The morning after Ryo's dream, the palace felt like a body that had never quite recovered from a wound. Hallways carried a smell of smoke and old ash; windows let in a thin, blood-tinted light. Guards moved with sharpened purpose, faces taut where they had been slack the day before. Rumors ran like rats through the kitchens — talk of flames, of strange lights, of a curse that had stirred.
Ryo did not listen to rumors. He listened to the mark.
It hummed beneath his ribs like something waking from a long sleep. It would not be silenced again.
Caro found him at dawn in the small sitting room off his chamber, staring at the place where the morning light pooled on the floor. She had bandaged the shallow wound on her shoulder after the alley fight, but the look in her eyes had not softened. Loyalty and fear coexisted there like two knives.
"You should not move far today," she whispered.
Ryo smiled without warmth. "No more hiding. Not anymore." He rose as if testing joints rusty with pain and poison. The mark under his shirt flared faintly, answering some thought that had not yet formed in words.
They were careful. They moved through servant passages and back stairways as if every stone might betray them. Ryo felt watched — the presence of eyes like needles across his skin — yet he walked into the day with a strange, cold certainty etched under his ribs.
He had not gone far when the sound of boots snapped the air.
Varen stepped from the shadow as though he had been waiting in the damp stone all his life. The spy's cloak was the color of midnight; his face showed the same thin smile Ryo had seen before. But that smile was bloodless now, sharpened by duty.
"You should not have defied the king twice, Prince," Varen said. His voice was small and precise, practiced at easing a man into a trap. "He forgives, until it is time he does not."
Ryo's jaw tightened. "You were told to follow me. Why haven't you reported?"
"To watch, not to report," Varen answered. "There are things the King prefers to see for himself." He spread his hands as if offering an explanation that would justify everything. "You came to the archives. You came out burning with ghosts. He was expected to be the danger. I was not to kill you — only to contain." His eyes flicked to Caro. "Perhaps your friend complicates things."
Varen stepped forward, blade light in his hand. The world constricted to the bright edge of steel and the quick, animal thread of panic that ran through Caro. In one motion Varen lunged not at Ryo but at her — close, lethal, intended to silence.
"Run!" Ryo shouted.
Ryo moved as a thing ordered by instinct and devotion. The mark on his chest answered like a bell pulled. Golden-crimson light bled from his palms and wrapped around his arms, translating fear into speed. He met Varen's strike.
The blade bit metal against bone and air. Ryo did not hesitate. He diverted, grabbed the wrist, and, in a motion that was equal parts protection and retaliation, he snapped the spy's arm and pivoted — a blow to the throat that was meant to stun but landed with deeper consequence. Varen staggered back, coughing, his dagger falling. He rose like a coiled shadow and attacked again, this time with the cold of a man who had no fear of killing.
They fought hard and quick, corners of the alley flashing with the sound of clashing steel. Ryo did not relish it; there was a terrible precision to his strikes that came from something older than him. Each time Varen lunged, Ryo's blood answered in bursts of light that protected and struck as if the mark itself were another hand.
When Varen lunged toward Caro a second time — calculated, merciless — Ryo moved like thunder. He grabbed Varen's throat, forced him backward against the cold stone, and lifted. The spy's eyes widened for an instant with the naked surprise of being bested, then hardened.
"This will not be forgiven," Varen spat. "You'll be remembered — as a monster."
Ryo did not lower his hands. The world flattened to the scent of blood and smoke and the base, human terror in another man's pupils. He pushed.
Varen's body slumped. For a moment there was a clean, impossible silence, like the breath held before a storm breaks.
Ryo's hands were steady when he let go. He had not meant to kill — but when fists and blades aimed for the woman who had stood with him, something within disobeyed mercy. The red-gold light along his veins dimmed. He stood over the fallen spy and felt nothing like triumph. He felt the cold inevitability of a man who had had to choose.
Caro dropped to her knees, hands pressed to her face. "No… no—"
Ryo's voice was a blade softened to velvet. "It is done."
He moved quickly. There was no time for mourning, no time for ceremony. He stripped the spy of his dark cloak and cloak-torn tunic with hands that trembled but worked with economy. He pulled the hood low over his face and set Varen's dagger aside — there was blood on the blade, and blood left prints across the stones. He covered the tracks he could, wiping at the stones with the sleeve of the spy's cloak until the marks were nothing but darker stone.
Back in his chamber, he worked like a man burying a life. He wore the spy's clothing — rough, black, easier to fade into crowds than princely silks — and he spread oil and old rags across the floor. He poured the rest of the blaze from a brazier into the pile and set it alight. The flame licked quickly, greedy as a living thing, swallowing cloth and paper. Smoke curled under the door and out into the corridor in a crawling ribbon.
