“Because I have no choice!” he shouted.
The torch spat sparks; the light warped between us. The jar on the table shivered, its glow dimming as though it, too, felt the strain.
For a long moment, there was nothing but the sound of our breathing—and the hungry hiss of the shadows crawling through the rafters.
Lazarus turned his head, refusing to look at me. “I can’t,” he whispered. “Not yet.”
The glow inside the jar flickered again, casting our faces in the same dim light.
I saw it then—the grief in his eyes, buried beneath anger—the memory of the boy who once saved me from my father’s whip.
And for the briefest moment, I wanted to tell him I remembered too.
But I didn’t.
I reached out and brushed the surface of the jar with my fingertips. Its warmth burned against my skin. “You don’t have to forgive me,” I said. “You just have to keep me around long enough to finish this.”
He didn’t answer.
The torchlight died between us. The shadows swallowed the walls, the ceiling, the floor—leaving only the two of us and the glow of the jar.
And in that fragile light, I realized something I hadn’t before.
The shadows didn’t just want our power.
They wanted our pain.
His face was carved from stone, his eyes hollow of everything that once made him human. I remembered the hiss of molten runes as he sealed me beneath his home, the way the air thickened when my Tome of Shadows was torn from my hands.
He left me with nothing but silence and the memory of what I had destroyed.
He did not come with love.
He did not come with mercy.
He came with purpose—and I was his penance.
Fifteen years of darkness followed.
Fifteen years without a voice, but the shadows gnawed at my bones.
Without my tome, I was nothing. The book was not ink and skin—it was marrow, it was breath. When it was taken from me, my power died. The shadows grew sluggish, heavy, like snakes sinking into cold water.
I had become a man again.
And men were fragile things.
It would remake us both.
And perhaps…just perhaps…this time, I could learn to be something more than the monster he buried.
Chapter28
Lazarus
The afternoon light was thin and gray, leaking through the salt-streaked shutters.
Inside the house, the jars waited on the table—their dull glow breathing in and out, as slow as sleep.
