"You know I wouldn't be asking unless it was life or death, Father," Horus' voice came through on the communication magic. "Something bad is happening here, and I need your help."

The spell shorted out like someone had cut off the magic, and Pyre's shoulders rose and fell as he took in a deep breath of frustration and sheer exhaustion with his son. Something always seemed to be crumbling or exploding with him, but this was the first time he'd asked for help. While Pyre was strict and hard on his children, he was not the cruel sort to abandon them, even if they needed a hand climbing out of a grave they'd dug for themselves.

"Helia," Pyre called his daughter into the room, and she barely made it out of the throng of generals without tripping over one or two. Powerful ember eyes and thick red curls reminiscent of his wife's fluttered as she steadied herself and headed into his office, shoulders squared and chin high. Helia was born a leader and wore it well, as her mother had before her.

The Cinders needed her.

Many were scattered and unsettled after Blaze had departed and taken half of their fighting force with. A split like this was the worst thing possible for the longevity of the Cinder line, but it had been eventual with Blaze's soaring ambitions. The man just couldn't see that he was putting them into a deathly predicament from all sides.

If the northern vampires caught word that the Cinder forces had diminished, they would descend on them in mass. Ever since the strongest houses had fallen in the conflict years ago, more were rising in their place, hungry to prove themselves by spilling the blood of whatever mages they could find. As one of the houses who'd refrained from joining the mage-vampire alliance, the Cinders were a constant target. Vampires littered the Cinder borders, and Pyre felled a few each month who thought to infiltrate.

"What's going on?" Helia asked, dropping into the chair on the other side of his desk with a sigh. White mage robes fluttered with her, her curls flickering like flames in the lamp light, and she nearly melded with the chair. There had been no end to the generals' inquisitions this morning, nor requests to train and prepare for the coming assault. The battleground vampires didn't know that Blaze had left through the transportation rooms, but the gaps in their patrols would become more evident.

And now Horus needed him.

It was only a matter of time now until something broke.

"I have to step out, Helia. Can you hold the complex?" The words were difficult to utter, and Helia's eyes boggled, her lips tightening into a tight line of confusion and disapproval. The worst of it was the doubt and nervousness that colored her sunset eyes. In any other situation, Pyre would not leave his daughter with this weight, but it was better to have two strained children than one and a corpse.

"We'll be okay until dusk. The vampires won't really start to poke around until the light wanes. Will you be back by then?" Helia sat up, trying to look strong, but the emotion was there under it all. A daughter reaching for the hand of her father for safety and security.

"I would hope so," Pyre said, a tired breath forcing him to his feet. The sooner he left and fetched Horus, the better. As to what trouble his son was in, he could not say with how the communication had been cut off. Saying anything to Helia would only further stress her, especially since his son had taken that vampire plaything of hers.

Stone, she called it. What sort of name was that? The boy was a jittery mess, lacking memories if Helia was to be believed, and as young as his daughter was both physically and emotionally. Such a weak thing around his daughter was as bad as if he were an assassin. Both were lethal in different respects, and he hoped Horus hadn't gotten wound up in anything vampire related.

Pyre had never been one for big shows of affection, but he ran his arm around his daughter's shoulders and held her close before he departed. For a moment, he imagined longing in her eyes, a desire to embrace him and keep him at her side, but it was washed away by the determination of a grand mage on a mission. Helia headed back into the complex with a confident gate to face the generals who needed her strength, and Pyre departed to the transportation room.

It didn't take many guesses as to where Horus might be, and Pyre headed to the outskirts of the pits with haste. Exiting the tent was quieter than expected, and Pyre had to stuff himself in a shop's door as people ran past. Humans, by the looks of them, but the scent of blood lingered in the air. The black market was a ghost town. Everyone had fled the alleyway, shops and customers alike, and smoke and screams rose up from the coliseum ahead.

What the hell was going on?

Pyre called to his flame magic to propel him forward, darting through the streets and down into the corridors of the coliseum. It was a battlefield inside, corpses littering the hallways of both humans and vampires. From their dress, the humans seemed like aristocrats who bet on the fights down here. If they'd perished, something must have happened in the arena, and fear pushed Pyre faster to the main halls. Horus would never fall to such riffraff, but chaos could result in anything regardless of a man's personal strength

Vampires, mages, and humans filled the observatory floors, and the stench of old blood was nauseating. It smelled like they'd gutted a battalion of men and drained them out onto the floor. Brown mush drew Pyre's eyes to the arena below, and he realized, to his horror, that they'd poured blood into it. What sick world had Horus wrapped himself with? Was this Pyre's punishment for being too hard on his son?

A predatory growl drove Pyre's hands, teeming with flame magic, to a corner where a vampire pinned a human and sank its fangs into her throat. A bleat of terror had Pyre's power rising within him, but his magic veered off course as another source of light magic collided with his arms. Before Pyre knew it, he was shoved into a wall around the corner, and he came eye to eye with vivid amber eyes that belonged to only his lineage.

"What are you doing here?" Horus hissed between his teeth, but Pyre was too shocked by his son's disregard for human life to pay attention. Angling his head, Pyre peered around his son's shoulder in time to see Rodney rip the man off the woman and shove him away. The vampire fled, and Pyre strong armed his son off of him.

