# Chapter 9: The Obsidian Siege

The silence of the dawn wasn't peace; it was the indrawn breath of a predator.

The mercury-grey light of the Starfall aurora had begun to pale, retreating before a bruised, violet sunrise that crawled over the jagged basalt teeth of the Volcanic Reach. Mira stood on the edge of the Sanctum balcony, her hands gripping the cold stone until her knuckles matched the color of the dying stars. The air was too still. Usually, the early hours at the Pyre were a symphony of low-frequency thrums—the rhythmic breathing of the cooling vents, the distant hiss of a pressure valve, the waking grumble of the Great Hearth. Now, the mountain was a tomb.

"The atmospheric density is shifting," a voice said from the shadows behind her. Dorian Solas stepped into the dim light, his presence no longer the biting, invasive chill that had defined their first few weeks of shared air. It was a grounded cold, a stabilizing baseline. He stood beside her, his moon-pale hair caught in the first weak rays of the sun, and for the first time since the Bridge, he didn't maintain the fifteen-foot radius. He stood within an arm’s reach, his shoulder nearly brushing her crimson silk sleeve. "The evidence suggests, Mira, that the thermal vents have been remotely shuttered. The secondary wards are... unresponsive."

"Shuttered? Actually. No," Mira snapped, though the heat in her voice was brittle, a thin glaze over a well of exhaustion. "They aren't shuttered, Dorian. They’ve been severed. I can feel the ley-lines. They’re bleeding out into the ash-quarry. Someone used a Master Key."

"A situation requiring immediate and undivided attention," Dorian murmured. He didn't look at the horizon. He looked at the empty space where the outer perimeter’s blue-white glow should have been. It was gone. The Spire’s archival shielding, the pride of his ancestors, had been snuffed out like a candle in a gale. "High Inquisitor Malchor has bypassed the outer Reach. The Ministry's Dissolution Decree—it contains backdoors we did not account for in our... clinical assessment."

Mira’s hands began to spark, tiny amber tracers of kinetic energy dancing between her fingers. "Backdoors? Past and rot with your clinical assessment! They aren't auditing us anymore, Dorian. They’re erasing us."

She turned, her eyes scanning the darkened Sanctum behind them. The maps of the school were still scattered across the mahogany desk, their ink fresh, their integration plans a beautiful, useless dream. But something was missing. The low-frequency hum of the third Chancellor, the steady, rhythmic pulse of fire-tempered iron that had always anchored the Pyre, was absent.

"Where is Kaelen?" she whispered. 

Dorian’s jaw tightened. "The evidence suggests Kaelen... was not in the Med-Ward when I performed the dawn census. I assumed he was in the Deep Archive. He has been... restless since the grounding."

"He went to the Arena," Mira said, a cold stone of certainty dropping into her stomach. "He told us last night. He wanted to see the sky. He wanted one last visit before the dark moved in. Stars' sake, Dorian, he’s terminal. He can barely walk across a room without coughing up his own mana-veins."

"It is probable," Dorian said, his voice dropping into a hollow, formal tone, "that he knew exactly what the Ministry’s timeline entailed. He is a Sentinel, Mira. He has always seen the bridge before the crossing."

They moved as one, a frantic blur of charcoal and crimson as they descended the spiral basalt stairs. They didn't take the lifts; the lifts were dead, the kinetic pulleys hanging limp in their shafts. Mira led the way, her palm flat against the masonry, feeling the mountain. The stone was screaming. Below them, in the roots of the Reach, she felt the heavy, metallic tread of boots—thousands of them. The Obsidian Siege wasn't a blockade; it was an invasion. 

They reached the entrance to the Deep Archive, the heavy silver doors ajar. Inside, the scent of parched cedar and ancient vellum was overwhelmed by the sharp, metallic tang of ionized air. On the central reading plinth, three letters sat in a row. They were sealed with Kaelen’s personal signet—the anvil and the star.

Mira grabbed the one with her name on it, her fingers trembling so violently she nearly tore the parchment. 

*Mira,* the script began, the ink steady and precise despite the man’s failing strength. *Do not look for me in the Med-Ward. By the time you read this, the Ministry will have reached the approach. I knew the Bridge was a trap from day one. I stayed to ground the surge manually so the trap wouldn't trigger before you and Dorian were ready. The terminal debt is a price I chose to pay. Do not waste the time I have bought you. Lead the students. Be the Grey.*

"He’s at the Bridge," Mira choked out, the letter crumpling in her fist. "He’s at the Obsidian Bridge alone. He’s going to intercept the vanguard."

