The iron shackles muted them but did not silence them. Their voices still threaded through the cracks, sharp and beckoning, curling in his ear like smoke. They pulled at him, begged him, promised power if he would only open his hands.
But he could not. Not here. Not now.
It was taking all his strength just to channel a thin trickle of shadow inward, weaving it into torn muscle and cracked bone. The work drained him as much as it restored him. Sweat slicked his skin. The taste of iron lingered on his tongue.
He had never done this before—not like this.
Azfar’s voice haunted him as much as the shadows did.Healing with anakara is not the way of our people. To pour shadow into flesh is to risk binding it into the soul. Too much, and you will weave yourself into something less than an orc, more than a ghost. A creature of hunger. A thing that does not remember its own name.
There were stories, darker than war: of shadow-walkers who bled themselves into the void, who rose again not as warriors but as things that hunted endlessly. Half-orc, half-nightmare. They roamed the plains in silence, their eyes empty, their blades dripping with the blood of kin and stranger alike. The shadows devoured them from within, and in their place, only monsters remained.
Rakhal clenched his teeth and pulled the thread tighter through the wound in his side. He would not be one of them.
But the risk lingered, terrible and real.
His mother’s blood made it worse. She had spoken to the dead, whispered to them, commanded their secrets. Her gift flowed in him, twined with his father’s line, potent and dangerous. Shadows, the night, the afterlife, the voices of the slain—they all recognized him as their kin.
And this place—this dungeon—was steeped in them.
Every stone had drunk its fill of death. Prisoners had clawed their nails bloody against the walls; men had drowned on their own screams beneath this ceiling. Those echoes lived on, disembodied and ravenous, clawing for purchase. They wanted him. They wanted to use him as a mouthpiece, as a blade. They pressed at the walls of his mind, promising power, promising vengeance, promising release.
Azfar had taught him to build barriers within himself, rooms the shadows could not enter. But here… here those walls felt thin. The pressure was constant. The temptation, endless. Hehad felt himself slipping once or twice before, in the heat of battle—rage opening cracks in his mind wide enough for the whispers to pour through. He had feared then what he might become. He feared it now even more.
At least the wards contained him. For now.
He drew in a breath, slow and steady, and closed his eyes. The shadows curled closer, eager. He ignored them and bent again to the work of healing, forcing his will upon every inch of darkness that touched him. His ribs ached, his chest throbbed, but the wound tightened, closed, little by little.
Still, he feared what each stitch cost him.
Chapter
Thirty-Five
Days blurred together in the dark.
He began to lose track of time. The torches outside his cell guttered and were replaced, though he never saw who came. The scrape of metal on stone, the shuffle of boots—these were the only rhythms left to him.
When sleep came, it brought memories. Not dreams—memories, old and sharp.
His mother’s bracelets clicking as she ground herbs by the fire. Her voice low as she spoke to what others could not see, bidding spirits back into the earth where they belonged. He had been small then, half afraid of her, half awed. She would turn her pale eyes on him and murmur,You hear them too, don’t you?
And he had.
His father had been the opposite—solid, practical, a man of orders and blades. “Steel doesn’t lie,” he used to say. “A man’s worth is in what his hands can hold.”
Between them, Rakhal had learned both kinds of power: the blade and the dark.
He remembered, too, his brother—Kardoc, laughing in the rain after a skirmish, blood on his hands and pride in his eyes. The laughter turned bitter when he remembered the betrayalthat followed, the armies split, the years of silence between them.Betrayal tastes like kin,Azfar had said once. He hadn’t understood it then. He did now.
And through every memory, Eliza’s face wove itself like thread—bright, defiant, unbearably alive. He tried not to think of her, but the mind had its own hunger. The warmth of her breath when she had defied him, the pulse beneath her skin when she had feared him, the scent of her hair after rain. The shadows writhed whenever she crossed his thoughts, restless and sharp-edged, as though they too remembered her.
He swallowed hard, pushed the memory down, and returned to the work of keeping himself alive.
The mages came often now. Some were silent and clinical, scribbling notes in the half-light; others took pleasure in cruelty. One young man—a soldier’s son, perhaps—called himbeasteach time he passed, as though the word itself could wound. Others discussed him as though he were an artifact, not a living thing.
“Remarkable cellular regeneration,” one murmured. “The shadow essence repairs flesh directly.”
“Dangerous,” another replied. “If it spreads beyond the host, the corruption could contaminate the wards.”
