The voices gathered, merging into one.
“You will not walk together. You will not fight together. Each of you will be unmade—alone. Broken. If you endure, you will rise. If you fail, you will be ours.”
The pit convulsed, its hunger erupting outward as the darkness surged at me. It swallowed the air, the sound, even the light burning inside my eyes.
“Salvatore Lorian… son of Marianna Lorian.”
My breath stopped cold. My heart faltered in my chest.
“Your mother stepped into this pit long ago. She surrendered herself to the shadows… and rose as the first Mistress of Shadows. She became Severen’s rival—her power matching his. Unstoppable. Defiant. When she grew stronger, he bound her. He took what he could of her power… and sealed the rest inside her tome, trapping her far away.”
The words struck like iron across bone. My vision blurred; I could taste blood as my teeth clenched so hard my jaw trembled.
“Tell me,” I rasped, my voice splintering. “Tell me how to undo it. Where can I find her?”
The shadows did not hesitate.
“Do you know why you are the way you are?
“Why your hands drip with blood, why your heart is hollow?
“You think it was a chance. You think it was your father’s fists, his curses, his hate. But it was never only him.”
My knees buckled. The air shuddered. My body trembled as though the pit itself was crawling beneath my skin. “Then who?” I gasped, my throat tearing open on the sound.
“It was Severen.”
The words twisted deep.
I staggered back, bile burning up my throat. “What do you mean?” I rasped, but the dark only laughed.
A thousand throats. A thousand echoes. The laughter of something that had never been human.
“Severen watched you from the moment you were born,”the voices whispered, weaving together until they spoke as one. “From your first breath. Your first scream. Your first step. He shaped the path beneath your feet so that one day, you would return here… to his prison… to feed him.”
The whispers pressed closer. I felt them curling around me, cold and slick, pressing against my temples until I swore they would split bone.
“You are Severen’s plan made flesh.”
The words sank deeper, burrowing beneath my ribs, twisting through the heat of my veins.
“Severen loved your mother, Marianna Lorian. But she did not choose him. She chose another. She chose your father. For that, Severen destroyed her. He bound her soul into her tome, chained her power, and made her a prisoner forever.”
The pit hissed. The sound rolled through the chamber, the walls shivering with the force of a thousand serpents moving through stone.
“Severen was the one who killed your father.”
The voices tore through me, merciless, unrelenting.
“He hated him from the start. Hated him for being chosen, for having what he never could. But Severen found a better purpose. Your father became the perfect vessel for his rage. The perfect weapon to break you—to forge you in misery until you were too broken to be anything else.”
My stomach heaved. I fell to my knees, shaking, my nails clawing bloody furrows into my scalp.
“No… no?—”
“And Julian,”the voices crooned softly, almost tender now.“Sweet, loyal Julian. Did you think he died by chance?”
Images crashed through me—Julian’s laughter, his unwavering strength, the way the army followed him without question. My father’s finest son. The one no one thought could fall.
