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**Chapter Six: The Flame Unbound**
I didn't mean to lift the blade.
My hand just… moved. Like it had always known what to do. Like it belonged to someone braver.
The chains clattered to the stone as the sword rose—light and heavy all at once. It hummed, not in sound, but in my bones. The markings along its edge glowed gold, then orange, then white-hot.
"She accepts you," the Watcher said, his voice unreadable. "And now they will come."
Before I could ask who "they" were, the air behind us tore open—split like fabric ripped across the sky. Three figures stepped out: robed, masked, and wrong. Their outlines shimmered like heatwaves, and their eyes burned with the same ember-light that lived in the pendant.
I raised the blade. My instincts screamed danger, but they didn't surge through me in panic—they steadied me, rooted me.
"You shouldn't be alive," one hissed. "Your mother broke the pact."
"She gave me this chance," I said, surprising myself. "I'm not wasting it."
The figures didn't wait. They attacked like shadows turned to flame, moving in unnatural bursts. I swung wildly, the sword pulling me with a power I didn't yet understand—but it met their strikes like it remembered fighting them before.
The Watcher joined in, fire spiraling from his palms like ribbons. Together, we forced them back. Two vanished. The third lunged—
And I caught it with the blade.
It screamed—a sound like burning paper and bones snapping—and dissolved in a spray of sparks.
My chest heaved. I hadn't even noticed I was bleeding. A slash across my arm glowed faintly—not with blood, but with light. The same mark as the one on the blade. The same symbol from Maama's book.
"They'll send more," the Watcher said. "Now that the sword is unbound, it's not just your father who will come looking."
"Good," I said. "I have questions for him."
He gave a crooked smile. "You're not ready to face him."
"Then teach me."
The chamber rumbled faintly beneath us. Lava cracked in the distance. Time was moving faster here. Or maybe fate was catching up.
The Watcher studied me for a long moment, then nodded.
"There's a place. A sanctuary buried beneath the old flame roads. Only the marked can pass through it. We go there… or we burn alone."
I looked down at the blade in my hand.
"I'm done burning alone."
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