The pain stopped.

Not gradually. Not with relief's slow exhale. Just... gone. Like a knife pulled from flesh, leaving only the ghost of where it had been.

Abigail breathed. Once. Her chest rose and fell with a singular rhythm. No echo of four others breathing in sync somewhere across the battlefield. No phantom sensation of lungs that weren't hers expanding in distant bodies. No telepathic awareness humming at the edge of consciousness.

Just her.

One heartbeat. One breath. One perspective looking out at a frozen wasteland littered with the dead and dying.

The quiet was the strangest part.

Months of constant background presence—five minds operating in parallel, thoughts bleeding between them like watercolors on wet paper—gone.

Not lost. Not missing. Consolidated. Like closing windows on a computer until only one remained, and discovering how much faster everything ran.

She lifted her hand, watched fingers flex that answered only to her intention. No coordination required with four other bodies. No subconscious adjustment to account for what Cinder was doing or where Pyra had moved. Just her hand, responding to her will, immediate and absolute.

The battlefield sprawled before her, and memory hit like overlapping photographs.

She'd approached from five directions. Seen these frozen wastes through five sets of eyes. Felt five distinct reactions to Belavar's walls rising in the distance. The memories existed simultaneously, each complete, each hers, all true at once. Not competing narratives but facets of the same diamond, all visible from her singular perspective now.

Pyra's fierce joy at the coming fight—that had been her.

Cinder's cold assessment of tactical weakness—that had been her, too.

Ember's protective fury for the soldiers fighting beside them—hers.

Kindle's determination despite grinding fear—hers.

Ash's analytical certainty of necessary sacrifice—all hers.

Not voices arguing in her head. Not separate personalities negotiating for control. Just aspects of herself, grown through months of independent experience, now present all at once. She'd been playful and tactical. Protective and analytical. Fierce and cautious. All of it was simultaneously true because all of it was her.

She took a step forward.

The stone beneath her foot cracked, spiderwebbing out in fractal patterns as superheated rock expanded too fast for its own structure to accommodate. She lifted her foot and watched the stone glow cherry-red where she'd stood, heat radiating up through her boot sole like standing on a stove.

Huh.

That was new.

Around her, snow vaporized in an expanding circle. Twenty feet. Thirty. Fifty. Steam rose in clouds that caught sunlight and turned the air into drifting rainbows.

Coalition soldiers stumbled backward, shields raised not against attack but against the simple fact of her existence. She heard their shouts, muffled and distant, saw them retreating to safer distances.

The ground where she stood began to melt. Permafrost liquefied. Rock softened into magma pools that spread outward like ripples on water.

She wasn't trying to burn anything. Wasn't channeling fire or focusing power. This was just... her. Just being. The ambient heat that had always radiated from her flames multiplied beyond reason, beyond control, burning hotter than she'd ever managed even at peak output.

There was no curse pressure driving her to split. No ticking clock on how long this form could be sustained. Just the realization that she could no longer do anything to make her flames dimmer than they were right now.

But how?

It didn't seem possible that integration by itself could bring such a dramatic change. Sure, she'd stopped having to dilute her power across five bodies. But she'd integrated multiple times before, and it hadn't made this kind of difference.

Nethysara's roar cut through her observation.

The dragon launched forward from where she'd been perched on the city's walls. Her flight path carried her in a wide circle around the steam-cloud of Abigail's presence. Not attacking directly. Assessing. Maybe a little uncertain. Her wings stirred the steam, pushed billowing white clouds away from Abigail to reveal the melted stone at the center.

Slow.

The world had slowed to a crawl. Or she'd sped up beyond anything she'd experienced before. Same result either way—everything around her moved with dreamlike languor while her thoughts raced at normal speed.

Nethysara moved like swimming through honey. Lazy. Glacial. As though the entire world was holding its breath, waiting for her to get to where she was going already.

How fast could she move now?

The question arrived with scientific curiosity rather than tactical urgency. Five aspects, each having pushed their speed to superhuman limits through repeated crisis and combat. All that development consolidated. The math suggested something absurd.

She should probably test that.

Abigail ran.

The world blurred. Wind screamed past her face, pressure building as she accelerated through air that couldn't move aside fast enough. The frozen battlefield streaked by in bands of white and gray and red where blood had frozen mid-spill.

She counted landmarks. The shattered siege tower where Force Alpha had held their line—there. The crater where Vorthak had fallen—there. The ridge where coalition command had established position—there.

Four miles. She felt the distance in her bones, mapped through the days of running these territories at superhuman speed. Knew the terrain like she knew her own hands.

She stopped.

The sonic boom hit fifteen seconds later.