"The Bridge is the only bottleneck," Dorian said, his voice fracturing for the first time. "If he holds the approach... he provides the diversion necessary for us to rally the Great Hall. But the evidence suggests he cannot survive even a single exchange with a Purifier cadre."

"Then we don't let him be alone! Obviously!" Mira roared, her fire flaring so brightly the shadows in the Archive fled to the corners. "We move! Now!"

They ran. They ignored the tactical logic, the Spire’s protocols for defensive entrenchment, and the Pyre’s mandates for tactical retreat. Mira’s boots felt like they barely touched the stone as she sprinted through the corridors. She could feel Kaelen—a fading, flickering amber ember in the distance, out beyond the Arena, where the school’s natural basalt met the manufactured obsidian of the bridge. 

The cold morning air hit them as they burst onto the Great Overlook. Below, the scene was a nightmare of gold and shadow. 

The Imperial vanguard had reached the Bridge. High Inquisitor Malchor’s Purifiers—hundreds of them in solar-gold armor that drank the morning light—were marching in a tight, kinetic Phalanx. Their orison-rods were already glowing, a sickly, blinding gold that hummed with the frequency of erasure. 

And there, at the very mouth of the Bridge, stood a single figure.

Kaelen looked small against the backdrop of the Imperial force. He wasn't wearing his Chancellor’s robes; he was in his old Sentinel leathers, his shoulders hunched against the wind. His skin was translucent, the purple mana-veins in his neck pulsing with the final, frantic output of a dying heart. He didn't have a staff. He didn't have a shield. He held only a single, heavy ingot of unrefined volcanic iron.

"Kaelen!" Mira screamed, the sound lost in the roar of the wind and the rhythmic tramp of the Ministry’s boots.

The Sentinel didn't turn. He couldn't. Mira felt him instead. In the "tactile" reach of her magic, he was a bonfire in a room of ice. He was burning his remaining terminal reserves, incinerating his very lifespan to stoke a flame that the Ministry’s gold magic couldn't quench.

Through the frantic sensory link they had shared for a decade, his voice entered her mind. It wasn't the voice of her Chancellor; it was the voice of the man who had taught her how to hold a flame without being consumed by it.

*Mira. Stay where you are. The Bridge approach must be sealed. Malchor believes the Accord is a legal document he can shred. Show him it is a foundation he cannot break.*

"No! Kaelen, move! Dorian, do something! Lattices, equations, anything!" Mira grabbed Dorian’s arm, her fingers digging into his sleeve. 

Dorian was staring at the Bridge, his eyes wide, his right hand extended. "I cannot... the distance is too great for a containment field. The evidence suggests... he is grounding the entire ley-line into his own marrow. He is making himself the anchor."

Below them, Malchor stepped forward. The High Inquisitor’s voice carried over the gap, amplified by the solar-gold rods of his retinue. "Sentinel! By the Dissolution Decree, you are ordered to stand down. You are an anomaly. You are a heresy. Step aside, or be scoured."

Kaelen didn't answer. He simply planted his feet. He looked up, his gaze finding Mira and Dorian on the overlook for a fraction of a second. He didn't wave. He didn't goodbye. He just gave them a short, resolute nod.

Then, he ignited.

It wasn't a fire. It was a localized collapse of reality. Kaelen’s body erupted into a pillar of pure, white-hot volcanic energy that clawed at the sky. He slammed the iron ingot into the obsidian of the bridge, and the world went white.

Mira felt the shockwave in her teeth. The Bridge, a three-hundred-year-old construction of Imperial magic and basalt, didn't just break; it liquefied. The mana-surge Kaelen released was an impossible fusion—a final, violent synthesis of the heat he had stored and the absolute zero of the mountain he was protecting. 

As the white light faded, the sound followed—a deafening, bone-shaking roar as the entire approach to the Bridge collapsed into the chasm. The Ministry’s vanguard was thrown back, their gold armor dented, their Phalanx shattered by a force they hadn't predicted. 

Where Kaelen had stood, there was only a jagged crater and a lingering scent of ozone and burnt iron. 

He was gone.

