Petrah Blueblood · The full story

The witch who felt too much

In a people bred to feel nothing, she grieved out loud — and the thing that marked her as broken is the thing that turned hundreds of witches against Morath.

THE WITCH WHO CHOSE A FEMALE

Even her wyvern was a quiet break from what witches were supposed to want.

At the Ferian Gap selection, where war wyverns were meant to be bulls, Petrah picked a large female she named Keelie, and the two of them became unusually close — mount and rider bonded like something warmer than the Ironteeth ever permitted. She commanded the Blueblood coven in the War Games, the brutal aerial contest between Blackbeak, Blueblood and Yellowlegs to decide who would lead the whole host. On the surface she is just a rival heir to Manon. Underneath, from the very first, she was already the one witch in that sky who loved something.

THE FALL, AND THE MERCY

Iskra broke the rules and broke Keelie's neck — and Manon dove after her anyway.

In a flagrant violation of the Games, Iskra Yellowlegs sent her bull Fendir to clamp down on Keelie's neck, and Petrah and her dying wyvern went into a spiral toward the canyon floor. Petrah screamed — not in fury, but in agonizing, soul-shredding pain. Manon abandoned a guaranteed win and dove on Abraxos; Keelie used her last strength to level out for her witch; Manon leapt across and cut Petrah free. Keelie still died. The rescue won Manon the Games anyway, and it set a life-debt between the whole Blueblood clan and the Blackbeak heir.

BROKEN IN THE SOUL

Ironteeth aren't supposed to be able to grieve like this. She couldn't stop.

Afterward, Petrah wouldn't get out of bed. It was whispered through the covens that part of her had died with Keelie — a depth of grief that, in witches bred to feel nothing for their kin or their mounts, marked her as odd, broken, wrong. That grief is the whole seed of her arc. It is why her mother Cresseida later spends the Blueblood life-debt to buy Manon the opening to turn on the Matrons, and why the Blueblood line survives to defect at all. The witch who felt too much becomes the exact reason a rebellion has somewhere to grow.

FOR KEELIE

A war later, she finished the sentence Iskra started over the canyon.

At the Battle of Orynth, Petrah arrived leading hundreds of rebel Ironteeth in a stunning betrayal of Morath, turning her own people against the demon army. She broke Fendir's death-grip off Abraxos — repaying the wyvern who once saved her — and claimed Iskra for herself: 'She's mine.' Then she chased Iskra down out of the sky, encircling her all the way to the ground, and banked away at the last instant, leaving Iskra and Fendir to crash and die. Two words closed the arc that had opened over a canyon a whole war before. The grieving witch got her reckoning, and she got it out loud.