Orin and Rian laughed under their breath—soft, smug. I pictured their throats under my hands and felt something sweet twist in my gut. That laugh would die before dawn.
Then he appeared.
Severen. The Shadow Lord.
He stepped out of the dark as if the stones had given birth to him—bones rattling softly from the strands hung across his chest. Finger joints, bird skulls, teeth worn smooth by years of touch. His hair hung in greasy ropes; his skin was as pale as lime dust. And his eyes—those hollow, endless eyes—burned with a hunger that no man should carry.
“Welcome to the Bloodcircle,” he rasped, a smile splitting his cracked lips. The sound of it crawled down my spine.
“Some of you think you’ve known fear,” he said, pacing the circle, the bones clattering like whispers. “Pain. Hunger. Misery.”
He stopped before me. The torchlight caught the edge of his grin.
And in that moment, I knew this trial would not test my body.
It would test whatever humanity I had left—and see how long it took to poison it.
He stopped suddenly, head cocking to one side like a vulture staring down at dying prey. His grin widened.
“You haven’t,” he whispered. “Not yet.”
No one breathed. Even the torches seemed to shrink.
“There are weapons buried in the dirt,” he went on, his voice dripping like venom from a wound. “Most of them are broken. Splintered. Worthless. Use your fists. Your nails. Your teeth.”
A laugh slithered out of him—low, corpse-cold. “I don’t care how you survive… or if you do. Most of you won’t.”
He stopped beneath the fissure of that ghost-pale light. The glow poured over him, and the shadows rose to meet it, worshipful. They carved hollows in his face until he looked less like a man and more like a skull remembering how to breathe.
Something in me recoiled. Something else leaned closer.
“You might get bitten,” Severen crooned, voice curling through the circle like smoke, “by animals… or by each other.” He smiled wider, teeth jagged in the ghost light. “The bees?” His head tilted again, a mockery of mercy. “Oh, they’ll come whether you’re ready or not. I’d tell you not to scream…”
His smile split deeper.
“…but the walls prefer it when you do.”
He threw back his head.
A laugh ripped from him—low, guttural, wrong. It rolled through the chamber like a funeral hymn gutted of mercy. The guards joined in, their laughter cracked and mad, rattling against the walls until it felt like the stone itself was laughing with them.
My hands closed into fists, nails cutting crescents into my palms. I hated him—this carrion king, this butcher wearing a man’s face. Severen. His name tasted of rust.
“Only a few of you will crawl out of this alive,” he hissed, the words crawling across the air like maggots over a corpse. “Make it count. Bleed for your chance to matter.”
A growl answered from the dark—deep, old, and hungry. Then came the shouting. Panic tore through the ranks like fire through straw. My skin prickled. Every man knew that sound.
A beast.
I moved before I realized it—toward Lazarus.
Not out of fear.
But because that was what we had always done.
When the world turned cruel—when fists flew, when laughter cut, when my father’s rage fell—we stood for each other. We were the shield and the blow. That bond had outlived everything.
So, I went to him.
