The Villainess Wants To Retire-Chapter 526: The god of fire
ERIS
The first thing I realized was that the ceiling was wrong.
It wasn’t the heavy, soot-stained timber of the north wing or the vaulted marble of the imperial bedchamber.
There was no scent of smoke, no distant sound of pickaxes striking stone, and most notably, no radiating warmth of Soren’s body beside mine. 𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢
The absence of his heat was a physical ache, a sudden hollow in the center of my chest that felt like a premonition.
Instead, I felt grass. Real, living grass pressed against my palms and the small of my back. It was soft, lush, and impossibly vibrant, each blade providing a distinct, cool sensation against my skin.
The air was cleaner than any air in Nevareth had a right to be, untouched by the rot of the city or the metallic tang of the battlefield.
It carried a scent that shouldn’t have existed: the heavy, sweet perfume of night-blooming flowers edged with a razor-sharp draft of mountain ice.
I opened my eyes slowly, bracing for the sting of reality, but the sky above me was a polished, shining expanse of cerulean and silver.
I sat up, the movement fluid and devoid of the agonizing hitch in my ribs that had defined my last waking moments.
I was in the mountains. Not the jagged, hostile peaks of the empire, but a place of myth.
The summits rose in the distance, crowned with perpetual snow that caught the ethereal light and scattered it into a thousand prisms. Waterfalls tumbled down sheer cliff faces, their mist catching the sun to hold permanent, shimmering rainbows.
Everywhere I looked, there were flowers, white, pale blue, and silver, their petals edged with a delicate rime of ice that refused to melt in the golden warmth.
They clustered around trees with bark like frozen lightning, and vines climbed stone outcroppings that seemed to defy gravity, floating over pools so still they mirrored the heavens with terrifying clarity.
I had been here before, in the fever dreams of my first life and the shadowed meditations of my second.
Of course, I thought, a strange calm settling over me. The beautiful lie.
Before I could fully process the landscape, a sound moved through the air. It wasn’t a sound heard with the ears so much as felt in the marrow.
It was a resonance, low, vibrating, and ancient.
It was the growl of a mountain shifting, a sound that had existed before human language had ever conceived of words for comfort or terror.
My name was carried in that vibration, spoken not by a throat, but by the very atmosphere of the realm. I turned my head, and there he was.
Pyronox as I remembered remained colossal. Even lying down, his presence rearranged the geography of the meadow.
His scales were the color of midnight given texture, a shade deeper than black itself, a vacuum that absorbed the light and gave back the suggestion of a subterranean fire.
His head, monumental and terrifying, rested on the grass near me, his eyes glowing with an intelligence that predated human civilization by so long that the word "old" felt like a pathetic insult.
In those eyes, I saw my own reflection, small, clear, and perfectly contained within the amber.
He watched me with a quality I hadn’t expected: a careful, almost hesitant patience. It was the look of a god watching something fragile that he wasn’t accustomed to finding fragile.
"WE MEET AGAIN, VESSEL," his voice rumbled, filling the space between the mountains.
I sat up fully, brushing a stray blade of grass from my tunic. My mind was finally arriving, stitching the pieces of my collapse back together. "We do," I said simply.
Something shifted in those burning eyes. "YOU FINALLY DID IT."
I looked at him, genuinely confused. The transition from the courtyard to this place had left me disoriented. "Did what?"
"Were honest," Pyronox observed. He let out a huff of smoke that smelled of cedar and sulfur. "WITH YOURSELF. WITH THE ONE WHOSE LOVE YOU CARRY."
The landing was immediate. I understood who he meant. In the vast, bloody history of my existence, there was only one person who fit that description. Soren. My heart gave a traitorous little jump at the name, even here, in the realm of the divine.
I narrowed my eyes at the dragon, crossing my arms over my chest. The absurdity of acting indignant toward a primordial force of nature wasn’t lost on me, but I had a reputation to uphold. "Have you been spying on my love life, old man?"
Amusement flickered in the amber depths. "It gets boring here, Eris. The waterfalls do not change their tune, and the wind has said all it has to say."
"So you’ve been watching," I accused, the indignation sharpening. "Everything? Including the courtyard? Including before the attack? Vetra? All of it?"
Pyronox didn’t deny it. The silence was his confirmation. He simply continued to watch me, a mountain of scales and ancient secrets.
"Unbelievable," I muttered, looking away at a floating stone. "I can’t even have a breakdown in peace."
"I know you have been searching," Pyronox said, his voice changing register, dropping into a more somber tone. "Searching for the weakness of a dragon. Looking for the hole in the armor."
I looked back at him. There was no point in lying; he lived inside my head, after all. "Well, someone wasn’t going to tell me," I said flatly. "I had to find out myself. I needed to know what really happened the day you were captured. How does a god of fire get taken by his own worshippers? It’s a pathetic story, if the histories are to be believed."
A ripple moved across his scales, not a shudder, but something older, the weight of a memory that still had teeth.
"My greatest regret," he said slowly, "was blessing the human race with magic. I thought I was giving you a tool for survival. I did not realize I was giving a child a torch in a library."
I nodded. I understood that part. Humans were the greediest of all creatures, always reaching for the thing that would burn them.
"That doesn’t answer my question. How did they do it?"
