The Dragon Kings' Forbidden Witch

Seraphine continued her calculations, but her eyes kept flickering toward Margot, as if reassessing everything in light of this new understanding.

Celeste simply sat quietly, her discomfort now validated by Margot’s indifference. If even the victim of the theft didn’t care about punishment, then what had they really done? What had they really accomplished?

And Margot simply sat with her tea, looking out the window toward the palace gardens already mentally preparing for her departure.

The servants continued to move quietly through the room, bringing fresh tea, replacing empty cups.

But something had changed.

The conspiracy had succeeded in its practical purpose: Morgana had been removed from the palace.

But it had also failed in something deeper: it had failed to provide the satisfaction that revenge is supposed to provide.

And in the tea room, in this space of luxury and beauty, the first cracks in Isolde’s careful construction were beginning to show.

She would continue to maintain her composure. She would continue to present herself as victorious.

But the doubt had taken root.

And doubt, once planted, has a way of growing.

***

The nightmare came like a thief in the night.

Elara was dreaming....or so she thought, and the dream had the quality of reality that nightmares sometimes possess. The kind of dream where the mind cannot distinguish between what is happening and what might be happening, where fear and vision blur together into something that feels undeniably, horrifyingly true.

In the dream, she saw chains.

Heavy iron chains, thick and brutal, the kind designed to hold something that might otherwise escape. They were wrapped around a figure....a small figure, a girl figure, a figure that Elara’s heart recognized immediately even in the darkness of the nightmare.

Morgana.

Her daughter was bound by the chains, her wrists raw where the metal bit into her skin, her hair matted and dark.

But the nightmare didn’t end there.

Because behind Morgana, arranged in careful stacks, were pieces of wood.

Logs piled together in a specific pattern.....a pattern that Elara recognized with absolute horror because she had heard stories of it, had heard people speak in hushed tones of this particular method of execution. The wood was arranged in a way that suggested one purpose and one purpose only: burning.

This was the pyre.

This was the structure upon which they burned witches. Upon which they burned those deemed too dangerous, too magical, too much of a threat to be allowed to live.

And Morgana stood at the center of it.

Her face was dark with dirt and grime. Her eyes were open but unseeing....glazed over with a kind of emptiness that suggested she had already given up, already accepted what was coming.

She was dressed in rags, not even proper clothes, but scraps barely holding together. Her body was emaciated, skeletal, as if she had been starved for weeks.

And as Elara watched in horror from somewhere outside the dream, unable to move, unable to act, unable to stop what was happening, a figure emerged from the shadows.

A figure holding a torch.

The figure approached the wood slowly, deliberately, with the kind of ceremony that suggested this was not a crime but a ritual. A necessary purification. A removal of something unnatural.

The torch came closer.

The wood...dry, prepared, ready, began to catch the flame.

Small at first...just the kiss of fire at the edges, but then growing, spreading, becoming an inferno.

Morgana’s face changed. The unseeing eyes suddenly focused. The acceptance transformed into terror. Her mouth opened as if to scream, but no sound emerged from the nightmare, only the terrible roaring of flames consuming everything they touched.

The fire spread faster, climbing up the wood, surrounding her, engulfing her in heat and light and absolute destruction.

And Elara watched, paralyzed, unable to save her daughter, unable to do anything but witness her child burn....

Elara’s eyes snapped open.

Her body convulsed with a gasp that became a scream that tore from her throat with the force of pure animal terror.

”MORGANA!”

The name ripped from her like something being torn out of her chest. It was not the measured call of a mother looking for her child. It was the primal cry of absolute fear, absolute anguish, absolute knowledge that something catastrophic had happened.

She bolted upright in her cot, her body drenched in sweat despite the cold of the room.

The nightmare clung to her like cobwebs, like something that wouldn’t quite release its hold. The images remained vivid in her mind...the chains, the wood, the flames, Morgana’s terrified face as the fire consumed her.

It had felt real.

Every terrible second of it had felt real.

Elara’s chest was heaving with gasps as she tried to breathe, tried to orient herself, tried to understand that she was awake now, that she was safe, that Morgana was not burning in a pyre.

But even as she told herself these things, she knew they weren’t true.

Something had happened.

Something terrible.

A mother knows. A mother feels these things in her bones, in the deepest part of her being, in a place that exists beyond logic or reason or the normal explanations for fear.

She tried to stand.

Her legs nearly gave out.

The room tilted slightly as her body....weakened by months of illness, by the cough that had been steadily worsening, by the stress of having Morgana away at the palace, struggled to respond to her commands.

She gripped the edge of her cot, her hands shaking so violently she could barely maintain her grip.

”No,” she whispered, though she wasn’t sure if she was trying to convince herself or the universe. ”No, no, no.”

She forced her legs to obey her, forced herself to stand despite the way her body screamed at the effort.

Once she was upright....barely, she made her way to the small wooden chair that sat near the window of her cottage.

Each step was an effort. Each movement was a battle against the weakness that threatened to pull her back down.

By the time she reached the chair, she was gasping as if she had run a great distance.