The Girl Who Rode Fire

The Serathian cliffs had been trying to kill people for centuries, and today they were feeling particularly ambitious with Mira Solvain.

She’d grown up hearing the stories in Saltmere’s taverns—how the ancient Serathi had thrown their criminals from these very rocks, believing the sea winds would carry their souls to judgment. How dragon hunters used to nest here, back when dragons were plentiful and stupid enough to build rookeries on accessible clifftops. How her own grandmother had lost three fingers to frostbite gathering winter-bloom here, sixty years past.

“Stupid bloody cliffs,” Mira muttered, her satchel bouncing against her hip as she hauled herself up another ledge, breath coming heavier now.

The coastal outpost’s healer, Old Henrik, had been specific: fireleaf and moon-moss, and don’t come back without them. Easy for him to say—he wasn’t the one with thick thighs and a pack full of glass jars trying to scale a mountain that clearly hated her. Every upward step made her calves scream and her chest burn, but she pressed on, jaw tight. Just a little further, she told herself, even as the rocks beneath her boots shifted like they wanted a show.

The wind cut through her wool cloak like it had a grudge. Below, the Cerulean Sea churned gray and furious, waves crashing against rocks that had been sharpened by millennia of violence. Above, storm clouds gathered with ominous intention.

In Saltmere, they said the cliffs remembered every death. That on nights when the moon was dark, you could hear the screaming.

Mira had always thought that was bullshit. Until now.

The sound that split the air wasn’t human—it was something raw and desperate and utterly alien. A screech that made her bones ache and her teeth clench.

“What the hell?” She froze, herb-gathering forgotten.