They said the Ruthless King never needed to lift a sword—his silence killed faster than any blade. But on the night House Amoréil fell, his silence came wrapped in fire.
Seraine remembered the taste of ash before she remembered the screams. Before the world shattered.
She had been curled in her mother's lap, just twelve, listening to the lull of the lake outside. The moon had reflected perfectly in the water, like a mirror—untouched, undisturbed. Then came the thunder. But it wasn't from the sky.
It was from men. And monsters.
Savages, her nurse had cried. Raiders from the Black Flame border. But Seraine heard otherwise when her uncle gasped out his final breath. "The king... he sent them."
Flames turned the lilies to smoke. Her brothers died fighting in their wedding cloaks. Her father, impaled on the Amoréil crest. Her mother—oh, her mother had known. In her final breath, she had whispered a spell and clasped a cold silver chain around Seraine's neck.
"You do not die tonight, child," her mother had said. "You wait. You rise. You make him regret."
She did die, though.
For a moment. In that tower.
And she did rise.
Not as a princess, but as a bride.
The bride of the man who
burned her world down.