When the fire took hold, Ryo paused. The mark beneath his shirt pulsed, a steady drumbeat, like a heart learning to strike in a new rhythm.
He took Caro by the hand. "We leave now," he said.
She looked at him with a look that asked if this was madness or salvation. Ryo only nodded, the world narrowing to the single point of his vow forming in his mind.
As they left through the servants' passage, Ryo glanced once at the small chamber door — already blackening at the edges, smoke pouring like a gray omen. Behind him, the palace still slept, or pretended to. Ahead, the city lay waiting and dangerous under a sky stripped to iron.
Ryo would not look back again.
Outside the walls, dawn bled cold. He and Caro moved through alleys that smelled of the market and of wet stone, heads bent low under rough cloaks. The spy's clothing hid him, the hood masked his face, and the small trinket Deros had placed upon the prince's bed — a silver pin — remained forgotten on his pillow, part of the theatre of his supposed life.
They walked until the palace, a pillar of white and ash, receded into the distance. Each step was a soft punctuation: a small death, a small freedom. Once — once only — Ryo whispered into the shallow morning.
"One day I will return. Deros. I will come back and burn your name from the mouths of men."
Caro did not answer. She simply kept walking by his side, the outline of hope and fear both pressed low.
---
In the throne room, King Deros woke to a report about the flames.
He listened with the practiced calm of a man who had learned how to take color from devastation and use it for his crown. His captain told him in clipped sentences: the fire had begun in the prince's chamber at dawn; inside the room they found a body of a man — a spy, burned and unrecognizable, the face melted by flame and smoke. The sentries swore the man had been found still warm.
Deros closed his eyes for a moment, savoring the taste of it. He imagined the boy charred, broken, the mark consumed with flame. For a leader who had taken a throne with blood and lied to hold it, such an image was sweet bread and wine.
He walked to his balcony overlooking the square. The bell towers were already calling a strange, celebratory peal — a sound he had put into motion with his own whisper. Word would spread: the cursed prince was gone. The gods had punished him. The kingdom could breathe again.
He announced it to the city with crafted sorrow and controlled composure.
"People of Salmara," he intoned before a crowd still raw and hungry for a story to cling to, "the flames have consumed the blight among us. The curse that haunted this house has been purged. Let us give thanks to the gods who have spared us their wrath."
The square erupted. Songs rose. Flags were raised. The same hands that had once grieved the Asskar name now clapped and cheered Deros as protector and savior. He let the adulation wash over him like oil over a wound.
He did not know — or did not want to believe — that the man who lay burned and unrecognizable in the charred prince's chamber was not the prince at all but his own spy. He had believed the convenience of the corpses the same way he had believed his lies: required, tidy, and sacred to his survival.
Later, alone, Deros allowed himself a private smile. He toasted a cup of wine to the empty throne, and whispered into the dark of his chambers, "Justice has been done."
---
Ryo and Caro did not travel far. They slept in a ruined watchtower until dusk, then moved to an abandoned cartmaker's cottage beyond the river. He did not sleep. He tasted the kill in his hands and felt the burden of it the way a blacksmith feels heat left in his arms. The mark along his chest thrummed: not with pain now but with a terrible, patient power, like a bell hammered but not yet tolled.
That night, Ryo pulled out a scrap of parchment — a map the old caretaker had slipped him — and traced the fingernail along the route to the Temple of the First Flame. In his dream, his mother's voice had spoken of that place, and now it rang like a command.
Caro watched him while she stitched his shoulder, her fingers gentle and trembling. She did not ask what Ryo would do next. The answer showed in the set of his jaw and the cold fire in his eyes.
"Deros will celebrate," she said once, voice small. "He will feast while we run."
Ryo turned. The candlelight made the gold in his eyes bleed into red. "Let him feast," he said. "He will eat and drink from a kingdom I will take one day. I will not return as the boy you thought you knew. I will return as the storm he cannot hold."
Caro's tears shone for a moment in the lamp light, then she wiped them away. "Then we leave at dawn."
Ryo nodded. He thought, briefly, of the spy beneath his boots and of the king on his balcony, holding a festival for a corpse that was only a tool. He did not gloat. He felt only the steady, cold notion of what must be done.
He stood, pressing his palm to his breast. The mark answered like an echo: alive, patient, inevitable.
Outside the ruined cottage, the city slept and celebrated a ghost. The gods, if they watched, were quiet. But a fire had been lit beneath the earth — a bloodfire that would not be drowned with words, alchemy, or political theater.
Ryo closed his eyes and listened. In the hush he heard it: the low, old whisper of his house, worn by time but unbowed.
Remember, Ryo Asskar. Remember where you come from.
He did.
And when dawn came, he would walk into the world a man with a purpose.