CHAPTER 236: WILL

ERIS

Solara’s hooves were a war drum. Each strike ate the frozen road, carrying me toward the stained sky, toward screams my magic pulled across impossible distances. Closer to the disaster that smelled like my own sin.

The demons were familiar.

Not like friends. Like my own face in a shattered mirror. Twisted. Wrong.

Demons.

Someone had summoned them.

And only one person should have been able to.

Me.

The me from before. The villainess. The witch who wrote the spell in a grimoire that should have burned with Solmire.

But the book I’d last seen in a traitor’s hands. The witch. The knight who betrayed me. The pieces locked together.

Solara was fast. Blessed by the fire leaking from my breaking seal. But not fast enough.

People were dying. Now. Each death was a cut. A debt added to a ledger already soaked in first-life blood.

They were my demons. My god’s ruined children. My fault.

I needed to be faster.

I reined Solara in hard. Her hooves skidded on ice. "Go back, girl."

She whinnied, refusing.

"Go."

She held for three seconds, a protest, then turned and fled toward the safety I had abandoned.

I stood alone on the empty road. The capital burned in the distance.

I closed my eyes. Reached for it. The seal cracked in answer.

Pyronox didn’t stir. He woke fully.

I felt his divine attention focus through me. Ancient. Assessing.

"Not yet," I whispered to the dragon in my chest. "Lend me your fire. Just this once."

A rumble answered. Not in my ears. In my bones. Amusement. Agreement.

I began the spell.

Words from a life I shouldn’t remember. A language older than speech. The consonants burned my throat. The vowels resonated with the forge-heart of the world.

The seal threatened to shatter.

Light... red, orange, glorious... blasted through the cracks. My skin glowed translucent. The earth at my feet split, vomiting heat.

"Infernum var al’kaar."

Fire answered.

Reality burned. The air ignited. Physics surrendered.

A rift tore open. Not a door. A wound in the world.

I stepped into the fire.

Into the spaces between.

Everything went red.

The red before color. The red of the first flame.

I walked the pathways that connect all fire, volcano to forge, candle to pyre. Time died. Direction meant nothing. I was fire walking through fire. I moved toward the epicenter. Toward the demons.

The capital appeared.

All at once.

I emerged floating above burning cobblestones, flames licking at my feet. Heat radiated from me in visible waves.

I saw Soren’s barrier first. A dome of divine ice. His work. Beautiful. Terrible. It made my heart clench.

Then... the demons.

Hundreds. Crawling through streets like a plague. Burning. Destruction.

My blood boiled. Literally.

A sound ripped from my throat. Not a word. A command.

Fire erupted from me.

A wave of annihilation. A good number of them vanished. Ash on the wind.

The rest scattered. They knew me. Knew the god in my vessel. They tried to run.

I raised my hand.

My voice was not my own. It was Pyronox’s, spoken through mortal lips.

"Var’keth solmara. Keth alis pyronax."

I invoked the oldest authority. I claimed my place. Not as master. As the vessel.

The demons thrashed. They fought the compulsion. They threw themselves against walls, against the ground. It was useless.

They crawled toward me. Dragged themselves. Against their will. Against their hate.

Hundreds of them. A tightening circle of molten terror and ancient obedience.

They surrounded me. Their combined heat would have vaporized stone.

I stood in the eye of the inferno.

***

Power surged through Eris with a force that transcended pain. It moved beyond mere sensation into a realm where agony became a language, where suffering was but a humble messenger her flesh bore while a divine will reshaped the mortal clay of her vessel.

Too much. She was wielding too much, invoking an authority that belonged to Pyronox alone, not his crumbling prison. She channeled currents meant to flow through celestial veins, not through limbs that remembered the fragility of bone and the warmth of blood.

The seal cracked.

Pyronox growled.

His consciousness uncoiled from the deep places where the seal had forced his slumber, places where Eris had learned, through years of desperate, silent practice, to bury him. She had believed he would sleep there until her death granted him release. Now, he stirred fully, a great beast roused in the core of her being.

The dragon perceived his servants. He felt their perversion, their wrenching from guardian form into weapon-shape. His wrath rose, a mirror to Eris’s own, fed by the profound wrongness of what had been done to beings he had kindled in the world’s first flames, before men had names for terror.

He sought the reins.

Eris felt him... not a push, but a claiming. A divine will attempting to supersede her own, the dragon reaching for her body as a smith’s hand reaches for a familiar hammer, with an assumption of ownership that brooked no question.

"Not yet!" The words were a ragged tear in her throat, raw from shaping syllables no mortal tongue was wrought to speak. Across her skin, delicate vessels surrendered, blooming intricate, crimson tracery. The patterns might have been mistaken for some strange henna, were it not for their source: a body weeping its fragility under a strain it was never meant to bear.