Mira fell to her knees on the basalt overlook. The "past and rot" fury she had expected didn't come. Instead, there was a hollow, echoing silence in her chest where a steady heartbeat had lived for ten years. She stared at the dust settling over the chasm, her hands flat against the cold stone. 

"The Bridge is sealed," Dorian whispered, his voice a ragged, hollow thing. He knelt beside her, his hand hovering over her shoulder as if he were afraid he would shatter if he touched her. "The evidence suggests... he held. He gave us... twenty minutes. Perhaps thirty."

Mira’s fingers curled into the stone. The grief was there, a sharp, jagged edge in the dark, but beneath it, the wildfire was starting to change color. It wasn't red anymore. It was mercury-grey. It was the color of the letter in her hand and the color of the mountain Kaelen had died for.

"He knew," Mira said, her voice dropping into a low, terrifying register. "He knew since the first day. He stayed on that Bridge so we could find the frequency. And we're sitting here... on the overlook... while Malchor regroups."

She stood up. She didn't look exhausted anymore. She looked like a kiln that had been stoked with the bones of a god. 

"Mira," Dorian said, reaching for her. "We must follow the protocol. We retreat to the inner vaults. We protect the archives."

"Actually. No," Mira said, turning to him. Her eyes weren't amber anymore; they were a burning, mercury-grey, the pupils wide and dark. "We aren't protecting the archives, Dorian. We’re protecting the students. Kaelen didn't die for a library. He died for the Union."

She grabbed his lapels, pulling him close until their mana began to clash—not as rivals, but as a friction that generated power. "Stop calculating the survival rates! Stop identifying variables! I need you to be the cold, Dorian! I need you to be the lattice for my fire! We are going to the Great Hall, and we are going to show these students what it looks like when fire and ice stop fighting and start winning."

Dorian stared at her, the clinical mask finally, utterly destroyed. The blue of his eyes reflected the grey fire in hers. He didn't look for a superlative. He didn't look for a formal understatement. He simply nodded, his fingers gripping her wrists until they grounded each other.

"The situation," Dorian whispered, his voice gaining a lethal, sharp edge, "requires an extraordinary resolution. I concur, Chancellor."

***

The Great Hall was a sea of frantic, weeping chaos. 

Five hundred students—some in the crimson of the Pyre, some in the sapphire of the Spire—were huddled together in the massive basalt chamber. The sound of the Obsidian Siege was no longer a distant rumble; it was a rhythmic pounding against the main gates, a sound that made the high, vaulted ceilings shiver. The air was thick with the scent of fear and the acrid smoke of panicked fire-weaving and the biting frost of ice-shields that were too brittle to hold.

Elara was in the center, her medic’s kit stowed, her hands glowing with a soft, steady kinetic light as she tried to calm a cluster of first-years. When she saw Mira and Dorian burst through the doors, her face went white. She looked past them, searching for a face she wouldn't see again.

"Where is he?" she shouted over the din. "Where is Kaelen?"

Mira didn't answer. She didn't have to. The look on her face was a terminal diagnosis. 

The Hall went silent, a heavy, suffocating weight dropping over the students. They weren't just looking at their Chancellors; they were looking at the last line of defense. 

"Students!" Mira’s voice wasn't just loud; it was a kinetic wave that silenced the room. She stood on the central dais, Dorian at her side. "The Ministry is at the gate. They are here because they fear you. They fear that a student of the Spire can hold a flame. They fear that a student of the Pyre can respect the cold. They are here to erase the Grey because the Grey is a power they cannot control."

A rumble shook the hall—deeper this time. The main gates groaned, the iron hinges beginning to glow with Malchor’s gold magic.

"Kaelen held the Bridge," Mira continued, her voice cracking for a fraction of a second before hardening into a blade. "He died to buy you this time. Are you going to spend it hiding behind your old house lines? Are you going to die as fragments, or are you going to live as a whole?"

She looked at the Spire students—the ones who had calculated their way out of every problem. She looked at the Pyre students—the ones who had burned their way through. 

"I need you to forget the crimson," Mira commanded. "I need you to forget the sapphire. I need you to reach for the person next to you. If they are cold, be their heat. If they are burning, be their anchor. We are the Solas-Pyre Academy, and we do not break!"

