Ashes and Embers: A Love Survives the End

The flames had been burning for three days now, and still Lyra could not bring herself to look away from the window. The ancient city of Aethermoor stretched below her tower room, its cobblestone streets and marble archways now wreathed in an otherworldly crimson glow. What had once been the most beautiful realm in all the Seven Kingdoms was slowly being consumed by a fire that burned with neither heat nor smoke, but with something far more terrible—the essence of magic itself unraveling.

She pressed her palm against the cool glass, watching as another building shimmered and dissolved into golden sparks. The Fire of Undoing, the scholars called it, though none truly understood what they were witnessing. Magic was dying, and with it, everything that had ever been touched by its power. Which, in a world where magic flowed through every stone, every tree, every breath of wind, meant everything.

"My lady." The voice behind her was soft, careful. Lyra didn't turn from the window as her handmaiden Sera approached. "The Council of Mages requests your presence in the Great Hall."

"They've found a solution?" Lyra asked, though hope had become a foreign concept these past days.

"I... they did not say, my lady."

Lyra finally turned away from the devastation below. At nineteen, she was the youngest person ever to hold the title of Keeper of the Sacred Flame, the ancient fire that had protected Aethermoor for over a thousand years. It was a responsibility that should have passed to her gradually, with years of training under her predecessor. Instead, she had inherited it when the previous Keeper simply... ceased to exist three days ago, dissolved into the same golden sparks that now claimed building after building.