Chapter 177: The Purple Flame

Chapter 177: Chapter 177: The Purple Flame

Theon hit the floor hard.

The sword had gone through the arm he threw up on instinct, through the shoulder behind it, and Voss’s whole weight had driven it on from there, down past the collarbone and into his chest.

Theon did not remember grabbing the blade. He only knew that his bare hand was wrapped around its edge, that the steel was biting into his fingers, and that he could not make himself let go. Blood ran down the metal in thin, bright threads and pattered onto the stone. Drip. Drip. Drip.

The corridor tilted. The ceiling swung away from him, and the pillars that lined the hall seemed to bend like trees in a storm. He tried to draw a breath, and the air stopped halfway down, caught on something that did not belong inside him.

*Strange,* he thought. *The Headmaster told me I could not die.*

The thought drifted away from him like a leaf on a river. Lyra. He had brought her along to keep her where he could see her, and somewhere inside the roaring fire above him she was watching it happen. He tried to say her name. It came out as a wet, broken whisper, and the cold spread through his chest.

A sound tore through the corridor. It was not a scream. It was a roar, long and ragged and so full of rage that the lamps along the walls shuddered in their brackets.

The Primordial Flame Empress stood where Theon had fallen, her hand still half outstretched toward the place where he had been standing a heartbeat earlier. The color had drained from her face. Her pupils had shrunk to pinpricks, and in them the flames of her cloak flickered and danced. She stared at the man in the doorway, at the sword in his hands and the blood on its edge, and for one long moment she did not move at all.

Then she moved.

She crossed the distance between them in a blink. Her fist swung in a short, savage arc, and it landed on Voss’s jaw with a crack like a tree splitting in two.

BOOM!

The man left the floor. He flew backward down the corridor, his cloak streaming behind him, and the sword spun out of his grip and clattered away across the stones. He smashed into a pillar twenty paces away. The stone cracked from top to bottom. Dust rained from the ceiling, and Voss slid down the broken column and crumpled at its base.

The Flame Empress did not watch him fall. She whirled, dropped to her knees, and gathered Theon into her arms. His head lolled against her shoulder. His face was gray, and his lips were moving, forming words that had no sound.

"Theon." Her voice shook. "Theon, look at me."

His eyelids fluttered. His fingers were still curled around nothing, red to the wrist.Beneath her ribs, the small heart that slept inside her was hammering with terror. She could feel Lyra pressing against the edges of her mind, begging, over and over, to be let out, to be let close. The Flame Empress held the thought still with all her strength. *Not yet, little one.*

"Headmaster!" She turned and laid him gently at the old man’s feet. Her hands trembled as she let go. "Save him. Do whatever you have to do. Save him."

"I am already doing it."

The Headmaster had dropped to one knee beside the boy. He pressed both palms against the wound, and light poured from his fingers, pale gold and warm. It sank into Theon’s chest and spread across his shoulder in glowing threads. The Headmaster’s brow was furrowed, and a bead of sweat slid down his temple.

The wound did not close.

The blade that struck him wasn’t ordinary it was specially prepared for him. It had gone straight to the heart, and the healing light seemed to disappear into the wound the way water vanishes into dry sand. The Headmaster set his jaw and tried again, and then a third time, layering spell upon spell, one rolling over the next. The light flared brighter. The air filled with the hum of old, strong magic.

He had healed wounds on battlefields for decades, and he had never felt one fight him like this. It was as though the injury itself refused to be mended. "Come on, boy," he muttered. "Hold on. Do not let go."

Behind them, something stirred.

The Flame Empress rose slowly to her feet. She turned, and the heat that rolled off her made the air ripple like a desert road. Down the corridor, Voss was pushing himself up from the base of the pillar. Blood ran from the corner of his mouth. His head hung low. When he lifted it, his eyes were white, empty and shining, and they were fixed on the boy lying on the floor.

"Kill the seventh prince," he whispered.

He staggered toward his fallen sword and snatched it up from the stones.

"Kill the seventh prince."

"Shut up." The Flame Empress’s voice was low and flat. Fire leapt from her hands in twin ropes of orange light. "Just Shut up and die."

She lunged.

Flame lashed out in a whirl of heat, and Voss brought the sword up just in time. Steel met fire with a screech. Sparks showered across the corridor. He staggered, planted his boots, and held on. She struck again. And again. Each blow came harder than the one before, a hammer of flame that cracked the floor beneath her feet and scorched the tapestries from the walls. Voss blocked every one, his arms trembling, the sword smoking in his hands.