Dorian stepped forward, his right hand extended. "The evidence suggests," he said, his voice resonant and commanding, "that our individual disciplines have reached their limit. The Imperial gold is a frequency of isolation. It can break a single mage. It can break a hundred mages. But it cannot break a synthesis. Connect your mana. Now."

It began with Elara. She reached out, her hand finding a Pyre boy who was shivering with somatic shock. She didn't treat him; she linked with him. He was a fire-mage, a chaotic furnace of untapped kineticism. She was a Spire-born, a master of containment. 

As their mana touched, a thin, shimmering ribbon of mercury-grey light appeared between them. Then another. And another. 

Across the Great Hall, the houses bled into one another. The frantic red and the brittle blue vanished, replaced by a deep, resonant grey that hummed with the frequency of the mountain itself. The air in the room didn't get hot, and it didn't get cold. it got... stable.

"They’re through!" a student screamed from the balcony.

The main gates of the Great Hall didn't just open; they were vaporized. 

High Inquisitor Malchor stepped through the ruins of the iron-work. He was a silhouette of blinding, solar-gold light, his armor a glowing furnace of Imperial mandate. Behind him, fifty Purifiers entered in a silent, golden wave, their orison-rods raised.

Malchor looked at the dais—at Mira and Dorian, standing together. He looked at the sea of students, unified in a grey luminescence he had never seen in three hundred years of ministry logs.

"Anomalies," Malchor said, his voice a distorted rasp of gold magic. "You have allowed a terminal heretic to collapse a strategic bridge. You have allowed your mages to contaminate their mana with a rival frequency. The audit is concluded. The verdict is erasure."

He raised his rod. The air in the hall began to hum with a lethal, high-pitched frequency. The gold light was blinding, a solar flare that threatened to incinerate the very stone of the mountain.

"Now!" Mira shouted.

Five hundred students didn't cast separate spells. They didn't weave individual shields. As one, they pushed their mana into the central resonance of the hall. 

The "Grey Shield" didn't look like a wall. It looked like the Starfall itself. A massive, swirling vortex of mercury-grey energy erupted from the students, a synthesis of heat and cold that didn't fighting for dominance. It harmonized.

When the Ministry’s gold magic hit the shield, it didn't shatter it. It was absorbed. The gold light was pulled into the grey vortex, its kinetic energy drained, its frequency neutralized by a power that had no single point of failure. 

Malchor staggered back, his rod sputtering. "Impossible. The math... the Imperial Lattice is absolute. You cannot... you cannot synthesize these frequencies! They are repellents!"

"The evidence suggests, Inquisitor," Dorian said, stepping off the dais, his moon-pale hair glowing in the grey light, "that your data is... suboptimal. A situation requiring your immediate and undivided departure."

"Dorian, stop talking!" Mira roared. Her own mana was a white-hot roar now, channeled through the students' collective shield. She didn't just want to defend; she wanted to push. "Actually. No. Don't leave yet, Malchor. I want you to remember this. I want you to tell the Emperor that the Grey Era has begun."

She threw her hands forward. The Grey Shield didn't just hold; it expanded. A massive, kinetic wave of mercury-grey light surged forward, a tidal wave of pressure that caught the Purifiers in their tracks. It didn't burn them, and it didn't freeze them. It simply pushed. 

The golden Phalanx was swept out of the ruin of the Great Hall, their solar armor dented by the sheer physical weight of the air. Malchor was the last to go, his gold light flickering and dying as the Grey synthesis scoured the Imperial mandate from his very skin.

The silence that followed was different from the silence of the dawn. It was the silence of a battlefield after the first victory. 

Mira stood at the edge of the dais, her chest heaving, her hands smoking with the aftermath of the surge. The Grey light in the hall was dimming, settling back into the students, but the change was permanent. They weren't Pyre and Spire anymore. They were something else. 

She felt the somatic bleed of the world—the mountain, the hall, and the man beside her. Dorian was watching her, his face a ruin of dust and soot, his right hand trembling as he lowered his guard. 

"The shield held," he whispered. 

"Obviously," Mira said, a dry, jagged laugh catching in her throat as she sat down on the steps of the dais. She was too exhausted to stand. She was too exhausted to think about the next wave, the Ministry’s regrouping, or the war that was now inevitable. 

She looked at the ruin of the hall, at the students who were beginning to realize they were still alive. She looked at Elara, who was sitting on the floor, her head in her hands, her shoulders shaking.

