Ashes Of Broken Home

Chapter Three – Ember Reckoning

The blue coals did not burn him the way the regent promised. They opened like a mouth and spilled a memory instead.

The moment the flame licked the rim of the pit, Darian felt something inside him break open. The locket against his chest heated until it was almost too hot to touch. Heat spread up his throat and into his skull like a voice trying to be heard. It did not scream. It whispered images, quick and cruel, and the hall filled with them as if someone had thrown pictures through the air.

First came a hall he knew only from the corners of old stories. His father standing before a map table, hands stained with ink and soot. A woman in a velvet robe pointing at a page and smiling with teeth that did not match her eyes. Men in dark cloaks writing names. A torch dropped and a boy running while someone called out his name and then silence. The memory unspooled like a wound laid open and the crowd watched it as if the images belonged to the walls and not to him.

Lyra shrank back, hand over her mouth. Tears shone on her chin. Someone in the front row choked. The regent's face lost the last of its calm and turned flat as a blade.

"That is trickery," he snapped, though his voice wavered. "Do not be fooled by charlatan flames."

But the images did not stop. They became sharper. A crest on a parchment, a seal pressed into wax, a man with the regent's face signing an order. A name in a ledger that matched the one carved on a pillar in Darian's memory. The crowd hummed with a sound that was not quite prayer and not quite fear.

Darian did not know if the Spire showed truths or lies. He only knew that what he had carried like a stone for years had become a loud music he could not turn away. It told him things he had not been brave enough to ask. It told him a room where his mother had been taken. It told him a tower where the crown's men kept lists and burned faces. It told him the regent had not saved the kingdom. He had been lied to.

"Silence," the regent ordered, but the word fell flat. A woman near the back shouted a name and a dozen voices picked it up. The sound grew like wind in dry grass. The hall became a living thing, breathing the same word over and over until it sounded like a drum.

"Regent!" a voice cried. "You burned them."

Captain Merek moved. He was a man who knew how to end a sudden tide. He pointed his spear and barked orders. Men surged forward to pull Darian back. The ropes ate into his skin and he tasted copper. The ember under his breast flared with the hurry of a trapped animal.

Lyra shoved through the crowd. Her ankle burned but she pushed anyway. She reached the railing and banged on it so hard her hand trembled. "Listen to him!" she shouted. "He speaks what he remembers. You cannot pretend you do not know."

Two militia men grabbed her arms. They were not gentle. Lyra's face went white but she did not stop. She spat at one and the sound seemed to make the crowd lean closer.

The regent's hand snapped and a bell tolled like a verdict. "Hold them," he said. "Seize the woman who incites. Take the marked to the inner chamber."

Hands closed on Lyra. The crowd hissed. A child wailed. Darian felt the world narrow to a single bright point where his name and the locket met. Rage tasted of ash and it steadied him. He wanted to tear the ropes. He wanted to set the hall aflame until every lie burned with it. He wanted the regent to fall and for their memories to be the new law.

"Do not touch her," he said. The words came more calm than he felt. The ember at his chest answered with a warmth that steadied his fingers. He had learned to keep it small, to hide the heat from those who feared it. Now it pressed against the ropes like a hand pushing from the inside.

Merek laughed then, low and ugly. "You threaten a captain now? You will learn what law is."

A guard stepped forward with the heavy staff meant for beating down troublemakers. He swung it. The staff was a blur. The world slowed to the arc and the rope that bound Darian's wrists and the heat that wanted out pooled into one bright thought.

He would not let them take her.

The ember at his chest answered like a bell. It spilled along the cord of the rope in a thin line and the fibers smoked where it touched. The guard's staff struck his arm and pain flared white, but the ropes at his wrists did not tighten. Instead they steamed and began to unravel like old cloth left at a fire's edge.

Gasps ran through the hall. The regent's eyes narrowed with something like calculation and terror. "Bind him tighter," he hissed.

Soldiers rushed in but the ropes fell away before they could reach him. Darian stood with his hands free and his skin prickling. He looked at Lyra whose wrists were held by rough hands. He also looked at the regent, at Captain Merek, at the faces in the crowd that had turned from curious to furious.

"Do it," the regent said. His voice was softer now. "Show me what you are."

Darian stepped forward. The ember at his heart wanted to leap. He thought of his father, of his mother, of the locket and the scrap of cloth and the promises stacked like kindling. He thought of Lyra's battered ankle and the way she had spat at the men who tried to stop her. The ember was hungry and it knew one work: to mark truth.

He lifted his hands. Flames licked along his fingers but they were not bright and wild. They braided together into a ring of ember that hovered between him and Lyra like a small sun. The light did not burn her. It made her eyes shine. It made the crowd lean in as if to read a book.

A whisper moved through the hall like a current. It was not the regent who spoke now. It was something older, older than law. The iron wheel above the pit began to turn on its own. Gears clicked in a rhythm that sounded like a lost song. The glass around the ironwork trembled and a thin smoke rose that smelled like rain on hot stone.

From the core of the Spire a deep voice, not quite human, not quite metal, rolled out as if from the walls themselves. It said one word that made the blood in Darian's ears roar.

"Heir."

The word fell into the hall and everyone froze. The regent's hand went white at his side. Lyra's mouth formed the word without sound. Captain Merek's jaw dropped. The ember ring at Darian's hands burned brighter and the blue coals below answered with a flare like a second dawn.

Then, before anyone could breathe, the floor beneath the regent cracked with a thin seam. A thin line of furnace light opened like a mouth, and something moved in the darkness below.

A scream tore through the hall.