Chapter 2: The Smith's Fire

The ember changed Kael in ways she did not immediately understand. That first night, she held it against her chest and felt warmth spread through her body like tea poured into cold water. She slept deeply for the first time in weeks, despite the frost that had turned every window in Thornfield into a sheet of opaque ice. When she woke, the ember was gone. Not lost, but absorbed. She could feel it inside her, a steady heat behind her sternum, pulsing in time with her heartbeat. At the forge that morning, something extraordinary happened. She reached for the bellows to stoke the furnace and the coals ignited before she touched them. Not a gentle catching of flame, but a sudden eruption of heat that made Master Brannock stumble backward and swear. Kael stared at her hands. They glowed faintly, a soft orange light beneath her skin, visible only in the dim interior of the smithy. She could feel the fire in the furnace as though it were an extension of her body, responsive to her thoughts, her breathing, her mood. Over the following days, she experimented in secret. She could summon flame from nothing, shape it in the air, hold it steady or let it dance. She could heat metal with her bare grip, softening iron without a furnace, bending it with her hands as though it were warm wax. The precision amazed her. She was not wielding fire as a weapon. She was communing with it, speaking a language she had never learned but somehow always known. Master Brannock noticed the changes. He was a practical man with no patience for superstition, but even he could not explain why the forge had not needed fuel in a week or why the apprentice's metalwork had suddenly surpassed his own. Kael told him about the dragon. He listened, nodded once, and walked to his bookshelf. He pulled down a volume bound in cracked leather and opened it to a page he had clearly visited before. The illustration showed a crown wreathed in flame, and beneath it a single word: Emberkrone.