Chapter 1
The smell of the smoke finally reached me. It was thick and suffocating, it curled beneath the door, laced with something darker underneath. Something that made my stomach turn even before my mind caught up with what it meant.
I sat up in bed, pressing the back of my hand to my nose, blinking against the sting in my eyes. The house groaned around me. Somewhere outside, something cracked and collapsed and then came the sound I would spend the rest of my life trying not to hear.
“Screaming.”
I scrambled out of bed and ran to see what was really happening.
I found her at the bedroom window.
My mother stood completely still, one hand braced against the frame while the other pressed flat against the glass as though she could hold back whatever was out there through sheer force of will.
The moonlight caught the silver threading through her brown hair, the rigid line of her jaw, and the way her shoulders had gone tight and high, as if she was bracing for impact.
I knew that posture. I had seen it before, in training, in battle preparations, in every moment when my mother chose to be Alpha before she chose to be afraid.
But her hands were shaking.
I moved closer, slow and quiet, until I was close enough to see her face reflected in the glass. Her expression made my chest tighten in a way I didn't have words for yet, not at twelve years old. Fury and grief tangled together into something terrible, her eyes glassy, her lips pressed so thin they had gone white at the edges.
Outside, the world was burning.
Thick orange light pulsed through the glass, painting her face in fire and shadow. Smoke billowed in dense rolling clouds, swallowing the treeline, swallowing the training grounds, swallowing everything that had always been permanent and safe and ours.
“My beautiful baby.”
She breathed it more than she said it just like a whisper. The kind that slips out before you can catch it.
"Mom."
She stiffened. Her reflection blinked.
I watched her throat move as she swallowed so hard, watched her draw a slow breath in through her nose, and square her shoulders, as if she were putting on armour. When she turned to look at me, her expression had rearranged itself into something that almost resembled calm.
"Are you okay?" I asked. My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to. "Mom are you okay?"
She looked at me for a long moment. Her lips curved into a smile that didn't come close to reaching her eyes, and something about the effort of it the way she was clearly forcing it just for me made my throat go dry.
She shook her head once. Then she crossed the distance between us and cupped my face in both her hands, tilting my chin up to meet her gaze.
"You don't have to worry, baby," she said softly. "I promise you. Everything is going to be alright. So just stay put, okay? Stay right here with me."
I wanted to believe her. I wanted to so badly.
But my mother never lied to me and the only way this felt like anything other than a lie was if she truly believed she could make it true through willpower alone.
She turned back to the window.
And then the scream came again.
My head snapped toward the window before I could stop myself, and I pushed up onto my toes, pressing my face to the glass beside her.
The orange was everywhere.
Bright and violent, it ate through the buildings below with a hunger that felt almost personal, the flames curling and reaching like fingers. The eastern wing had already collapsed on one side, timbers jutting from the rubble like broken ribs. And between the burning structures, through the rolling smoke, I could see them.
“My people.”
Warriors racing through the chaos, shifting mid-stride, crashing into shadows that moved too fast to do anything.
It was an attack. Not a fire by accident, not a stray flame.
The kind someone had planned. The kind that required maps and numbers that someone who knew exactly where our defences were weakest.
A sob worked its way up my throat before I could stop it.
A massive section of the ceiling in the great hall gave way with a sound like thunder, crashing to the floor in a cascade of flame and sparks. I couldn't see who was beneath it.
"Mom"
"Don't look."
Her hand came up and covered my eyes, pressing my face against her shoulder so that all I could see was the weave of her tunic and all I could smell was her pine and warmth and the faint copper thread that meant she was afraid.
"Don't look, Kaelira. I've got you."
I stood there with my face buried against her and my hands fisted in her sleeves and my whole body shaking, I let myself just for a moment pretend that this was something that could be fixed. That my father was out there handling it. That by morning, it would be over.
But then I heard my father's voice.
