Chapter 172 Blood and Fire Part 1
Daisy knelt on the rotten floorboards where her mother had once collapsed, legs folded under, spine upright and rigid as an execution stake. The storm raged through the open window, wind flaying the wallpaper, rain lashing her naked arms. Every drop that struck her skin hissed, steam rising where the water met the fever running just under her surface. The black veins up her forearms, her neck, her jaw, her temple, were a living garrote—the mark of the chain-sickness, passed down from mother to daughter, awakened now by the curse in her blood. The illness had a hunger of its own, growing worse with every day she denied the ritual. When she pressed the tip of the blade to her palm, the nerves didn’t even bother to scream.
She drew a line from heel to fingertip. Blood spattered, then streamed, then pooled to meet the first of the runes already painted in the dust. The circle was uneven. The petals of each daisy—sixty of them, perfectly counted—were sharp as the memory of every cut she’d ever taken. Every night she’d lain awake in the city’s gutters, wondering what kind of joke it was for the world to keep her alive.
Oliver watched from the edge of the blood ring. He’d tried to stop her twice already: once with words, once with his whole body. He still limped from where she’d kicked his knee out. The bruise was a thunderhead beneath his skin. His coat was sodden. Hair plastered to his brow. Yet every time the lightning broke outside the window, Daisy saw his eyes—always on her, burning. Not with anger, but with desperation. The kind that made her want to look away. The only thing stopping him now was the fact that he believed, just a little, that she might know what she was doing.
She wiped her blade on her thigh and picked up the book.
It wasn’t a real book. Not the way the priests had meant when they’d locked it away in the White Library. The cover was leather, but the kind that squirmed if you squeezed too hard. The pages were thin; the writing bled through. Each glyph is alive, bright against the yellowed skin. They called it the Chainbook, and legend claimed it had ended kingdoms and driven cities to madness before the priests tried to hide it. More than forbidden, it was cursed—rumor said the last person who opened it vanished, leaving only blood and petals behind. She flipped to the marked section. The air around the book turned sour—the stink of rot and copper. The wind snapped the pages back and forth until Daisy slammed her hand down, splattering the old script with fresh red.
She began to read.
The words tasted like battery acid. Not language but poison. They clung to her throat, refusing to be spit or swallowed. The circle flared. The veins on her arms pulsed; each daisy grew, petal by petal, around the old scars. The pain was less than she’d expected—more like a tickle. Yet every heartbeat pushed the black higher, until she felt it in her mouth, in her sinuses, behind her eyes.
Oliver reached for her. His fingers stopped half an inch from the line of blood. “This is wrong,” he said. “Daisy, this isn’t what Delia wanted—what any of us wanted. There’s another way. We’ll find it.”
She grinned, lips splitting, teeth black at the gumline. “Yeah? You’re the expert now?”
He flinched. “I just don’t want to see you—”
She cut him off. “Doesn’t matter what you want.” Her voice came out strange, doubled, like there were two of her, one inside the skin and one wearing it as a suit.
Oliver didn’t move. “If you go through with this, you’re dead. You know that.”
She shrugged. “If I don’t, we all are. The chain-sickness won’t just kill me—it’ll spread, swallowing the city, breaking everyone it touches. I’m just skipping the queue.”
He closed his eyes, then opened them slowly. “Let me help.”
Daisy let the silence stretch. The wind rattled the glass in the window. A floorboard in the kitchen collapsed, taking with it a sodden mass of old cloth and mouse skeletons. The city outside was nothing but an echo. The night was so deep and black it felt like an ocean had rolled in over the roofs.
She stared at Oliver, memorizing the lines in his face: the way the stubble ran unevenly, the slant of his jaw, the cut above his eyebrow from three nights back, when they’d both realized they were being followed, and neither wanted to say it out loud. He looked so tired. So stupidly alive.
“You can’t,” she said, softer now. “I’m not sure anyone can.”
But she did not tell him to leave.