Her brain did the calculation automatically, numbers falling into place like childhood blocks. Four miles. Four seconds of subjective running time. The sonic boom arriving at a known distance.

That was...

Mach five.

Five times the speed of sound. Five times what her maximum had been before. Not additive—multiplicative.

"Oh," she said aloud. "That's faster than expected."

She stood there, watching the dust plume of the sonic shockwave spread out across the tundra behind her, and considered the possibilities.

Abigail turned, picked the fastest path toward Belavar's distant walls, and leaped. The frozen earth crumbled to powder beneath her launch. The air whipped past, pressure waves building in a halo of blurred distortion around her as she outpaced the atmosphere.

Her landing cratered permafrost, sent broken ice and snow in a radial spray that turned to steam before it even finished airborne travel.

Around her, the sonic boom's shockwave rolled across the battlefield, shattering ice sculptures and knocking soldiers flat. She heard their distant shouts, saw coalition forces scrambling to understand what had just happened.

Oops.

She turned back toward where she'd started. Nethysara hung in the air, frozen mid-breath-weapon, her attack aimed at empty space. The dragon's eyes tracked slowly, searching, not yet comprehending what had happened. Where she'd gone.

Abigail walked back. Each step melted snow into steam, cracked stone into slag, left glowing footprints in her wake. Her hair floated behind her like she'd dunked it underwater.

Everything felt different. Slower. Softer. Easier. She couldn't tell whether the world had changed, or if her perceptions had shifted to match her increased speed and power, but it felt like a dream.

Valerian stood frozen in his spell casting, his arcane sight blazing as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing. Even from this distance, Abigail could read the expression on his face—the particular combination of awe and terror that came from witnessing something that shouldn't exist.

Around him, soldiers backed away from her approach. Not retreating from battle. Retreating from her.

She couldn't blame them. The ground liquified where she walked.

Nethysara's frost breath finally released.

Ice crystals bloomed across empty air, beautiful and useless. The dragon's eyes widened, tracking Abigail's new position with the sluggish realization of a predator discovering it had become prey.

Abigail flexed her hands, watching flames dance across her knuckles without conscious effort. Blue-white fire that burned hotter than anything she'd managed before. Superheated plasma that warped the very air around it.

She wondered what else had changed.

Nethysara wheeled in the sky, coming about in an arc of slow-motion flight. The dragon's mental pressure built again, that crushing weight meant to drive enemies to their knees in submission. Abigail felt it arrive like a wave hitting a seawall—present, acknowledged, completely ineffective.

The pressure had always slid off the five of them. Whatever made them immune remained true now. Useful to know.

"You're going to have to do better than that," she said.

Nethysara descended in a controlled dive, claws extended, moving with the desperate speed of something fighting for its life. Still slow. Still so impossibly slow that Abigail had time to study the approach, note the angle of attack, calculate three different counters, and choose the most efficient before the dragon had crossed half the distance.

She stepped aside.

The dragon's momentum carried her past, talons raking through space Abigail had vacated seconds ago in real time but an eternity in her perception. Nethysara's bulk crashed into the ground with enough force to shake the battlefield, ice and stone erupting upward in a geyser of debris.

Abigail landed on the dragon's back. Scales shattered under the impact. Blood boiled into a pink-red fog that floated in curling ribbons across the blue of broken ice.

Nethysara bucked, trying to throw her free, but the motion was too slow to track. Abigail held tight, digging her fingers into flesh that steamed at her touch.

The world continued its dreaming slowness around her—the dragon's thrashing movements unfolding with underwater grace, coalition forces frozen mid-reaction, even the steam rising from their contact drifting upward like dandelion seeds on a calm day.

She pressed her palm against Nethysara's scales.

Fire erupted from her hand without conscious direction, drilling into ancient armor that had turned aside the coalition's most powerful spells. Energy flowed through her in a channel that burned clean and hot. She didn't need to focus, didn't need to guide the attack—just incandescent power driven to iridescent brilliance by her five-fold experience.

The dragon shrieked.

The sound arrived distorted through Abigail's accelerated perception, long and low like a distant warhorn stretched into melody. There was anger there. Fear.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Pain.

Abigail jumped clear, leaving a charred crater in the middle of the dragon's back. Nethysara twisted, her body moving in dreamy curves that left afterimages hanging behind them like ghost trails. Her tail swept through the space where Abigail had been.

Abigail pivoted on one foot and struck out with the other. Her kick caught the descending tail, sent it slamming into the earth where the dragon's bulk had already carved devastation.

Ice splintered. Permafrost liquified. Slabs of rock heaved upward from the blow.