They should have killed it.

"What is wrong with you? That thing was preying on her and you gave it a swat on the hand?" Pyre's rage dimmed as he took in his son. Blood spattered his mage vest and bare arms, dripping down his face from a wound on his head, and Pyre's eyes fell to his son's shaking hands as they clenched short blades.

"You can't be here. Leave now." Horus demanded, ignoring his words and turning to Rodney as he approached his back. The blue-haired vampire had a healthy fear of Pyre even if it hadn't sense enough to stay away from their family. Pyre narrowed his eyes and concentrated his magic until Rodney took tentative steps back.

"I don't understand," Pyre growled. Horus had called him here, so why now was he pushing him away?

"It's two words. Which do you need defined?" Horus sassed him like the petulant child her was, and Pyre bristled.

"What do you mean, what I am doing here? You sent me a voice communication," Pyre said sternly, keeping an eye at his back where mages and vampires were clashing. "You said it was life or death, Horus."

Horus' eyes drifted higher almost as if to roll them, but he dropped his face into his hands for a loud groan that sounded more like a growl at the end.

"Father, I would happily go to my grave, Rodney at my side, before I asked you for help. I'm a grand mage, and I clean up my messes. This however" —Horus gestured around him— "is not one of them. This is a ploy to murder innocent people and pin it on a fool stupid enough to go dashing into a crap heap because he thinks his son is incompetent. Welcome to the Cinder family coup"

The realization hit Pyre like a punch to the skull, but it didn't hurt near as much as Horus' words.

That was not why he'd come. Pyre new Horus could handle himself, more so with his vampire groupie, which was why he left his son to his strange outings. They might never see eye to eye with how similar they both were. Horus would never admit he was as stubborn as his father, and Pyre would always be so hard on his son that Horus would never understand the love behind the actions.

But a coup?

Pyre reached into the fight with his magic and recoiled back when he felt what he suspected. There were Cinders here. This had to be Blaze's doing. No one else knew him well enough to understand that he'd come for Horus even if he hated his son. Pyre's love for his children ran deeper than any disapproval he outwardly showed, but few knew that.

Blaze set a stage of carnage and malice and then put the only man who might cause such right in the middle, peppering the scuffle with enough Cinders that no one would doubt the perpetrator. Pyre would never wantonly kill or destroy this way, but he was quite vehemently and publically against vampires and what Horus did. It was not outside the realm of possibility to imagine he might lose himself. Blaze wanted power, and in order for that to happen, Pyre had to fall from grace. What better way than slaughtering the hobby that had taken his son from him, and what better place to frame him than somewhere people could legitimately see him destroying.

Good fucking show, Blaze.

Pyre would end this, even if there would be no proof of his innocence. Ignoring Horus' yell of protest, he located the first Cinder in the scuffle and cracked him over the head. The man went down with a thud, and Pyre dropped a small snare around him. This one was no more than an acolyte, a mage in training whose name he didn't know. Perhaps that was why he'd sided with Blaze, because Pyre wasn't intimately close with most. The snare was more to protect him from the rabid vampires than to cage him, but it served both purposes well.

The Cinders fell like rats, a plague easily squashed by a few cats, and a sinking feeling of disgust settled through him as he stood in the center of the melee. Flame magic surged in the air, his magic, and he watched it rip an acolyte in two right above him. Blood splattered down on him, and he backed away in confusion as he shook his hand to figure out why his magic was acting on its own. The poor boy was conscious long enough to sputter why before he died in the dirt, and Pyre laughed, but it didn't come from his mouth. Pyre spun to come face to face with himself, vivid, rage-filled, amber eyes flashing with amusement for only a second before they mirrored his expression of horror.

"What's going on here?" Both he and his copy said, and Pyre circled the man as flame magic rose between them. This piece of shit was a mimic. The magic was common enough, the spell not all too complicated, but it lasted only hours. The doppelganger had wasted no time he was sure, downing mages, vampires, and humans alike to frame him for his demise.

"This is why I said to stay out of it," Horus yelled over a pile of bodies.

The railing to the right threatened to drop him near two stories if his mirror pounced, and the way his son was looking between them with a despairing sinking of his features, he couldn't tell them apart. That was Pyre's fault too, he supposed. If he knew his son better, he would not falter on which of them to strike at. That meant it was up to him to conquer the beast ahead. While the spell was simple to cast, emulating another person and mastering their magic was the difficult part. That wasn't in the magic.

Both of those things, this vampire seemed to have no difficulty with. Pyre threw a burst of flame magic at the man in a roar of power, but his double mirrored it to cancel them out entirely. If he dashed forward with a sword of flame, the mimic parried and countered, and when he summoned his magic, the copy was already using the same spell. This man had trained and practiced Pyre's form and power, which meant Blaze had been planning this coup for much longer than this morning.

No one was left alive around them, either fled or felled, and that made sense. The double couldn't have witnesses seeing two of him if he meant to pin this at his feet. The only remaining people were Horus, Rodney, and Pyre had forgotten about Stone. Perched behind his mimic, with dark skin and pitch mage attire, the man was near invisible up on one of the rafters. No magic gave his presence away either. It was like looking at stature, or aptly, a man of stone.

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