Dorian sat down next to her—not fifteen feet away, not within arm's reach, but right next to her. Their robes touched, the crimson and the charcoal blurring together in the grey dust of the hall. 

***

**SCENE A**

The aftermath of the surge felt like a hollowed-out world. 

I leaned my back against the dais steps, my breath coming in shallow, frantic hitches. My skin was buzzing with the residual frequency of the Grey Shield—a high-frequency vibration that made the marrow of my bones feel like it had been replaced with quicksilver. It tasted like ash and ozone, a heavy, metallic weight in the back of my throat. 

I looked at my hands. They were shaking. The amber tracers of my magic had vanished, leaving my palms cold and grey. I used to think of my fire as a resource, something I stoke and hoard until it was time to burn. But after the synthesis, my internal kiln felt... quiet. It wasn't empty, but the roar had settled into a steady, resonant thrum. 

Actually. No. It wasn't just quiet. It was mourning.

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the white-hot pillar on the Bridge. I saw Kaelen’s resolute nod. He hadn't just bought us thirty minutes; he had given us the blueprint. He had shown us that the only way to beat a gold mandate was to become the very thing they feared—an impossible, beautiful contradiction. 

Beside me, I felt Dorian’s presence like a physical grounding wire. For months, our proximity had been a source of somatic assault, a collision of two magics that shouldn't occupy the same space. Now, the fifteen-foot radius was a ghost. I could feel his cold—dull, aching, and anchored—seeping into my side, pulling the excess heat from my blood. He didn't say anything. He didn't offer a clinical assessment of the structural damage to the hall or a probability chart for the Ministry's return. He just sat there in the settling dust.

I looked at the students. They were sitting in small clusters on the basalt floor, their charcoal and crimson and sapphire robes all one uniform shade of grey at this light. Some were crying. Some were staring at their hands, trying to find the individual fire or ice they had lost in the synthesis. 

"Kaelen’s letter," I whispered, the crumpled parchment still in my fist. "He knew. Dorian, he knew exactly what Malchor was going to do. He Stayed to ground the surge manually... stars' sake, he stayed so we wouldn't have to."

The vertigo of the grief hit me then—a sudden, violent realization that my senior proctor was gone. There would be no more morning briefings. No more lectures on tactical bracing. No more steady, fire-tempered iron to balance my own kinetic outbursts. He had left me alone with a school on the brink of war and a rival chancellor who had just shattered his last logical wall.

I felt a sudden, sharp spike of Dorian’s cold. He was looking at the ruin of the iron gates, his eyes fixed on the spot where Malchor had stood. I could feel his anger—no, it wasn't anger. It was a cold, absolute resolve. It was the same look Kaelen had before he ignited. 

"The Grey Era," I said, my voice barely a thread. "It’s not just a theory anymore. It’s a survival mechanism."

Dorian didn't look at me, but his fingers found mine in the ash. His skin was freezing, but for the first time, I didn't want to pull away. I wanted the cold. I wanted the anchor. We were the only two people in this Reach who knew the true price of the shield that had just saved five hundred lives. 

***

**SCENE B**

"The probability of High Inquisitor Malchor... regrouping at the High Spire Peak... is approximately ninety-eight percent."

Dorian’s voice was a wreckage of its usual precision. It sounded jagged, the subject-verb-object structure barely holding together. He didn't turn to face me, his gaze still fixed on the dust motes dancing in the Hall’s mercury light. 

"Ninety-eight percent?" I wheezed, sitting up and wiping a smear of soot from my jaw. "Only ninety-eight? Stars' sake, Dorian, you're the one who always says we shouldn't underestimate Imperial persistence."

"The remaining two percent," Dorian said, his jaw tightening, "allows for the possibility that he is currently... horizontal locomotion challenged. The kinetic backlash from the Grey Shield was... extraordinary."

"He’s alive," I said, a jagged spike of 'past and rot' fury flaring in my chest. "I felt him at the edge of the overlook. He’s alive, and he’s going to tell the Emperor that we’ve built a heretic’s fortress. He’s going to bring the whole Imperial Phalanx next time."

Dorian finally looked at me. His face was a map of exhaustion—shadows under his blue eyes, moon-pale hair dusted with basalt powder. He looked... raw. "The evidence suggests, Mira, that we have already committed the heresy. The synthesis can neither be undone nor... categorized as a legal defense. We have declared sovereignty."

