The air in the ruined spire was thick with the smell of ozone and old blood, but the tension shifted from the supernatural to the fiercely personal. Duke Astra had just burst through the heavy doors, his voice calling out for his daughter in a ragged, panicked sob—but Seraphina didn't even turn her head.
Seraphina was vibrating with a white-hot fury that seemed to radiate more heat than the magical pyre. She ignored the guards, ignored her father, and focused entirely on the three men and woman who stood before her.
"You three... you absolute, brainless idiots!" she hissed, her voice trembling as she jabbed a finger at Killian, then Alaric, then Eveline.
"Seraphina—" Killian started, but she cut him off with a sharp glare that could have withered stone.
"Shut up! All of you!" she screamed, tears finally spilling over. "I watched your memories! I felt your pain! Killian, you became a ghost who sought death! Eveline, you let yourself be burned alive! And Alaric... you died in a gutter because you couldn't be bothered to breathe without us!"
She grabbed Alaric's breastplate and shook him, her knuckles white. "Why didn't you just live? Why didn't you go find a new life, a new city, a new name? You should have abandoned me! You should have treated my memory like the tragedy it was and moved on! Your lives were worth more than a dead girl in a cell!"
For a moment, the three of them stood in stunned silence. Then, a strange thing happened. Killian started to laugh—a dry, jagged sound—and Alaric shook his head, wiping blood from his lip.
"You think we're the idiots?" Killian stepped forward, his shadow towering over her, but his eyes were soft. "You're the biggest idiot of all, Seraphina."
"Excuse me?" she gasped, recoiling.
"He's right," Eveline said, stepping up and crossing her arms, her white hair swaying.
"You climbed a spire and set your soul on fire to save an Empire that had already failed you once. You spent two lifetimes trying to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders, thinking we'd be fine if you just disappeared."
Alaric placed a heavy, grounded hand on Seraphina's shoulder. "Did you really think we could just 'move on'? You were the center of our world. To ask us to treasure our lives while you were rotting in the dark... that is the stupidest thing I've ever heard."
"We aren't four separate people, Sera," Killian growled, his hand finding the back of her neck to pull her forehead against his. "We're a disaster. A single, interconnected disaster. If one of us goes out, the rest of us are just walking corpses. You want us to treasure our lives? Then stay alive. Because our lives don't exist without you."
Seraphina opened her mouth to argue, to tell them again how much they had wasted, but the words died in her throat. She looked at their bruised faces, their tired eyes, and the fierce, stubborn love they held for her despite the horrors they had witnessed.
"So," Eveline whispered, a small, bittersweet smile tugging at her lips. "Who's the idiot now?"
Seraphina let out a choked, half-sob, half-laugh. "We all are. We're all complete fools."
"Seraphina!" The Duke's voice finally broke through the bubble of their shared trauma. He rushed forward, his face a mask of disbelief and relief. He reached out to pull his daughter into his arms, his hands shaking.
Seraphina finally turned, her anger cooling into a deep, exhausted ache. She looked at her father—the man who, in another life, had died not knowing how cruel his death was for her.—she let herself be pulled into his embrace.
Over his shoulder, she locked eyes with Killian, Alaric, and Eveline. They were bloodied and broken, but they were standing. For the first time in two lifetimes, they weren't just survivors. They were a family.