The collared Merdelainian told them about the doors to the south. Shadow demons, bound in darkness, guarding chambers that had once belonged to the Collar Master before he changed and was relocated. Nobody went there any more. Siax thought it was a luxury. Arya agreed. The rift came first.
The elemental chaos hit them before they reached the chamber. Kael was pushed back. Tiaumil came close to understanding the forces at work but could not hold the insight. Kael recognised it: all four elemental planes, locked in tension, the energy output enormous. The collared creature confirmed what they already suspected. You did not step into the circle. You went around it.
Pancheska looked at Arya and said only, "Remember what I said." Then he nodded for her to go ahead.
What happened to Arya was different. Her magic had been running hot since they entered the tower, but this was something else. Her hands grasped for a staff she no longer carried. Her summer aspect became literal. She began shedding heat that forced the others back, wreathed in fire like armour.
Inside the rift chamber, suspended in the column of energy between floor and ceiling, was a figure compressed into a ball of flame. Not an object. Something alive, something that had been alive for a very long time and crushed into a shape that was not its own. Arya sent the wildfire spirit in. It touched the sphere, and a deep hum filled the chamber, and she knew immediately what she was looking at. An archfey, missing from the courts for longer than she had been alive. Voren, the Lord of Flames.
He knew her too. He spoke her true name. The wildfire spirit was a piece of his essence, he said, what little he could reach from inside the rift. The staff she had carried was his creation. She told him it had been taken. He told her they had tried to use it and it had engulfed them for the trouble.
He asked to be freed. She said yes. Pancheska tried to warn her in Sylvan that releasing Voren could unravel everything the fey courts had built. Arya told him it was the right thing to do. Voren, his voice growing less like fire and more like a person, spoke of Selephra and how she had been joyful once, before grief made her into the Bramble Queen. He looked at Pancheska. "How else would you heal her?"
Three pillars needed disrupting simultaneously. Kael took the first and weathered the backlash. Siax took the farthest, drove his moonblade into the pillar like a lightning rod, and rolled a natural twenty. It worked, but when he drew the blade out the blackened rune from the Hand of the Queen's theft had spread, thin cracks reaching through the steel. Pancheska cast guidance on Arya and stepped back. She took the third.
The rift collapsed. Kael and Arya were pulled in. Kael fell through to the Plane of Fire, saw a burning city and an efreeti watching him from a parapet, and hauled himself back through a vine ladder Siax fired into the stone above. Arya fell into the Plane of Water and nearly drowned before Tiaumil's phantom steed gave her something to grab. The last thing she felt before crossing back was something vast beneath her, swimming upward, looking at her with the patience of a thing that had decided she was interesting.
Voren emerged from the sealed rift diminished but free. He studied each of them in turn and stopped at Kael. "You should not be here," he said, without malice. Kael was from the material plane but also not. Someone had written him into this world's story, Voren said, and whoever it was had not stopped writing.
He sat cross-legged and shaped fire into wood and remade the Staff of Embers in Arya's hands. He told her the staff held a final gift: when she truly needed it, it could transform her into a being of pure fire. He showed her a glimpse. A tower melting like a candle. "Fire does not choose what it burns," he warned.
He gave them a target before he left. The Collar Master, now fused with the tower itself in the Masters' Domain far above. Killing him would equal three disruptions and drop every collar in the tower. He would be terrified of them, Voren said. Centuries alone in his own mind. But terror would make him dangerous, and he would call every collared creature to his defence.
Voren looked at Arya one last time. Torrheval had not cared that people cared for him, he said. He stayed, made a life here, and the whole war was built on that misunderstanding. "If you care for people as you say, tell them."
Then the flame folded inward, and he was gone.