Nethysara reeled back, wounded and wary. She hovered just above the battlefield now, her wings pumping great sweeps of air that had barely lifted her before but now seemed unable to bear her weight.

Ice constructs erupted from the frozen battlefield. Hundreds of them materialized simultaneously in sprays of snow and frost. Ice golems. Frost wraiths. Jagged crystalline elementals that lashed at her with wind and ice.

They surged toward Abigail in a wave of white and blue.

She walked through them.

Her passage melted constructs mid-step and sent their shattered remains clattering to the ground in a hail of unmade body parts. The wave crashed and broke and became nothing more than detritus beneath her tread.

Nethysara launched herself forward, abandoning flight for a ground charge. Her bulk shook the earth, talons tearing furrows in frozen soil.

Abigail sidestepped.

The dragon's momentum carried her past, massive claws missing Abigail by miles in real time and inches in perceptual distance. Nethysara's tail swept around in a follow-up strike, seeking to catch her from behind.

Abigail caught it.

Her hands closed around crystalline scales that cracked and hissed under her touch. She planted her feet, set her shoulders, and pulled. Nethysara's bulk shifted, began to fall.

For a moment, it seemed like the dragon's size would overwhelm even Abigail's enhanced strength. But that moment broke and the dragon continued her descent into an uncontrolled tumble. She hit the earth in a thunderous crash, landing belly up with wings and limbs splayed in limp submission.

Abigail didn't give her a chance to recover.

Her fist slammed into Nethysara's flank with the sound of a meteor impact. Scales cracked. Bone beneath fractured. The dragon's body lifted off the ground from the force, sailing sideways through the air in a tumbling roll.

Frost breath erupted again, not aimed at Abigail but at the ground between them—creating barriers, obstacles, anything to slow the approach of something that moved faster than her ancient eyes could properly track.

Abigail walked through the ice walls like they were curtains.

"I offered you peace," Nethysara's voice carried across the battlefield. "Evolution. You chose violence."

"You chose first," Abigail replied. "When you enslaved thousands. Called it mercy."

"I freed them from pain!"

"You took their choice." Abigail's hands ignited. "That's not the same thing."

She moved.

The distance between them vanished in the time it took Nethysara to blink.

Abigail's flaming fist drove into the dragon's chest. The impact sent shockwaves rippling across Nethysara's bulk, visible distortions that traveled from point of contact to wing tips.

The dragon's blood hissed where it met flame, boiling away before it could hit frozen ground.

Nethysara's claw came around in a desperate swipe. Abigail ducked under it, the movement casual, almost bored. Her second strike caught the dragon's exposed neck, flames carving a furrow through armored scales.

The ancient being staggered. Tried to take flight, wings beating with ragged desperation. She managed fifty feet of altitude before Abigail jumped, caught her tail again, and dragged her back to earth with force that cratered the landing site.

Nethysara rose once more, slower this time, her movements carrying the weight of accumulated damage. Blood leaked from a dozen wounds, each one cauterized almost instantly by the ambient heat radiating from Abigail's presence. The dragon's breath came in ragged gasps that frosted the air around her muzzle.

"You don't understand what you're destroying," Nethysara said, her voice losing the projected authority it had carried before. Quieter now. Almost conversational. "I've spent millennia learning what mortals refuse to accept—that suffering is the constant, and only through transformation can it be transcended."

Abigail circled, watching her enemy's movements, seeing every twitch and flinch as an opening she could exploit if she chose to move fast enough. "You mean only through slavery."

"Through peace." The dragon's head tracked her movement with eyes that held genuine conviction beneath the pain. "I've watched civilizations rise and fall. Seen countless generations born, struggle, die in endless cycles of grief and loss. What I offer is escape from that wheel. No more loss. No more aging into weakness. No more watching everyone you love crumble to dust while you remain."

"No more choice either."

"Choice." Nethysara laughed, the sound wet with blood. "What good is choice when every option leads to suffering? When the freedom to choose is just freedom to hurt?"

Abigail stopped, standing in a pool of liquified rock that bubbled around her feet. Steam rose in columns that caught the light and turned her into a figure wreathed in rainbows. She looked at the ancient dragon, really looked, and saw something she hadn't expected.

Certainty. Not cruelty. Not sadism. Just absolute conviction that she was right.

"You really believe that," Abigail said. Not a question.

"I've lived long enough to know it as truth." Nethysara settled back on her haunches, blood pooling beneath her in spreading darkness. "I was young once. Believed in the value of struggle, the nobility of choosing one's path. That idealism fell to cynicism with age. Now there is only this."

