The mark pulsed with each step, but its warmth felt thin here, weakening with each foot of depth between her and the surface.
"Where are we going?" Her voice came out smaller than intended, swallowed by the pressing dark.
"Where all liars go." His hand on her arm was the only warm thing left, and even that felt like mockery.
The corridor ended in a circular chamber that made her head ache to look at. The walls curved wrong, surfaces carved with symbols that seemed to writhe in her peripheral vision. When she tried to look directly at them, her eyes watered and refused to focus.
"The last human I kept spent three days here once," Eliam said, guiding her to the center. "She was defiant too. Liked to run away from her promises."
He released her arm and stepped back. Without his touch, the chamber felt colder and hungrier somehow.
"She screamed for the first day. Begged for the second. By the third..." He smiled, and in the strange light his beautiful features turned cruel and cold. "Well. She was much more agreeable when I finally let her out."
"Is that supposed to—"
The floor opened at her feet, the stone parting smoothly, folding inward to create a perfect circular void. Where solid floor had been, a hole now yawned into existence. Perfect darkness filled it so dense it seemed to have physical weight, pulling at her vision and making her inner ear scream warnings about depth.
She stumbled back, but his hand was there again, catching her wrist.
"Your punishment," he said softly, pulling the bracelet from his pocket. He examined it a moment, as though still trying to comprehend what about it was so appealing. “I hope this bit of plastic was worth all this trouble.” He slipped it over her hand, the beads now heavy against her skin. "The Oubliette, a place of contemplation, to reflect on the price of looking me in the eye and speaking falsehood."
"How long?"
"Until it pleases me to release you." He pulled her closer to the edge. The darkness below exhaled cold air that smelled of centuries and stillness and things that grew without light. "Could be hours, or days. Time moves strangely in the deep places. Minutes stretch endlessly while years compress into moments."
"Please." The word escaped before she could stop it. Terror crawled through her chest. She had never feared the dark, that is, until she had come to this awful place, and the thought of going down into that hole made her physically ill.
"Begging already? You'll want to save that for later." His thumb pressed against the plastic beads, and one cracked. "The ones who scream early always break faster. But then again, the ones who stay silent sometimes forget they have voices at all."
She tried to pull away, but the floor was already tilting. Not physically, she could see it remained level, but her body slid toward the hole anyway, pulled by forces that had nothing to do with gravity.
"Eliam—"
"Reflect well, little thief. I'm curious as to what truths will find you in the dark."
The slide became a fall that seemed to last forever and no time at all.
She hit bottom hard, her knees buckling on impact while her hands scraped against rough stone as she caught herself. The ground was damp earth mixed with rock, cold seeping immediately through her dress. It smelled of minerals and rot, of places that had never known sunlight.
Looking up, she watched the perfect circle of gray light contracting above her—smaller and smaller until it vanished completely.
Darkness consumed everything.
She waved her hand before her face and saw nothing. Desperation made her press fingers to her eyes to make sure they were open, and she felt her lashes move against her fingertips.
The mark on her arm, always warm, always present, felt suddenly distant. It was still there, she could still feel it, but it felt muffled now, the connection weakened by layers of stone and earth between them. Even that violation felt like comfort here, and its muting made her chest tight with a different kind of terror.
The air around her shifted.
Cold recognition crawled across her skin before her mind caught up to what her body already knew—something in the darkness was moving.
She scrambled back until she hit a wall of rough stone, slick with moisture and what felt like moss or slime. The surface was real and solid, but somehow that made it worse.
A whisper reached her ears, not words but something older than words, the sound of someone who'd forgotten language but remembered the shape of screaming. It came from everywhere and nowhere, so close she felt breath that wasn't breath on her neck.
Another movement pressed closer, an unnecessary reminder that the darkness wasn't empty.
It was very, very full.
