CHAPTER 58: ABDICATION

The first gasp was sharp enough to draw blood.

Then came another. And another. Until the ballroom rippled with the sound of disbelief... a thousand breaths caught, choked, and released in unison.

And then, the flood.

"She can’t do that!" someone shrieked from the mezzanine.

"Is this even legal?" cried another, voice breaking with panic.

"What does this mean?"

"Where is she going?"

"Tyranny will cease to exist!" came a jubilant cheer from a brave—or foolish—merchant lord.

"Who will rule us now?" a matron sobbed into her fan.

The air turned to wildfire... questions, protests, and curses all colliding in a single infernal roar.

Priests scrambled toward the dais, their sacred robes tangling as they clutched holy relics and demanded proof.

Councilmen shoved each other aside, shouting for order, for sense, for control... anything to reclaim the illusion of stability.

But chaos had no interest in being tamed.

Caelen stood motionless at first, still clutching Ophelia as though she were the last solid thing in a world that had just shattered. His face drained of color, the blood retreating like the tide from the shore.

This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be.

"No."

The word tore from him like a wound.

He released Ophelia’s hand and began to move... shoving past startled nobles, ignoring their protests, his eyes locked on the her.

"ERIS!"

The name ripped through the air, raw, desperate, unguarded.

Ophelia, left standing in the storm he’d created, could only stare.

Shock rooted her in place, but beneath it... beneath the numbness... something else stirred.

Relief? Fear? She couldn’t tell.

If Eris truly meant to abandon the throne... what would that make her?

What would that make them?

And then there was Soren.

Standing on the fringes of pandemonium, his silver and ice-blue attire catching the riotous light of the flames. He did not shout. He did not move. He only watched her.

Eris.

So calm amid the frenzy. So still it seemed the chaos parted around her, unwilling to touch something so resolutely divine.

She had planned this. He knew it now.

The veiled hints. The map traced by trembling hands. The soft, haunted words: "Too late."

This was her endgame.

And for the first time in years, Soren’s chest hurt.

Not from battle, not from injury... but from something far more treacherous.

Because he understood now. She wasn’t escaping power.

She was escaping herself.

All around them, nobles were fracturing into factions... some celebrating, others snarling in outrage.

"Finally, the tyrant falls!"

"She was the flame that devoured her own house!"

"What happens to the crown? The alliances?"

"Who commands the armies?"

The councilmen barked for restraint; the priests called for divine verification from the high keeper himself.

Their voices tangled like smoke... thick, suffocating, directionless.

And yet—through it all—Eris stood.

At the foot of her throne, unmoved, untouchable.

High Keeper Dareth stood beside her, clutching the scroll as nobles tried to seize it, his knuckles white, his faith trembling.

But she?

She was serene.

Tranquil in the way only one who has already lost everything can be.

She lifted one hand... small, delicate, deadly.

The Eternal Pyre obeyed.

Flames shot upward, licking the dome of the ballroom, burning thirty feet high. Heat rolled through the air like a living heartbeat. Every noble dropped into stunned silence, terror seizing their tongues.

When she finally spoke, her voice was not a queen’s command but a verdict:

"As of dawn, I am no longer your Queen. Solmire belongs to Caelen Caldrith. May you serve him better than you served me."

No blessing.

No apology.

No fond farewell.

Just a parting blow... a flame flung into the dark.

And gods help them all, for in that moment, she looked less like a fallen monarch

and more like a goddess withdrawing her divinity.

It was supposed to end quietly.

A queen stepping off her throne and out of history, vanishing like the last breath of a dying fire. No spectacle, no pleas. Just silence.

But fate, ever the dramatist, had other plans.

Eris turned toward the side archway... the one that led into the moonlit corridors beyond the ballroom. The crowd was still reeling, nobles clawing for sense, priests fumbling for prayer, yet she moved through the storm untouched or rather tried to...

The train of her gown brushed the marble, crimson silk whispering like smoke against stone.

Freedom waited just beyond that door.

Or something like it.

And then... he stepped into her path.

Caelen.

Tall. Rigid. A wall of iron and disbelief. His gold-trimmed coat gleamed under the firelight, and the fury in his eyes could have outshone even her flames.

He didn’t shout, he didn’t need to. The sheer weight of his presence stopped her mid-step.

For the second time that night, she was forced to look up at him.

Not across a throne room.

Not across the void of their marriage bed.

Not through the veil of politics and poison.

Just... him.

And gods, how strange it was. How intimate.

More than the dance they shared at the beginning of the ball.

The distance that had always cushioned her heart was gone.

And in that unguarded space between them, a memory struck like lightning.

The smell of smoke.

The metallic sting of blood in her mouth.

His sword... his sword... driving through her chest.

Through that cursed, dragon-blackened heart of hers.

The look on his face as he did it... grief painted over duty, horror shaped into mercy.

The memory sliced through her so vividly she almost staggered.

Her throat tightened; her pulse roared in her ears.

But her face... oh, her face did not move.

The queen’s mask held, flawless and cold, even as something inside her cracked wide open.

Caelen’s voice broke the silence first.

Low. Controlled. The calm before something terrible.

"What are you doing?"

The words were sharp enough to leave scars.

Eris met his gaze without flinching. Her tone, when it came, was steady. Deceptively simple.

"What I should have done a long time ago."

And just like that, the marble underfoot seemed to tilt, reality warping around the weight of her calm.

Caelen’s disbelief darkened to anger. His jaw tightened, his voice frayed at the edges.

"What are you up to this time?"

Each word a knife hurled in accusation.

"You never do anything that doesn’t end cruel or twisted."

There it was... the venom she had once loved in him.

Suspicion, distrust, the faithless certainty that she was always playing some darker game.

The sound of it might have gutted her once.

Now, it only made her smile.

A faint, wry curl of her lips. Almost soft. Almost sad.

"This is a different reaction than I expected," she said lightly. "I thought you’d be jumping for joy."

She let the pause hang between them like a blade balanced on air... then, with a glint of something strange in her eyes, added:

"After all... you were written to be the hero."

The words struck him like a ghost’s whisper. Written.

A word that didn’t belong in their world.

It unsettled him more than her abdication had.

And in that moment, while confusion flickered behind his anger, she did what she’d always done best... she smiled like she knew something he didn’t.

And for the first time in his life, he wondered if she truly did.