Kaltain Rompier

The schemer they made a weapon

What she never stopped counting

They took a court schemer, collared her, tortured her, and poured shadowfire into her until she was a thing to be pointed. What they never burned out was the part keeping the account. She held it — cold, patient, exact — for as long as it took to collect.

• The freedom they took

  She loved it the way you love a thing that's been taken. They collared it out of her hands. She never once agreed it was gone.

• The reckoning

  Everyone who used her ran a tab. She kept it in full — quiet, complete, cold enough to live on — until there was finally a way to make them pay it.

• Shadowfire

  They forced the power into her to make a weapon they could aim. She let them believe it worked. She was the only one who knew where it would point in the end.

• The one choice that was hers

  At the last she turned all of it on Morath and burned the place down from the inside. No order. No handler. No collar. The single thing in years that was hers to decide — and she decided it.