"Sovereignty? Actually. No," I snapped, leaning my head back against the dais. "We’ve declared war, Dorian. Kaelen sealed the Bridge. There’s no way back to the Capital now. We’re an island in the Reach, and we’ve only got enough Grey to hold the hall, not the whole mountain."

"We have more than thirty minutes now," Dorian said, his fingers tightening on mine. "The ley-lines in the Deep Archive... they are stabilizing. The resonance from the Shield hasn't dissipated. It is... sinking into the stone. The mountain is accepting the synthesis."

I looked around the Hall. Elara was walking toward us, her charcoal tunic torn, her medic’s bag clutched in a white-knuckled grip. She looked aged, her eyes bright with a grief she hadn't yet allowed to break her.

"Chancellors," she said, her voice steady but thin. "The injured are... their mana is quiet. The synthesis... it didn't just shield them. It stabilized their somatic fatigue. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s as if they’ve been 'grounded' by the mountain itself."

"Kaelen," I said, reaching out to her. 

Elara took my hand. She didn't have to say anything. She already knew. We were the only three left in this room who remembered the Reach before the Accord, and now the man who had held the center was a crater in the chasm. 

"He left a letter for you, too, Elara," I said, gesturing to the Deep Archive. "In the plinth. He stayed to buy us the stabilization."

Elara nodded, a single, silver tear tracking through the dust on her cheek. "Then we don't waste it. The students... they’re asking what happens at sunset. They think the Ministry will return when the light fades."

"The light isn't going to fade," I said, looking at Dorian. "Obviously, we can't maintain the Shield for five hundred people indefinitely, but we don't need to. We just need to hold the Sanctuary. Dorian, can the Spire’s archival lattices be repurposed for a Grey resonance?"

"Theoretically," Dorian said, his clinical mask flickering back into place for a second, "the geometry is... compatible. It would require a permanent somatic bridge between the two Houses. A perpetual synthesis."

"Then that’s what we do," I said. "We build a perpetual synthesis. We honor the Bridge Kaelen built by becoming one that doesn't break."

***

**SCENE C**

The twenty-four hours that followed the fall of the Bridge were a study in rhythmic exhaustion. 

The Great Hall became our transition ward, our bunker, and our boardroom all at once. We didn't sleep. Mira moved among the Pyre students, her hands constantly busy—rekindling small, controlled fires for warmth, sharing the tactile 'feel' of the synthesis to keep their kineticism from turning into panic. Dorian stayed at the central plinth, his right hand tracing the silver-lattice equations that would anchor the new Grey Shield to the mountain’s bedrock. 

They worked within the same five-foot radius, the fifteen-foot rule a forgotten relic of a world that ended at dawn. Every time my fire spiked with a memory of the white light on the Bridge, I felt Dorian’s cold reach out to steady me. It wasn't an invasion anymore; it was a rhythmic stabilization. 

By noon of the second day, the mercury-grey light of the Starfall aurora had settled into a permanent, gentle luminescence over the Reach. The Ministry’s gold flares hadn't returned. The chasm remained a jagged, impassable border, and the mountain was silent. 

I stood by the ruined gates, looking out at the dust settling over the ash-quarry. The "Obsidian Siege" was far from over—Malchor would be fortifying the Northern pass, cutting off our supplies, and preparing an Imperial-level audit. But we weren't the same school they had tried to dissolve. 

The students were eating together now. Not in segregated rows, but in clusters of charcoal and crimson and sapphire. They were talking about the Grey—not as a theory they studied in a Spire library, but as the thing that had smelled like ozone and felt like survival. 

Dorian walked up behind me. He didn't say anything at first. He just stood there, his presence a cooling shadow in the afternoon sun. 

"The evidence suggests," he said after a long silence, "that the structural integrity of the Great Hall is... eighty-four percent restored. The archives are... secure."

"Eighty-four percent? Actually. No," I said, turning to look at him. "It’s a hundred percent, Dorian. We’re still here, aren't we?"

He didn't pull back into his formal understatement. He looked at the ruin of the gates, then at the students, and then at me. 

"Yes," he whispered. "We are still here."

In the rubble and ash, Dorian looked at her and said, "Mira." Just that. And she was too exhausted to tell him her title was "Chancellor." She was also too exhausted to pretend she minded.

---END CHAPTER---