Their voices slithered closer, cruel and intimate, wrapping around me like chains of breath.
“True love.”
The words burned through me like molten iron.
“True love will always remain. It cannot be devoured. It cannot be undone. But it is fragile, Lazarus James. It will see what you become. It will look into your vacant eyes and know you are no longer the same. If it rejects you, you will have nothing. Nothing but the crown. Nothing but power. Nothing but the void.”
Amara’s face flickered in the dark, pale and luminous.
Her voice—soft, trembling—echoed in memory.
My heart twisted until it hurt to breathe.
If she saw what I became… if she looked into me and saw Severen staring back?—
Would she run?
Would she scream?
Would she still love me?
I shook my head violently, choking on the words, the grief, the fear.
“I don’t want to be him,” I spat. “I don’t want to be my father.”
The shadows laughed—low, rusted, ancient. It rattled the ground, the air, my bones.
“You are his son. His blood. But you did not come here to kneel to him.”
The pit quaked beneath my feet, the walls rippling as the darkness rose like a storm.
“You came here to destroy him.”
The air shuddered, every whisper building into a howl that seemed to split the world in two.
“That is your purpose, Lazarus James. That is why you were born. You came to this prison because of Salvatore—but once inside, you saw what Severen had built. A kingdom of agony. A tomb where souls were ground to ash. You saw the innocent chained, broken, devoured. And you could not turn away. Even born of filth, even dragged through shame, you carried a heart that refused to look elsewhere.”
My tears burned, hot and sudden, tracking salt down my face. “And if I ascend…?” I croaked, voice small in that vast dark.
“Then you can destroy him. End him forever.”
The answer came like a verdict.
“But you will not walk out the same man who entered this pit. You will not walk out as the boy who stubbornly clung to goodness when the world spat on him. You will not walk out as Lazarus, son of gutters and shame. You will walk out as something else. A monster. A Shadow Lord.”
My hands trembled. My ribs felt already split, as if the pit had started its work on me from the inside. All my life, I had tried to be good. I had held onto that scrap of light even when there was nothing left to hold. And now, in the place that ate souls, they asked me to murder the last shred of myself.
“Gods help me,” I whispered to the dark whisper that tasted like prayer and ash. “I wanted to save the prisoners. I wanted to save Amara. But if I do this, I’ll never be me again.”
The shadows pressed in; their chorus swelled until it was all I could hear.
“Then choose, Lazarus. Stay in the dream—loved, warm, forgotten—a prisoner of illusions. Or tear the boy out of your chest, burn your goodness to ash, and rise. Rise as a monster. Rise as a lord. Rise to break your father and burn his shadow from the world. But know this—once you do, there is no undoing. The man you were will be dust forever.”
The pit tightened like a hand around my throat. Shadows slid along my skin, as cold as knives, whispering the only truth they had ever kept.
“You have always tried to be good, Lazarus. When the world spat, when you starved, when it beat you into dirt, but goodness does not crown. Goodness does not save you here.”
Images tore themselves through the dark—memory and accusation braided together. I saw Salvatore in the trial—chained, raw, blood on his skin, guilt a live thing between his ribs. I had stood above him once, vengeance warm in my hands. His throat had been there to take. His life was an answer to every wound. Iwantedto kill him. Gods, I had wanted it with a hunger like no other.
