The words were like a lance of fire through Gorm’s heart. He couldn’t speak, but shook his head.

The mage continued, “I want vengeance. I want a way to… to win… for all we lost to not be in vain. But I need to be right about it. And this feels wrong. So I… I can’t give into the fury, Gorm. I don’t know what we should do. I don’t know if I’ll make it worse. But if I stay in control and… and try to feel as the dragon feels, I think I can find the way forward.”

“Bloodroot wasn’t your fault. It was mine.” Gorm’s voice was ragged and labored after fighting past the hot lump in his throat. “I should have suspected what the guild was up to, and I charged ahead into Johan and Handor’s trap, and all them Orcs and Niln and Tib’rin paid for it.”

A firm hand gripped his shoulder. Gorm looked up into Gaist’s eyes, dark and sorrowful and, above all, understanding.

“We all should have seen it,” said Heraldin.

“We all charged ahead,” agreed Jynn. He handed Laruna the gem. “We all fell into the trap.”

Laruna lifted the glittering crystal to her head, faint weaves of fire twisting around her fingers. The gem hung in the air in front of her, every facet alight with a sudden, inner flame. “And we all can be better,” she said.

Gorm nodded. “Go,” he whispered, eyes squeezed shut. “Find us a way.”

“And watch out for the dragon’s fire,” said Heraldin.

Laruna didn’t glance back. “I am the fire,” she said. Then the solamancer walked around the stone and toward the dragon, the gem above her head glowing with enchanted light.

Chapter 25

Thin strands of illumination stretched out into the void, a bridge of blue dusk in an otherwise impenetrable darkness.

Kaitha had expected something like this, though she recalled from temple lessons that there was supposed to be a light at the end of the passage, and possibly flying children with stringed instruments. What she did not expect was the sensation of flaming centipedes ripping up and down her body. For a moment she wondered if this indicated that her soul hadn’t met some sort of metaphysical standard to walk the path, and then the pain became so sweeping that it was all she could do to squeeze her eyes shut and breathe.

After a brief and excruciating interlude, three things became clear.

The first was that she was not dead yet, as evidenced by her labored breaths. The second was that this came with some drawbacks. The third, and this was directly related to the second, was that emergency surgical sprites were in no way as addictive as salve. Emergency surgical sprites weren’t as addictive as self-administering salt to the eyes. Emergency surgical sprites were less pleasurable than the injuries that triggered their frenzied, fiery ministrations. She wasn’t sure they were preferable to the death that they had arguably prevented.

The best thing about emergency surgical sprites, in her opinion, was that they expired with tiny, wistful sighs as soon as their work was done. Yet once they were gone and the pain had receded enough for her senses to come back, Kaitha found herself alone in the darkness with her thoughts and recent memories. A deep heartache rolled over her, pushing aside the agony of her injuries and their treatment. Fresh tears rolled down her face.

Thane came back for her and he died. He looked in her eyes, and never heard her speak, and now he…

He didn’t die so ye could throw yer life away.

The memory of Gorm’s words cut through the crush of grief. She might meet Thane some day in the afterlife, after all, and if she wanted to be able to look him in the eye—or do whatever disembodied souls did to regard each other with mutual respect—she couldn’t tell him that she used the time his final sacrifice afforded her to fall down a hole and starve to death.

Even the thought of moving forward, of a time when something could be different, helped a little. “I don’t want to remember,” she murmured, and opened her eyes.

To her surprise, the bridge of blue light was still there. The shimmering pathway hadn’t been a vision of the afterlife after all. Instead, luminous sapphire fluid was pouring down from the heights above her and running through the channels that Stennish craftsmen had carved ages ago.

On either side of her, the walkway she stood on fell away into total darkness. Looking up, she could make out the amber light of a distant flame through the tangle of stone pathways, like looking at a campfire through a thicket. It occurred to her that she must have hit most of the stone glade’s branching pathways on the way down in order to survive such a fall. It certainly felt like she’d hit most of them when she struggled to her feet.

That left her with a choice between following the strange light or walking away from it into the darkness. On the surface it was a straightforward decision; her glowstone was gone, her healing items were recently expended, and she couldn’t survive another fall like the one she’d just endured. The only sensible choice was to stay on the glowing trail.

