This Shouldn't Work, But Here We Are

Inheritance of Ash

The battle wasn't long. It wasn't fair, either.

Acturos' chaos danced through the ruins like wildfire on poetry. Wings and steel and shrieks. The Flock followed with cruel elegance, every step vengeance sung. And Elide? She was the storm. No longer the hero. No longer the daughter. Just reckoning.

When it ended, she stood over her mother's broken body, blood painted her cheek.

Domerron tried to crawl. "We gave you everything."

"No," she said, voice low. "You gave me nightmares."

Ko arrived at dawn, cloak swaying gently, tail flicking with worry. She didn't ask what happened. She just took Elide's trembling hands in hers and kissed the blood away from her knuckles.

"Come home," Ko whispered.

Elide nodded. Behind them, Acturos stood atop the rubble, wings stretched against the morning light like a shadow longing to fly.

The Flock didn't look back.

They never did.

~+~

Ash clung to Elide's eyelashes like frost as she stepped over what remained of the House of Vinterre. The sun had barely broken through the stormclouds of smoke, but light had a strange way of pretending nothing burned beneath it.

Ko walked beside her now, boots crunching glass and bone. Her dog ears were lowered, tail unmoving, a rare silence from someone who usually spoke in color and spark.

"Do you regret it?" Ko finally asked, voice gentle, but it didn't hide the fear.

Elide didn't answer right away. They passed a cracked mirror, the one that used to reflect opulence and legacy. Now it held only ruin. She glanced into it, half-expecting to see her mother's sneer in her reflection.

"I don't know yet," Elide said quietly. "I think I'm still bleeding somewhere I can't see."

Behind them, Acturos cackled, kicking over what might have once been a throne. "Regret is a waste of a good massacre," he muttered. "They deserved worse. You were merciful."

He twirled a chunk of marble like it was a coin, then threw it into the rubble hard enough to shatter what was left of a statue's face.

Ko gave him a look. "You don't understand families."

"No," Acturos said, suddenly calm. "I don't. I ate mine."

No one asked what that meant.

The walk back to the city was long. The Flock flew overhead in strange, graceful spirals. It always looked like they were dancing between grief and mania. One of them, a quiet boy with burnt wings named Miro, flew low beside Elide and handed her a cloth.

"To clean your hands," he said.

She stared at her palms. The blood had dried, dark and cracked, like war paint that refused to come off.

"Thanks," she whispered.

~+~

They reached the gates of Elesmere by dusk. Civilians peeked from windows, whispering rumors that had already grown wild wings. Children called her Queenkiller, Saintbane, Featherwitch.

She didn't correct them.

Ko grabbed her hand. "You're not like them."

"I killed them."

"You didn't become them."

Elide turned to face her, Ko, who loved too hard, who always smiled like strawberries and blood after battle, who held her like she wouldn't break.

"They made me sharp," Elide said, throat tight. "You made me kind."

Ko smiled, sad but proud. "Then be both."

~+~

That night, the Flock held a funeral, not for the villains, but for the part of Elide that had to die with them.

They burned feathers soaked in oil, wrote sins on paper, and let them rise in smoke.

Acturos performed a chaotic eulogy. He stood shirtless on a table, wings spread, eyes wild.

"To the dead who earned it," he declared. "To the children who outgrew their monsters. And to Elide, our lovely disaster, who proved that sometimes the bloodline has to burn before the garden can grow again."

The Flock howled and threw wine on the fire.

Elide watched it all, holding Ko's hand, surrounded by outcasts with wings and broken hearts. And for the first time, she didn't feel cursed.

She felt reborn.

And somewhere, in the ashes of her legacy, something new began to bloom.