Summoning Hall's ancient stone held memories like trapped breath—generations of fme-born who had stood within its sacred circle, ciming their inheritance through fire and will. It was a space where legacy manifested as tangible power, where bloodlines spoke through the color and shape of conjured fme. Those who mastered the summoning rites ascended; those who failed became footnotes in ancient tomes of lineage and loss.

  From the high balcony reserved for royal observers, Serakha stood wrapped in contemptive silence, the embroidered hem of her formal cloak—bearing the thirteen-fold fme sigil of direct royal bloodline—barely stirring in the updraft of heat rising from the chamber below. Golden thread caught torchlight like captured sunlight, transforming abstract patterns into moving fme when she shifted her weight. Her scaled fingers rested against the carved obsidian railing, leaving faint impressions of heat that faded moments after she moved.

  Below her, the summoning chamber glowed like the heart of a forge—its circur floor inid with ptinum and dragongss, forming draconic symbols that pulsed faintly with dormant power. The candidates knelt in precise formation within the inner circle, heads bowed in reverence—or fear. Around them, Fmecallers in ceremonial armor stood at cardinal points, their expressions hidden behind masks of hammered gold shaped to resemble ancient wyrm faces. The air within the chamber was deliberately heavy with incense—rare herbs and dragon-bone dust that enhanced crity of sight beyond the merely physical.

  Her eyes tracked the next in line with predatory focus.

  There. The cloaked one again.

  The girl without a House. The interloper who had arrived with no name, no crest, no visible legacy—yet moved with the confidence of nobility. The anomaly that made something ancient and instinctual twist uneasily in Serakha's chest.

  Serakha's arms folded tighter against her chest, fingers digging into the scaled flesh beneath her formal robes. She'd watched this one since the first trial, marked her movements, cataloged her suspicious perfection. The way she moved—too graceful to be untrained, too precise to be lucky, too deliberate to be natural. Someone had prepared her. Carefully. Secretly. With purpose that tasted of treason.

  The hooded girl stepped forward when her unmarked token was called, approaching the summoning circle with measured steps that betrayed neither hesitation nor fear. Unlike the other candidates with their inherited regalia and ancestral focuses, she carried nothing but herself into the circle. The chamber hushed as she passed—conversations faltering mid-sylble, breaths held in anticipation of something unprecedented.

  She stepped into the summoning circle with the assured grace of one returning home rather than entering forbidden territory. A ripple of unease passed through the watching nobles like wind across ash. The air stilled as if the mountain itself held its breath. The fme runes etched into the circle's edge fred awake with unusual brilliance, as if they sensed something... wrong. Something that didn't belong—or perhaps belonged too perfectly.

  Unlike those before her, the girl performed no eborate preparatory ritual. No ancestral chant passed down through generations. No flourish of inherited technique. Just one raised hand—palm up, fingers slightly curled as if to cradle something precious.

  The silence cracked like a brittle egg.

  Fwoom.

  A column of violet fire erupted from her palm, twining upward like a serpent made of pure heat. It coiled and spun, reaching toward the domed ceiling with hungry intensity. Unlike the steady gold or red fme of noble houses, this fire shimmered with iridescent edges—fme not born of mortal lineage, not sanctioned by royal decree. It cast shadows in colors that shouldn't exist, illuminating faces with light that revealed too much truth.

  Serakha's breath hitched, caught between shock and recognition.

  Violet. Not red, not gold. Violet.

  The forbidden hue. The color of fme that had been systematically expunged from the royal spectrum, erased from permissible magic with the same methodical thoroughness that had removed certain bloodlines from official records.

  A murmur carried across the upper balconies—nobles and councilors exchanging hurried whispers behind jeweled fans and gloved hands, eyes wide with recognition they should not possess if purges had been as complete as history cimed.

  "Not since the cinders of Vatrax..."