Yet there was something horrible and familiar about the light. Looking at it made her feel as though she’d stepped into a scene from a half-remembered nightmare. Cold dread welled up from her depths, and she felt like it would be better to fling herself into the darkness than follow the flowing light. “I don’t want to remember,” she said, almost reflexively. She wanted to forget the pain, his screams as he died, but more than that, she wanted to never find out the secret of the glowing water. “Don’t make me remember. I⁠—”

He didn’t die so ye could throw yer life away.

“He came back,” Kaitha growled, shoving the despair away. “He came back for me. I can do this. I will do it. I owe it to him.”

Her bow was lost in the fall, presumably on a ledge above her or broken in the depths below. She drew an arrow from her Poor Man’s Quiver and held it like a dagger as she set off. She did not know where she was, or what lay ahead, or the reason for the terror that gripped her heart. Yet she was sure of what had been done for her, and what it cost, and it gave her the strength to walk down the path.

High above the Elf, Laruna was also slowly making her way along a stone path, though her leaden pace had little to do with uncertainty and more directly pertained to the angry dragon hissing at her. But Laruna was also propelled forward by the sense of recent loss, and beyond that, a white-hot rage that she had only recently tamed.

The dragon was only making things worse.

The massive reptile seemed incensed by the idea that a mortal would approach it alone, and even more so by the deliberate steps she took toward it. It spat at her while the tip of its great tail whipped back and forth like a perturbed cat’s.

“What’s it saying?” Jynn hollered from behind her.

“I don’t know. It’s angry!” she shouted back.

“I can see it’s angry!” The wizard ducked behind the pillar as Laruna waved away another blast of dragonfire. “I meant, what’s it saying through the Eye of the Dragon?”

“Nothing!” Laruna flicked the gemstone as one might tap a thermometer to settle the mercury. “I’m not sensing anything.”

“You should be able to tell how it’s feeling!”

“I believe we’ve established the anger!”

“Maybe you should get closer?” Heraldin said.

The thought gave the solamancer pause. Flames held little fear for her, not even dragonfire, but teeth like swords and scything claws were another matter. She wasn’t exactly sure how far the creature’s serpentine neck could stretch, but it seemed like the sort of thing you only got the opportunity to misjudge once.

Yet as Laruna tried to gauge the creature’s reach, she saw a flash of panic in the simmering eyes, and it occurred to her that watching a furious mage advance through a firestorm was likely a frightening sight; it was the last thing many a deceased monster saw before it was summarily executed-slash-cremated. And while she couldn’t bring herself to feel pity for the creature that killed Thane and Kaitha, she could carry herself far enough in that direction to see there was only one way forward.

It was an enlightened thought, and apparently one the dragon had yet to reach. Dorsal spines rose like hackles along its serpentine neck, and it looked ready to strike.

“I see that you are angry,” the mage called to the dragon. “That’s good.” She spread her open palms in a gesture of peace.

The dragon leaned back and snorted, like a schoolboy preparing to do something unpleasant to a teacher. With a flash of crimson along its blackened scales, it vomited forth a dribbling ball of flame, the last of its reserves thrown into one final assault.

There was nowhere to run, no side to dodge. Laruna’s vision went white as the dragonfire rolled over her, and her world was a sea of fury and flame. It felt like both of them would consume her, and she loosed a shriek that almost drowned out the despairing cries of the heroes behind her. Yet Laruna’s wasn’t a scream of pain, or even frustration, but of effort—a grunt of exertion as she beat back the rage—the justified, righteous fury—that threatened to overwhelm her.

Laruna’s universe was a white-hot ball of fire and anger. Yet she was not the anger she felt. She was separate from the anger, and in control of it.

“I am the fire,” she said.

The heat was as warm and welcoming as a blanket; the blistering flame felt like an extension of herself. It didn’t matter where it came from or who conjured it or how much of it was dragon snot by weight—the fire was as much a part of her as she was of it. And like her anger and herself, when she controlled it, it could not harm her.

The hottest flames on Arth coalesced into a small, blinding ball in the mage’s palm, leaving her unscathed but not unchanged. Amid the receding dragonfire, rubies and black pearls boiled to the surface of her robes amid streams of molten gold. The fabric bloomed in black and crimson splotches, like parchment falling on hot embers. When the last of the fire coalesced in Laruna’s hand, she wore the red and black robes of a pyromancer.

“Laruna?” said Jynn from somewhere behind her.

She ignored his questions, eyes locked on the stunned dragon as she stepped over the invisible line that she imagined marked the edge of the dragon’s reach. All it would take was a quick flex of the dragon’s neck, and she’d give the beast a very short dental examination in passing.