Page 153 of Labyrinthine
The gate shudders again behind me.
Mallen’s scream fractures the silence.
But I do not flinch.
The world behind me howls its grief. Let it.
I refuse to look back.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The throne roomsmells of tar and death.
The heavy doors scream shut behind me. My boots echo on the marble floor, dark with soot and cracked like a scorched desert. The banners are gone, and the vaulted ceiling is laced with smoke. Only the fire remains—burning in braziers along the walls, coiling around the throne like a serpent guarding its hoard.
He sits atop it like he belongs there. Robes scorched, crown gleaming. One hand rests on the carved armrest, the other curls lazily around the hilt of a sword propped at his side. That sword was never meant to be seen clean. I remember the stain it left on the nursery tiles. I remember the way it hummed, like it wanted to speak.
And behind him, hidden half in shadow, are the nobles he called loyal. The ones who drank his wine, smiled at his jokes,and sent their sons to taunt me. Now they cower. Not from me. Not yet.
No one moves. The fire crackles softly, like it’s holding its breath.
My heartbeat isn’t loud, but it’s steady—like a drum before a charge. I don’t feel brave. Only sharpened—like a weapon honed by its maker, ready to be tested.
I take a step and then another.
“You came,” he says, voice low, warm, intimate.
The sound stops me. My chest tightens.
“I wasn’t sure you would.” His eyes find mine. Flame-cast and gleaming. “I thought that boy might have to drag your corpse back to me.”
“I left him behind,” I say.
I don’t tell him Mallen tried to stop me, that he would have died for me. That he might still die for me.
“Good,” my father says. “This is between you and me.”
“And the men who died because you invented the Reaping,” I say. “You turned my choice into a blood pageant to keep your throne. You starved Larksbind of hope and fed the sand with bodies so the magic would crawl back to your hand.”
He smiles thinly. “Order costs. Power costs more.”
“And you never paid any of it. You feared my choice and made others bleed for it.”
He rises and the room inhales.
The fire surges—leaping from the braziers to the pillars, racing up the walls like veins gone to rot. It spills across the floor in molten rivulets, and curls behind him like wings spun from ash and vengeance.
He towers above the throne now, crowned in flame, silhouetted like the god he always pretended to be.
“They’ve been waiting for this moment.” He gestures toward the nobles. “They are bored of waiting for my magic to return,bored of a girl playing at a choice that was never hers. They want a reminder of what power is.”
I don’t look at them. I don’t need to.
“They respect me,” he says, stepping down from the dais. “But now they need reminding of what happens to those who don’t.”
Another step. Another coil of fire at his heel.
“You were supposed to die.”