  The name hung in the air like smoke, impossible to recapture once released. Vatrax. The exiled bloodline. The lineage systematically wiped from scrolls and memory through thirteen years of deliberate erasure. The shame of House Drakhalia—the royal line's greatest secret and most terrible sin.

  Serakha's jaw flexed until her teeth ached from pressure, the scaled ridges along her temples flushing dark gold with suppressed emotion. Her gaze didn't leave the girl, even as the violet fme receded like a tide returning to unknown shores. The chamber fell into stunned silence, broken only by the faint crackling of torches and the whispered prayers of Fmecallers who recognized bsphemy but cked authority to name it.

  The girl bowed low to the tribunal—not with the trembling humility of one aware of transgression, but with the calm mastery of one who had fulfilled exactly what was required, nothing more or less. She turned to leave the circle, stepping over the boundary that should have fred in warning but instead dimmed like dying coals in her presence.

  She walked differently now, Serakha noticed. Not with the calcuted anonymity she had maintained before, but with the fluid confidence of royal blood. She moved like she belonged here. Like she knew the halls already. Like the mountain had welcomed her back rather than admitted her for the first time.

  The realization crystalized in Serakha's mind like a shard of ice forming in the heart of fme. Every instinct honed through years of training and vigince screamed a warning she could no longer ignore.

  Serakha didn't realize she'd spoken aloud until she heard her own voice echo against the stone, cutting through the chamber's stunned silence.

  "Who are you?"

  Her words carried the weight of royal demand—the harmonics that compelled truth through bloodright rather than mere authority. The tone that none could refuse without decring themselves enemy of the throne.

  Yet the girl continued walking, her back to the tribunal, to the nobles, to the heir apparent who had just directly addressed her. She reached the great doors that separated the summoning chamber from the outer hall and paused—not in acknowledgment of the question, but as if considering whether the conversation deserved her participation.

  After a moment that stretched like heated gss, she half-turned, her face still concealed beneath her hood. But there was no mistaking the smile that curved one visible corner of her mouth—not triumphant, not mocking, but knowing. As if they shared a secret Serakha had forgotten she possessed.

  Then she was gone, the heavy doors closing behind her with finality that echoed through the stunned chamber.

  No one answered Serakha's demand.

  But the violet fme still flickered in her bones, an echo of recognition she could neither name nor deny.

  The heavy door closed with satisfying weight behind her, sealing out the whispers, the stares, the accusations not yet spoken but gathering like storm clouds. Her breath caught as she leaned against it like she could keep the entire world at bay through physical force alone. The summoning fme still danced behind her eyelids every time she blinked—violet and alive, a testament to truth stronger than decree. Her skin tingled from head to toe—not from heat, which had been her constant companion since birth, but from exposure.

  She hadn't meant to call violet. She never meant to. The pn had been simpler: demonstrate enough power to advance, but not enough to draw scrutiny. Fme control was the first skill Raazek had taught her—before combat, before history, before even her true name. "Control is survival," he'd said, over and over, as she'd practiced turning raging infernos into candle fmes and back again.

  But the fire—her fire—had always chosen its own form when it mattered most. And when she stepped into the circle, surrounded by symbols that recognized her blood more truly than any living person in that chamber, it didn't listen to fear or caution. It listened to truth.

  To heritage.

  To the voice that had whispered to her from the circle itself: Show them.

  The stone chamber she'd been assigned was bare by noble standards but luxurious compared to her years in exile: a narrow cot with actual linens, a cracked mirror salvaged from some forgotten storeroom, a rusted washbasin that nonetheless held clean water. Still better than the caves she'd grown up in, where dripping stactites and bioluminescent fungi had been her only decorations.

  She kicked off her boots—supple leather worn thin around the soles from years of silent traversal through dangerous territory—and knelt, tugging the hem of her scorched robe out from under the cot. The spell-resistant fabric had been one of Raazek's gifts, designed to withstand her frequent fre-ups during training. But even it showed signs of strain—the edges charred and fraying, the embedded protective sigils fading from overuse. The smell of char clung to it, bitter and telling.