Her eyes began to bleed. Not tears tinged with red, but a slow, deliberate welling of life’s essence from the very corners of sight. It painted heated trails down her cheeks, steam whispering from the rivulets, each drop glowing with a dull, infernal ember-light as if her blood remembered the fire it now hosted.

Yet, she held.

Through a will that had withstood a father’s cruelty, that had endured the crossing from one life into another, that had carried the weight of being a monster while clawing toward something else... she forced the god back. She pressed him down into the depths of her soul, though the walls were gone, maintaining her sovereignty through nothing but a refusal, absolute and snarling, to be made a passenger in her own flesh.

The demons circled her, a corrupted constellation. Hundreds of them, compelled by the divine authority they sensed yet straining against it with the greasy desperation of their defilement.

They moved not randomly, but in a dreadful, precise geometry, their steps etching a terrible sigil upon the ground around her. The pattern was hypnotic in its wrongness, a beauty that sickened the soul.

Eris spoke again. Her voice was now a chorus of two: the woman’s steel and the dragon’s forge-roar, woven into a single, dissonant chord. It was a sound that made the air feel thin and reality seem unsure of its own laws, a testament to the borders crumbling within her.

"Why have you risen?" The demand echoed, layering upon itself, spreading outward in palpable waves that made stone hum. "Who commands you? Speak!"

The response was a horror of unity. A hundred throats, twisted and molten, gave voice as one. It was less a chorus and more a single thought screamed through a fractured lens, a sound that vibrated in the teeth and chilled the spirit.

"Summoned." The word rolled from every mouth, a seismic groan. "We were summoned."

"A price was paid in blood." "A pact was forged." "We cannot refuse."

Their voices overlapped, a cacophony that built into a symphony of torment, a collective confession dragged from beings who had forgotten speech and knew only how to scream.

Eris’s vision swam, blurred by blood and the searing light of the awakened god, yet her focus sharpened. "By whom?"

A heavy silence descended, thick and listening. The crackle of distant fires seemed to retreat. The demons strained, a visible shiver passing through their ranks.

Then, the answer came... not from one, but in broken shards from many, piecing together a mosaic of dread.

"Voices... from the dark." "A crone’s whisper." "And another...a colder shade." "We saw no faces." "Only a veil...a barrier of ritual." "We heard." "We felt." "We obeyed."

Eris’s mind fitted the fragments together, the picture confirming her gravest fears while birthing new ones that coiled like ice in her gut.

The book, the knowledge... it had a master. One with understanding. One with malice.

A blood sacrifice for a summoning of this magnitude. Ten souls, at the least. Likely more. The innocent, always the innocent, for corruption demands the spoiling of purity as its tithe.

Someone with the power to claim the grimoire. Someone with the heart to spill such blood upon the altar of ambition. Someone who would see the union of Fire and Ice as a threat to be drowned in flame.

Vetra.

The name arrived not as suspicion, but as cold, certain truth, etched by the instinct of one who had navigated the poisoned courts of two lifetimes. The Regent Empress, who saw Soren’s throne as her own, who would view a foreign queen not as a bride but as a usurper.

"Return to the abyss." Eris’s command cut through the swirling dread, aimed at the immediate, circling doom. "Leave this world. Go back to your chains."

The wail that answered was the sound of hope dying. It was a wave of pure, desolate anguish that made the earlier cacophony seem orderly. It spoke of a binding deeper than command.

"We cannot." "The pact chains us to this earth." "We must burn.We must destroy." "Until we are unmade." "There is no release." "No return." "No mercy."

Understanding, cold and final, settled upon Eris. The summoning was a knife with no hilt. The ritualist had called the Zahkar forth and then severed the path back.

They were bound to this realm, compelled to wreak havoc until they were individually extinguished... weapons thrown with no thought of retrieval, set to burn everything they touched, including themselves.

They were a fire set in a library, with no means to quench it save to let it consume all.

She drew a breath to think of something, a counter-incantation, the forced banishment that would require all she was, that would demand she let Pyronox rise, that might very well turn her vessel to cinder in the process.

Then she felt it.

A bloom of cold. Not the surface chill of night, but the deep, ancient winter of the buried world. A divine frost, fighting, struggling, being overwhelmed. It pulsed from beneath the earth, a signature as familiar to her now as her own fire.

Soren.

Her heart did not sink; it was ripped from her chest and cast into the void. This was not fear. This was the certain, crushing knowledge of a loss hurtling toward her, inevitable as a falling star.

The fool. The brave, glorious, reckless fool. He had not just fought the demons... he had followed their stench back to the very pit.

"No." The word was a ruin of sound, half-choked sob, half-raw scream. Blood ran fresh from her eyes. "No, you cannot, you cannot be there..."