“Then we’ll dissect it before that happens.”
Laughter. Quills scratching. None of them dared step too close.
But the longer Rakhal remained in the dark, the more he understood thatsomething elselived down here—older, deeper, waiting.
The walls hummed at night, not with his power, but with something vaster. The ghosts that pressed against his thoughts were not merely human remnants. There was will in them, a mind that coiled through the stone. The air tasted wrong, sharp with metal and cold rot. Even the shadows hesitated at times,as if another presence moved among them—something that claimed this place long before the humans built their fortress.
He tried to warn them.
When the mages next arrived, he lifted his head. His voice was rough but steady.
“You shouldn’t keep me down here,” he said. “These shadows are dangerous. Old shadows such as these… they were here before your wards and sigils were writ. They don’t care much for them.”
The nearest mage snorted. “Superstition. Even monsters dream.”
Rakhal’s gaze hardened. “This castle is built on cursed ground. You can’t contain what’s here. Neither can I.”
They exchanged glances, amused. One whispered, “Delirium.” Another smiled thinly. “Arrogance.”
“Orc stupidity,” the youngest said. “He’s raving.”
“Perhaps,” said the leader. “But a raving beast still needs discipline.”
He touched a rune on the chain.
The sigils on Rakhal’s manacles blazed. A surge of searing light ripped through his body, bending his spine against the wall. Pain flooded him like molten iron, and the shadows screamed in his veins. The mages watched, unflinching.
“Tell me,” one murmured, voice almost curious, “how it feels to have your own darkness turned against you.”
Rakhal couldn’t answer. The sound that tore from his throat was half growl, half breath.
When they left, the air still burned. The scent of scorched metal and flesh clung to him. The shadows gathered around his trembling body, restless and furious, pressing like wolves against a fence.
He drew a ragged breath and forced them back, terrified of what would happen if he let them loose.
He had seen death in a thousand forms—on battlefields, in brotherhood, in betrayal—but this was different. This place was not a dungeon. It was a wound in the world.
And the humans, with their chalk and sigils and arrogance, had no idea what they were keeping chained down here with him.
He lay back against the stone and stared into the dark until the whispers came again—soft, patient, older than language—and wondered how long before even he would stop resisting their call.
Chapter
Thirty-Six
Days bled into nights, nights into the same gray blur of half-light and cold air.
The torches outside his cell burned down and were replaced. The footsteps of guards changed weight and rhythm as new men took their turns. Rakhal marked the passage of time by the ache in his side, by the slow thickening of scar tissue where shadow had stitched his flesh.
The dungeon had its own pulse now. A sound that lived beneath sound, deep and steady as a buried heart. Sometimes he thought he could feel it echo through his bones. The thing below was stirring. He felt it in the cold drafts that crawled through the cracks, in the sudden dimming of the ward-runes. The mages above thought their sigils sovereign. They didn’t know what slept under their boots. They didn’t know what it meant that it had begun to listen.
The spirits called to him more insistently. They whispered his name, promised freedom, promised revenge. The pull of them was physical—his body trembling, slick with sweat, his breath shallow as the darkness tried to claim more of him. He held the line. For now.
When he closed his eyes, Eliza’s memory returned—not as comfort, but as ache. He remembered the warmth of her skin beneath his hands, the defiance in her voice, the quickened beat of her heart against his palm. The recollection wound through him like fever. The shadows responded, thickening around his wrists, humming to his pulse as if they, too, remembered the rhythm of her breath.
He fought them down, shamed by his own hunger.
But at night, when pain dulled and exhaustion blurred thought, that hunger felt like life itself.