  They'll talk, she thought, running her fingers over the damaged fabric. They always do.

  The nobles who had witnessed her summoning would already be spinning theories, forming alliances, preparing defenses against a threat they couldn't fully articute but instinctively recognized. Temple records would be consulted. Ancient ledgers examined for discrepancies. Guards would be quietly posted near her quarters under the guise of protection rather than surveilnce.

  She sat heavily on the edge of the bed, burying her face in hands that still carried the phantom sensation of violet fme dancing across her skin. For a long moment, she let herself feel the full weight of it—the danger she'd invited, the exposure she couldn't take back, the acceleration of pns too fragile to rush. She traced the outline of the pendant beneath her robe, feeling its fractured edges through the fabric.

  And deeper still, beneath conscious thought—the whisper she thought she'd heard when the fme struck the ceiling like captive lightning breaking free.

  Daughter...

  Not Raazek's voice. Not her own imagination. Something older, something that lived in the mountain itself—in the stone that had witnessed the birth and death of dynasties, in the fme that had burned before being tamed and categorized and controlled.

  She wasn't ready. She'd never be ready. The wounds were too deep, the losses too raw, the memories too fragmentary. But if she waited for permission, for perfect timing, for universal recognition of the injustice that had shaped her existence—she'd die in shadow like her mother, a footnote in a history deliberately miswritten.

  Her reflection stared at her from the cracked gss hanging crookedly on the wall opposite her bed. Pale skin smudged with soot that no amount of scrubbing ever seemed to fully remove. Hair the color of embers, tightly braided to prevent accidental ignition during emotional moments. Eyes faintly glowing from within—violet bleeding into gold as her control reasserted itself after the summoning ritual had stripped away pretense.

  "Who do you see?" she asked it softly.

  The mirror didn't answer. It couldn't. It was just gss, warped and broken like the history she was attempting to correct. But she searched it anyway, looking for traces of her mother's face—for the simirities that might prove what the fme already knew. For evidence that she wasn't just a vengeful ghost conjured from spite and shadow, but the legitimate heir to a legacy of fire and fury.

  She reached under the cot again and pulled out the object she'd kept hidden even from Raazek in recent months—a pendant shaped like outstretched wings, fractured down its center, worn smooth by years of being held in trembling hands. Her mother's final keepsake. Her inheritance. Her curse. Her proof.

  The metallic surface caught what little light existed in the chamber and transformed it, sending ripples of iridescent color across the ceiling like captured fme. The wing-shape was unmistakable to anyone versed in royal iconography—not the thirteen-fold fme of the current ruling house, but the ascending phoenix that had once graced the crown itself.

  She clutched it close to her chest and whispered a name not even the fmes were meant to hear yet—its sylbles soft, almost prayerful despite her ck of formal faith.

  "Selyra."

  Her name. Her true name. Not "little cinder" or "girl" or "nameless one"—the designations that had followed her through years of hiding. But the name her mother had whispered while pressing this very pendant into her palm on that night of fire and betrayal. The name that connected her to the throne more directly than any eborate trial or ritual could ever prove.

  For a moment, the pendant grew warm in her hand—almost unbearably so, as if responding to the sound of a name too long unspoken. The crack at its center seemed to pulse with inner light, revealing intricate patterns within the metal itself—dragon-script too ancient for modern schors to fully transte, secrets preserved in material meant to outst civilizations.

  She closed her fingers around it tightly, welcoming the pain as proof of reality. She was here—within the very heart of the system that had tried to erase her. The first step had been taken. There would be no turning back from what came next.

  The Queen's sor was positioned deliberately—not at the highest point of Heartspire where one might expect the ruler's private chambers, but midway up the extinct volcano, where the mountain's natural heat kept the room pleasantly warm without artificial enhancement. It was a space of calcuted contradictions: militaristic maps alongside delicate artifacts, ancient weapons dispyed beside fresh flowers, rigid formality coexisting with intimate comfort.

