Ahead, the king and queen walked the narrow path toward the citadel, their cloaks dragging through dust and salt.
“Your Majesty.”
My voice carried softly, cutting through the wind like the edge of a bronze blade.
Queen Seraphina gasped, a hand to her breast. “By the gods, Lazarus! You frightened me. After fifty years, you’d think I’d be used to your cursed vanishings.”
Her smile was small, as brittle as a reed in drought.
“My apologies,” I said, bowing my head. The shadows coiled and uncoiled around my feet, restless. “But you must understand the price of what you ask.”
I met their eyes.
“To forge one who can walk the river of time… I must ally with Salvatore. I would have to free him.”
The queen’s composure shattered. Her shadow shrank and shivered, as thin as a child’s cry.
She did not fear me.
She fearedhim.
The creature entombed beneath black stone—the brother I had chained but never destroyed.
King Cyrus’ shadow flared, its edges snapping like fire on cedar.
Rage poured off him in waves—thick, choking, helpless.
It was not the fury of command but of loss.
He was a man cornered by the end of his own reign, hollowed out by the knowledge that the gods no longer listened.
“No!” Seraphina’s cry cut through the wind, as sharp as flint on bronze. Her hands trembled beneath her cloak. “He’s too dangerous.”
“He has tortured innocents,” Cyrus growled.
They stood tall as monarchs should, cloaks whipped by the sea wind, faces carved from the same weary stone as their city walls. But their shadows betrayed them—two shivering shapes drawn back across the dirt, shrinking from my words as though burned.
“I am sorry,” I said, and meant it. “This is not my will. It is what the tome has decreed.”
The king and queen looked at each other—that long, silent look of two souls who had ruled too long, who had given too much. The years had emptied them; the wars had stripped them bare.
I remembered them as they once were—their armies shining beneath banners of gold, their faith in gods that no longer listened. But the war had taken everything.
Now Ugarit’s walls sagged like tired lungs, its fields burned, its soldiers little more than boys with spears.
Seraphina’s lips parted, and I saw the conflict in her eyes—fear, love, and something else… the desperate need to save what could not be saved.
“You think this is easy for us?” she whispered, her voice breaking. “We have buried sons, friends, half the city’s children. Our armies crumble, our gods are silent, and every night I wake to the sound of the sea dragging another piece of our kingdom away. And still, the people look to us. They believe we can save them.”
Her voice faltered. Tears welled but did not fall. “If freeing him is the only way to protect them… then what choice do we have?”
Cyrus reached for her hand, his face drawn and gray. “We swore an oath to guard this city,” he said, his words trembling like an old sword in a dying hand. “If we must damn ourselves to keep Ugarit breathing one more day, then so be it.”
He turned to me, jaw locked, eyes hollow but resolute. “Do what must be done. If bending the river of time will save our people, then let it be bent. We will pay the price.”
The words struck like the toll of a bronze bell, deep and final.
They had permitted me—and in doing so, they had bound themselves to the same curse that shackled me.
