"You can. You must. If something happens to me, you'll find another way out. Tell no one what you've seen. Not ever."
Brenna bit her lip but nodded, gripping the lantern tighter. "Yes."
They moved again. The sound of dripping water echoed from somewhere ahead. The light grew strange—too sharp, too pale.
Finally, they reached a small door recessed into the wall: ancient oak reinforced with iron bands, its surface carved with sigils that pulsed faintly in the lamplight. The air around it shimmered, dense with residual power.
Eliza traced her fingers across the runes. They were cool, resistant, alive. The metal beneath her hand throbbed once, as if sensing her intent.
"This is it," she whispered. "The old access to the lower dungeons."
The wards resisted, weak but stubborn, humming against her skin. She pressed her palm harder, feeling the faint vibration of the runes fighting to hold. The pull beneath them—the darkness she had felt for days—answered like a breath exhaled from below.
Then the lantern guttered.
Brenna gasped, shielding it, but the flame sputtered again and died, plunging them into darkness.
"Eliza—"
"Quiet," she breathed.
They waited, blind. The air was utterly still. Then, from beyond the door, came a sound.
It wasn't a voice, not exactly—more a low, resonant pulse, deep and steady. A heartbeat, slow and vast, echoing through the stone.
Eliza's own heart matched it, beat for beat.
The darkness pressed closer, listening.
She laid her hand flat against the door and whispered, barely audible, "I'm here."
The echo answered.
Chapter
Forty-Two
The door fought her.
Its iron bands had swollen with centuries of damp; the old sigils across the grain flickered like embers under ash. Eliza braced her shoulder and pushed. Wood groaned. A seam parted, exhaling air that smelled of rust and old blood.
"Careful," Brenna whispered, lantern lifted.
They slipped through, the lantern's glow catching on damp stone, on the glitter of salt in the mortar, on the drift of pale dust like ash. Stairs dropped steeply into the earth. The hum down here was stronger, a low vibration that seemed to live inside Eliza's ribs.
A few turns, and the passage widened into the lowest vault.
Darkness pooled in the corners, still as sleeping cats. Four lamps guttered along the wall, too thin to bite through the dark. Instruments lay on a side table: knives, clamps, bowls carved with runes gone oily-black. And in the centre, on a raised iron dais, Rakhal.
He hung in the manacles like a man resting between blows—head down, breath rough, chains thrumming when he shifted. Runes burned a dull red along the cuffs. Cuts crossed his chest and side in neat lines, some closing even as she watched, edgesknitting with a slick of shadow that moved like breath beneath skin.
Brenna made a small sound. "Mother—" She clapped a hand to her mouth. "My lady... what is he?"
"Alive," Eliza said, because the other words tasted like surrender. "For now."
At the sound of her voice, he stirred. A slow lift of the head. Dark eyes until irises swallowed pupil, black as a well. He stared at her as if she were a conjuring trick he did not trust.
"You," he said, and the word rasped like a blade dragged on stone. "Come to watch?"
