The forge roared like a caged beast, flames licking the stone walls with a hunger that never slept. Kaelith wiped sweat from her brow, her soot-streaked face catching the red glow of the coals as she struck the iron again and again. Sparks danced around her like fireflies in a storm.
"You're hammering it too thin," Old Bren called over the din, his beard coated with ash. "Steel needs strength, not grace."
Kaelith didn't answer. Her hands moved with precision, but her mind drifted. She had dreamed of fire again last night—not the forge, but a city aflame, screams echoing, shadows rising from the smoke. In the dream, her hands weren't crafting. They were burning.
The anvil rang sharply as her grip faltered.
"You dreaming again, girl?" Bren grumbled, squinting at her. "A blacksmith with her head in the clouds ends up with a broken blade—and no fingers."
"I'm fine," Kaelith muttered, setting the iron aside. But the heat from the forge felt different today. Too hot. And the metal had curled, like it feared her touch.
She stepped outside for air. The village of Darnwich was quiet, nestled beneath the jagged spires of the Wyrmback Mountains. Smoke curled from chimneys, and crows perched like watchmen on crooked rooftops. Beyond the fields, the forest loomed—ancient, whispering.
Kaelith's eyes were drawn, as always, to the road leading north. No one traveled that way anymore. Not since the Order's men came, years ago, with their burning books and silver swords.
They had taken her mother.
A scream shattered the air.
Kaelith spun.
From the edge of the forest, villagers were running. A boy tripped and fell in the mud, and behind him—
Horsemen.
Armored in black, with the sun sigil of the Holy Order glinting on their chests. One raised a crimson banner. The Inquisitors.
Kaelith's blood turned to ice.
"Back inside!" Bren bellowed. "Get to the cellar!"
But Kaelith stood frozen. The ground beneath her trembled—not from hoofbeats, but from something deeper. Her fingertips tingled. The shadows at her feet... shifted.
Then she saw him.
A rider without a helm, his face pale and scarred, eyes glowing with a dim red light. He stared straight at her. Raised a gloved hand.
"You," he said, his voice impossibly clear across the distance. "Ashenborn."
Before she could move, the forge behind her exploded.
The force of the blast threw Kaelith into the dirt, the world ringing with the sound of shattering stone and roaring flame. Her ears buzzed. She blinked smoke from her eyes, heart hammering.
The forge—her home—was in ruins. Flames licked the sky. Bren was nowhere in sight.
Screams pierced the haze. Villagers ran blindly, cut down by the riders like wheat before a scythe. The Inquisitors moved with terrifying precision, not shouting commands, not speaking at all, as if death was just another part of their day.
Kaelith stumbled to her feet. Her hands were blistered and shaking, her arm bruised from the fall. Her first thought was to run.
But then she saw the boy—the same one who'd fallen earlier—pinned under a fallen beam, crying out for his mother.
Kaelith darted to him without thinking. The beam was heavy, thick oak charred black, but something inside her stirred as she wrapped her fingers around it.
A strange warmth bloomed in her chest—not fire from the forge, but something ancient and electric. The wood hissed where her hands touched it. And then—crack—the beam split in two like dry bark.
She stared at her hands. Smoke curled from her palms. Her skin was unburnt.
The boy stared at her too, eyes wide.
"Are you... a witch?" he whispered.
No time.
Kaelith pulled him up and pushed him toward the fields. "Run. Don't look back."
A whinny cut through the chaos. The helmless Inquisitor was riding straight for her now, his pale face twisted into something between awe and hunger. In his hand, a chain whip shimmered with silver spikes—blessed to wound magic-born.
Kaelith turned and ran. Not toward the fields. Toward the forest.
The villagers said the woods were cursed. That the trees whispered secrets no sane person should hear. That the Ashenborn had once ruled the shadows beneath those branches, until the Order burned them out.
But if there was one place the Inquisitors feared to follow, it was there.
Branches tore at her arms. Roots snagged her boots. Behind her, the rider crashed through the treeline like a hound on blood scent.
"You cannot run from what you are!" he called. "The Crown awakens! It calls!"
Kaelith didn't know what he meant. Didn't care.
She broke into a small glade, breath ragged, lungs burning. The light here was strange—dim, though no clouds covered the sky. The air shimmered like heat above a flame.
And in the center of the glade... was a stone.
Black. Smooth. Cracked down the center like it had been struck by lightning.
Kaelith was drawn to it.
Something inside her—something that had been asleep for seventeen years—was now fully awake. Her footsteps slowed. The whispers she'd heard in her dreams returned, not voices exactly, but memories not her own.
You were born of ash and storm. The last daughter of fire.
She reached out, fingers trembling.
The stone pulsed with light. Then crumbled.
Inside it was a crown—not gold, not silver, but dark as night, forged of shadow and flame. And it pulsed with the rhythm of her own heart.
Behind her, the Inquisitor burst into the clearing.
He stopped when he saw the crown. His eyes widened. "No... It cannot be you. The bloodline was broken—"
Kaelith turned to face him.
And for the first time in her life, she didn't feel afraid.
The shadows twisted around her like living smoke. Her eyes glowed. Her voice, when she spoke, was layered with something ancient:
"No one breaks what the fire forges."
She raised her hand—and the glade erupted in darkness.