CHAPTER 48
LYKOR
Lykor surrendered breath and stepped into the dark.
No illumination rose to face him, only stagnant air, thick with the sour exhale of earth left to rot. Intimate and unwelcome, it crawled over his skin, carrying the memory of screams that burrowed into bone.
Vesryn slipped in next through the portal, flaring orbs of light above his palm.
The chamber hadn’t changed.
Of course it hadn’t.
The glow struck Galaeryn’s altar, crouched at the room’s center like a beast starved between offerings. Marble glinted dully beneath the pallid light, its surface filmed by decades of blood. Chains sagged against the walls, each link scabbed with rust, every stain a record of pain carved in flesh.
Lykor sensed Aesar going death-still. He’d never allowed him this sight, having buried every echo behind the obsidian doors in his mind that Aesar had never dared to open.
The hush devoured Lykor’s footfalls as he strode forward, stone swallowing sound the way it once had swallowed his screams. Behind him, the others filtered in through his portal—rangers, wraith, druids, Daeryn and his warriors.
Hardened though they were, he tracked the falter. Eyes narrowing against the dim light. Essence wavering around white-knuckled hands. A cough caught and died half formed. Leather creaked, more than one grip sliding instinctively to a hilt.
When the last of their number crossed through, Lykor snapped the rift shut, sealing them inside stone that knew his name and had never forgiven him for surviving.
His gaze snagged on the altar again before he tore his eyes away. The taste of iron flooded his mouth, though no blood had been drawn.
Not this time.
“There are four holding chambers,” Lykor said, the words clipped as he pivoted toward the looming obsidian doors. “Each cavern is bound to the next by a web of tunnels.”
He pressed his palm against the smooth stone. The unyielding weight pushed back, as if the mountain had no intention of letting him go. For one fractured breath, fear hooked into him—that he might be buried inside this room for an eternity.
Lykor crushed the pulse rising in his throat and reached into his Well instead, yanking Essence until it burned hot beneath his skin. The blue glow of force raced along his forearm as he drove the magic into the keyless slabs.
The doors groaned beneath his power, then split with reluctant weight. A lightless tunnel gaped beyond.
“Stay close,” Lykor muttered. He didn’t wait for a reply before stepping forward, claiming the darkness on his own terms.
The air thickened, cooler and closer, sending a prickle of warning along his spine. Stone bit into his boots, slick where no water should have reached. Cracks veined the ceiling likeold scars, and the walls seemed to pulse faintly, as though something buried deep within had learned to breathe.
Vesryn drifted to his side, casting the globes of illumination ahead. Lykor’s gaze stayed fixed on nothing, legs moving through routes he’d traveled so often they lived beneath thought.
Then the slope shifted.His balance caught, muscles adjusting for a turn that never came.
The tunnel should’ve curved right. That certainty lodged deep in his marrow. The drag of his body through these corridors lived in him still—limp, half-conscious, Essence flayed raw. Every surface that had feasted on him remained imprinted in his mind, each step tallied by heels streaking blood across stone.
But the way forward veered left instead, a gradual descent that felt deliberate. Wrong.
Either time had distorted his memory, or the mountain had rearranged its bones. The thought clawed cold beneath his skin, absurd but unshakable. Impossible.
And yet the deeper Lykor led the others, the sensation sharpened, gnawing along his senses. He’d known these tunnels as stone, carved by mortals who’d been obliterated by shadows after their labor.
Now the passages wound through the earth, as though another will had pressed through the rock and reshaped the terrain entirely.
Lykor glanced over his shoulder, catching Kal’s gaze. The question lodged in his throat as he fought the urge to ask if Kal felt the difference.
“He does,”Aesar whispered from the depths of their mind.
Lykor shoved the thought aside. Perhaps Galaeryn had expanded the prisons. Carved new hollows. Whatever had changed here didn’t matter. He’d feign certainty, refusing tobleed doubt where others could scent it. Not when they were this close.
