I could just leave. I could just leave.

If Coddin were here he would call this too great a risk with no certain reward. He would say that but he would mean “Get the hell out of there, Jorg,” because he wouldn’t want me to burn.

And if my father were here. If he saw me stepping toward the sunlight. Taking the easy path. He would say in a voice so soft that you might almost miss it, “One more, Jorg. One more.” And at each crossroad thereafter I would choose the easy path one more time. And in the end what I loved would still burn.

“Make a fire, Gog,” I said. “Make the biggest fucking fire in the world.”

Gog looked at Gorgoth, who nodded and stepped back. For a long moment, measured by half a dozen slow-drawn breaths, nothing happened. Faint at first, as if it were imagination, the flame patterns on Gog’s back started to flicker and move. The colour deepened. Flushes of crimson ran through him and the ash grey paled. The heat reached me and I stepped back, then back again. The shadows had run from the cavern but I had no time to see what they revealed. Gog pulsed with heat like an ember in the smith’s fire pulses with each breath of the bellows. Gorgoth and I retreated into the tunnel that led up from behind the cathedral cave. We stood with the heat of Gog’s fire burning on our faces and the air rolling down from behind us icy on our necks.

The flames came without sound and the whole of the cathedral cave filled with swirling orange fire. We staggered back, losing sight of the cavern but still blistered by the inferno. My breath came in gasps as if the fire had burned out what I needed from the air.

“How will this help?” Gorgoth asked.

“There’s only one fire.” I drew in a lungful of hot and useless air. Black dots swam across my vision. “And Ferrakind watches through it as if it were a window to all the world.”

Gorgoth caught my shoulder and stopped me falling. It seemed to take no effort and I managed a small pang of resentment at that even as I began to slip into a darker place where his hand could not support me. I could hear nothing but my own gasps and the sound of my heels dragging as he pulled me farther back, farther up. Most of me felt hot enough to ignite spontaneously, but strangely my feet were freezing.

The fire that had made no sound as it came gave a distinct whumpf as it went out. It ended before I passed out entirely, and a shock of cold brought me round with a hoarse curse.

“What the hell?” I lay in a small stream of icy water. The tunnel had been dry before, yet now a stream ran along it, rattling pebbles in its flow. I rolled in the freezing trickle for good measure then used the wall to get myself vertical. Gorgoth led the way back. He’d spent a lifetime in the dark beneath Mount Honas and his cat’s eyes found him good footing whilst I stumbled behind. The little stream followed us back into the cathedral chamber where it bubbled and steamed on the hot rocks.

Gog waited where we had left him, still glowing, and Ferrakind stood at the mouth of the tunnel that led to the entrance chamber.

I had thought to find a man with fire in him. Ferrakind was more of a fire with a touch of man remaining. He stood in the form of a man but as if fashioned from molten iron such as runs from the vats of Barrow and of Gwangyang. Every part of him burned and his whole shape flickered from one posture to another. When his eyes, like hot white stars, glanced my way his gaze seared my skin.

“To me, Gog!” It hurt to shout, but the steam from the meltwater around my feet helped a little.

“The child is mine.” Ferrakind spoke in the crackle of his flames.

Gog scrambled toward us. Ferrakind made a slow advance.

“And why would you want him?” I called. I couldn’t get any closer without the skin melting off me.

“The big fire consumes the small. We will join and our strength will multiply,” Ferrakind said.

It seemed to me as if he spoke from memory, using what parts of the man had yet to burn away.

“We came to save him from that,” I said. “Can’t you take the fire from him and leave the boy behind?”

Those hot eyes found me again and stared as if truly seeing me for the first time. “I know you.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. My lips felt too dry for the foolish words I might have found in other circumstances.

“You woke a fire of an old kind that hasn’t burned for a thousand years,” Ferrakind said.

“Ah, yes,” I said. “That.”

“You brought the sun to earth,” Ferrakind’s crackle softened as if awed by the memory of the Builders’ weapon. Shadows ran across him.

Gog reached us, the heat gone from him leaving new markings, bright flames caught in orange across his back, chest, arms.

“So can you change him? Can you take the fire out of him, or enough so he can live with it?” I asked. It still hurt to breathe and the steam from the meltwater made it hard to see. Somewhere above and behind us the heat from Gog and Ferrakind was meeting the ancient ice at Halradra’s core.

Ferrakind’s fire guttered and spurted, flowing over the cavern floor. I realized he was laughing.

“The Builders tried to break the barriers between thought and matter,” he said. “They made it easier to change the world with a desire. They thinned the walls between life and death, between fire and not-fire, whittled away at the difference between this and that, even here and there.”

It occurred to me that Ferrakind’s sanity had been one of the first things to be consumed in his own personal inferno. “Can you help the boy?” I asked, coughing.

“It’s written in him. His thoughts touch fire. Fire touches his mind. He is fire-sworn. We can’t change how we’re written.” Ferrakind stepped toward us, flames rising around him like wings readying for flight. “Give me the boy and you may leave.”

“I’ve come too far for ‘no,’” I said.

Fire isn’t patient. Fire does not negotiate. I should have known these things.

Ferrakind reached toward us and a column of white flame erupted from his hands. I had considered myself quick, but Gog moved quicker than I could think and caught the conflagration in his arms, his body shading from orange toward white-heat, but none of it reaching Gorgoth or me.

“Behind us!” I shouted. “Send it back.”

And Gog obeyed. The tunnel behind us filled with Ferrakind’s white fire as Gog caught it on one hand and threw it away from the other. I could see nothing of the fire-mage, just the white inferno boiling off him, and nothing of the tunnel, just a fierce tornado of white fire swirling away through it, up. We stood in a cocoon with furnace heat on every side and one small boy keeping our flesh from charring to the bone.

For an age we saw nothing but blinding heat, heard nothing but the roar of fire. And each moment that I thought it could last no longer, the fury built. Gog blazed, first the bright orange of iron ready for the hammer, then the white of the furnace fire, then a pure white like starshine. I could see the shadows of his bones, clearer by the heartbeat, as if fire were burning though him, taking substance from muscle, skin, and fat. Leaving him brittle and ashen.

And in an instant the fire and fury fell away revealing Ferrakind, white-hot and molten, with Gog crouched, pale as silvery ash, unmoving.

A torrent of meltwater rushed around us now, hip deep, white, and roaring, pouring into the main chamber through a tunnel mouth that lay dry and gritty when we first scrambled through it to escape the fire. The waters divided around Gog and again around Ferrakind as if unable to touch the essence of fire. Gorgoth and I kept close to Gog and the water hardly reached us.