You could win your freedom.
And in this place, hope… even twisted, bloody, impossible hope… was a dangerous thing.
But I held onto it anyway.
Because it was all I had left.
One day, in the caves, I drew closer to a cluster of prisoners huddled near a crumbling wall. Their faces were gaunt, their skin pulled tight over bone. They couldn’t have been older than me—twenty, maybe twenty-five—but their hair had already gone pale, and their eyes looked like extinguished lamps.
They didn’t look alive.
They looked like the ghosts this place forgot to bury.
I lowered my voice. “What are the rumors about the Shadow Lord Trials?”
One of them turned his head slowly. His gaze was keen despite the wreckage of his features. He looked at me like I was something unfamiliar, something that hadn’t learned how to decay properly yet. “You haven’t been here long, have you?” he rasped.
“Why would you say that?”
“Because everyone knows about the Shadow Lord Trials,” he said. His lips cracked when he spoke. “They’re the only reason most of us haven’t let the stones swallow us yet.”
He leaned back against the damp wall, his bones creaking under the motion. “What’s your name, stranger?”
“Lazarus,” I whispered.
“Orin,” the first man said, pressing a thumb to his sunken chest. “And this is Rian.”
The second man gave a slight nod. His wrists were rubbed raw where the chains had eaten through his skin. His hands clutched his knees like he was holding himself together by sheer will.
“And the one pretending not to listen,” Orin added, jerking his chin toward a figure sitting just beyond them, “is Tarek.”
Tarek didn’t look over. He just grunted.
“I’m listening,” he said, his voice flat and dry. “I just don’t waste words on the new ones.”
“Why?” I asked.
He turned then, his eyes sharp but empty, the kind of gaze that had stopped seeing the difference between day and night. “Because they die quickly.”
“I’m not planning on dying,” I said.
Tarek gave a low chuckle. It wasn’t humor—it was exhaustion made sound. “No one plans to. That’s the joke of it in here.”
Rian’s eyes narrowed. “You really don’t know, do you? About the trials.”
“I’ve heard whispers,” I admitted. “Shadows that move like snakes. Wild animals. Some kind of… tests.”
Orin exhaled sharply through his nose. “Tests? That’s what they call them now?” He leaned closer, voice dropping to a rasp. “It’s not a test. It’s a siphon. The trials drain you. Break you. You go in as men and come out as husks—if you come out at all.”
I frowned. “Then who lives?”
They exchanged glances—one of those silences that carried more weight than speech.
Orin’s voice came next, low and venomous. “Severen.”
The name crawled through the air like a curse.
“He’s always listening,” Rian whispered, his eyes darting around the cave. “Even through the walls.”
