Chapter 28 The Edge Of Ember

• The wind over the ruined plains was different. Sharper. Restless. Elira felt it in her blood—a buzzing, like distant thunder that never quite reached the ground. The closer they got to the broken citadel, the more the earth changed. Trees thinned. Ash coated the soil. Even the air, thick with the scent of old magic, felt heavier, like breathing through memory.
• Kael hadn’t spoken in over an hour, his jaw clenched as they rode. He was watching everything—cloud shifts, the angle of sunlight, even the way the birds refused to cross into the valley below. She couldn’t blame him. Nothing about this place was natural. It was a scar.
• When they finally reached the crest of the final hill, Elira drew in a breath. The capital—if it could still be called that—rose like a corpse from a battlefield. Towers once white and gold now stood in jagged half-ruins, scorched black at the tips, like they’d been burned from the heavens down. Ivy clung to broken walls. Fire hadn’t touched the plants—only stone. The palace itself sat at the center, sunken and silent, its spires bent like broken fingers pointing at the sky.