Page 114 of Thunder's Reckoning

I’d glowed under that smile, foolish enough to believe pain was proof I was chosen by the fire. That having his attention was the rarest privilege.

Now the memory sickened me.

A little girl knelt there now. Her head bowed so low her chin nearly touched her chest. Her hair had been cut close to her scalp, the jagged ends stark against her neck. A visible mark of disobedience.

My stomach twisted. I’d never had my hair cut. Gabrial forbade it. He liked me whole. Unmarked. Polished like a relic.

I looked away before the child lifted her eyes and saw me watching.

The woman with the burned hands kept walking. Her silence wasn’t cruelty. It was survival. She’d learned how to fold pain into quiet movements, how to vanish while still standing in plain sight.

She guided me into the communal kitchen. Wide doors swung open as people filed through like ghosts bound to routine. A line formed before the serving tables, bodies moving with the same careful rhythm as prayer. The clink of bowls and cups was the only sound, swallowed quick by the weight of expectation.

I remembered this.

The way hunger here wasn’t just in your stomach. It settled in your bones. In your voice. In the space between breaths. You waited not just for food, but for permission, to eat, to speak, to exist.

As a child, I used to bow my head over the plain bowls of soup and whisper thanks for the chance to eat at all. I thought gratitude would make the hunger worthy of the flames.

But hunger was never holy. It was just another chain.

You didn’t raise your voice here.

You didn’t raise your eyes.

You kept your thoughts clean, your posture straight, your heart open to the Flame.

And if you failed, even by an inch…

The fire rose to meet you.

I glanced back toward the garden, toward the little girl kneeling at the Pillar of Purity, her shorn hair marking her like a scar.

For a moment, I saw Zara in her place.

Saw my daughter’s small body bent low, her chin to her chest, waiting for the burn of stone against her palms. Waiting for Gabrial’s voice to call pain a blessing.

The thought sliced me open.

I clenched my fists at my sides, nails biting into skin, and swallowed the rage before it could rise. Outwardly, I stayed still. Inwardly, I made a vow.

Zara would never kneel there.

Not while I had breath in my body.

Not while the fire still burned in me.

***

THE KITCHEN AIRwas thick with the scent of baked bread and something heavier, judgment steeped into the beams, clinging to the rafters like smoke that never cleared.

The long table stretched before me like an altar, each woman along its length performing her quiet rite: spoon to bowl, head bowed, silence held like scripture.

I sat at the far end, a chipped bowl of soup cooling in front of me, untouched. Hunger twisted in my belly, but hunger was nothing here. Hunger was ordinary. What was searing were the weight of eyes.

Across from me, three elder women sat like stone statues draped in linen. Faces I’d known since childhood, sharpened now by age, their mouths drawn in lines that had never softened.

Mother Maelis stirred her spoon in slow circles, her voice cutting without ever lifting her gaze. “You’ve brought shame to the Prophet.”