The Thirteenth Ember - Chapter 46: Chapter 46

The morning they began the march to Nar’Vareth, the sky wept cold rain, and the earth drank every drop like it knew what was coming.
Aeryn stood at the edge of the encampment, boots slick with mud, eyes fixed on the eastward trail that led into the cliff-riddled valley of the old world. She wore no armor — only a storm-colored cloak, her embermark exposed on her collarbone, glowing softly.
Kael approached behind her, already dressed for war: black leathers, a flame-split blade at his hip, and the burnished bracer gifted to him by the Southern Riders strapped tight on his forearm. But his gaze was not hard today.
It was haunted.
“You slept little,” he said.
“Sleep is a luxury I no longer trust,” she replied
He nodded, standing beside her as the rebellion’s vanguard gathered in quiet rows behind them. Liora moved among the scouts. The Hollow Reach twins sharpened their arrows beside a sputtering fire. Tension hung like smoke.
“We could wait a day,” Kael offered softly.
Aeryn shook her head. “Every day we delay, the Court weaves another trap. And the Order… they’re already moving.”
He didn’t argue. He only slipped a small cloth-wrapped token into her palm.
A string of black opal beads her mother’s, returned to her without ceremony.
“She left it where you sat,” he said. “After you left the Hollow.”
Aeryn stared at the beads, and for a moment, her fingers tightened around them.
Why now? Why Nar’Vareth? Why the past again when the future burned at her heels?
Twelve years ago, deep within the Vault of Thorns…
Miraen was no queen then.
Just a girl in red robes, her eyes seared gold from magic saturation, her wrists bleeding where Order chains had begun etching obedience into her skin.
She knelt before the High Witness, a man with black feathers braided into his beard and eyes like hollow knives.
“You were chosen,” he said. “Born from the first ignition. The Emberblood must be tested.”
Miraen didn’t flinch. “And if I refuse?”
“You won't.”
But she did.
And in the silence that followed, she let her flame rise not in fury, but in stillness. Controlled. Sacred.
A fire that did not consume the chamber.
But consumed him.
By the time the guards forced the doors open, the High Witness’s body was ash and silence.
And Miraen was gone.
Back in the present…
The rebellion's march was quiet.
No horns. No banners.
They moved like shadows through forest and field, keeping to the broken paths, cloaked by rain and silence.
Kael rode beside Aeryn, his hand never far from hers. Liora flanked the rear, ever-watchful, while scouts returned with word of burnt villages and displaced Order priests — signs of unrest echoing ahead.
But it was the seventh day of travel when they reached the edge of the Forgotten Ring the jagged border of Nar’Vareth and found the first real message.
A tree, split cleanly down the center by lightning.
At its base: a single red cloth.
Tied into a knot only one person could tie.
Miraen.
Aeryn dismounted slowly, her pulse in her throat.
“She’s close,” Kael said.
“She’s watching,” Aeryn murmured.
As night fell, they made camp in the ruins of an old war chapel. Vines grew through its broken walls. The altar was blackened from some long-forgotten ritual, and the windows had no glass only carved ashwood framing the stars.
Aeryn stood at the broken threshold, watching the sky.
Kael joined her, quiet.
“Are you afraid?” he asked.
Yes,” she said. “But not of them.”
He looked at her.
She looked back.
“I’m afraid of what I’ll become if I win.”
Kael touched her face, slow and deliberate. “You’ll still be you. With blood on your hands. And a fire no one else has. But you.”
Aeryn leaned into him.
And for a few precious moments, they didn’t speak.
They just held each other.
Breathing.
Alive.
Together.
But not far from their camp, in a glade untouched by sound, the Order gathered.
Clad in ceremonial robes.
Eyes white with oathfire.
And at their center, a child no older than ten knelt in silence her head shaved, her skin glowing faintly.
A new vessel.
Bred from captured flame.
Trained since birth to house it.
“She will not yield,” one priest said.
The lead Witness touched the girl’s brow. “Then we will make the world burn with both.”
Back at camp, as sleep finally claimed her, Aeryn dreamed.
Not of flame.
But of a child’s laugh in her arms.
Of Kael beside her in peace.
And then ash.
So much ash.
And a woman’s voice whispering: “Only one will walk out of Nar’Vareth. You must decide which.”