Fed the shadows with their agony, drank from their screams, reveled in their pain.
I staggered against the wall, sickened. This was what he was now. What I was bound to. Two men—one resisting, one embracing the monster in his veins. Both of us were Shadow Lords.
I forced myself onward, deeper into the Dreadhold.
The corridors narrowed into blackened arteries, the stone slick with damp and streaked with dried blood. The deeper I went, the heavier the air became—as thick as tar, clinging to my lungs until every breath ached. My torch sputtered, the flame choking in the gloom, but I kept descending, step by step, along a stairway carved straight into the bowels of the earth.
At the bottom, the stone gave way to something else.
A cavern that did not feel like stone at all. The walls pulsed, veins of shadow crawling beneath their surface like worms beneath skin. The floor was a graveyard of bones—ribcages shattered, skulls crushed underfoot. The marrow of centuries-old dead seeped into the rock here, making the ground soft, porous, hungry.
The shadows were thickest here. They pressed close, whispering, testing my grip on the books in my arms.
I knelt, driving my hands into the brittle ground. The bones cracked, splintered, and gave way beneath my palms. The stench of decay rolled up from below. My fingers sank into the marrow-rich soil—wet, sticky, as though the earth itself bled beneath my touch.
I lowered Severen’s tome into the hollow I had torn open. The leather burned hot in my grip, resisting, its pulse quickening like a heart about to be buried alive.
“Stay here,” I whispered, my voice rough. “Let the dark remember what it made.”
I pushed the book down, covering it with handfuls of bone dust and marrow until the last flicker of its glow vanished beneath the dirt.
No one would find him here. Not man. Not shadow.
The ground shuddered beneath my hands. And then I heard it—soft, far away, but unmistakable.
“One day…”Severen’s voice.
“One day, someone will save me from this pit. And when they do…”
The whisper slithered up through the earth like breath through a grave.
“I will rise again.”
The echo faded, but the chill it left behind would never die.
The shadows thickened, pressing against my spine. A presence stirred behind me—heavy, deliberate, watching. My skin crawled. I spun, teeth bared, the black coils flaring along my arms in defense.
But nothing.
Only black stone, slick walls, and the slow hiss of the Dreadhold breathing.
I stood frozen for a long moment, heart hammering against my ribs, the weight of unseen eyes pressing down on me. Then I clenched my jaw and forced my body to move.
“Stay buried Severen.”
I didn’t look back.
I left the cavern, left the corpses, left the ruin behind. But the whispers followed—Severen’s curses gnawing at my marrow, his laughter echoing in the hollow corners of my skull.
Every step toward the surface grew heavier, as though the Dreadhold itself clung to me, dragging me back toward its depths. I was empty now, stripped bare, remade into something unrecognizable—a Shadow Lord. My emotions felt dulled, blunted—grief an echo, joy a ghost. Yet his curse still coiled in my gut, poisoning what little humanity remained.
The shadows whispered without end, a thousand murmurs skittering through my mind. Would I ever grow numb to them? Or would they drive me into madness?
Stone and gravel crunched beneath my feet, as sharp as breaking bones. The stench of the Dreadhold—death, rot, and decay soaked into every wall—filled my lungs until I gagged. It was a scent I knew I would never escape.
When I finally reached the upper halls, the air grew colder, thinner, the darkness lighter by degrees. I pushed through a broken archway and at last stepped outside.
The night air struck like ice against my skin.