The battlefield had quieted. No more ice elementals emerged from the ground. No more frost spiders or jagged ice towers. Just frozen ground, and snow falling soft across the devastation they'd left behind them.

"I ended the screaming," Nethysara continued. "Here, in this place, for these people. They're safe now. Protected. The cold preserves what matters and removes what hurts. That's not slavery. That's mercy."

Abigail felt the weight of those millennia in the dragon's gaze. The accumulated grief. The terrible logic that had led from compassion to compulsion, from wanting to protect to needing to control.

She'd seen that path before. Seen heroes become villains because they couldn't accept that sometimes people needed to make their own mistakes, face their own pain, choose their own suffering.

"It's still their choice to make," Abigail said quietly. "Even if they choose wrong. Even if it hurts. That's what being alive means."

"Your compassion is limited by your youth. Short years breed shallow wisdom." Nethysara's voice softened, not with menace, but something almost gentle. A parent leading a child toward truth. "In time, you'll understand. And I'll be here to welcome you when that happens."

She opened her mouth and unleashed one final frost-breath.

Abigail's flames erupted, and she walked through it all. The world burned around her.

It took seconds. One final surge of fire, guided by hands that had always known how to fight. Guided by instinct earned across five minds' experience.

The fire consumed Nethysara in a column of white-hot plasma that reached toward the sky like a pillar supporting the heavens. Abigail stood at the center, flames blazing up around her in a hurricane of light and energy, until the dragon's bulk disappeared into drifting ashes.

There was no scream this time. No last words. Just quiet acceptance of a conflict that could only end one way.

When the flames subsided, nothing remained.

No body. No scales. No bones to mark where an ancient being had made her last stand. Just scorched earth and the lingering heat of total annihilation.

The battlefield fell silent.

Coalition forces stood frozen, staring at the space where Nethysara had been. Even the wounded stopped their groaning. Even the dying paused their final breaths. Everyone watched Abigail standing alone in a circle of melted stone, flames burning around her with the intensity of a sun made small and local, and tried to process what they'd just witnessed.

Then her hands started cracking.

Not bleeding. Cracking. Like porcelain under too much pressure, hairline fractures spreading across skin that glowed from within. Light bled through the breaks—not fire, but something more fundamental. Raw energy demanding release.

Abigail looked down at her hands, watching the cracks spread up her fingers toward her wrists.

The sensation was familiar. Curse pain. But different than before. Not the stabbing agony that had driven them to maintain five forms, but something worse—the feeling of her body rejecting the power it contained.

Like trying to hold an ocean in a bottle. The container would break. Was breaking.

Around her, the temperature spiked again.

Air ignited in spontaneous combustion, flames springing to life without fuel or source. The ground beneath her feet turned to lava, stone running like water in expanding pools. Trees exploded into torches. Snow and ice boiled away in clouds that stretched to fill the horizon.

She tried to pull the fire in, focus it down, draw its shape back into something she could contain. It resisted, flaring outward with force that drove her to her knees, palms pressed to newly formed lava beneath her.

The cracks spread up her arms. Across her shoulders. Light bled through each fracture, growing brighter as the structural integrity of her physical form began to fail.

Minutes. She had minutes at most.

Coalition forces realized what was happening. Orders were shouted in panic. Soldiers scrambled to retreat, abandoning positions and equipment in their desperation to escape the expanding heat. Mages threw up barriers that lasted seconds before failing. Knights on horseback turned and rode, their mounts foam-flecked with terror.

Valerian's presence flickered at the edge of perception. Arcane sight, amplified by whatever magic he was using and driven by the urgency of the situation. Abigail could feel him tracking her power and realizing the magnitude of what was building at the center of this new disaster.

"Everyone back!" he screamed, his magically amplified voice carrying across the battlefield. "Full retreat! NOW!"

Theron echoed the order, his soldier's instincts recognizing imminent catastrophe. "Move! Move! MOVE!"

The army broke into chaotic withdrawal, all pretense of formation abandoned in favor of raw survival. They'd won the battle. Killed the dragon. Freed the duchy. None of it would matter if they were all dead when the hero who'd saved them exploded and took half the countryside with her.

Abigail felt their retreat more than saw it. Her vision had started to blur, reality fragmenting at the edges as the cracks spread across her face. Every breath pulled at the fractures, widening them, letting more light bleed through.

The ring on her finger—Senna's gift—burned against her skin. Not painfully. Urgently. Like it was trying to communicate something her failing consciousness couldn't quite parse. The crystal at her throat—Khroma's gift—resonated, vibrating with a frequency that matched the cracks spreading through her body.

Both of them pulsing in rhythm. Growing brighter. Growing hotter.

