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Not Atlas, like I hoped.

But an evil version of him, connected by blood.

His brother.

“I’ve finally found you…

…the key I need.”

The crossing was a single step that seemed to last a thousand years, yet no time at all.

One moment, the cold, wet hollow of the marches, and then, in the next breath, came nothing but stone. We came out into a tunnel of it, something ancient and vast. The hint of a vaulted ceiling somewhere in the dark above. The walls were choked with pale roots that had forced their way through the joints in the masonry over what must have been a hundred lifetimes. Water dripped slowly somewhere, its echo magnified by the tunnels. The air was cold, deathly still and smelled of old earth and even older stone. A faint grey light came from everywhere, yet it had no source.

Instantly, I felt lost without Acelin, leaving only my own two feet to guide me. My strength to continue was the precious weight in my arms as I carried her through this new hell. Through the long curving tunnels with their broken arches and their dripping roots. It looked like a place where even death dared not touch. Yet deeper we travelled into a place that felt older than the world above.

But holding her kept me anchored to my own kingdom in a way that only ones fated ever could. I didn’t even feel her weight, not once, because there are some burdens a man’s heart simply refuses to let his arms call heavy.

As for Theron, he walked beside me, silent now, watchful. His cockiness gone entirely. Whereas Aster and Lazaros came behind with blades half-drawn, the sound of our boots the only sound in all that vast and waiting dark.

A darkness that found us long before we saw them. One moment, the tunnel stood empty before us, and the next, it didn’t. They came out of the shadows as though they had been a part of them all along, a dozen blades levelled at our throats.

It wasn’t exactly what I would call a warm welcome.

More startling yet was that they weren’t beings, at least not by my definition.

Or at least not any longer, for I had no idea what they once were or what the shadow realm had made them into, for they were something else entirely. Every one of them was taller than they had any right to be, wreathed in living darkness that frayed at their edges into smoke. So much so that I couldn’t have said where the warrior ended, and the shadow began.

Unsurprisingly, they all wore black like a second skin, ragged robes on some, tight wrappings on others, with deep hoods that swallowed their faces whole. Where I could see faces at all, they were masked or worse… they were simply absent. Like a smooth nothing where features should be.

And the eyes.

Gods, the eyes.

They burned out of the dark in colors that did not belong to anything living. A cold gold here, a bruised violet there, a pair resembling the dead white of bones. And not one of them blinked. Not one of them spoke. The blades in their hands were made from solidified shadows, pointing at us so steadily that they looked frozen in time.

Aster went still as stone at my side, as surprisingly, even he had nothing to say, but it was Theron who stepped forward into the ring of levelled dark. He did so with all the unbothered grace of a man arriving late to a feast held in his honor. He spread his empty hands, and when he spoke, his voice carried down the vaulted dark with the weight of one crown addressing the servants of another.

“Be at peace, for we are no thieves, and no enemies of your master.” He inclined his head slightly in a king’s courtesy, and no more. “I am Theron of House Chrysaor, King of the Badlands. We have crossed your threshold by blood freely given, as is the old law, and we seek an audience with your king.”

For a long moment, nothing moved. Instead, only eyes burned in the dark as their blades didn’t waver.

Then, somewhere far ahead in the dark, a low sound answered. Not a voice, not quiet, but more the memory of one. Hearing this, one of the shadow-warriors stepped back and turned towards the tunnel ahead. A signal for it to suddenly open up in front of us, as fog as thick as a wall sank all at once into an abyss below. Like a Rift, only this time, one led to what looked like,

The end of the world.

The cavern fell away before us into an immense, drowned gorge. Far across it, rising sheer from a black cliff that plunged down into mist with no end in sight, stood the castle. It clawed up out of the dark in a forest of spires, more than I could count. Spires upon spires, slender and savage and impossibly tall. Black stone, half gone gray with age, pinnacles like spear-points raised against a sky that was no sky at all. It was more like a churning, starless storm. Lightning moved in it without ever falling. And every dark window in that terrible place seemed to be watching us as we came closer.

Somewhere behind those ten thousand windows waited the only creature in two worlds who could save her. My Queen. And there was no hell I wouldn’t walk through to make that happen. Which meant that I would walk into the dark and bargain with a legend to do it.

The shadow-warriors did not sheath their blades as we walked towards the castle. Which meant the meaning was clear enough… follow or stay and learn what the dark did to those who lingered, unwelcome within it.

A bridge spanned the drowned gorge, though I would not have honored it with the word. It was a single span of that same black stone, incredibly narrow and without rails. Its precarious surface was slick with a wetness that looked like it never dried. And beneath it, there was nothing at all but the long grey fall into mist.

I carried Alexandra across it with my eyes fixed on the gates ahead and her heartbeat fluttering thin against my chest. I refused to look down as my father’s voice came to me for the first time in years. Words of encouragement that always kept the fear at bay when I was a child. The words would have been similar to, ‘Don’t look down, because a man who has decided to bargain for a life cannot afford to be reminded how easily the dark takes them.’

The gates opened before we reached them, yet they were touched by no hand. They simply drew apart. Huge slabs of iron-bound black wood, taller than the walls of my own keep, which led us into the cold.

A single figure stood waiting for us in the hall beyond. He stood alone at the center of all that giant, frozen emptiness as though he had been waiting a very long time and would have gone on waiting a great deal longer without complaint.