“Where are they taking us?” the bald woman whispers to no one in particular.
“Obviously the veteran training pits,” Sariah answers, her voice strained. “Where the advanced prepare for the arena.”
“We're not ready,” Lira murmurs.
“That's the point,” I breathe.
The tunnel opens into a massive chamber carved from the mountain's heart. Unlike the juvenile enclosure we visited above, this space is designed for violence—tiered stone rings form fighting pits of various sizes, each occupied by recruits engaged in brutal combat. The walls are lined with weapon racks holding real steel. Blood stains the sand covering the floor of each pit. My gaze passes over massive iron eyelets embedded in the ground at intervals. I prefer to not imagine what those are for. My skin tingles uncomfortably just looking at them.
I suddenly spot a familiar, unmissable, face amidst a group of male recruits in the ring nearest to us. Zeriel Caelith. “Current champion of the Ironhold.Son of the disgraced House Caelith.” Tomas’s words come back to me.
Up close, he seems more like something hewn from the old courts than a man of flesh and blood. Scars score his arms like runes of violence, each one a mark of battles survived, the most brutal cutting across his throat and jaw as if war itself had tried to silence him and failed. Torchlight glances off his bronzed skin, the sheen of someone who’s lived too close to fire. He looks untouchable—inevitable. His hair falls unbound, dark as raven feathers, scattering wildly across his brow. His ears taper to the familiar sharpness of our kind, though on him the angle seems keener, harsher. His eyes are a deep, feral brown—earth churned and blood-soaked, seeming merciless in their judgment. He moves with the lethal grace of a predator born, not trained, every strike fluid and deliberate, as if he were cutting through the memory of foes long dead. The other trainees watch in reverence laced with fear.
I wonder what his heritage is. Once, the noble houses bred mostly true to their bloodlines, each court marked by its own stamp: mountain fae with their stone-forged strength, desert fae burnished by thesun, frost fae cold as their northern peaks, storm fae swift and mercurial, river fae pale and cunning, dusk fae cloaked in omens… At least a hundred bloodlines in all, each carved from the land and elements they ruled. Zeriel could belong to any of them—or none. Too tall for a river-born, too swift for a mountain scion. Perhaps a fusion of lines, as noble houses sometimes schemed through marriage.
A weapon forged of fallen courts… honed for destruction.
Our handlers shove us forward, drawing the attention of everyone in the chamber. Conversations halt mid-sentence. Training pauses. All eyes turn to our small group of women in our gray recruit uniforms, starkly out of place among the veterans in their black training garb.
“What's this?” demands a broad-shouldered trainer, striding toward us. I notice Selen at the edge of the room, coldly observing.
“Handler Voss's orders,” our handler replies. “These recruits are to join veteran combat training.”
The broad-shouldered trainer's eyebrows raise, but he nods curtly. “Divide them,” he orders, pointing to different pits.
A handler grabs my arm, dragging me toward the closest—and largest—pit, where the steely figure of Zeriel Caelith stands, now glaring at us. My heart hammers against my ribs as I'm shoved forward, stumbling into the sand. Barely ten feet in front of me, I see Krall's massive form, his nose still swollen from our encounter yesterday. His eyes narrow when he spots me, recognition followed by hatred flashing across his scarred face.
“What is this?” Zeriel’s voice slices through the murmurs, cold and honed as a blade. He turns to the handler who brought me in. “We don’t train with frail meat.”
“Trainer Voss's orders,” the handler repeats, already backing away. “Said they needed real combat experience.”
Zeriel’s dark eyes meet mine directly for the first time, his gaze brutally assessing—and dismissing me—in a single heartbeat.
“She won’t last five minutes,”he snaps.
“I’ve survived worse than you,” I fire back before I can stop myself.
What in the hells am I saying?
The champion stills. Something flickers in his gaze—not disbelief, but surprise, quickly tempered into something sharper, hungrier.
“Have you now?” His voice drops, low and deliberate, each word weighted like a challenge. He stalks closer, the air seeming to narrow with him, and I force myself not to retreat. His scars speak in a language I don’t want to understand. “What’s your name, new recruit?”
“Veyra,” I reply, deliberately not using my number.
“Well,Veyra,” he says, my name sounding like an insult in his mouth, “welcome to real training.”
One of the handlers turns to address the pit at large. “Pair up. Full-contact drills. The new arrivals need to understand what they're facing.”
Krall immediately steps forward, a savage smile splitting his face. “I'll take the street rat.”
“No.” Zeriel's voice splits the air like a whip. “You're with Milor.” His eyes return to me. “I’m with this one.”
His words send ice threading through my veins, but I fight to keep my expression neutral. I’ve wounded the fragile ego of the most lethal gladiator in the chamber, and I have only my sharp mouth to blame.
Around the pit, veterans pair with my fellow special training recruits—Nessa with a lean fighter whose arms are covered in ritual scars, Vex with a woman whose face is partially hidden behind a leather mask.
“Weapons rack,” Zeriel snaps at me, jerking his head toward the wall. “Try choosing something you won't immediately kill yourself with.” His voice drips with derision.
