But it wasn’t freedom.
The wind carried the taste of ash and ruin, the breath of everything I’d buried behind me. I was no longer the man who had entered these walls. That man was gone—erased, consumed by the shadows that now moved through my veins.
I turned once, only once, to look back.
The Dreadhold loomed in front of me, a carcass of stone and shadow against the horizon. It had swallowed everything—hope, blood, and time itself.
I didn’t know how long I’d been here. Weeks. Months. Perhaps longer. The shadows warped all sense of it, twisting days into nights, nights into years. Down in that pit, the sun was a forgotten dream.
So much had changed. So many truths unearthed.
My father, Morgrath Severen, revealed not as a warden of this place but its master, a Shadow Lord who had turned the Dreadhold into his kingdom, feeding on pain, pleasure, and despair. My supposed brotherhood with Salvatore had shattered; he had dragged me into this fucking hellhole, butchered prisoners to feed his own hunger, and murdered my mother long before I could even grieve her.
And above all, I had learned the cruel origin of it all—Marianna, his mother, had chosen Lord Lorian instead of Severen, and for that single choice, every life in her bloodline had been damned.
I stared at the fortress one last time, bile burning my throat. I wanted to bury it forever.
Salvatore would never find his mother’s book. Let him rot with his curses. Let the darkness devour him as it once devoured me.
I turned from the Dreadhold—away from the corpses, away from the brother I once loved, away from the father I had destroyed—and walked into the wind.
The night air bit cold against my skin. I now carried two books, their weight dragging against my arms. My own Tome of Shadows, bound in the same dark leather that now bore my name, and Gareth Blackmoor’s—Amara’s father.
Her father’s tome pulsed softly as I walked, alive and waiting. His presence within it was not cruel like Severen’s. It was patient, sorrowful.
The leather bindings were slick with dust and blood. I tore strips from a dead man’s tunic and tied both tomes together, fastening them to my side. The cloth was brittle with age and stained with gore—fitting, I thought, that the fabric of the dead should carry the weight of the damned.
With a weary sigh, I rose and began the long trudge home.
When I pushed open the rusted gate encircling the Dreadhold, it shrieked—a sound of iron grinding against iron, like a mourner’s wail echoing through a tomb. It felt right, a dirge to mark my leaving.
I didn’t look back.
That place had taken everything—time, faith, love, mercy—and left me with only this—the burden of the shadows and the ghosts of what I once was.
I stepped beyond the gates, but the world was no longer the same. The air smelled of salt and ruin; the sea wind carried whispers through the pine-covered hills, and the earth beneath my feet trembled, alive with unseen movement. Shadows stretched where they shouldn’t, slithering beneath my feet, coiling alongside me, whispering—always whispering. Some murmured my name. Others wept, pleading for deliverance I could never give.
I breathed deep, filling my lungs with the night. The air was colder than I remembered, sharper, as though the seasons themselves had shifted while I’d been buried beneath stone. The scent of pine and damp soil lingered—familiar, grounding—but beneath it clung another smell—the bitter tang of burned offerings and the dust of the dead.
The road to Ugarit wound before me, unchanged yet unrecognizable. The old basalt stones glimmered under the moon, damp from the mist rolling in from the sea. The fork marked by the great limestone boulder shimmered in the distance—not with light, but with memory. It pulsed, grief made visible, as though it still remembered the travelers who never returned.
The longing to see Amara burned in my chest, a hunger fiercer than any I had known in the trials. The journey that had once taken a full day on horseback now felt unbearable to my impatience. Strength coiled through my limbs, the shadows feeding it, driving me onward. I began to walk faster—then run, feet pounding the old Phoenician road, every stride a prayer and a curse.
I told myself that soon, we would have peace.
But the closer I came to home, the less familiar the world became.
Night draped itself over the hills of Canaan like a funeral shroud. The fields that once glowed with fireflies now lay suffocated, the long grass pressed flat as if by unseen hands. The olive trees bowed low, their twisted branches reaching toward the ground like bones clawing from the earth. Even the air felt wrong—thick, restless, whispering in tongues older than any prayer I remembered.
The scent of pine and damp earth should have calmed me, but it was poisoned now—laced with iron and smoke, the stench of sacrifices burned too long ago.
And then I saw it.
Our home.
Its shape stood against the moonlight, built of mudbrick, familiar yet cloaked in unease. The small oil lamps flickered in the windows, their flames bending as if afraid. My chest tightened. My legs trembled with each step forward, torn between dread and the desperate hope that she was still waiting.
The wooden door creaked open.
