Page 151 of The Blood Rites

“To see what would happen. They treated him like an experiment,” Nyxen says.

His fist hits the stone wall before I realise he’s moved.

“Did you protect him, then?” I ask.

“I was forbidden. I was only there to observe. The test was to see if he could survive.”

Nyxen’s hand lands on my shoulder. “He did,” Nyxen says. “But what survived was not what went in.”

His fingers tighten once, then loosen. “He couldn't move. For weeks.”

The water roars somewhere ahead of us. “What did they do?”

Nyxen’s breath catches, so faintly I almost miss it. “They fed it to him.”

“Fed him what?” I ask.

“Inhibitium,” he murmurs. “They put it in his food. They wanted to see how much he could take.”

My stomach turns cold. “Why didn’t you stop them?”

“I tried,” he says, and the words come out wrong. “They didn’t stop.”

The darkness presses closer. “What did they do to him?”

“Whatever they wanted.” The answer is too quiet. Too flat.

“They beat him,” he says. “Whipped him.”

The water pounds against stone.

“Cut him.”

His hand leaves my shoulder. “His father didn’t care,” he says. “Whether it was the Withering or not...”

The silence after that is worse than the dark.

“He let it happen.”

Nyxen’s voice becomes a whisper. “I was beaten within an inch of my life after I got him out.”

I want to tell him that it’s monstrous, but it’s pointless. Maybe that was when cruelty learned to call itself duty.

“You think it’s cruelty,” Nyxen says, like he’s heard the thought anyway. “It isn’t. Shadow Dominion life is hard. It requires resilience. But they went too far.”

I can’t even speak. Too far? It’s sadistic.

“When Kael recovered, he was changed. Some say broken. All his scars are from that time.”

I picture the way Kael’s tattoos writhe over his skin, the places where the ink looks like it’s crawling out of old wounds. It makes me sick. I have never hated the Crowns, or what they represent, more.

“Kael told me his father forced him to kill another boy when he was just a child.”

Nyxen says nothing for a while. When he speaks, his voice is quiet. “Kael has seen no shortage of evil.”

The tunnel opens abruptly into a wide chamber, and I summon my light, an orb glowing softly in my palm. The ceiling is lost in shadow, the walls glistening with wetness. At the centre lies a black, rippling pool, fed by a waterfall cascading from somewhere high above and churning the water below.

We skirt the edge of the pool, our reflections warping and hollowing in the light as it fights against the dark.