The Villainess Wants To Retire-Chapter 527: The god of fire pt 2

Pyronox’s silence was brief, a gathering of breath. "Your forefathers, the ones who led the first war against the winter-blessed, they were the beginning. Magic does not choose by birth, Eris. It never did. It chose the soul. Fire chose your line, and ice chose others. It was not decided by blood, but by the temperament of the spirit."

He paused, his eyes reflecting a distant, flickering light. "But your forefathers were not content with what was chosen for them. They did not want to be stewards of the fire; they wanted to be its masters. They wanted more than a blessing. They wanted the source."

"And?" I pressed, leaning forward.

"They found a way," he said, his voice careful, as if measuring the weight of the words. "They found a way to freeze my heart."

I went perfectly still. Of all the theories I had constructed, of all the dark rituals I had imagined Ellyn’s theories might contain, this hadn’t even crossed my mind.

"Ice magic," I whispered, the pieces beginning to click into a grotesque pattern. "They used ice magic against you. The very thing the Ignivas claim to loathe. They used the power of their enemies to enslave their god."

"I did not fully understand it myself, even as it happened," Pyronox confessed. "Something that should not have been possible was done. A bridge was built between the two poles of magic, a cold so absolute it could still the pulse of a sun."

I was already connecting the dots. Someone had helped them. An ice mage, a traitor to their own kind, or perhaps something worse. Something that shouldn’t have existed. I filed it away; the history of the world was far filthier than the scrolls suggested.

"When the ice began to weaken," Pyronox continued, his voice growing heavier, "when my strength began to return, they realized they could not hold a god in a cage of frost forever. So they decided to seal me. Within a human vessel. A living prison that could be replaced, generation after generation."

He described the attempts with a chilling, detached clarity. One person after another, used like kindling. The Ignivas had lined up their own kin, their own children, and forced the fire into them.

Each one had burned from the inside out, their nervous systems vaporized within seconds. They were dead before they even understood the horror of their inheritance.

"They did not stop," he said simply.

I felt sick. The Igniva name tasted like spoiled meat in my mouth. My line. My blood. We weren’t just conquerors; we were parasites who had fed our own children to a god just to keep the hearth warm.

"Honestly, I understand your grudge," I said, my voice dry. "It’s barely a punishment, isn’t it? What’s happening to me? It’s just the bill finally coming due for the souls my family took." 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

"It was not entirely your fault," Pyronox said after a long moment. "You were also a victim of their design." He paused, and for the first time, I heard a crack in the divine resonance.

"I am sorry, Eris. For taking too long to understand that. I amplified what was already there, the rage, the bloodlust. I fed it.

I added my own hatred for your line to your own natural fire and made sure you felt it all at full capacity. I wanted you to burn because I wanted them to lose their prize."

The silence that followed was unprecedented. A dragon apologizing was not something the universe was designed to handle. I looked at him, searching for the catch, but I found only the same weary honesty I had seen in Soren’s eyes earlier that day.

"Don’t take all the credit for yourself," I said, my voice firm. "I knew, every time, what was wrong. I knew what I was doing was inhuman, and I continued anyway. Some part of me decided it was acceptable as long as it got me what I wanted. I barely feel sorry for myself about the seal, Pyronox. I’m just tired of the noise."

The dragon watched me, his amber eyes unblinking.

"Speaking of understanding things too late," I said, deliberately shifting the weight of the conversation. "The last time we spoke, you mentioned her. Aenithra. You spoke about the Goddess of Ice like she was something more than a fellow divine. Like she was... a person."

The scales on Pyronox’s neck shifted, a tremor of something older than magic moving through him.

"It was worse than that," he said quietly. "I never got to tell her. I never got to tell her how much I loved her."

The realm responded to his grief. The flowers swayed without a wind, and the light dimmed, the air turning heavy with the specific, particular ache of a yearning that had been suppressed for eons. It was a mirror of the feeling I had felt in the courtyard, the terror of the unspoken.

I thought of the promise. From what I had gleaned of the old myths, Aenithra had promised to return. And I thought of Soren.

I thought of him in that battle against Vetra, the way the ice had responded to him, the way he had looked when he called upon the Frostmother’s power. It hadn’t looked like a mage using a spell; it had looked like a son reclaiming a birthright.

"My husband," I said, my voice careful and deliberate. "Soren."

Pyronox’s eyes sharpened. "The one with her mark."

"Yes. You mentioned before that he bears Aenithra’s mark. You said you sensed a part of her within him. You assumed it was because he is a prodigy, the strongest ice mage in generations."

"Is it not?"

I met those amber eyes, my heart hammering a rhythm of pure, dangerous intuition. "But what if Aenithra is closer to you than you think, Pyronox? What if she didn’t just leave a mark? What if she stayed?"

The silence that followed was different from all the others. This one had the quality of something that had been waiting a thousand years to be asked. It was heavy, pregnant with a truth that could unmake the world.

Pyronox didn’t answer immediately. He just stared at me, his ancient, burning eyes searching mine, as the beautiful lie of the realm began to flicker at the edges.