Chapter Forty-One: The Crownless March
"A crown means nothing to the dead. Only the fire remembers who bled for it."
They marched over ash and corpses.
What was left of Vareth's defenders had no banners, no anthems. Just blood-streaked armor and the smell of rot clinging to their clothes. The sun refused to rise fully, hidden behind a ceiling of smoke thick enough to choke the gods.
Kael walked at the front, cloak torn, armor dented, sword still red from the last man who tried to gut him. He had no crown, no title, no throne—just the fire in his veins and the weight of a promise in his gut.
Burn it all if you have to. But don't lose him.
Behind him, Riven moved like a shadow—barely healed from the last attack, but quieter now. Harder. He didn't flinch when they passed the bodies strung up along the ridge. Old nobles. Traitors. One was still twitching. Kael didn't stop.
They had left mercy behind with the palace walls.
The survivors called it the Crownless March. The path they took through broken cities and purged temples. No one dared challenge them—not after what they did in Fareth Hollow, where Kael ordered the execution of a hundred Scorchborne priests who begged for forgiveness.
"Fire doesn't forgive," he had said, blade buried in one of their chests.
Riven had watched, silent, eyes cold. He wasn't sure he liked what Kael was becoming. But he didn't stop him either.
Because this wasn't a war anymore.
It was a reckoning.
On the fourth day, they came to the Field of Banners—once the ceremonial grounds of the empire's oldest legion.
Now it was a graveyard of steel.
Kael ordered every imperial sigil ripped from the ground and burned. He spat into the dirt and turned to his people.
"No more thrones. No more oaths to corpses. You want to follow me? Follow fire. Follow fury. Follow truth."
A soldier raised his sword. Then another. Then a hundred.
And when the flames were lit, they burned the old banners to ash. The smoke rose like a funeral pyre.
But fire always demands blood.
That night, a loyalist cell struck their camp. Blades in the dark. Riven killed three before he was fully awake. Kael's left arm was slashed open to the bone. They lost twenty-six men.
He didn't scream.
He stitched it himself by firelight, jaw clenched, blood dripping onto stone.
"I should've seen it coming," Kael muttered.
"You did," Riven said. "You just wanted to believe they'd stop."
Kael looked up at him, eyes dark. "I don't believe in anything anymore."
Riven met his gaze. "Believe in me."
Kael's voice cracked. "That's the only thing keeping me from burning everything."
In the days that followed, Kael changed.
His fire grew wilder. Less controlled. The Heartflame no longer whispered—it screamed. In battle, he tore men apart with nothing but his bare hands, their blood hissing on his skin like rain on embers.
Riven watched, terrified and awed.
Because Kael wasn't just becoming a king.
He was becoming something else.
They reached the ruins of the Eastern Citadel on the twelfth day.
The final stronghold of the loyalist generals. And the place where Kael had once been trained to kneel.
He didn't wait for a siege.
He marched straight through the shattered gates, Riven at his side, and gave one order:
"Leave no one breathing."
The fire answered.
And the gods turned their faces away.
End of Chapter Forty-One