Clang! Clang! Clang!

"Kill the seventh prince," he said, between blows. "Kill the seventh prince. Kill the seventh prince."

"I said shut up!"

She drove a wall of fire into him and sent him skidding backward. He dug the blade into the stone, and it carved a groove as long as a man’s body before he stopped. He rose again at once, steaming, his cloak in shreds. The whisper never stopped. It slid out of his mouth like water from a cracked jar, flat and calm and relentless, as though pain did not matter to him at all.

The Flame Empress stood in the middle of the burning corridor and breathed hard. Her hair stirred in the heat. Behind her, a faint golden glow pulsed against the wall as the Headmaster worked. Every second counted. Every second this man stayed on his feet was another second Theon lay bleeding on the floor.

"I have had enough of this," she said.

She raised one hand toward the ceiling.

"Phoenix Flame."

The air screamed. A vast circle of fire opened above her head, spinning, and out of it unfolded two enormous wings of crimson and gold, each feather a blade of living flame. The light threw the whole corridor into a blazing noon.

"Total Destruction. Single Point Angle."

The wings beat once. A storm of arrows leapt from them, thousands of lances of fire, hissing through the air so fast that they left trails of white. They rained down in a curtain across the entire corridor. The Flame Empress closed her fist, and the arrows turned. Every one of them swung in the air like a flock of birds and bent toward a single point.

Voss.

The arrows screamed down on him. He threw himself sideways and rolled across the floor. A lance of fire struck the spot he had left and blew a crater into the stone. He sprang up, leapt a second blast, ducked beneath a third, and spun in the center of the storm with the sword in his hand, cutting two arrows in half and sending a third spinning harmlessly into a wall. Fire roared in every direction. Pillars cracked and burned. Smoke rolled across the ceiling. When the last arrow fell, he was still standing, his coat in flames and his chest heaving, but whole.

The Flame Empress stared. She had burned fortresses to glass with that spell. She had watched armies scatter before a single volley.

"A human," she said slowly, "dodged that."

It was not possible. No ordinary human could have read those arrows, let alone moved fast enough to evade them. She stared at the way he stood, the odd, loose angle of his limbs, the way his head tilted as if listening to a voice she could not hear. His chin rose a fraction at a time. Something about him was wrong.

*No,* she thought. *Something is not right. He is not the one controlling himself.*

The fire in her hands died down. The great wings above her folded in on themselves and faded into sparks. The corridor fell quiet, apart from the crackle of burning wood and the Headmaster’s steady murmur of healing spells behind her.

She took a slow step forward and studied the man’s empty white eyes. "Who are you?"

For a moment he did not answer. Then his lips curled, and a voice spoke out of his mouth, and it was not his. It was deep and smooth, patient as stone, and it carried a faint, amused weariness, like a teacher addressing a child who had forgotten a lesson.

"You really do not remember me, Flame Empress."

A chill touched the back of her neck. She did not let it show. "What do you want with the Seventh Prince?" she demanded. "Why do you intend to kill him?"

"That boy will bring a great catastrophe upon this world." The voice spoke slowly, with great calm. "A calamity. He will destroy this world and I must prevent that."

"Lies." Her hands closed into fists. "I do not know you. How do you know my name?"

The pale eyes held hers. The corner of Voss’s mouth lifted, a smile that did not belong to the face it sat on.

"Do not worry," said the voice. "I believe you will remember soon. In fact, I think you will figure it out right about now."

The Flame Empress frowned. Then a strange, prickling heat touched the top of her head, a different heat from her own, a heat that made the fine hairs on her arms stand on end. She looked up.

A flame was falling from the ceiling.

It was purple, a deep, dark purple, the color of a bruise at midnight. It drifted down slowly, a single teardrop of fire, and everything around it seemed to shrink back. The light of her own flames dimmed beside it. *Where did that come from?* she thought.

She threw herself backward.

The purple flame hit the floor exactly where she had been standing.

There was no explosion, no roar. The stone simply gave way. It softened and ran like hot wax, and the floor sank into a glowing pit that spread wider and wider, until a circle six paces across had melted into a bubbling, hissing pool. The edges glowed a dull violet. The heat rolled over her, and it was nothing like fire she knew.

It was something powerful and utterly without mercy.

The Flame Empress stared at the pool, and her blood ran cold. She remembered that color and the smell of it, and the silence that had followed the last time it fell.

Slowly she raised her eyes to the man standing in the smoke with the sword in his hand.

"Wait," she whispered. "Do not tell me you are.... Casa Doom."