thing is built to pull in clean, directional sacrifice," she said. "Obedient fear. Controlled violence. All neatly fed into their pretty little knot."
Her mouth twisted.
"But I'm not clean," she said. "I'm…wrong. I'm illness and dragon and a system ghost that refuses to die. I'm already messing with the rules. If I can spit even a little of this into that altar—"
She thumped her chest.
"—it might choke."
Mira stared.
"Fia, that is not a medical plan," she said.
"It's a sabotage plan," Fia said. "Medically questionable, strategically sound."
Lyriel's eyes lit despite her pallor.
"She's not entirely wrong," she said. "Those structures are designed around predictable energy. Life, death, fear, devotion. They're stable because they know what they're eating. If you throw corrupted or unclassifiable power into the mix, the harmonics will shift."
"In words I understand," Elira said.
"In words you understand," Lyriel said dryly, "if Fia spits dragon-plague into their sacrificial soup, it might curdle."
Ardentis rumbled, thoughtful.
I do enjoy ruining recipes, he mused. We could…season it.
Mira pressed her fingers to her eyes.
"I hate all of you," she muttered. "And I'm not letting you do this alone."
Seraphine's hand settled on Fia's back.
"If we're sabotaging a war altar," Seraphine said, "we're doing it with a full escort."
Hadrien made a strangled sound.
"An escort?" he repeated. "Through what, exactly? Their entire army?"
"Not physically," Lyriel said. "Magically. The altar is the new center of their array. If Fia hits it from here, through the lattice, the backlash will try to travel the same path. If we're braced for it, we can take some of the strain before it hits her."
She spread her hands over the stone.
"I can thread the ward lines to route some of the shock into the dome and the fort's existing anchors," she said. "The rest…"
She looked at Mira.
"At me," Mira said.
Lyriel shook her head.
"At all of us," Seraphine said.
She stepped closer.
"So she's not the only one holding the line."
Fia's throat felt tight.
"This is insane," she said.
"Yes," Elira agreed cheerfully. "We specialize in that."
"Fia." Mira's voice was very soft.
Fia looked at her.
"You don't have to," Mira said. "You never have to. There's no prophecy forcing you. No system prompt. No 'bad end #7' hanging over your head. If you say no, we go back to attrition. We patch what we can. We find another way."
Fia swallowed.
Out beyond the dome, the altar pulsed.
The battlefield's hum bent toward it.
Every scream, every clash of steel, every mortal fear was a thread being pulled into that knot.
If she did nothing, that knot would become a weapon.
If she did something stupid, it might blow up in her face.
If she did something smart…
She thought of last night.
Of Mira's hands.
Of Seraphine's kiss.
Of Elira's laugh.
Of Lyriel's forehead pressed to hers like a sigil.
Of the morning's ache that had felt, for once, like living and not just hurting.
"I want more of that," she said quietly.
Mira's eyes went soft.
"Good," she said. "Then make your choice with that in mind."
Fia turned back to the field.
To the altar.
To the tide of bodies and fear.
"All right," she said. "Let's spoil their god's dinner."
They built the circle on the wall.
Not the big, echoing chamber in the palace.
Not some remote tower.
Right here, under the humming dome, with the enemy's altar a black spear on the far ridge.
Lyriel chalked sigils on the stone, quick and precise, fingers blackened.
Mira carved smaller marks into her own palms, neat and shallow, letting just enough blood bead to serve as sympathetic focus.
Seraphine stripped off her gauntlets and set both hands on the circle, every line of her body screaming anchor.
Elira…watched the stairs.
Sword drawn.
Jokes, for once, shut down to a low simmer.
If anything reached this wall while Fia's mind was elsewhere, it would reach Elira first.
And that was not a comforting thought for anyone with an interest in staying alive.
Fia stepped into the center of the circle.
Her hands shook.
Her chest hurt.
Her dragon coil was wound tight, pacing.
This will hurt, Ardentis said.
"I assumed," Fia thought.
