The question hit like a blade slipping between ribs.
I turned toward him, the words catching in my throat before I forced them free.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “This is about saving Ugarit. That’s all.”
He laughed, soft and cruel.
“You lie even to yourself. You never cared for thrones or crowns. You want what every damned man wants—a second chance. You crave redemption. You’d burn the world to hold her hand again.”
His shadow reached for mine, long and serpentine on the floor.
“So, tell me, when the time travelers are created, will you save the city, or will you trade it for her heartbeat?”
I clenched my fists until the skin broke. “Enough.”
I stepped past him and went to the table. The Tome of Shadows sat there, closed, the leather dark and still. I laid my hand on its cover; the surface pulsed beneath my palm, as if something sleeping stirred below the skin.
“Shadows,” I said quietly, “tell me how to create a time traveler.”
The flame in the torch snapped. The wind died. The house itself seemed to hold its breath.
The book shuddered beneath my hand and then, slowly, the cover lifted. Smoke poured out—thin at first, then thick, filling the air with the scent of salt and iron. Pages turned on their own.
From the darkness inside came a murmur—hundreds of voices, whispering as one.
“So, it begins. This is where everything changes, Lazarus,”the voices breathed, their tone both promise and curse.“For him. For you. Forever.”
The tome flared open, pages bleeding light.
And the shadows began to write.
Chapter27
Salvatore
UGARIT 1222 BCE
The moment the tome opened above, I felt it—power uncoiling through the stone, threading down into the earth like molten fire.
It moved through the ground, through the cracks of my prison, through me. The air itself shuddered, heavy with salt and heat, as if the world had remembered my name.
The shadows stirred inside my bones, quivering with recognition. I closed my eyes and let it wash through me, that old communion I had starved for.
Fifteen years since I last saw Lazarus’ face.
And yet the two times I saw him most clearly refused to fade.
The first was the night Amara died—his eyes wide with horror, his hands slick with her blood pooling at my feet. When she fell and his scream followed, something in me split open.
Whatever part of me had once been human died with her.
The shadows rejoiced that night.
They sang in my ears, sweet and savage, praising what I had done. They crowned me in whispers, calling me their chosen, their hunger, their weapon.
I drank their voices like wine. I fed them sorrow and ecstasy and pain until every sound tasted the same. But the more they fed, the more I hungered.
I wanted more.