  The room was quiet save for the ticking of an old sand clock whose crystal housing had been carved from the eye of an elder dragon, and the occasional hiss of the hearth where sacred fme burned regardless of season or weather. Serakha stood at the center of the room, posture like a drawn bde, hands clenched at her sides. She'd not even shed her formal cloak before demanding audience—an unprecedented breach of protocol that spoke louder than any verbal decration of urgency.

  The Queen poured herself tea with deliberate slowness, steam coiling between long, ringed fingers that bore the scars of fme-shaping and combat. Her scales—finer and more numerous than Serakha's—caught the firelight like burnished gold, though gray had begun to infiltrate their edges. When she spoke, it was with the calm of someone used to commanding storms rather than fearing them.

  "You're angry."

  Three sylbles that acknowledged everything and committed to nothing. The Queen's specialty.

  "I'm concerned," Serakha replied tightly, the formal response struggling to contain the emotion churning beneath. "That girl—she summoned violet. That's not accident or anomaly. That's heritage."

  The Queen raised an eyebrow but continued pouring tea as if they were discussing nothing more consequential than tomorrow's weather. The deliberate casualness was a tactic Serakha recognized but couldn't counter without appearing hysterical—a perception the heir could never afford, especially now.

  "Perhaps it's simply rare," the Queen suggested, offering a cup that Serakha ignored with pointed stillness. "Not all fme manifestations are matters of lineage. Some are individual peculiarities—genetic variations rather than bloodright assertions."

  "No," Serakha snapped, patience fracturing like thin ice. "You know what that color means. That bloodline was purged for a reason."

  The Queen's lips thinned, the only evidence that the conversation had pierced her carefully maintained composure. She set down her own teacup with a precision that bordered on threatening—each movement measured, controlled, significant.

  "There are things older than your training, Serakha. Older than your understanding of how fme and blood and throne intertwine. Older than the simplified history you were provided to make governance more straightforward."

  "I saw the way she moved," Serakha pressed, unwilling to be diverted by philosophical abstractions. "Her stance. Her control. She's not new to the fme. She was trained. Secretly. And we let her pass the gate without a House name or lineage verification? Without even basic identification? In the middle of succession trials?"

  "You overstep," the Queen said coldly, the temperature in the room dropping perceptibly despite the crackling hearth. It was not just a rebuke but a reminder—that regardless of heir status and imminent succession, Serakha stood before the current sovereign whose authority remained absolute until formally transferred.

  Serakha flinched at the tone, but only slightly—a reflexive response to authority ingrained since childhood, quickly mastered through force of will. Her hands unclenched deliberately, though the tension merely relocated to her shoulders and jaw.

  "I've always done what was asked of me," she said, voice quieter but no less intense. "I followed every rule set before me. I mastered every fme form prescribed in the ancient texts. I memorized bloodlines and alliances and territorial boundaries until I could recite them in my sleep. And now I watch someone walk into our sacred halls bearing forbidden fire—the very hue associated with our darkest chapters—and I'm told to ignore it? To accept 'rare' as expnation?"

  A long silence passed between them. The sand clock measured it in tiny cascades of crystal grains, each representing a moment that could never be recimed. The Queen studied Serakha with eyes that revealed nothing yet saw everything—the fear beneath the anger, the uncertainty beneath the righteous indignation.

  Then, the Queen spoke with careful precision.

  "If you're right... then you have every reason to fear her."

  Serakha's throat tightened, her worst suspicions confirmed in that single conditional statement. "So it's true? She's—"

  "I said no such thing," the Queen interrupted, moving toward the window that overlooked the ceremonial courtyard thirteen levels below. From this height, people appeared as small as insects—their complicated lives and motives reduced to predictable patterns of movement. "Theories without evidence are dangerous, especially from the throne's heir."

  "You're protecting her." It wasn't a question but an accusation, delivered with the confidence of one who had learned to read royal evasions through years of careful observation.

