Chapter 101 Small Mercies
(Caelum Ashborne)
He didn’t say what he wanted to: that reaching didn’t mean choosing. That chains could teach the body lies. He knew better than to take it personally. She didn’t know him. She’d seen him twice—once as a ghost behind a wall, once as a shadow in her room offering stolen cloth and half-truths. Her entire world down here had narrowed to chains and the monster who held them.
Still.
It was one thing to imagine the Devil breaking her. Another thing to hear her mouth shape his name like that. Apollo took names like claims. Caelum heard them like warnings.
He straightened, forcing his shoulders back.
She was weak. Even with the water loosening the ropes, it wasn’t enough.
Caelum bit back another curse. This could be a very bad idea, but he couldn’t leave her like this.
He pulled a small vial from inside his belt—thin glass, stoppered with black wax. Emberborn tonic. Not much. Meant for emergencies. For spies who got caught in their own fires.
This counted.
He stepped up onto the lower beam of the cross, balanced carefully, he wrapped an arm around her waist, taking her weight. Her skin was hot—fevered from exertion and residual magic. He couldn’t help but notice how well she fit against him. She groaned, something that sounded like “No” and “More” mixed together.
Her body spoke in echoes now. Caelum hated that he could hear the pattern Apollo had taught it.
He pressed two fingers against her jaw to tip her face slightly. “Don’t fight me,” he whispered. “You don’t have the energy for it.”
Her lashes trembled again, but she didn’t pull back. Couldn’t.
He thumbed the wax off with one hand and brought the vial to her lips. Tilted it.
A single drop hit her tongue. The tonic flared in the back of his own throat in sympathetic taste—bitter, metallic, laced with ember-heat.
She coughed weakly, throat flexing. Then swallowed.
“Good,” he muttered. “That’s it.”
Another drop. Then another. Just enough to coat her tongue, to trick her body into remembering how to take something in that wasn’t pain. The tonic’s magic slid through her slowly, a dull red glow flickering briefly under her skin along her throat, then sinking deeper. As it settled, the gold in her eyes brightened by a hair’s breadth, and the runes under the cross responded with a single, soft pulse, like a heartbeat agreeing to continue.
Colour crept back into her cheeks. Not much. Enough.
He stoppered the vial and tucked it away.
“Why,” he asked softly, more to himself than her, “do you do what they all say you will?”
Prophecies talked about fire and chains and crowns. They did not talk about the girl inside them. They never wrote about thirst, or fear, or the way a person could be turned into a symbol and still bleed like a person.
She shifted minutely against him, a small involuntary twitch of muscle that made the smoke-ropes flare brighter where they cut into her. A whine slipped from her, soft and unconscious.
Caelum’s throat tightened.
“I can’t cut you down,” he said finally, forcing the admission out.
He couldn’t risk it.
Not when the same prophecy that placed her in Apollo’s grasp also said losing her would cost the Emberborn their last chance.
“I need you alive,” he said quietly. “We all do. Even if you hate us for it later.” There it was, the mirror he hated: Apollo needed her bound. Caelum needed her breathing. Both needs were cages.
The word we in his mouth felt dangerous. Treasonous. True.
He ran his thumb over the corner of her mouth. The pink of her full lips stood in stark contrast to his grey-black skin.
Beautiful. He told himself.
He adjusted his stance, gently, reluctantly, releasing his hold on her. The wood groaned softly under her weight.
“I’ll come back,” he promised. “When I can do more than just watch you hang.”
He hesitated, then added, “Try not to die before then. It would really ruin my father’s plans.” The attempt at humour tasted like ash.
Her lips twitched. It might have been a grimace. It might have been almost a ghost of a broken smile. He chose to take it as a sign she’d heard him. A micro-mercy: not hope. Not yet. But proof she was still in there.
He stepped down from the cross and let his gaze skim her once more—checking, cataloguing, memorising every mark Apollo had left. Not for voyeurism. For record. For rage. For eventually. There was nothing abstract about what had been done to her. Nothing theoretical about the bruises or the raw skin or the faint tremors that still shook her muscles.
Queen’s Flame sparked faintly somewhere in her chest, still curled around the Devil’s bite like golden smoke around a brand. His own ember answered it, and for a heartbeat he felt something impossible—three fires brushing the same thread: hers, his, and the Devil’s.
The thread tugged. Not toward Apollo. Not toward Caelum. Toward something beyond both of them, as if the prophecy itself had fingers. Caelum’s skin prickled with the sense of being measured. Chosen. Not by his father. Not by a king. By the fire.
It made his skin crawl.
He stepped back, letting his gaze flick once around the room. He wiped any trace of his own magic from the floor, smoothing the imprint of his boots with a hiss of golden flame. The cup he’d formed he reabsorbed into his palm, leaving no glass, no residue.
Only the loosened bindings and the cloth remained—both subtle enough that Apollo might attribute them to his own oversight, or to the vagaries of magic settling after a storm. Or, if the Devil noticed, subtle enough to wound his pride without giving him a target. A kindness disguised as an accident.
Caelum moved back toward the wall where his secret slit waited, then paused.
“Hold on, little ember,” he whispered in his own tongue—a language older than this palace, older than the Devil’s reign. “Don’t let him be the only one you burn for.”
As he spoke, a faint gold ember drifted from the cloth at her shoulder and vanished into the air, like a firefly escaping a jar. He didn’t summon it. He didn’t chase it. He only watched it go with a tightness in his chest that felt like a premonition.
Her only answer was a faint, shuddering exhale.
The stone sighed.
He slipped through the crack in the wall and let the stone seal behind him, folding his flame back into silence as he vanished once more into the hidden veins of the palace—just another shadow carrying very old secrets, and a new, terrifying certainty.
The echo of their combined fires still rang in his bones as he descended into the dark.
If the prophecy had truly begun, then time—always slippery in Hell—had just become a knife-edge.
And Caelum realised, with a cold clarity that didn’t feel like thought, that every “small mercy” he gave her was also a signal. A spark. A breadcrumb for forces that listened through stone.
And Caelum Ashborne, son of the Emberborn’s hidden king, knew one thing with painful clarity:
If he didn’t move soon, the Devil would finish what he’d started.
And the Queen they’d all been waiting for would never live long enough to wear a crown.