You may fall, he added. You may bleed. You may see things that are not there.
"Encouraging," she muttered.
But you will not be alone, he said.
She smiled, crooked.
"I know."
Mira took her left hand.
Seraphine took her right.
Lyriel set her palms against Fia's back, right over the dragon mark that curved between her shoulder blades.
Elira didn't touch the circle.
But Fia felt her presence like a blade pointed outward instead of in.
"On your word," Lyriel said.
Fia breathed.
In.
Out.
She reached.
Not for the forts this time.
Not for Vyrn's anchors.
For the ugly new knot on the far ridge.
The altar's presence filled her senses like smoke.
Thick.
Sweet.
Rotten.
Whispers crawled along its surface—chants, bargains, pleas.
Not to a god.
To a king.
To power.
Take this life. Take this fear. Give us her.
It reached for her.
She almost recoiled.
Almost.
Instead, she let it brush her.
Just enough.
Her dragon coil snarled.
Thieves, Ardentis spat. Begging crumbs from their own terror. Watch, little altar. This is how you eat.
Fia opened herself.
Not fully.
Not the uncontrolled, desperate channel she'd used in the first Calamity.
A slit.
A cut.
Enough for dragonfire and illness and all the twisted, half-coded residue of the suspended system to leak through.
It poured along the ward lines in a thin, ugly stream—dark gold shot with sickly green, the psychic taste of glitch and fever and stubborn, furious will.
It hit the altar.
The knot paused.
The battlefield's hum hitched.
Then the altar tried to swallow it.
Fia screamed.
The sound stayed behind her teeth, caught by Mira's palms and Seraphine's grip and Lyriel's buffering sigils.
Inside, pain slammed through her.
Not the clean burn of fire.
A tearing, grinding, nauseating wrench as the altar's logic slammed into the mess that was her.
It tried to sort her power into neat boxes.
Life.
Death.
Fear.
Devotion.
There were no boxes for "terminally ill girl with a dragon tenant and half-deleted game code in her bones."
The knot shuddered.
Fia felt its confusion.
Its attempt to compartmentalize.
To allocate.
To categorize.
She laughed.
It came out broken.
"Choke on it," she whispered.
On the ridge, Lysa Kharan staggered as the altar flared.
The Iron Circle handler beside her cried out as a wave of warped energy rolled off the structure, knocking lesser mages to their knees.
"What did you do?" he snarled, clutching his head.
Lysa stared at the altar.
"I didn't do anything," she said. "She did."
On the wall, Lyriel gritted her teeth.
The backlash hit the circle.
Hard.
Power tried to rebound.
Lyriel caught it, shunting it sideways into the dome.
The ward skin flared, light racing along its curve.
Mira's magic plunged deeper into Fia's chest, bracing tissue, holding aneurysm-level pressure at bay.
Seraphine's fingers dug into Fia's, gripping so hard her knuckles hurt.
Elira's voice, somewhere distant, cursed at anyone foolish enough to approach.
The altar writhed.
Fia pushed.
Not with more force.
With more wrongness.
She let it taste every part of her she hated, every fevered night, every coughing fit, every half-finished system prompt that had flickered in her vision before the suspension.
[CALAMITY ROUTE ERROR]
[UNDEFINED END STATE]
[RECALCULATING…]
She shoved those into the altar's greedy mouth.
It tried to pattern them.
They slipped.
It tried to bind them.
They bled.
Its carefully carved channels, meant to conduct clean sacrifice, found themselves clogged with nonsense, with paradox, with improvised loophole.
The knot brightened.
Then flickered.
Then—just for a heartbeat—split.
Fia's vision went white.
Pain screamed through her.
Her hearts stuttered.
Mira shouted something that sounded like a prayer and a curse wrapped together.
The ward dome flared so bright that every soldier on the field—crimson and Vyrn alike—had to shield their eyes.
The altar howled.
Not in sound.
In magic.
The knot ruptured and reformed, but its pull changed.
