But the survivors in those cells deserve escape too. And they can’t achieve it without help.
“The cells.” My voice is quiet but certain. “We open every door. Free everyone who can be freed. And then?—”
“Then we take the torch to it.” Zrynok’s arm tightens around me. “Leave nothing standing. Make sure nothing can grow here again.”
I turn in his embrace. Cup his face in my hands. Kiss him—slow, deep, a promise for later when we have time to be something other than fighters in a war that’s finally ending.
“When this is over,” I murmur against his lips, “we’re going to need a new purpose. Something to do with ourselves that isn’t fighting monsters.”
“I’ve been an executioner my whole life.” His hands settle on my hips. Familiar now. Comfortable. “I don’t know how to be anything else.”
“Then we’ll learn.” I kiss him again. Brief this time. A seal on the promise. “There are still monsters out there. The Abbot’s patrons. The nobles who funded this place. We find them. We end them.”
His lips curve against mine. Almost a smile.
“That sounds like a purpose.”
I take his hand. Turn toward the eastern wing. Toward the people who need us. Toward the work that still remains.
“One thing at a time.” I pull him forward. “First, we empty the cells. Then we take the fire to what’s left. Then we figure out the rest.”
He follows without argument.
And in the distance, the Thornwood waits. Patient. Ancient. Ready to reclaim whatever the fire leaves behind.
FORTY
ZRYNOK
I’ve seen prisons before.
Dungeons beneath warlord keeps where men rot for decades before anyone remembers they’re there. Pit cells carved into mountainsides where the condemned wait for execution. Iron cages hung from city walls, their occupants left to the elements until death claims them.
A long life of serving authority has shown me every method humans and orcs have devised for storing the inconvenient.
The Confessional Cells are different.
The prisoners here aren’t criminals waiting for judgment. They’re not enemies of the state or threats to public order or condemned men counting their final hours. They’re victims. People stolen from their lives and locked away until they forgot that freedom was possible.
And now I’m opening their doors.
The east wing stretches before me—a honeycomb of small stone chambers, each barely large enough for a person to lie down. Iron doors line both sides of the corridor, fitted with small slots at eye and waist level. The smell hits first: unwashed bodies, stale air, and underneath it all, that particular rot that belongs to the Bloom—years of it settled deep into the stone,into the mortar, into the grates that delivered spores along with filtered light. Everything coated in a fine crimson dust.
Arwen moves ahead of me, her shoulders tight with tension I can read from a dozen feet away. She knows these cells. Lived in them. Survived what happens behind these doors.
I reach for her. My fingers brush her lower back—brief, light, a touch that says I’m here without demanding her attention. She doesn’t turn, but I feel some of the rigidity leave her spine.
“The locks are standardized.” Her voice carries the clinical flatness she uses when discussing horrors. “Iron bolts, no keys required from the outside. The Abbot believed that making escape obviously impossible would break resistance faster than complicated mechanisms.”
“How many cells?”
“Forty-seven in this wing. More in the basement levels.”
Forty-seven people. Minimum. Locked away in darkness, fed through slots in their doors, their only light the grates that deliver the Bloom’s spores along with filtered illumination.
I start with the nearest door.
The first prisoner doesn’t move when I throw open the bolt.
