Page 127 of Embers of Ruin

“If I leave it sealed, you will keep bleeding around it.”

Thorin closes his eyes for a heartbeat. When he opens them, the king is back and through my hazy gaze I see that his eyes are… his eyes are solid black.

Is that scream coming from me? It can’t be. My throat feels raw. That can’t be my scream.

“I am sorry,” he says.

The words make my blood go cold. “Thorin—” His name leaves my mouth before I can stop it.

His shadows rise and the stormy gray eyes that I know are gone. There is only black.

Endless, lightless black. Dark veins creep from the corners of his eyes, branching across his temples like cracks spreading through stone.

“Look.”

The command strikes through me. Not as sound but as force. The golden wall inside my mind cracks and a thin line of light splits through it, bright and terrible, and from the other side comes the faintest sound.

A child crying.

My breath stops and the crack widens.

And then the world goes white.

CHAPTER 26

For a moment, nothing happens. That’s the detail that hurts most. Not the screaming. Not the destruction. Not even the grief waiting just beyond the next few minutes.

It is the normalcy of what comes before. The way disaster arrives quietly. The way no one ever realizes they are standing in the last ordinary moment of their life.

* * *

Young me simply stares. The gold beneath my skin isn't frightening yet. It appears sometimes when I'm upset, or excited, or when I laugh particularly hard. Once, when I was six, flowers bloomed beneath my feet and my mother spent three days convincing me I wasn’t secretly turning into a garden.

At the time, I thought it was wonderful. Magic felt wonderful then.

My mother kneels in front of me, taking both of my hands in hers. Her face is calm, but I know her well enough to see the worry hiding behind it now. I always knew when she was worried, even when she tried to pretend otherwise. Her smile becomes too careful. The corners of her eyes tighten.

"Look at me, little flame."

I do.

The light beneath my skin grows brighter. My father rises from the table. Not quickly. Just attentive. As though this has happened before.

Maybe it has.

Maybe there were signs long before this night. Maybe my parents spent years protecting me from fears I never knew existed. The carving horse remains abandoned on the table. Its crooked little face stares toward us. I find myself focusing on it. The memory wants me to focus on it. As if some part of me already knows that later, when everything else is broken, I will remember that ridiculous horse.

I will remember it more clearly than I remember my own breathing.

"It's alright, you didn’t do anything wrong, sweetling," my mother says.

And the worst part is that she believes it. I can hear it in her voice. She genuinely believes she can make this better, that she can protect me. The knowledge tears through me because I know something she doesn’t. I know how this ends. I know she doesn't get the chance.

They needed protection from me.

The gold spreads slowly up my arms. Not violently—beautifully. Like sunlight moving beneath water. I was imagining what an actual sun was. I said I wanted to be just like the sun and burn bright.

Young me watches with fascination. Not fear.