Instead, she slid the tip of the knife across her other palm, watching the fresh blood well up before dripping to the floor. She pressed both bleeding hands to the boards, spreading her fingers wide to brace herself, and concentrated until she felt the world’s magic tug at the old roots below. This was what it meant to be born into her line: every daughter inheriting the chain, every mother bound by the same curse and the same terrible power, all of them keepers of a magic older than memory. In that moment, she sensed not only her own pain but the collective endurance of all the city’s women marked by the chain—her sisters, mothers, and the dead aunts whose marrow had once flowed through the same darkness. The bonds between them shimmered, indivisible and forged through suffering as much as strength. She saw them all, a continuum of women, generation by generation, each face lit by the same defiant spark, reaching back to the first girl who had knelt in this house, in this room, and dared to resist, saying No for all of them.
The ley lines answered, slow at first, then surging. Pressure dropped. The dead hearth kindled to life. Every scrap of paper hovered, script dissolving and reforming to echo the book’s language. The wind stopped.
Then the world went flat.
The pain was immediate. Immense. The kind that made it hard to remember what your own name was. Daisy bit down hard, grinding her molars together until she felt one crack. The chain inside her was hungry, greedy, eager for the taste of her soul. She let it in. She let it devour her. The words from the book spilled out of her in a scream—not a sound but a vibration, a frequency that set every bone in her body to ringing.
The veins crawled up her jaw, over her nose, into the corners of her eyes. When she blinked, the world was outlined in black and white. The only colors: the blue fire of the daisy petals and the red smear of blood on the floor.
Oliver’s voice, close. “Daisy. Daisy, let go.”
She wanted to laugh, but her throat was locked. The book’s pages flapped, turning on their own. She saw the next illustration, the one she’d dreaded since she’d first read the book. A girl, no older than she was, split open from crown to crotch. The chain inside the girl bloomed like a field of flowers, roots crawling in every direction.
Her blood spilled out, pooling, but did not clot. It snaked along the floorboards, tracing the circle's lines. The pattern was completed, petal by petal, until the daisy at the center was perfect.
At that instant, the sky above the city lit up. Not with lightning, but with something slower, more deliberate. A web of black veins crept across the clouds, pushing the rain into a spiral. The rain funneled to a single point above Daisy’s head.
The pressure spiked. Daisy’s eardrums ruptured. Her vision swam. The cold in the room locked in, freezing her breath to frost. fingers into the floorboards, gripping as tightly as she could, and pulled with all her might, using both her strength and her will to draw on the ley line below.
The ley line, buried beneath centuries of mud and rot, answered her call. The whole house shook. Floorboards buckled. The circle glowed, first with daisy-blue, then with a crimson so deep it was almost purple. The pain was a mercy now, a shield against the worst thing, the thing waiting just behind her eyes.
She looked at Oliver, the only real thing left in the room.
He reached for her again, and this time, she let him.
His hand closed over her wrist. The contact sent a bolt of magic through both their veins, lighting up, black on his skin now, too, for a heartbeat.
He pulled her hand to his chest, pressing it over his heart.
She could feel the fear there, the want.
“Whatever happens,” he said, “we go together.”
She tried to nod, but couldn’t. The circle finished itself, locking them both in.
Above them, in the city’s heart, the ritual began in earnest. Daisy felt the other chain—the Emperor’s chain—reach for her. He was more than just a figurehead; the Emperor, centuries old and bound to his own unbroken chain of power, had waited years for this moment. It was said he was the first bearer of the chain-sickness, the one whose curse had spawned Daisy’s own. A rival vein. A second pulse, whispering of promises made in blood. His anticipation, his satisfaction, his need. For a moment, their minds touched, and Daisy saw everything:
—A line of prisoners, each one bearing the black veins, each one broken
—A locket, identical to the one at her own neck, hanging from the Emperor’s fist
—The whole city bent double, waiting for her to either finish the chain or break it.
The air in the room froze, then shattered, every molecule of water turning to rime, then snow, then nothing at all. Daisy felt her own blood run dry. She blinked, once, slowly, and then the world went white.
She had become the embodiment of the daisy—her identity now inseparably fused with the symbol and its power.
She was the root.
And for the first time, she believed she could end it.