The lines that had been drawing clean streams of blood-echo now twisted, some snapping back into the earth, some lashing toward the sky, some simply…dissolving.
It didn't die.
Not yet.
But it stopped drinking.
Fia felt the suction ease.
The battlefield's humming, which had begun to tilt toward that single point, leveled.
The backlash hit her one last time like a hammer.
Her knees buckled.
Her lungs seized.
For a moment, she couldn't breathe at all.
Then Mira's power slammed into her chest fully, sacrilegiously, ripping control away from her hearts and forcing them to beat.
One-two.
One-two.
Air tore back into her lungs in a ragged gasp.
She collapsed.
Seraphine caught her before her head cracked against the stone.
"FIA!" Elira's voice, rough and furious.
Lyriel sagged, bracing herself on her hands as the last of the rebound drained into the dome, leaving the air crackling and the stone under their feet hot.
"Pain?" Mira demanded, voice shaking.
Fia coughed.
Blood sprayed onto her lips, her chin, Mira's sleeves.
It wasn't as much as after the monster army.
Her vision was a mess of sparks.
Her chest felt like someone had stirred broken glass around her hearts.
"Eight," she croaked. "Maybe…eight and a half."
Mira's eyes flashed.
"You idiot," she hissed. "I said—"
"I hit the altar," Fia rasped. "Tell me I hit it."
Lyriel staggered to the battlement.
She peered at the distant ridge.
The war altar was still standing.
But its glow was wrong now—flickering, uneven.
The air around it seethed with uncontrolled spilloff.
Some of that spilloff arced down into the enemy camp, frying sigil arrays that weren't insulated for this kind of surge.
She watched one partially completed tower's spiral flare and then implode, collapsing into dead, inert metal.
She watched three Iron Circle mages clutch their heads and drop to their knees.
She felt the altered frequency of the knot—less organized hunger, more tangled feedback.
"It's broken," she whispered. "Not destroyed. But broken. It can't harvest like it was. If they keep feeding it, it will start eating them."
Hadrien choked out a disbelieving laugh.
"Good," he said savagely. "Let it."
Mira bent over Fia, palms glowing.
"Stay with me," she said, voice low and intense. "Look at me. Don't you look at that altar. Look at me."
Fia forced her eyes open.
Mira's face hovered above her.
Sweat dampened her brow; her braid was coming undone.
She looked half furious, half terrified, and fully here.
"I see you," Fia whispered.
Mira's hands moved over her chest, pushing healing into torn vessels, coaxing frantic hearts back into safer rhythms.
Seraphine knelt behind Fia, cradling her against her armor, one hand stroking damp hair back from her face.
"You did it," she murmured into Fia's ear. "It's not clean. It's not pretty. But you did it."
Elira crouched at Fia's side, one hand on her forearm.
Her grip was gentle in a way that didn't match her usual swagger.
"You're insane," Elira muttered. "Reckless, terrifying, and far too good at making me want to shake you."
Lyriel sank down cross-legged at Fia's feet, ignoring the scorch marks on the stone.
She peered at Fia's aura with professional curiosity even as her expression wobbled.
"Her threads are…frayed," Lyriel said slowly. "But not snapping. The dragon is…holding them. Irritated, but holding."
Ardentis snorted.
She threw me into a garbage fire and expects me not to complain, he grumbled. But the altar is choking. That pleases me.
Fia laughed weakly.
It turned into a cough.
Mira rolled her eyes and kept working.
"Welcome to consequences," Mira said. "Both of you."
Under them, the fortress hummed.
The ward dome's light began to settle from blinding back to steady.
On the field, the crimson army faltered.
Their towers—half-built and half-ruined—stood in uneven, broken lines.
The war altar pulsed erratically, its once-clean aura now spiked with Fia's wrongness.
Iron Circle handlers argued frantically near its base, gestures sharp.
Several of their assistants bled from the nose.
In the command tent, Lysa Kharan watched the readings from her own mages and pressed a hand to her mouth.
