Aeloria

SPOKEN FROM A THRONE NO ONE ELSE CAN STAND NEAR

They sent me south because I carried the heat and my sister carried the cold. I remember touching Elenara's face like I was drawing a line I already knew I couldn't uncross, and giving my mother a nod instead of the tears I didn't have time for. Even then, something in me understood I wasn't leaving to be safe. I was leaving to be forged.

Lord Valerius didn't raise me so much as temper me, the way you'd temper steel. My magic frightened everyone who'd ever stood near me — in his fortress it was simply a weapon I hadn't learned to hold yet. He told me, more than once, not to fear the very thing that made me who I was. I believed him, mostly. I still don't know if that was the right thing to do.

I was thirteen when they took me. Not to kill me — to use me. Three years I spent learning exactly how small I could make myself, how far I could bury the fire so it wouldn't cost me another lash. I stopped waiting to be rescued somewhere in the second year. I'm not sure I ever fully believed I would be, even after I was.

It only took one more hand raised against me — one more familiar kind of pain, after my father's army finally brought me home — for whatever I'd been burying for three years to stop being something I could hold at all. The mountains didn't just tremble. Everyone I had left, the family that raised me and the ones who broke me first, all of it went into the fire with the rest of the world.

They call me a monster now. The Lava Queen. A warning parents use on children who won't sit still. I built a kingdom out of what was left — glass towers cooled from the same magma that took everyone I ever called family, bridges out of grief, because building was the only thing left that didn't feel like burning something down.

I am queen of a kingdom with no subjects, and some nights that's the only silence I can stand. I'm still waiting for someone to look at all this fire and see the girl who never wanted to be the one who started it.