The warden of the Dreadhold. His name had been spoken in Ugarit for generations like a curse, a warning, a promise of what waited for the condemned.
Now the promise stood before us.
Alive. Breathing. Monstrous.
The air thickened around him, pressing down until it felt like the yard itself might crack beneath his presence. He didn’t speak, and still the noise of the world fell away.
When he finally did, his voice was deep and cold—stone breaking under strain.
“Welcome to your hell.”
The words carried easily, swallowed by no wind.
“This is where hope dies. Where men are stripped of their humanity.”
His gaze swept the yard with the patience of a craftsman studying materials. The light caught in his eyes—hard, metallic, without warmth. He wasn’t looking at men; he was choosing what to break first. His stare locked on me, held until my breath stalled, then moved to Lazarus.
“…And where no one survives.”
The silence that followed was unbearable. It pressed on the lungs, a second skin of fear. Even the other prisoners stood motionless, as though breath itself might draw his gaze.
Then his mouth curved—not into a smile, but into something worse—a study in cruelty.
“You are nothing now,” he said. “You belong to me. Mine to break. Mine to command.”
And with that, he turned.
He walked away, cloak dragging behind him like a shadow trying to keep up. He never looked back.
He didn’t need to.
His words stayed.
They didn’t fade. They burned.
They branded deeper than the iron.
You are nothing now. You belong to me. Mine to break. Mine to command.
And beneath the fury still burning in my bones, beneath every fading spark of defiance, a truth waited in the dark—as quiet as breath, as certain as death.
This is where you die.
Chapter10
Lazarus
The cold here wasn’t a feeling. It was a being.
It gripped with a crushing weight, creeping beneath the skin, burrowing deep until I couldn’t tell where it ended and I began.
So, I let it take me.
Fighting only made it worse. Resisting meant believing there was something left to save. And hope had no place in this tomb.
I curled into myself, tighter and tighter, until I thought I might fold into nothing. A serpent devouring its own tail. If I could make myself small enough, maybe I would vanish. Maybe the gods—if they still bothered to look this far down—would forget I was ever here.
Our cell wasn’t a room. It was a hollow in the belly of Ugarit, carved not by craft but by cruelty. The air stank of wet limestone, old blood, and flesh too long denied burial. The walls were rough-hewn, hacked out in haste and hatred, their edges jagged and sweating with water that dripped like a clock that never stopped.