"You stupid, stupid man," she whispered, not sure whether she meant the king, the handler, or herself.
"General?" Arven asked.
Lysa straightened.
Her decision, half-formed earlier, solidified like cooling steel.
"Order a full withdrawal from the forward positions," she said, voice flat. "Beyond the altar's primary radius."
The Iron Circle handler snapped his head around.
"You can't," he hissed. "It's just stabilizing."
"It's corrupt," Lysa snapped. "Whatever they did to it, it isn't ours anymore. We keep feeding men into that thing, it'll start chewing on our command chain. Fall back."
He took a step toward her, eyes black with borrowed power.
"If you disobey the king—"
She drew her sword.
Pointed it at his throat.
"I'm obeying my duty," she said. "Protect the army. Secure the realm. The king's obsession with a dragon bride is his own problem."
For a moment, she thought he was going to push it.
Behind him, dozens of soldiers watched.
Tired.
Cold.
Waiting.
The handler's jaw worked.
The altar pulsed behind him, sending a twisted shudder through the air.
He felt it.
Fear flickered in his eyes.
He stepped back.
"Fine," he spat. "Retreat. But you'll answer for this."
"Gladly," Lysa said. "As long as there's an army left to answer with."
The retreat horn blew.
For the second time that week, the crimson lines pulled away from Vyrn.
This time, they did it with a war altar snapping at their heels.
On the wall, Fia slumped in Seraphine's arms, Mira's magic finally tapering as the immediate danger passed.
Her lungs still hurt.
Her head pounded.
But she was conscious.
Breathing.
Alive.
"Pain?" Mira asked, because she always would.
Fia considered.
Her chest was a chorus of aches and hot spots.
The dragon coil felt like a cat that had just fought a thorn bush and won.
"Seven," Fia said. "Maybe…six and a loud complaint."
Mira let out a shaky little laugh that sounded suspiciously like a sob.
"Six I can work with," she said. "Six isn't terrifying. Six is…just stupid."
Seraphine pressed her forehead to the top of Fia's head.
"I'm banning you from 'good ideas' for a week," she murmured.
Elira huffed.
"I'd say a day," she said. "We might need another good idea tomorrow."
Lyriel coughed.
"In my professional opinion," she said, "we should let her sleep for twelve hours, then wake her up, feed her something with actual nutrition, and then argue about how insane this was."
Fia managed a faint smile.
"I'd like to request…hot food," she said. "And maybe…not thinking about altars for at least, I don't know, three hours."
Mira smoothed a hand over her hair.
"That," she said, "I can promise."
They lifted her carefully.
Her legs shook.
Her lungs protested.
But she stood, leaning heavily on Seraphine and Mira.
As they turned to go, Fia looked back once.
Beyond the dome, the war altar was still there.
Broken.
Flickering.
Dangerous.
But no longer gorging on the battlefield.
Its hunger had been turned inward.
It would bite the hand that fed it, eventually.
She met its warped glow with a tired, defiant gaze.
"You don't get to write this story," she whispered, too soft for anyone but the dragon to hear. "I do."
Ardentis hummed approval.
Good, he said. Tell the altar and the king and the system and anyone else who thinks they can script you: this fire chose its own fuel.
Fia leaned more heavily into the women at her sides.
Her bodies ached.
Her mind throbbed.
But under the pain, under the exhaustion, under the lingering fear—
there was something else.
A stubborn, adult, utterly unreasonable desire to live long enough to be annoyed by normal things.
Curtains.
Blankets.
Who stole the last piece of bread.
Who gets the warm side of the bed.
The siege weapons would come again.
New ones.
Stranger ones.
The enemy wouldn't stop just because one altar got fouled.
But today, Vyrn still stood.
The dome still hummed.
The dragon still purred.
And the villainess—terminally ill, dragon-touched, stubbornly in love—was still breathing.
Still choosing.
Still burning.
Not as a lone flare in someone else's script.
But as the beginning of a fire no altar, no king, and no broken system could fully control.