Two prisoners dragged a second woman from the shadows. Her linen shift was torn, her body shaking.
“Please—” she rasped.
“Get on me,” Severen murmured, his voice like smoke.
She refused, shaking her head, pressing her palms to the stone as if it could protect her.
“Strike her,” he said.
The whip cracked. Once. Twice. Flesh split, red spilling in narrow streams. The sound echoed like thunder in a cavern. Her cries turned raw, each one smaller than the last.
And then I saw it.
Severen’s head tilted back. His mouth parted, and his breath came slow, reverent. His long gray hair stirred, though no wind moved in the chamber, the strands lifting as if drawn toward the dark itself.
The shadows along the limestone walls began to writhe, coiling toward him like serpents seeking warmth.
That was when they appeared.
The black ringlets.
At first faint, like bruises beneath the skin—then alive. They slid to life across his arms, chest, and throat, as thin as inked chains, circling his flesh in perfect symmetry. One by one, they brightened, pulsing with a dull, feverish glow, like embers seen through ash.
The air thickened. The torches bent toward him, their flames elongating, whispering as the oil hissed. The woman’s screams faltered, catching in her throat, and—then stopped entirely.
I knew they hadn’t ended.
The sound was still there. It was simply beingconsumed.
Severen was taking it from her—the cries, the terror, the breaking. Even the air shuddered as her pain was torn out and devoured.
The rings brightened. The glow crawled over his body, tracing the slope of his shoulders, the hollow of his throat. He exhaled, a slow, shaking breath, and smiled—that same thin, sinless smile a man might wear after prayer.
The shadows pressed closer, clinging to him like worshippers at a shrine.
It wasn’t lust. It wasn’t cruelty. It wasa ritual.
Severen fed on her agony the way the gods of old once fed on sacrifice, as if her suffering were incense rising toward him. Her body convulsed; her sobs broke into silence. He inhaled it—her despair, her shame—until the very air shivered with his pleasure.
His skin caught the firelight, glowing gold beneath the shifting black rings. His chest rose and fell in a shuddering rhythm, each breath a hymn to ruin.
I gagged. The bile burned my throat. The smell of scorched oil and blood filled my nose.
“What… what is this?” I breathed, though I already knew I shouldn’t have asked.
The woman’s final plea came out in a rasp, half-prayer, half-sob.
“Please, master Shadow Lord, I’ll obey.”
Severen’s eyes snapped open.
Pale as the moon, glimmering with that sick, ancient light—and his grin widened. Savage. Triumphant. He looked reborn.
Salvatore froze beside me, his fists clenched until the tendons stood out white against his skin. His silence was heavier than any word.
We both saw it—the truth rising from that pit like smoke.
He wasn’t merely a man, or even a monster.
