The scent of smoke was sweet.
Too sweet.
It clung to Elira's hair, wove through her lungs, and settled like rot beneath her ribs.
She stood shackled in the courtyard where traitors were burned.
Once, she'd watched this place from velvet windows. Now, the crowd stared up at her, cloaked in silence—no sneers, no shouts, no pity. Just thousands of blank eyes, watching their princess bleed from her knees on the pyre.
A boy stepped forward.
Hair the same shade as hers.
Eyes the same silver.
Crown tilted too easily on his brow.
Her twin.
"By order of the crown," Calian said, voice steady, "Elira Caelira of House Veyne is sentenced to death for the murder of King Thorian."
The crowd flinched. Not at the words—at the name.
Their king.
Her father.
Her chest heaved. "Calian," she whispered. "Don't. Please."
He wouldn't meet her eyes.
Behind her, the executioner lit the torch.
The pyre hissed. Wood snapped. Flame bloomed at her feet like a hungry flower.
Panic clawed up her throat, and still she searched his face. One flicker of doubt. One twitch of regret.
But Calian only raised his chin and said, "Let justice be done."
And the fire took her.
—
Pain was not like they'd told her.
It wasn't a scream. It was a silence—so loud it drowned the world.
She didn't feel her body burn.
She felt memories burn.
Her mother's lullabies.
The garden where she and Calian once chased fireflies.
The first time she held a sword, and her father smiled.
Gone.
Ash fell from her lips like prayers.
And then
A snap.
Not in the wood. In the world.
The flames flickered sideways, twisting into unnatural shapes hands, faces, shadows with open mouths. Her soul screamed even when her body could not.
And the sky above her cracked.
Through the split, something old looked down at her.
And opened its arms.
She fell not through fire.
But into ash.
The world was silent.
No screams. No breath.
Elira woke face-down in grey dust, choking on soot, her hair crackling with embers. The air smelled like memory burned bones, dead gods, and betrayal.
She sat up slowly.
The sky above her wasn't a sky. It was a ceiling of blackened roots and drifting cinders. Ruins stretched into the fog, bones curled around broken thrones. Nothing lived. Nothing moved.
She touched her chest. No flames. No chains.
Just… scars. Everywhere. Etched like runes.
A whisper came not in sound, but in meaning:
You should have died.
You did.
Now rise.
She looked at her hands. They glowed faintly, the way embers do before they catch.
Something inside her was catching.
Elira didn't cry.
She stood.
One step. Then another.
Somewhere far away, a throne was being warmed by the one who had condemned her.
She would return for it.
Not as a princess.
Not as a sister.
Not as a ghost.
As something else.
As what fire leaves behind.