The stone breathed.
Sweat. Sorrow. Something older than both.
Bronze shackles bit into my wrists, ankles, and neck, chafing skin already raw. The metal was ancient—green with age, etched with the ghosts of countless hands. I found myself wondering who had forged them. Some blacksmith from centuries past, sweating over his anvil in the glow of a temple fire, believing his work would serve the gods.
Now his work served damnation.
Divine craftsmanship, turned to chains.
The air never moved. It sat heavy and wet in my lungs. Every breath tasted of copper and decay, of piss dried into the stone and blood ground into dust. The smell made sure we never forgot where we were—or what we had become.
Sound was the only thing that ever escaped.
The groans of the dying. The whispers of the broken. The drip of water counted down the hours of those who no longer kept time. Sometimes a sob would echo down the corridor, soft and thin, like a ghost relearning how to breathe.
I tried to shut it out. To imagine somewhere else.
But the Dreadhold didn’t allow escape—not even in the mind.
Its echoes clung to you.
They crawled beneath the skin, nested deep, and whispered until your thoughts no longer sounded like your own.
And when the silence finally came, you learned it wasn’t mercy.
Only when they sent us deeper—into the caves—did it change.
Down there, sound became labor.
The clang of bronze on stone.
The grunt of chained bodies.
The scrape of iron, the hiss of breath through clenched teeth—over and over, hour after hour, until your ears forgot what quiet was and your thoughts dried up like dust.
And beneath it all, the earth murmured—a low, constant groan that rose through the stone.
It felt like Ugarit itself was weary of holding us.
Like the city wanted to sink, to bury us where no god could find what was left.
It had been days since the branding, but my shoulder still burned as if the iron had only just lifted. The flesh throbbed with fever, the pain crawling down into the bone.
Across from me, Salvatore sat in silence, his back to the wall, head bowed. We hadn’t spoken since the day the Dreadhold had stolen our words, leaving us alone inside our own pain.
The only sound was the chain between us, shifting when one of us moved.
I missed Amara with a grief that came in waves, sharp enough to make breathing feel like betrayal. But it wasn’t her face that haunted me most.
It was my mother’s.
I hadn’t meant to lose control that day. I’d come home from war with one question burning in my chest—who was my father? She refused to tell me. I was angry, hurt, tired of living beneath a lie, of being handed a story I was never meant to question.
When she still wouldn’t speak, I brought up her past—and it gutted her. The look in her eyes when I said those words would follow me until I died.
She left that morning in silence. When she returned later, she locked herself in her room. I told myself I’d give her time, that I’d apologize when she was ready to listen.
But the gods never gave me that chance.
