“I’ve become a Shadow Lord,” I said. The words tore through my throat, rough, and blood-warm. The title didn’t settle over me; it pressed into me, a weight that crushed, that claimed. And when I spoke it, I felt the shift. The power heard its own name.
Amara’s gaze held mine, full of sorrow that felt older than the room.
“I know,” she murmured. “You’re just like what my father was.”
I froze.
“Your… father?”
She nodded, slow, trembling.
“Gareth Blackmoor,” she said, her voice breaking. “The last Shadow Lord Severen destroyed.”
Her words fell like stones into a still lake—ripples spreading through me until they became waves.
“I watched how the power changed him,” she whispered. “Not all at once. Quietly. Like death beneath the skin.”
She paused, her breath shallow, eyes unfocused, as if what she saw wasn’t me but the ghost of someone she used to love.
“It stripped away the good first,” she whispered. “The warmth. The gentleness. His laughter vanished, like it had never belonged to him.”
Her throat tightened. She swallowed hard, voice quivering.
“Then even his love… started to hurt.”
Her wrists twitched in their shackles, iron biting into skin rubbed raw, but she didn’t stop.
“He still looked like my father. Still wore his voice, his face. But something else was inside him. Something colder. Hungrier.”
The words hung between us.
“It tore our family apart,” she said softly. “Not with rage. With absence. With silence. With all the little ways he stopped being ours.”
Her lashes fluttered. A tear slid down her cheek and fell without sound.
“And when there was nothing left—when the last thread of him had vanished into shadow—Severen didn’t just kill him. He unmade him.”
Tears streaked her face, glinting in the dim light.
Her next words came low, filled with fury barely held in check.
“And now you…” She almost spat the word. “You’ve stepped into the same grave. You think you’re strong enough to hold onto yourself. You think you’ll use this power for something noble.”
She shook her head slowly, the motion solemn, like the closing of a tomb.
“But it always ends the same.”
I tried to speak—to deny it, to promise her she was wrong—but she cut me off, grief twisting into something jagged.
“You’ll ruin people, Lazarus. You’ll hurt the ones who love you. You’ll tell yourself it’s righteous, or earned, or necessary. And one day…” Her voice broke into a whisper. “One day you’ll look down at your hands and realize the blood never washed off.”
The air left my lungs in a shudder. Her words struck deeper than any blade, because they came from the one person who had once seen me as human.
I reached for her.
She recoiled instantly, shrinking back into the torn silks, chains rattling. The sound was fearful—and it shattered something inside me.
For a moment, I wanted to beg. To fall to my knees and promise her that I was still the man who once tore his bread in half and fed her first.