  "I am protecting us all." The Queen turned then, her silhouette bathed in firelight from the hearth, her expression cast in shadow that concealed as much as it revealed. "Do nothing. Say nothing. Let this trial py out according to ancient w. Some truths burn more than they reveal—and lighting such fmes before their time risks consuming the very future you're meant to preserve."

  Serakha turned away, unable to maintain the intensity of eye contact without revealing too much of her inner turmoil. Her gaze fell instead on the eborate map of the kingdom that covered one wall—territories meticulously charted, boundaries clearly defined, order imposed upon natural chaos through generations of careful rule.

  "If that girl is Vatrax," she said finally, using the forbidden name deliberately, testing whether it would elicit reaction, "then we're letting a firestorm into our halls. Into our trials. Into our succession."

  "And yet here you are, still standing," the Queen said, not unkindly. "What does that tell you about the nature of fire and those who wield it?"

  That I haven't burned yet, Serakha thought, fingers unconsciously tracing the embroidered fme on her sleeve—the symbol of legitimacy she had never questioned until this moment.

  But she didn't say it.

  Some realizations were too dangerous to voice aloud, even between queen and heir.

  The ancient courtyard y hushed under the silver light of three moons—each representing one aspect of draconic divinity according to old texts that modern Fmecallers dismissed as superstition. The smallest moon, blood-red and fast-moving, was said to be the eye of the War Drake who watched for threats to the kingdom. Tonight it hung low on the horizon, as if peering intently at the scene below.

  At the courtyard's center stood a monument that predated even Heartspire's oldest structures—a massive tree, long dead yet mysteriously preserved. Its petrified trunk rose like a skeletal sentinel, branches reaching toward the stars with fossil-like precision. Its bark bore the metallic sheen of volcanic gss—evidence of the catastrophic event that had simultaneously killed and preserved it.

  According to legend, this was the pce where dragons had first taken humanoid form—where ancient wyrms had wept molten tears beneath its branches as they sacrificed wingspan and scale-armor for the dexterity and versatility of the two-legged form. The grass around its roots was dead, yet somehow... sacred. Nothing would grow there despite countless attempts throughout the centuries—as if the ground itself remembered something too profound for mere vegetation to survive.

  Selyra pulled her cloak tighter around her shoulders as footsteps echoed behind her—not from fear of identification, for she had deliberately sought this meeting, but from the habitual caution of one who had survived by remaining unseen for most of her life.

  He emerged from the shadows like a specter, tall and robed, face half-hidden beneath a deep hood that concealed most of his draconic features. Even in darkness, his uneven gait was distinctive—the legacy of injuries sustained during the purge that had cost him everything except his knowledge and his hatred.

  "You were reckless," Raazek said without preamble, his voice carrying the gravelly undertone of one whose throat had been damaged by fme meant to kill rather than transform. "They will be watching you now. All of them. With fear rather than mere curiosity."

  "They were already watching." Selyra kept her eyes on the petrified tree, its silhouette stark against the star-filled sky. "The difference is now they're seeing."

  "Not like this." He moved closer, his cloak rippling like liquid shadow. "Recognition brings danger faster than anonymity ever could. You were noticed. Named. Whispered about. The very things we worked years to prevent until you were ready."

  She didn't respond to the reprimand. Instead, she silently handed him the scroll she'd received after the summoning—a formal document bearing the Tribunal's seal, officially acknowledging her advancement to the next trial phase. The parchment gleamed with embedded wards that verified its authenticity—spells that would have immediately disintegrated it had she been rejected or disqualified.

  "Did you think I wouldn't be ready?" she asked as he examined the document with critical eyes that saw beyond its physical form to the magical constructs woven through its very fiber. "After everything you taught me? After everything I've survived?"

  "I knew you would burn brightly," the mentor said, rolling the scroll with careful precision and returning it to her outstretched hand. "I just hoped you'd burn quietly. At least for a while longer."

