Chapter 70 His Little Flame
(Apollo)
Slowly—very slowly—Apollo’s awareness crawled back into place.
He felt the weight of his horns. The drag of his wings. The rough scorch of stone under his knees. The lingering taste of ash and blood and fear on his tongue. Every breath scraped like he’d inhaled ground glass, every exhale came out laced with smoke and a frustration that tasted too much like fear.
He tried again. “Shift.” His body refused.
Pain crackled through his bones as he forced his magic inward, trying to peel skin from scale, shape from monstrosity. He clawed his way toward his humanoid form with sheer, stubborn will.
Not for dignity. Not for vanity. For control.
He would not be trapped in the war-form. Not again.
A snarl ripped from his chest as something inside his spine cracked, sliding back into place with a sickening pop. Muscles constricted. Horns receded by painful inches. His wings shortened, folding closer to his body.
It was like forcing a boulder through the eye of a needle. Bit by bit, the beast shrank. Not all the way. Not cleanly. But enough. His silhouette blurred, edges softening, though the wrongness remained, clinging to him like a second skin.
When he finally lifted his head, the creature that remained was an unsettling compromise—too large, too horned, too clawed to pass as human, but no longer the unstoppable engine of annihilation he’d been minutes—hours—ago.
His breathing slowed. Not to normal. But to something less than a roar.
Ash lay thick on the floor. Pieces of demons—armour, weapons, scraps of robes—were scattered through the wreckage. Black stains marred the cracked obsidian, still smoking faintly.
He did not look at them long. They were irrelevant.
The only image that mattered burned behind his eyes:
Adelaide, blazing.
Her body was wrapped in liquid flame that did not consume. Fire trailing over her skin like worshipping hands. Her eyes were wide with terror. Her voice crying his name.
His chest tightened. Something old and rusted inside him lurched, as if a long-closed door had been kicked half-open by that single, terrified cry.
He flexed his clawed hand and felt the phantom echo of her throat beneath his fingers, the pulse that had thudded wild and furious against his palm earlier.
He had taken offerings for centuries. Been worshipped. Feared. Bargained with.
But this… This was different.
“You are not supposed to exist,” he muttered under his breath, the words falling heavy into the quiet. They sounded less like a condemnation of her and more like a confession of his own failure.
The air flickered in front of him as flames, still unsettled by his rage, danced along the fractured walls.
He pushed himself up from his knees, the movement sending a low groan through the stone. His wings dragged as he turned to face the throne.
The monolith of black stone glared back—veins of molten gold still pulsing faintly. Faces etched into its surface stared at him with twisted mouths and hollow eyes, caught mid-scream.
They remembered. They always remembered.
He approached slowly, claws scratching on the cracked floor.
The throne was not just a seat. It was a monument. A relic of another reign. He had shaped it from the heart of the Queen’s fallen citadel after he’d taken her crown. Melted her palace. Ground her banners into dust.
The same fire that had burned her had forged this.
A reminder. A threat. A confession. A promise carved in stone: this is what happens to those who burn too brightly against me.
Apollo rested one clawed hand on the armrest, feeling the ancient stone vibrate under his touch.
He could still hear it if he let himself. The night the old Queen fell.
The roar of her flames, bright and defiant, as they tore through the sky. The way the realm shook under her death-screams. The smell of burning gods and bleeding worlds.
He had ended that. He had ended her. He’d made certain. Hadn’t he?
His jaw tightened.
He had believed her line erased. He’d hunted the Emberborn. Driven the loyalists into the cracks of Hell. Torn down shrines. Burned libraries. Scattered prophecies. He’d watched ink curl to smoke and stone tablets split under his boot, thinking if the words died, the future they promised would die with them.
And still—still — after all that— A mortal girl in a nameless human village had erupted in gold flame in his own bed.
Adelaide.
Little flame.
He hated the name for how much truth it held.
The bond pulsed—sharp as being stabbed from the inside.
He felt her now—faintly. Not her thoughts, not her words, but an echo of her existence. A small, defiant ember far down the corridors of his palace. Alive. Exhausted. Frightened. Still here. Still his.
It should have given him satisfaction. It did not. It unsettled him in a way he did not have language for. Her fear crawled under his skin like a splinter he couldn’t dig out; her stubbornness burned there like a coal he refused to drop.
His tail lashed once, hard enough to knock a toppled column further across the room.
This never should have happened. The bite was supposed to chain her. That was all. It should have been a leash—one-way, controlled, his magic sinking into mortal flesh to anchor her life to his realm. A mark that let him: Track. Summon. Punish. Not feel. Not echo. Not mirror.
And yet, when he bit her—something else answered. Her blood met his power like old magic greeting a familiar enemy.
The mark burned now. Not with ownership. Not with dominance. With…connection.
He refused to name it. He refused. He dragged himself back from that thought like it was a cliff edge.
He let out a slow, shaking breath, smoke curling from between his teeth.
If the Emberborn were still out there—and he knew, deep in his instincts, that they were—they would have felt that flare. They would be looking. Waiting. Scheming. Old grudges did not die; they banked themselves like coals, waiting for exactly this kind of wind.
They could not know she existed. No one could. Not the Emberborn scum. Not the lesser demons. Not the rival lords of Hell, waiting centuries for a crack in his armour. No one.
He pushed away from the throne, straightening to his full, half-shifted height.
The decision formed itself, hard and sharp as obsidian.
He would hide her. He would lock the realm down. He would clear his palace of every useless, prying eye. And he would keep Adelaide where no one—not Queen-loyalists, not Hell’s vultures, not even his own generals—could touch her.
Because if anyone else learned what she was, they would see a weapon. He saw that too. But he also saw something worse: Someone who could unmake him.
And if anyone was going to hold that kind of power over the Devil, it would not be Hell.
It would be him. If anyone was going to stand close enough to put a blade to his throat and live, it would be the girl whose fire already scorched his veins.