Page 157 of Labyrinthine
And I rise—not like a girl pulling herself off the floor, but like a reckoning born from the grave.
The fire flares higher, but it wavers now. Flickers. Wounds bleed backward, and I see the truth in him now, as he sees it in me.
“You shouldn’t be able to stand,” he whispers.
“You shouldn’t live,” I say.
And I strike.
I drive the blade through him.
Not in rage, but with the certainty of a verdict long overdue. It’s not fast. It’s sure. Slow. A sentence passed by silence, carried in shadow.
I remember his hand on my wrist. The poison he poured as he lied. The silence that followed. The years I spent starving for kindness. For safety. For what would never come.
Iwasborn for this.
He gasps.
My darkness crashes into his core—not flame meeting flame, more a new dawn rising. One that’s brighter and that obliterates his existence. It unwinds him from within. His fire flickers, thrashes, and then gutters. The heat devours itself, swallowed by the whole of what I am. His magic burns bright and then breaks.
Mine does not burn.
Mine ends.
His whole body goes still. The sword falls from his grip.
The fire vanishes.
And when I pull my blade free, he crumples forward, smoke curling from his mouth like a final curse. He hits the marble with a dull, wet thud. His crown rolls from his brow, clinking down the steps of the dais.
Silence.
The nobles behind him stare. Some with mouths open. Some with tears streaming down their faces. No one moves.
The shadows hiss. The death inside me settles. And I walk forward, past his body, past his fallen sword, up the dais where the crown waits.
I bend. Lift it.
It’s warm—with blood.
“I am Azhara.” My voice rings through the room. “And I do not burn.”
No one speaks.
But—one by one—they kneel.
Even the ones who cursed my name.
Or who thought they could live through this war without taking a side.
I plant the crown on my head.
The doors groan open before me. My father’s palace is still half-burning. The walls are charred, and the halls echo with the sounds of the wounded, the weeping, the dead.
But he is gone.
I am here.
