Page 196 of A Kingdom of Shadow and Ash

My duty as a witch has always been to protect the eight kingdoms.

This has been the only way.

Tabitha Wysteria

Ash Acheron was no more. And yet, he was.

He had been burnt and unmade, reduced to nothing but flickering embers, his body swallowed by the molten depths. But in the endless void between destruction and rebirth, something else took root—something ancient, something vast. He was twisted and reshaped, stretched beyond the boundaries of time, of existence itself.

In the nothingness, hesaw.

Not only the past—not only the truth hidden beneath the blood and bones of history. He saw himself, from the moment his mother had brought him into the world, to the instant Mal had plunged the dagger into his heart and sent him to the fire. He saw the Great War, saw what had truly happened, saw how the world had been rewritten in lies.

And when the curse shattered, darkness rushed in. Stormclouds devoured the land, lightning split the heavens, and the world trembled under the weight of something vast, something unfathomable.

Through the veil of his unraveling, Ash watched as Tabitha Wysteria stepped into the afterlife—as she found Hadrian at the end of all things.

He saw the truth of the storm.

He saw what the thunder heralded. What it let in.

He saw the future.

And when the fire finally released him, when he rose from the ashes of his own death, he was no longer the Fire Prince.

He had become something else entirely.

A Seer.

But not just any Seer. No—his sight had been altered, tainted, touched by Tabitha’s magic, by the unraveling of the world itself. He could seeeverything.

And as his first breath filled his lungs once more, his golden eyes—now burning with something beyond mortal comprehension—found her.

Mal.

His wife. His executioner. His salvation.

In that moment, he understood.

The weight of all things pressed into his chest as he spoke.

‘We were always wrong,’ he whispered, his voice a raw, reverent thing. ‘We were wrong about ab-absolutely everything.’

The sky above them deepened into an abyssal shade, the heavens splitting with a guttural growl of thunder—a warning, a harbinger of something unseen. Shadows thickened, coiling around them like an encroaching tide, the air itself turning dense, weighty, pressing against their lungs with an almost suffocating force. As if the world held its breath, waiting for thearrival of something dreadful, something inevitable.

‘You always be-believed that the gods never listened,’ Ash continued, his voice breaking beneath the sheer weight of knowing. ‘But they w-were. They were always lis-listening. They did not respond b-because they couldn’t. They were trapped. And now—’ He turned his gaze skyward, where the storm churned with something monstrous, something divine. ‘Now we ha-have set them free.’

Lightning crashed above them, striking the land with a force that rattled the very earth beneath their feet.

Ash’s breath hitched as realisation settled deep into his bones. He turned his gaze back to her.

‘The curse was keeping us s-safe.’

Mal’s expression did not change, but something in her eyes—something deep, something buried—faltered.

Ash swallowed hard, his heart pounding in his chest.

‘We w-were wrong about you too,’ he said. ‘You w-were never a witch.’

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