  She ughed—a short, dry sound devoid of humor but not of confidence. "The fire's never quiet. Not in me. You've known that since you found me half-dead in the ashfields."

  He nodded, a gesture barely perceptible in the moonlight. "Then let it roar if it must. But remember this—"

  He stepped closer, pcing a cwed hand gently on her shoulder—the touch careful, almost reverential despite his earlier criticism.

  "Fme without control is mere destruction. And you are not here to destroy. Not yet." His voice dropped lower, becoming almost subliminal in its intensity. "First comes recognition. Then restoration. Destruction serves neither without purpose to shape its course."

  She looked past him to the ancient tree—a monument to transformation and sacrifice that had survived upheaval that should have erased it from existence. Just like her.

  "I heard a name during the summoning," she admitted quietly. "Mine. Not spoken by any living person in that chamber."

  Raazek went still, his one good eye widening slightly—the first genuine surprise she had seen him dispy in years of tutege. "Already? The mountain speaks to you?"

  She nodded once, unwilling to eborate on the whisper that had accompanied her fme's violet manifestation—the voice that seemed to emanate from the stone itself, from the ancient foundations that predated political machinations and bloodline purges.

  "Then the blood remembers," he said, a note of something like awe creeping into his usually cynical tone. "And if blood remembers, then stone remembers. And if stone remembers..."

  He didn't finish the thought. He didn't need to. They both understood the implications—that legitimacy ran deeper than decrees or decrations, that some truths were woven into the very substance of the world and could not be permanently erased by those who found them inconvenient.

  She didn't ask what it meant. She already knew—had known since the moment she'd stepped into the summoning circle and felt recognition pulse through her veins like liquid fire seeking its source. The mountain itself had acknowledged her presence, had responded to her blood with ancient welcome rather than rejection.

  As Raazek melted back into the darkness with the practiced ease of one who had survived by remaining unseen, Selyra approached the dead tree that stood as silent witness to generations of draconic evolution and adaptation. She pced her palm against its bark—not with reverence but with curiosity, wondering if it would speak to her as the summoning circle had done.

  The surface felt cool initially—ordinary petrified wood, unremarkable despite its legendary status. But as her hand remained in contact, something shifted beneath the brittle exterior. Something stirred—soft, pulsing, alive despite all evidence to the contrary. A heartbeat where none should exist.

  Not memory.

  Recognition.

  Connection to something that had been deliberately severed but never truly destroyed.

  And then—faint but clear, a whisper that seemed to travel through her palm directly into her bloodstream:

  "Selyra... my emberborn child..."

  She swallowed hard, eyes stinging with heat that threatened to manifest as fme rather than conventional tears. Her throat closed around words she might have spoken in response, leaving only the pound of her heart to answer the tree's greeting.

  They remember me, she thought with fierce triumph that transcended fear. Not just Raazek with his fragmented knowledge and personal vendetta. Not just the shadows he had cultivated as allies in forgotten corners of the kingdom. But the nd itself—the foundations, the ancient powers, the true authorities that preceded crowns and councils.

  They remember what was taken. What was hidden.

  What might yet be restored.

  Serakha descended the hidden staircase that connected the royal quarters to the shrine of forgotten records—a pce only the Royal Fmekeeper and direct heir were allowed to enter. The steps were worn smooth by generations of feet moving with simir purpose—seeking truth behind carefully constructed myths, searching for answers to questions too dangerous to ask publicly.

  The chamber at the bottom was perfectly circur, its walls lined with sealed niches containing artifacts deemed too problematic for general knowledge yet too significant to destroy. The ceiling arched overhead in precise mathematical harmony, designed to enhance certain frequencies of sound while dampening others—acoustic engineering that predated modern understanding of such principles.

  At the center stood a freestanding fire bowl of unknown metal—not gold or silver or even dragonsteel, but something older that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. Its surface bore no decoration save a single continuous line that spiraled from base to rim, representing the unbroken flow of royal bloodline according to tradition.

