Page 60 of Scorched
Ilara Vey-Sorath.
I stare at it. The letters swim. The caldera's heat is pressing against my skull, the Bloodwork harmonic is vibrating in my bones, and I'm looking at my grandmother's true name written in the handwriting of the male who branded me three times and knotted me on the floor of his forge.
The annotation beside her name: Not located. Presumed fled. Heritage status: confirmed dormant. Threat assessment: low.
Low. He assessed her as a low threat. The woman who escaped. Who survived long enough that the name became a story, became a grandmother's namesake, became a heritage so diluted it read as dormant. He wrote low beside her name and moved on to the next entry.
I'm sitting on the floor of a vault full of dead people's names and I'm holding a ledger with my ancestor's name written in the handwriting of the male whose sigil burns over my heart. The woman my grandmother was named for. The one who got away.
The brands are hot. The sigil is pulsing. Through it I can feel his heartbeat—steady, distant, alive. He's somewhere above me. In the throne room, perhaps. Or the study. Going about the business of being a king while I sit in his secret vault and read the minutes of his war.
The Bloodwork harmonic reaches a pitch that cracks the nearest shelf. A wooden beam splits down the middle. Scrolls tumble. The singing isn't coming from the weapons anymore.
It's coming from me.
I can feel it in my chest, in my throat, in the brands on my skin. A frequency pouring out of my body, out of my blood, answering the dead metal around me with a living voice. The artifacts respond—blades rattling in their barrels, hammers jumping in their crates, the entire vault alive with the sound of six hundred years of silence breaking.
I let it happen. I sit on the floor with my grandmother's real name in my lap and I let the Bloodwork harmonic pour out of me and fill the vault and shake the mountain's bones.
The caldera'sheat hasn't changed in four hours. The stone beneath me is the same temperature it was when I sat down—hot, constant, the mountain's fire indifferent to the woman sitting in its belly reading the records of her people's murder. My legs are numb. My eyes burn from the lamplight. The Bloodwork harmonic has settled into a steady, enormous sound—not the scream from before, but a sustained note, a chord, the combined voice of every artifact in this room singing in response to the frequency pouring from my body.
I have names now. Faces, in the few sketches included in the records. A drawing of a female smith at an eastern forge—young, dark-haired, her hands resting on an anvil that looks like the one upstairs. The notation beside her sketch: Forge Master Liera Vey-Sorath. Extinguished. Three apprentices confirmed.
Vey-Sorath. My name. My grandmother's name. My family's name, written in the records of the people who killed us.
He finds me at dusk.
I hear him on the stairs. The heavy, deliberate tread of a Fae male descending into the dark. The fire-thread in the stairwell lights for him—a trail of orange fire tracing his path down, the mountain knowing its king even this deep.
He reaches the bottom. He sees me. He sees the ledgers. He sees the kill orders with their broken seals spread on the floor around me.
He stops.
"How long have you been down here?" His voice is quiet. Not careful—quiet in the way that a furnace is quiet before the bellows pump.
"Long enough."
He looks at the ledger in my hands. He can see which page it's open to. He can see the name.
"Ilara Vey-Sorath," I say. "My great-great-grandmother. The one your records say got away. Threat assessment: low."
He doesn't flinch. He doesn't look away. He stands at the bottom of the stairs with the fire-thread bright around his horns and his golden eyes on mine and the Bloodwork harmonic screaming in the vault between us.
"She wasn't a low threat," he says.
"No."
"I made an error."
"You made a lot of errors." I close the ledger. I hold it against my chest. "You documented them all. Very thorough. A three-year-old. Confirmed."
Something moves in his face. Not the mask—something underneath it, something that breaks through the nine centuries of control for one instant before he catches it and pushes it back. I see it. I'm trained to see things like that. The specific flinch of a male confronted with the shape of his own decisions.
"Every name," he says. "I know every name."
"Good. So did they. Before you killed them."
The vault is loud around us. The harmonic pressing against the walls, against the ceiling, the artifacts singing with the full voice of a people whose names are written in the ledgers on the floor. His fire magic is flaring—I can feel it, the heat pouring off his skin, the fire-thread in the walls blazing in response. The two frequencies filling the vault—Bloodwork steel and Ember fire, the old argument, the ancient push.
