Page 120 of Incoronate
He rose to his feet in one fluid motion and pulled me up with him, his hand staying around mine for a moment longer than necessary before letting go.
Dominic had already moved closer, positioning himself at my other side without a word.
He glanced toward the small table near the wall, then reached out and picked up what sat on it. An oil lamp of sorts, fashioned from dark stone and hammered flat at the base, its reservoir filled with dark rendered fat, still and glossy at the surface. A short wick rose from its center, unlit and waiting.
He turned it over once in his hand, then held it out to me.
‘Try to call up your fire’, he said into my mind, and I felt Trace register it at the same moment I did. ‘Start small. Just the wick’.
I took the lamp carefully, the weight of it heavier than it looked. For a moment I just stood there holding it, the memory rising unbidden.
Caleb sitting cross-legged across from me. The patient calm in his voice as he had guided me through it the first time. I remembered the way he’d told me not to reach for it like I was grabbing something, but to invite it. To picture the flame first. To feel the heat before it existed and let the magic follow the image rather than the other way around. The strange, almost embarrassing intimacy of learning how to pull something elemental out of myself and shape it into something tangible.
I closed my eyes, letting everything fade away until there was only my thoughts and the image of the lamp. The wick at its center.
I reached inward for the same place Caleb had shown me how to find and brought the heat forward slowly, carefully, gathering it and bending it to my will just like he had taught me. I drew the heat forward slowly, coaxing it the way you coaxed something skittish, and felt it stir somewhere deep and low, sluggish in a way it had never been before, as though I were trying to start a fire in a wet forest.
“Ignire flamma,” I murmured and then opened my eyes.
For a second, I thought nothing at all had happened. And then I saw it. A single ember, orange and trembling, clinging to existence like it wasn’t entirely sure it was allowed to be here.
My breath caught.
The ember held, flickering faintly before slowly pulling itself into a flame.
I bit down on my lip as I stared at it, the relief and the doubt arriving at exactly the same time. Because it was there, yes. But it was also the most pitiful flame I had ever produced in my life, and if this was the full extent of what I could access in this Realm, it was not going to bring down any walls.
“Great. I managed an ember,” I said tartly, looking between them.
Dominic reached out and pinched the flame between two fingers, extinguishing it cleanly. “It’s weak,” he said. “But it’s there.”
The disappointment that moved through me was immediate and heavy. Weak wasn’t going to cut it. Weak wasn’t going to get us out of here.
Dominic seemed to read that thought immediately. “This is a good thing, angel.”
“How do you figure?”
“The Realm may be interfering with it, but it hasn’t blocked it entirely,” said Dominic, his eyes moving to thedarkened wick thoughtfully. “Think of it like static cutting across a signal. But the signal itself is there. It simply isn’t coming through at full strength.”
“Try again,” said Trace, his baritone voice roughened just enough to slide under my skin.
Dominic’s eyes met mine. Use us, he said to my mind. ‘Draw as much as you need.’
Something moved through my chest that hadn’t been there a minute ago. Not quite confidence, but something that definitely wanted to be. Something that was tired of being afraid and had started looking for somewhere else to put all that energy.
I turned the lamp over in my hands and closed my eyes. The bond stirred immediately in response, both of them suddenly present in it in a way that made the magic inside me shift and stretch toward them like a plant reaching for sunlight. And this time, when I reached for my magic, I didn’t reach alone. The heat came to me faster. Fuller. Like a door being pushed open from both sides at once.
Ignire flamma, I said again and then opened my eyes.
The flame that rose from the wick was small, but it was there, and it was bright, and it didn’t flicker.
Nobody said anything as we watched the flame dance between us.
“Okay,” I said quietly, a smile pulling at the corner of my mouth. “Better.”
It wasn’t enough. Not yet. But it was a start, and in a place that had spent decades convincing people that hope was futile, in that moment, it felt like everything.
39. A SEAT AT THE FEAST
