I was done kneeling.
The shadows crowned me now.
They whispered in my veins.
They craved me. They loved me.
And I would give them everything.
And if Lazarus would not give me his love, then he would learn to fear me.
The last prisoner clawed at the stones as I dragged him through the dark. His fingers left streaks of blood across the floor, his voice breaking on the same prayer I had heard too many times.
“Please… please?—”
The shadows inside me stirred, restless and hungry. I did not summon them. They were already awake, whispering in my blood, coiling in my veins.
When the man’s pleas turned to sobs, Ifedthem.
The shadows drank.
Their hunger burned through me, through every wound Severen had ever carved into my soul. My skin prickled. The marks beneath it came alive, black lines pulsing, glowing with each heartbeat. The man convulsed before me, his agony pouring through me like fire, filling the vacant spaces until I could almost taste it.
When he fell still, the silence that followed wasn’t mercy.
It was fulfillment.
I left his body in the dark, the stones slick beneath my feet, the air thick with iron.
I turned toward the heart of the Dreadhold. Toward the throne room.
Lazarus stood before Severen’s doors when I reached them. The torchlight caught his face, drawn tight with resolve, his eyes already searching for redemption that no longer existed. He held the Noctyss vessel against his chest, wrapped in layers of dark cloth, the fumes sealed away.
“Did you free them?” he asked, his voice thick with a hope he should have buried.
I met his gaze. A slow smile curled at the corner of my mouth.
“I did.”
He didn’t ask how.
He nodded once, satisfied, and turned back toward the doors. Together, we pushed them open.
The hinges shrieked.
Heat rolled out, heavy and rancid. The air was thick with incense and sweat, the musk of indulgence clinging to every breath. Shadows writhed across the walls, moving in rhythm with the scene sprawled before the throne.
This was no throne room tonight.
It was an altar of depravity.
Oil lamps crowded the obsidian steps, their flames bouncing as rivulets of oil ran down like pale blood. The throne itself loomed above, jagged and black, a monument to corruption, but Severen wasn’t sitting upon it.
He was sprawled before it.
Bodies lay tangled beneath him—women sprawled across the cold stone like discarded offerings. Their eyes were glassy, unfocused, their skin slick with sweat and blood. Severen’s hands moved lazily among them, claiming, toying, desecrating.
They writhed beneath him in half-conscious moans, some bound, some unbound but too weak to flee. Bruises and lash marks darkened their flesh, catching the lamplight like the sheen of oil. One woman arched as he forced her down, her mouth breaking open in a sound that was neither pleasure nor pain but something between—something ruined. Another clutched his shoulders, nails raking blood down his back as his hips drove harder.