  Serakha lit the ancient vessel with a whispered incantation taught to her on her sixteenth birthday—words not in modern Drakhalian but in the old tongue spoken before the kingdom's formalization. The bowl fred to life with golden fme that cast revealing light across stone walls inscribed with names and dates—some prominently dispyed, others partially obscured, a few deliberately chiseled away yet still faintly visible as negative space.

  This was the true record—not the sanitized histories taught to noble children or the propagandistic accounts distributed to the general popution, but the actual chronicle of events as they had unfolded, with all their messy contradictions and inconvenient truths. Here, succession disputes were documented in full rather than simplified to legitimate current rule. Here, purges were recorded by name rather than obscured as "necessary transitions." Here, bloodlines were mapped with scientific precision rather than political convenience.

  She approached the fme with purpose, removing a small pouch from within her robe. From it, she extracted a single strand of hair—not her own, but one she had managed to collect from the summoning chamber floor where the mysterious girl had stood. She fed it to the fme along with a name she dared not speak aloud but merely thought with intense focus.

  Vatrax. The forbidden bloodline. The purged house. The name associated with violet fme and ambitious overreach, with attempted usurpation and consequent elimination.

  The fme fred momentarily, consuming the offering—then dimmed almost to extinction, providing no answering vision, no confirmation, no record of connection between the hair and the name provided.

  Nothing.

  No record of the girl's existence within the forbidden archives.

  No connection to known bloodlines—purged or otherwise.

  No expnation for violet fme wielded with evident mastery.

  Serakha gritted her teeth in frustration, scales along her jawline darkening with suppressed emotion. "Even ghosts leave ash behind," she muttered to the uncooperative fme. "You're not a ghost. You're not a myth. You summoned violet fire in front of two hundred witnesses. You exist."

  As if responding to her decration, the sacred fme pulsed once—brightening momentarily—then shifted hue with startling suddenness.

  From gold to violet.

  Her breath caught as she stumbled backward, nearly overturning the ancient bowl in her shock. The temple fme was fixed—immutable, unchangeable, aligned permanently with the royal bloodline through rituals that predated written history. It could not change color any more than the sun could choose to rise in the west.

  Yet before her eyes, violet fme danced within the sacred vessel—impossible, heretical, yet undeniably present. It sted only moments before resolving back to its proper golden hue, but those moments were enough to send cold certainty rushing through her veins like ice water.

  Something fundamental had changed. Something beyond politics or succession or individual identity. Something at the level of elemental alignment and cosmic order.

  Across the vast expanse of Heartspire, in a small chamber assigned to trial participants of unremarkable background, Selyra traced the raised scar on her left wrist—a deliberate mark in the shape of a fme, self-inflicted years ago to remind herself of the promise she had made beside her mother's unmarked grave. In the cracked mirror hanging on her wall, her reflection stared back—no longer fragmented by doubt or hesitation, but whole and resolute.

  The violet glow in her eyes had not fully receded since the summoning, as if some fundamental barrier between her true nature and her careful fa?ade had been permanently breached. Her pendant hung heavy against her chest—the physical proof of heritage now matched by magical manifestation that could no longer be dismissed as anomaly or accident.

  "I don't need them to know me," she whispered to her reflection, watching how the words shaped themselves in air that shimmered faintly with her suppressed power. "Not yet."

  She turned from the mirror and let the fmelight fade behind her as she prepared for sleep—not the restless, vigint half-consciousness that had been her norm for years, but true rest born of progress made and destiny acknowledged. Tomorrow would bring new trials, new challenges, new opportunities to recim what had been stolen.

  But deep within, something had awakened that transcended physical fme or political ambition. Something primal and connected to the mountain itself—to the magic that had drawn draconic kind to this pce eons before crowns or succession or trials had been conceived.

  And it would not be ignored.

  Not by her. Not by Serakha. Not by anyone who stood between her and the truth of her birthright.

  The mountain had recognized her.

  Soon, everyone else would too.