Salvatore was gone. His last words burned like brands into my memory.
“Next time our paths cross, Lazarus… I’ll be your nightmare. I’ll carve out everything you love, one by one, until you finally understand what it means to be empty. I’ll burn your home. I’ll strangle every joy you cling to. I’ll break your children, rip your happiness apart piece by piece, until your curse feels like a mercy.”
Once, he had been my brother. Now, he was my enemy. We had entered this place as men clinging to hope. We left as monsters, chained to curses and hate.
The voices whispered in my skull, slick and merciless.
“Individual curses may be unwoven through sacrifice, through blood, through power. But curses spoken together, bound as one—they cannot be broken. Not by shadow. Not by light. Not by anything.”
I pressed my palms to my eyes, bile rising in my throat. To be bound to Salvatore—even in death—was a torment worse than any trial we had endured.
When I lowered my hands, my gaze fell upon the book in my lap—Severen’s prison. His essence still thrashed inside, unseen but alive. I could feel him waiting. If left here, someone might find it. Someone might free him and that could never happen.
I rose from the throne, but as I turned, the shimmer behind it caught my eye.
A shelf, carved into the black stone wall, half-swallowed by shadow.
I approached.
Dozens of tomes lined its length, their spines glinting in the dying light. Each one pulsed softly, alive. The air was heavy with the weight of centuries—the scent of dust, blood, and forgotten souls.
Every name burned into the leather was that of a man—Lord Verrin. Lord Durok. Lord Kethar. Lord Varran. Lord Calder.
All Shadow Lords destroyed, every rival erased. Marianna had been the only Mistress—one woman among centuries of kings and tyrants.
My fingers brushed over the spines, each one shivering beneath my touch, until my gaze fell upon the last name in the row.
Gareth Blackmoor.
Amara’s father.
The lettering was scorched, half-consumed, but the heartbeat inside the book was still there—weak, flickering, but alive.
I reached for it. The leather was warm beneath my palm, trembling like flesh. The shadows stirred around me, whispering her father’s name, the echo of what he once was.
“Amara…” I breathed, the sound barely a whisper.
I lifted his tome from the shelf and pressed it against my chest. Beneath my touch, it pulsed once, faint but steady. Her father. The man she had loved and been robbed of. The man, Severen, had bound forever.
I would not abandon Gareth’s book. I would take it with me and give it to Amara. She deserved to have her father by her side.
Beside it, Severen’s book still throbbed with malice, the dim heartbeat of a trapped god. And tucked beneath my ribs, I felt the pulse of my own—my curse, my legacy, the tome that marked me as a Shadow Lord.
I would never leave Severen’s tome here, not where another might find it. His book had to be buried deeper than shadow itself, beneath the world, where even time would forget him.
I looked again at the shelf, the names of countless Shadow Lords staring back at me from their bindings, generations of men devoured by the very darkness they had once commanded. And I understood then what they truly were. Not rulers. Not gods.
Echoes.
Souls consumed, bound, and forgotten.
I turned from the shelf, the three tomes pressed tight to my chest, and stepped through the archway beyond the throne.
The corridor was lined with corpses, men and women sprawled in rivers of blood, eyes wide, mouths still frozen mid-scream. The stench of iron and death thickened the air, curling into my throat until bile burned behind my teeth.
My stomach turned to ice.
Salvatore hadn’t freed them. He had butchered them.