She knew what came next. Supernova. Most likely, the curse's final punishment for existing as one. Catastrophic energy release that would vaporize everything for miles. Turn this battlefield from frozen tundra to glass crater. Kill everyone she'd fought to save.

Everyone.

No.

Abigail ran.

Her speed, already enhanced beyond reason, increased as desperation overrode the failing structure of her physical form. The world blurred into streams of color. Wind pressure built and broke and built again as she accelerated. Behind her, a trail of fire marked her passage, burning the ground in a streak of blue-white ignition that would have killed anything that tried to follow.

She needed distance. Needed altitude. Needed to be so far from everyone that when she came apart, the only thing she'd destroy was herself.

The ground fell away as she launched skyward, using pyrokinesis to propel herself into the heavens like a comet with a human shape. Fire erupted from her hands and feet, not controlled jets but uncontrolled eruptions that pushed her higher, faster, away from the earth and everyone on it.

Mile after mile fell away beneath her. The air grew thin, cold, irrelevant. Stars became visible even in afternoon light as she punched through cloud cover and kept climbing. Below, the battlefield shrank to toy-soldier scale, then disappeared entirely behind the curve of the world.

Higher. Had to go higher. Had to be far enough that the explosion wouldn't reach them.

The cracks had spread across her entire body now. Light poured through them in beams that cut the thin atmosphere like searchlights. She was fracturing, breaking apart, becoming something that wasn't quite solid anymore.

It was almost peaceful up here. Quiet. Just the wind and the stars and the approaching oblivion.

Her eyes began to glow. Light spilled from her mouth. Every cell burned from within, the final bonds holding her physical form together giving way.

She'd been Abigail Callahan once. Barista and superhero. Powerful and reckless and absolutely certain she could handle anything.

Then she'd been the Fragmented Flame. Five aspects learning to work together, to trust each other, to become something greater than any individual part.

And now, for these brief minutes, she'd been whole again. Complete. Strong enough to do what had to be done.

It had been worth it. Every moment of pain and confusion and desperate integration. Worth it to feel this complete. Worth it to know what she was capable of when all her pieces worked as one.

She just wished she could have kept it longer.

The world below was safe now. The coalition would free the servitors. Would rebuild. Would make something good from all this death and ice and grief. She'd done her part. Played her role. Saved the day like heroes were supposed to.

And if the cost was everything, well. That's what made it heroic.

She thought of Theron and Valerian, probably watching from below. Of the coalition soldiers who'd fought beside her. Of Thaddeus and the five of them sharing meals around the cottage table. Of Spark, who'd probably miss her until he found someone else with warm hands and poor impulse control.

She thought of Pyra's joy, Cinder's pragmatism, Ember's warmth, Kindle's determination, and Ash's quiet wisdom. Aspects of herself that had grown into something like siblings. Like friends. Like people she'd miss despite being them.

Had that been the lesson? Not to take power lightly, but to recognize that even the parts of yourself deserve respect? That fragmentation wasn't weakness but a different way of being strong?

If so, she'd learned it too late.

Abigail closed her eyes and waited for oblivion.

The ring on her finger blazed like a star, silver threads from Senna's divination magic weaving through the cracks in her skin. The crystal at her throat sang with harmonics that shattered what remained of her coherence, Khroma's interdimensional resonance finding frequencies that matched her fragmenting consciousness.

Both of them reacting to something she couldn't name but felt in the fundamental structure of what she was. Not stopping the supernova... redirecting it.

Transforming destruction into separation.

Into salvation.

Reality fractured.

Not the world—her. Her sense of self splitting along familiar fault lines. Five perspectives. Five aspects. Five ways of experiencing existence that had been compressed into one and now demanded their individual expression.

Light erupted from her body in five distinct streams. Not an explosion. A separation. Controlled somehow, guided by forces she didn't understand and couldn't resist even if she wanted to.

The integration broke.

Abigail came apart at the seams, consciousness scattering across five trajectories as the gifts at her finger and throat channeled the supernova's energy into transformation instead of destruction.

Five flames streaked across the sky, each one trailing different colors—orange and gold and crimson and azure and smoky blue-gray. Pyra, Ember, Kindle, Cinder, and Ash, splitting from singular to plural in a kaleidoscopic eruption of fire.

The fragments descended to earth in arcs of light, spreading out across the landscape, following invisible lines of force that pulled them to unfamiliar destinations.

And behind them, tumbling through thin air, the ring and crystal fell—their magic spent, their purpose fulfilled, descending toward the earth far below.

Next chapter will be updated first on this website. Come back and continue reading tomorrow, everyone!

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.