Rise together. Fall together. Die together.
I stumbled back from the grave, bile rising in my throat, tears still burning my cheeks. I swore, again and again, that I would prove them wrong—that I would tear Salvatore from my life and bury him deeper than the shadows could reach.
But as I staggered into the night, their laughter followed me.
And somewhere deep within me, where the curse still lived, I feared they might be right.
Chapter26
Lazarus
The sea still reeked of blood after fifty years.
Salt ground against the scars carved into my flesh, and the wind off the Sea of Ashur tasted of iron and memory. Half a century since I crawled from the Dreadhold—broken, marked, crowned in shadow. Half a century since Salvatore and I bled the world until even the gods turned their faces away.
And for what?
Ugarit was once a jewel on the coast, its limestone walls gleaming like bone beneath the sun. The harbor brimmed with ships from Cyprus and Sidon; cedar, copper, and wine filled its storehouses. Priests burned incense at dawn, and the scent of oil and barley smoke carried across the sea.
Now it was a carcass clinging to the cliffs—a city of ghosts.
The raiders came first—sea-folk beneath black-painted sails, their hulls slick with pitch and salt. They swept through the harbor at sunrise, cutting moorings, burning granaries, dragging women and bronze back to their ships before the watchfires could be lit. The beacons flared along the headland, but no god answered. None ever did.
Then came the hunger.
The barley fields shriveled into dust; the olive groves, once thick enough to shade a man at midday, stood gray and brittle. The cisterns ran dry, the wells tasted of brine. Fish drifted belly-up along the surf, their silver scales flashing like coins scattered for a god who had stopped listening.
Rats had claimed the granaries; fever the children. The songs of mothers had fallen quiet, replaced by the rasp of prayers that faded before they reached the heavens.
Ugarit—once bright, once feared—was dying.
And I, Lazarus, Shadow Lord of Ugarit, could do nothing but watch it fade.
The stones along the cliffs were slick with salt and older stains—blood dried black from raids long past. No tide had ever washed them clean. The western wind howled through the broken gates, carrying the scent of rot and iron, the low hum of mourning. It moved through the streets like a ghost, whispering through cedar beams and shattered idols.
Sometimes, when the wind cut through the harbor, I still heard her voice in it—Amara’s laughter, as soft as the reeds along the riverbanks of our youth. The sound died before I could breathe it in.
Once, I planted olive shoots beside my mother.
Now, I walked among their bones.
The shadows beneath my skin stirred when night fell. They remembered the Dreadhold, the chains, the screaming stone. They murmured of what would come next, of debts yet unpaid. Sometimes, I thought they spoke the city’s name. Sometimes, I thought they spoke mine.
Ugarit breathed in slow gasps, the wind rising and breaking like a dying man.
Perhaps it was not the city’s breath I heard.
Perhaps it was my own.
My house stood at the city’s edge, beyond the reach of market cries or temple songs, far from the last embers of civilization. The road that once led here had been swallowed by thorn and sand. No merchant dared this path; no pilgrim sought its end. The few who strayed too close—drawn by the glint of sea light on stone—fled when they saw the door marked with unreadable sigils and the shadows writhing at my feet.
It was an unremarkable dwelling, the kind built by a man who had forgotten how to live among others.
Rock, wind, and the sound of waves breaking on the cliffs below—nothing more.
Inside, a bed of straw, a scarred table, a single chair, a blackened urn. The hearth lay cold. I had no use for warmth.
The only heat in that house came from the book.
