Today’s soundtrack is Iron West’s “Mother I Burned the Sky,” and I’m writing Chapter Ten of the next book in the Witchfire series.

Which feels... alarmingly appropriate.

There are songs that make good background music while you write.

And then there are songs that walk into the room, look at your characters, look at the disaster you’ve created for them, and say:

Yes. This is mine now.

“Mother I Burned the Sky” is very much the second kind.

By Chapter Ten, this story has moved beyond the quiet warning signs.

The cracks are getting wider.

The old laws are starting to matter.

The vampire Houses are watching one another.

The Veil is becoming harder to trust.

And at the centre of all of it are Elara, Cassian, and Lyra—a family that should never have been possible according to almost every rule the immortal world has spent centuries protecting.

Naturally, that means the immortal world is handling things calmly and rationally.

I’ll give you a moment to stop laughing.

Elara has never been particularly talented at accepting the roles other people assign her.

Witch.

Bride.

Queen.

Mother.

Threat.

Every time someone decides what she is allowed to become, her response tends to involve blue fire and an impressive lack of respect for ancient authority.

And now?

The stakes are changing again.

This story isn’t simply about whether Elara can survive what is happening to her.

It’s about what happens when survival itself becomes transformation.

What happens when the power inside you stops asking whether your body—or the world around you—is ready for it?

What happens when the woman everyone has spent years trying to contain finally becomes something they can no longer contain?

And then there’s Cassian.

Seven centuries of kingship have taught him how to survive wars, betrayals, rebellions, assassins, rival Houses, and every ambitious immortal who ever decided the Night Throne might look better beneath them.

None of that prepared him for this.

Cassian can destroy armies.

He can terrify courts into silence.

He can stand before creatures older than kingdoms without lowering his eyes.

But he cannot command Elara’s body to stop failing her.

He cannot order prophecy to behave.

And he cannot simply murder every problem facing his daughter.

Although I assure you, the man remains deeply committed to testing that theory.

Meanwhile, Lyra continues to be the tiny supernatural impossibility around whom an increasingly nervous immortal world is beginning to revolve.

She has mortal breath.

Immortal blood.

Magic nobody completely understands.

And parents who would burn kingdoms before surrendering her.

Which brings me back to today’s soundtrack.

Mother, I burned the sky.

There’s something about those words that feels right for where Witchfire is heading now.

Because some stories are about protecting the world that already exists.

This one is beginning to ask a much more dangerous question:

What if that world deserves to burn?

Not the people in it.

Not everything Cassian and Elara have fought to protect.

But the rules.

The old prejudices.

The ancient systems that decided witches should fear vampires, vampires should rule from the shadows, humans should remain ignorant, and an impossible child like Lyra should never exist.

Those rules have survived for centuries.

Elara Mărginean has never cared much for rules that mistake age for righteousness.

So here I am.

Iron West playing.

Chapter Ten open in front of me.

The Veil cracking.

The High Houses circling.

Cassian becoming increasingly dangerous.

Elara becoming increasingly impossible.

And somewhere in the middle of it all, blue Witchfire reaching higher than anyone expected.

Maybe high enough to burn the sky.

Chapter Ten is officially underway.

At this point, I’m not entirely sure whether I’m writing the fall of the old vampire world...

...or the birth of the one that replaces it.

Either way, I suspect there’s going to be fire.

— J. Sands