Finn had never planned to make the Camelia his home and he still wasn't sure how he'd ended up here specifically. He'd wanted to get out from under the shadows of his older siblings and the Crimson Army had seemed like the way to go. He expected to be sent out to one of the border stations as soon as he finished training, but he'd made the mistake of pissing off one the instructors so badly the man had pulled strings to stick him in every boring assignment he could find and now Finn was two years behind the rest of his cohort in experience.
He'd started to think about leaving, about returning home in defeat and just dealing with the derision and pity from his family, when Princess Soliel appeared practically out of nowhere.
Finn hadn't heard anything about her marriage to Lord Ye, which seemed like it should have been a big enough deal to have everyone talking about it, but apparently his parent's had actually learned about it from him when he'd written to tell them she'd chosen him as her aide.
He'd been excited to finally do something, even if it meant long hours and the ridiculous demands the nobility was known for. And at least Eirian was close enough to him in age that they knew the same people and shared some of the same experiences.
Marian has found him a room in the main castle too. She'd claimed it was because he needed to be close to Eirian as her aide, but his cousin had been trying to look out for him since he arrived, and he knew she didn't think he was safe in the barracks thanks to the angry instructor. He hadn't put up much of a fight about the move either, even though he had nothing but a small bag of clothes and his journals. Marian had had to outfit the entire apartment for him and Finn was kind of afraid to touch most of it.
Even the furniture looked too old and too valuable to actually use, and Finn had been born and raised in Monnett, the ancestral seat of the Vermeer family where the newest items were still older than the current ruling line of Sorrow.
There'd been so many reminders not to touch anything as a child that he still found himself hesitating to sit on anything but the ground when he was somewhere new.
And now it was all on fire and somehow, unrealistic as it may be, Finn was having a panic attack, convinced it was all his fault.
All he'd done was go to bed at a reasonable hour and been woken an hour later by frantic footsteps in the hall and found the entire room engulfed in flames.
He hadn't even made it out of the bed when the door exploded inward with enough force that it came clean off the hinges.
As the dust cleared, Yuze appeared in the doorway. "Get up, we need to go."
"Go?" Finn shrieked and looked around. "Everything's on fire! Where am I supposed to go?"
"It's not real." Yuze stepped further in the room, the flames swirling around him.
"How can it not be real? There's no such thing as not real fire!" Fire was fire and fire was dangerous or so said every teacher Finn had ever had.
"Look around." Yuze had plenty of patience when it came to his work, but notably little when it came to dealing without people outside of it and he was already starting to sound angry. "Nothing's burning."
He wasn't wrong, Finn realized. He looked around as he took several deep breathes and tried to calm down. There were flames everywhere, but nothing seemed damaged. There was no smoke.
No heat.
"What the hell is happening?" He cried and flung himself off the bed toward Yuze. The spy caught him as he stumbled and hauled him out into the hall.
"I don't know. I haven't heard-"
Horns blared. So loud and jarring that it made Finn's ears hurt.
"The horns." Yuze finished with a sigh. "Someone must have gotten out. Or the fire spread." He pulled Finn along, darting past the guards working to evacuate everyone else.
"Shouldn't we be going the other way?" Out instead of further in?
Yuze didn't give any sign he'd heard him, but before Finn could ask again, they turned a corner into Eirian's hall and found Chenzhou banging, weakly, on Eirian's door as his own guard caught up to him.
"EIRIAN!"
Yuze joined him, pulling on the door but it didn't budge.
"Maybe she's already outside?" One of Chenzhou's guards suggested as the horns blared again.
"Shouldn't we evacuate?" Anna whimpered. She flinched every time a flame flickered but she seemed unharmed.
Chenzhou and Yuze shared a long look, a lifetime of friendship allowing them to hold an entire conversation in a glance.
Chenzhou nodded and stepped back and Yuze kicked the door down.
The fire was more intense inside, the temperature finally starting to rise but there was still no smoke. Nothing burning.
Yuze and Chenzhou went straight for Eirian's bedroom, surprised to find the door already open.
Eirian was still in bed, still and deep asleep despite the fact that she was wrapped in fire and the Camelia was burning down around her.
"Eirian! Eirian, wake up." Chenzhou rushed to her bedside as Yuze stared at the fire in awe.
"This is her magic, isn't it?" Yuze whispered in awe and Finn and the others froze in shock. Rumors of Eirian's magic had already made their rounds of course. Nothing travelled faster than gossip but talking about magic was different than seeing it in person.
Seeing a fire that didn't burn, or a tree branch grow out of nothing but air. Even growing up in the capital where there was gold to burn on the most useless indulgences, Finn had never seen magic in person.
He'd heard about it sure. People liked to brag, like to set themselves apart and above. His parents had employed a wizard once, for a very short period of time, and still liked to brag about it on occasion.
They never admitted to why they'd hired the wizard, but that never seemed to bother anybody.
~ tbc