But Dreadscale’s eyes found mine…
Hold on.The command burned through me, silent and absolute.We will find you. Do not surrender.
I held his gaze and the doors slammed shut between us.
And the dark swallowed everything.
I weaved in and out of consciousness. Heavy. Like dragging myself out of deep water.
First, the sound. A resonant, rhythmic thrumming in my ears that slowly sharpened into my own pulse. Too fast. Too loud.
Then the pain.
My skull felt like it had been cracked open and put back together wrong. A dull, grinding ache behind my eyes that made the mere thought of moving nauseating.
I lifted a heavy hand to the back of my head. My fingers found the swollen knot before the pain caught up—a split-second delay before the whole back of my skull lit up white. My teeth clamped together hard enough to crack.
I groaned. My throat was dry as dust. I tried to peel my eyes open. The lids felt weighted, glued shut with grit and exhaustion. I managed a slit.
Cold, damp stone pressed into my cheek. I blinked, forcing my vision to clear. The world spun, tilted, then settled into something grim and solid.
Rough floor. Shadows. The distinct, metallic taste of enclosed air.
I pushed myself up on one elbow. The room swung sideways and my stomach tried to follow. My arms felt borrowed—too heavy, wrong weight, like someone had filled them with wet sand while I was out.
Then the smell hit me.
It wasn’t damp stone or the stale air of a deep underground.
The smell of scorched flesh.Myflesh.
The memory crashed in—the chaos, the ambush, the iron disk in Eryndor’s hand—and the throbbing in my skull was instantly drowned out by the screaming agony in my chest.
I wasn't dreaming.
I opened my eyes. The dark didn't lift; it just gained shape. Iron bars. Stone walls.
The King’s dungeon. A place people only mentioned in whispers—because no one who went in ever came out to correct the rumors.
There was a thick, suffocating silence broken only by the rhythmic torture of water hitting rock.
Drip.
Drip.
My torso was a ruin of raw nerve endings. The Quell-Rune Eryndor had burned into me wasn't just a wound; it was a parasite. I could feel the magic of it, dense and oily, burrowing into my collarbone, radiating a sick, writhing heat that made me nauseous. The smell of my own charred skin clung to the damp air, thick and sweet and wrong. I gagged, trying to turn my head, but the movement pulled at the burn, and white spots fractured in front of me.
Drip.
Drip.
It was the only sound in the world. Louder than the alarm had been. Louder than the screams. A relentless, irregular metronome counting down the seconds of my failure.
Drip.
I tried to grasp my power. Just a spark of Light to warm the shivering that rattled my bones, or a thread of Shadow to numb the pain.
Nothing.
