Ember
The road out of Aldenmere smelled like ash.
She didn't look back. Looking back meant seeing the scorched ring where the market had been. The overturned carts. The faces of people she had spent three months learning to trust, watching her with something caught between gratitude and fear.
Fear won. It always did.
Luna padded silently at her heel, close enough that their shadows merged into one. The dog hadn't made a sound since it happened. Hadn't whined, hadn't pressed her nose into a palm asking for reassurance. Just walked. Present and steady, the way only animals know how to be.
The soldiers had come at dusk. Six of them, bearing the king's crest — the crowned serpent she had grown up seeing stamped on everything her father owned. They hadn't been looking for a runaway princess. Not yet. They were collecting a tax the village couldn't pay.
She should have stayed inside.
The first soldier raised his hand against the innkeeper's wife and something old and furious woke up behind her ribs. It didn't ask permission. It never did.
The fire came from her palms first — always the palms. Then her forearms, her shoulders, until she was standing in the middle of the road wrapped in something that wasn't quite flame. Hotter than flame. More deliberate. The soldiers scrambled back. Two ran without looking back.
She handled the remaining four.
But fire doesn't stop when you tell it to. That's the thing no one understood. It wasn't like lifting a hand or raising a shield. It was like screaming — once it started, it had to finish. The heat rolled outward in a wave she couldn't pull back, and the market stalls caught, and the dry summer air caught, and for a moment she wasn't a person at all.
She was just burning.
Luna didn't run.
While the world around them cracked and roared, the dog sat down in the middle of the road and went still. Not frozen — still. Deliberately, impossibly calm. It was Luna's eyes finding hers through the smoke that did it. Dark and quiet and entirely unafraid.
I see you. Come back.
The fire died in her hands like a candle pinched between wet fingers.
She stood in the ruin of it, chest heaving, palms blistered and already healing. The innkeeper's wife was safe. The soldiers were gone. The market was not.
No one said thank you. They didn't need to. She understood.
She whistled once and Luna rose and fell into step beside her without hesitation.
The road out of Aldenmere smelled like ash and the next village was two days north. She pulled her hood up and kept walking. A lost princess with burning hands and a dog that refused to leave.
Behind her, someone would eventually describe what they saw to the wrong person. A woman wreathed in fire. Hair like a dying coal. A dog sitting calm at the center of the storm.
The king's men would hear it. They always did.
Luna pressed her flank against her leg as they walked, warm and solid and real.
She kept moving.
