Page 31 of Scorched
I need the forge.
The thought arrives sideways, slipping in between the heat and the need and the shame. Not him. The forge. Metal under my hands. Fire at my back. The specific silence of a workspace where the only voice belongs to the thing you're making.
I don't question it. I can't. My body is already moving.
His shirt ison the floor, massive—it falls to my thighs when I pull it over my head. It smells like him, the fire magic in the fabric faint but present, a low heat that presses against my skin and makes the brand at my throat pulse.
I walk barefoot through the Ember Court.
The stone is warm under my feet. The fire-thread in the walls responds to me in a way it didn't before the claiming—brighter where I pass, dimming behind me, a trail of gold that followsme through the corridors like a living thing. I don't know why. I don't stop to think about why.
The guards see me. They step aside without a word. One of them glances at my throat—the brand—and something shifts in his face. Recognition. Respect. Fear. I note the look and keep walking.
The forge is empty.
It's the largest workspace I've ever seen. The caldera's heat comes up through the stone floor in waves. The anvils are ancient—nine hundred years of use worn into their surfaces. The tools hang in rows along the walls, organized by a system I recognize because my grandmother uses the same one. Old system. Pre-war system. The kind of organization that was standard in forges before?—
I stop.
I don't finish that thought. I don't know enough to finish it and the heat in my belly is rising and my hands are itching and there's iron in a bin by the nearest anvil and I need to touch it.
I pick up a piece.
The iron is raw. Unworked. Cold. It should stay cold in my hands—I'm human, I have no fire magic, I can't heat metal with my skin. This is a fact I've known my entire life.
The iron warms in my grip.
Not much. Not enough to work. But enough that I feel it—a low hum in the metal, a vibration so faint it might be my imagination except it isn't. I've felt this before. Every time I've worked metal in my grandmother's forge. The hum that means the iron is ready to listen.
I set the piece on the anvil, pick up a hammer—too heavy for me, designed for Fae hands—and I don't care. I bring it down.
The iron sings.
I don't knowhow long I work.
The heat haze makes time soft. Minutes or hours—the distinction stops mattering when the metal is singing under my hands. I'm not thinking. My hands are thinking. They know shapes I've never been taught. Angles I've never practiced. The iron responds to every strike with a note that gets clearer and purer the deeper I go.
I'm making a blade. Not one of my grandmother's blades—clean, efficient, designed to kill quickly. Something different. Something with more curves than a killing tool needs. Something that looks, when I hold it up to the forge light, like it was made to be beautiful first and lethal second.
It's the most dangerous thing I've ever created.
I know this the way I know my own name. The blade in my hand could cut through Fae wards. I don't know how I know this. The knowledge is in my hands, not my head. My hands shaped the edge at an angle that shouldn't work against magical shielding but will. My hands folded the iron in a pattern that creates a frequency—a hum in the blade that I can feel in my teeth.
The fire in the forge walls is doing something strange. The flames are leaning toward me. Toward the blade. The fire-thread in the stone pulses in the same rhythm as the hum coming off the metal in my hands and I don't understand why and I'm too deep in the heat haze to be frightened of it.
I hold the blade up. It catches the forge light and throws it back in a color that's not quite gold. Warmer. Richer. The color of the fire magic in his ridges when he?—
I set the blade down on the anvil. My hands are shaking.
Not from the work. From the thing sitting behind my ribs—tight, hot, close to tears. I just made something with my bare hands that is better than anything I've ever made in my life. I don't know how.
"Sophia."
I spin around.
He's in the doorway, leaning against the stone frame with his arms crossed. He's dressed—loose trousers, nothing else, the fire brands on his chest and arms catching the forge light. His golden eyes are on me. Not on me. On the blade.
His face is doing something I've never seen on it. Not the amused predator who watched me try to kill him. Not the alpha in rut who pinned me to the stone floor. Something else. Something closer to the expression my grandmother wore the one time I made a blade that was better than hers—the look of someone seeing a thing they thought was impossible.
