I am walking as flames ignite across the walls of a palace I have never seen.

  Each flash sears brighter than the last, a collision of stone and flame and moments that refuse to arrange themselves in order. Through corridors of red stone veined with black, fire consumes tapestries bearing the two-headed drake. The fabric curls and blackens, threads glowing orange before crumbling to ash. I watch it fall. I watch it hang intact. I watch it fall again.

  I do not know when this is.

  The flames bend around me like water parting for stone, close enough to taste but refusing to touch. Heat that should blister leaves my skin cool. Smoke that should choke fills my lungs with nothing. I am here and I am not here, walking through a moment that exists in three states at once: the corridor polished and whole, the corridor burning, the corridor reduced to charred ruin.

  My feet carry me forward because I do not know what else to do.

  Through a window I glimpse gardens below. Tactical gardens, I know somehow, though I have never walked their labyrinthine paths. High hedges form patterns I almost recognize. In one breath they are green and precisely trimmed. In the next they burn. In the next they are overgrown with decades of neglect, choked with weeds that have claimed the stone pathways.

  I blink and they are all three at once.

  Ahead, through the smoke that both exists and does not exist, someone stands motionless in the burning corridor.

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  Platinum-blond hair catches firelight without singeing. A figure that does not flinch as flames consume the space around them. I cannot see their face. They are turned away from me, watching something I cannot perceive, and though I walk toward them the distance between us neither shrinks nor grows.

  I open my mouth to call out.

  No sound emerges.

  Or perhaps sound emerges and I cannot hear it over the screaming that has not started yet.

  The figure begins to turn.

  Reality fractures.

  I am standing in the corridor before the first spark. Stone gleams. Tapestries hang heavy and proud. Somewhere distant, voices murmur in conversation, words I cannot quite distinguish. The air smells of nothing. The walls hold no memory of fire.

  I am standing in the corridor as it collapses. Ceiling beams crash down in slow motion, trailing sparks like falling stars. The heat is absolute. The smoke is everywhere. Someone is screaming a name I do not recognize, over and over, until the screaming stops.

  I am standing in the corridor years after. Moss grows between cracked stones. Vines twist through empty window frames. The sky above is gray and silent. Nothing moves. Nothing breathes. The ashes have long since scattered to wind.

  The world screams my name.

  The sound comes from everywhere. From the flames. From the figure. From my own throat. I do not know if it is warning or accusation. I do not know if it has happened or will happen or is happening now.

  I do not know if I am the one screaming.

  The figure's face begins to resolve through the smoke.

  Features I almost recognize.

  Eyes that hold something I cannot name.

  A mouth opening to speak words I am not ready to hear.

  I stand alone in fire that touches me without heat, surrounded by walls that are whole and burning and ruined, and tears fall from my eyes though my eyes are dry.

  I do not know what is happening.

  I only know that I have seen this before. That I will see it again. That somewhere in the space between memory and prophecy, House Vermilion burns.

  And I am there when it happens.

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  ? Nightbreak (Patreon-exclusive)

  ? Ablations (ongoing)