SOREN
The wine stain on her lips stayed in my mind longer than it should have.
Odd, considering I've seen blood there before.
I undid the buttons of my coat slowly, peeling away the layers of travel and formality. Solmire's heat had a way of clinging to everything, silk, skin, thoughts. I could still feel it ghosting over me, the memory of fire veiled in perfume and laughter that didn't quite reach her eyes.
Eris Igniva.
I had seen her before. Banquets. Council halls. One victory celebration, if memory served.
But I had never seen her like that.
She looked like ruin and divinity wrapped in one... barefoot, bare-faced, with wine still catching the light on her bottom lip like a secret. There was something… vulnerable about her. Not in the sense of weakness, but in the sense of danger, like a sword mid-fall.
She had looked soft. Almost lost.
And I've always had a weakness for things that don't belong.
Everything Caelen said about her... every word of contempt and warning, did the opposite of what it should. If anything, it only added color to the fire. He painted her as a monster. But monsters, in my experience, rarely wore that much sorrow in their bones.
I caught myself chuckling. Perhaps the heat was already loosening the screws in my head. Or perhaps it was the wine.
Either way, I needed more of it.
...
Dinner passed like most things in courts do, long, loud, laced with laughter. Caelen drank too much. I drank just enough to get warm. Ophelia eventually came to pry him off the table like a dutiful wife, even though she wasn't. I offered her a dry smile and assured her I'd find my way back to the guest wing on my own.
And I fully intended to.
Until I didn't.
I don't know what made me wander.
Curiosity? A shadow of memory? Or simply that restless pull I always got in places that hummed with ghosts?
I stepped outside the Celestium wing and wandered east, toward the Queen's domain. No guards stopped me. No servants questioned me. I moved like frost over marble, silent, unbothered, almost invisible.
And then I saw them.
The gardens.
Not just any garden, hers.
Wild. Untamed. Blooming with every kind of flower, vines curling over carved stones, moonlight painting the petals in silver-blue.
It was beautiful, in the way old grief often is.
And there, among them, seated with her back to me on a curved marble bench was... Eris.
Not the Fire Queen. Not the tyrant.
Just her.
Still. Barefoot again. Her pale hair unbound and spilling like milk across the dark fabric of her robe. Her head tilted slightly, as though she were listening for something only she could hear. Waiting, maybe.
Waiting for someone to take her away.
I didn't speak. Not yet.
I simply watched.
And for a moment, I wasn't sure if I had found her, or if she had summoned me, because her heat reached me before her voice did.
Even from where I stood, half-shadowed by the garden's carved archway, I felt it, like the air itself shifted around her. She radiated it, but it wasn't the violent blaze I had expected from Solmire's Fire Queen. No. It was subtler, more dangerous. A steady warmth that crawled over the marble, crept up the columns, and bled into me until I felt something I hadn't in years.
Melting.
I told myself it was only curiosity, only the strangeness of seeing her alone and unguarded. But the thought slipped through anyway, unbidden and unwelcome: Eris Igniva looked like a goddess. One sent from the heavens themselves, not to bless me, but to torment me. Perhaps to torment Caelen as well.
And the worst of it? She succeeded.
I thought of Caelen, of his cold contempt for her, and wondered how he failed to see what stood before him. The beauty. The loneliness carved into every angle. The fire that was not merely power, but hunger. And then I remembered: beneath all of that was cruelty. Pure, razor-edged cruelty. The kind that drove men to madness. The kind that had nearly undone my dear friend more than once.
I almost convinced myself of it. Almost.
But then her voice cut through the garden like the strike of a match.
"If you plan to sneak and watch me," she said, sharp and smooth, "you could at least pretend to hide properly. Your ice has been announcing you since you arrived."
My composure cracked.
Just a moment. A single, sharp second where I was flustered, like a boy caught peering where he should not. I cursed myself immediately and blamed the wine.
Stepping forward, I let the moonlight fall over me, though the sight that met me almost stole my breath again. She hadn't turned fully, only enough that I could see the curve of her jaw, the faint smirk tugging her lips. Her heat hit me in waves, taunting, daring.
I was staring. And she noticed.
She laughed. Low, rich, edged like a blade. "You look as though you've been struck dumb. Like a stag catching the hunter's eye."
I smiled faintly, forcing the ice back into my veins, flipping the game before she could claim it all. "Perhaps," I murmured, tilting my head, "but tell me, Queen Eris, will you grant me the hunter's mercy?"
Her eyes glinted like embers catching wind.
I inclined slightly at the waist, cool, measured, deliberate. "May I join you?"