Page 66 of Scorched
IGNUS
The court runs the way a court runs when its king is present and his mind is elsewhere.
I hold audiences. I review border reports. I approve forge requisitions and trade agreements and the endless, grinding minutiae of maintaining a court that has stood for nine centuries. I sit on the volcanic throne and I listen to petitions and I make decisions and every decision is correct because I've been making correct decisions for longer than most of my courtiers have been alive.
None of it matters.
The forge is dark.
She left four days ago. The fire-thread in the forge walls hasn't lit since the morning she rode through the gate, and the caldera beneath the forge floor has dropped to its lowest output in my memory. The mountain is mourning. I'd find this observation sentimental if it weren't literally true—the fire-thread responds to the presence of Ember blood, has always responded, and the Bloodwork harmonic that's been feeding it for six weeks is gone. The mountain felt her leave. The mountain misses her.
I go to the forge at night because I can't stop going to the forge at night.
The weapons she made are stacked against the far wall. Twenty-seven blades, each one singing the Bloodwork harmonic into the dark. The serrated war-curve. The hooked guard-blade. The throwing knives. The god-killer is gone—she took it with her. The absence of its voice is a gap in the harmonic, a missing note that the other blades sing around but can't fill.
I stand among her weapons. I don't touch them. The metal hums for her, not for me, and my fire magic pushing against the Bloodwork harmonic wouldn't be an answer—it would be an argument. The old argument. The one that ended six hundred years ago with forty-seven forges extinguished and a three-year-old's name annotated confirmed in my handwriting.
The fire-thread in the walls is dark. I bring fire to my palm—a small flame, barely enough to see by—and the shadows it throws are long and sharp against the stone. The forge looks like a body without breath. The anvil cold. The coals gray. The vents closed. The leather apron she wore hangs on a hook by the workbench, still shaped by the curve of her waist, still carrying the faint scent of omega and iron.
I walk through the forge the way I walk through the vault—reading absence. The workbench where she stood. The corner where she slept between knotting sessions, curled on the stone floor with my shirt around her. The anvil where she made the singing blade, where the Bloodwork harmonic first woke in her hands and the fire-thread first brightened for someone other than me.
The god-killer's voice is missing from the harmonic. The twenty-seven blades sing around the gap—an incomplete chord, a song with a note torn out. The sound fills the dark forge the way smoke fills a room, dense and heavy and impossible to breathe through.
She was the forge's heart. Not its fire—I'm its fire, I've always been its fire—but the thing that gave the fire purpose.
I extinguish the flame. I leave. The dark closes behind me.
I sendthe shadow guard on the second day.
Three of my best. Aethel, Karn, Sorrath. Hand-picked for fieldwork in the human districts, for their ability to move unseen in spaces that weren't built for Fae. I give them clear orders: find her, follow her, keep her alive. Don't let her know they're there. Don't engage unless she's in immediate danger. Report to me at dawn and dusk.
The other courts know what she is. They know what she can do. A Bloodwork heir traveling alone through human territory is the most vulnerable target in the Fae world.
I tell myself this. The fire-thread in my study flickers when I give the order, a bright, hot pulse that says the mountain doesn't believe me and neither do I.
The first report comes at dawn on the third day. Aethel's voice through the fire-thread communication channel, the words carried in heat rather than sound—a technique my court developed four centuries ago for long-distance intelligence.
She has reached the human district. She has entered a forge on the eastern lane. An older woman admitted her. No signs of pursuit. No hostile signatures detected.
Her grandmother's forge. She's gone home.
I stand at the study window. Dawn light on the mountain, pale gold through the cloud layer, the eastern slope dropping away into the valley below. The glass is cold under my fingertips. My reflection stares back at me—horns, golden eyes, the fire brands on my chest glowing faintly through my shirt. I look old. Not physically—the Fae body doesn't age the way humans age. But something behind the eyes. Something that's been theresince the night she walked out of the forge and the fire-thread died.
Somewhere in that valley, three days' ride from where I stand, Sophia is sitting in her grandmother's kitchen with a ledger full of dead names and a god-killer at her hip. She's asking questions whose answers I should have given her weeks ago. The sigil tells me she's alive. It tells me her heartbeat is elevated. It tells me nothing about whether she's holding a blade or a teacup or the hand of the woman who sent her to me.
The forge chimney below my window is dark. No smoke. The mountain's forge, cold for the first time since I built it. I haven't been able to bring myself to light it. The forge was hers. Lighting it without her would feel like speaking to an empty room.
The second delegation arrives that afternoon.
Lord Aratus again. This time without the others—alone, without his guard, which is either a show of trust or a calculation that a single Frost Court lord without military escort poses less provocation. Both, most likely. Aratus has survived this long by being both things at once.
"She's gone," he says. Standing in my study. Not the throne room this time—he asked for a private audience and I granted it because Aratus alone is a different conversation than Aratus with Karax and Kaelen.
"She left of her own volition."
"The Bloodwork signatures are still present. Your vault is still singing. The weapons she made are still in your court." He moves to the window. Looks out at the view I have been staring at for four days. "Ignatius. Old friend. You need to understand what is happening."
"I understand perfectly."
