Salvatore lifted his eyes to mine. Blood had dried on his cheek in a dark streak, split like parched earth. His gaze was rimmed red but steady, the steadiness of someone who had already stepped beyond shame.
“I swear to you, Lazarus,” he said. “My father was alive when I left him.”
But about the others—Helena, Azarel, Dagonel—he said nothing.
No denial.
No defense.
Only silence—heavy, and suffocating.
It told me everything words could never confess.
Bile rose hot in my throat. I turned from him, my jaw clenching until pain bloomed in my teeth. My friend. My brother. A murderer.
He hadn’t simply broken—he had chosen to burn.
My mother’s face flickered behind my eyes. Her last soft smile. The blood beneath her. The way her eyes had stared at nothing, dust clinging to her lashes like frozen tears.
In that moment, I knew my life had been split in two.
There wasbefore—when hope still smoldered in me, even after the war.
And there wasafter—where everything I loved lay dead or rotting in my hands.
The wagon groaned onward. The city walls of Ugarit rose closer through the shimmer of heat, their mudbrick towers as impassive as the gods. The sun burned high and merciless, an eye that never blinked, watching it all.
The ropes bit deeper into my wrists with every jolt until the hemp had rubbed raw rings into my skin. Sweat trickled down my back. My grief festered, sour and hot, feeding on itself.
Dust rose in choking clouds as the horses trudged forward, their hooves striking the baked earth in a rhythm that felt like a funeral drum. None of us spoke. Not Salvatore. Not the guards. Not me.
And then?—
We crested the hill.
And I saw it.
The Dreadhold.
It rose from the cliffs like something the gods had tried to bury, and the earth had vomited back into the light.
Its walls were carved from black basalt and pale limestone, fused by salt and centuries. Bronze gates sealed its mouth—green with age, carved with symbols no one remembered. Timber scaffolds jutted from the outer ramparts where guards watched through narrow slits, their spears flashing in the glare like shards of the sun itself.
No banners flew. No sound carried—only the sea below, beating itself to foam against the rocks.
Even from the wagon, I could smell it—the stench of rust, damp stone, and decay. The wind that touched the fortress felt colder, as if even the air feared to enter.
I had heard of the Dreadhold all my life—whispers traded around hearth fires to frighten children into obedience. But the truth was worse than the stories. This was no place of justice. It was a wound carved into the world and left to fester.
They said Morgrath Severen ruled within those walls, a warden who called himself a servant of law but worshipped only pain. His judgments were carved into flesh, his mercy, measured in screams.
A sickness stirred in me as the wagon groaned closer. Whatever life I’d dreamed of rebuilding—peace with my mother, a future with Amara—was dust now—crushed beneath the horror of this place—ground to powder like grain beneath the temple millstone.
The Dreadhold wasn’t built to hold the damned.
It was built to erase them.
And I was next.
