Tarek nodded toward the stone. “He’s got spies everywhere. In the cracks. In the dark.”
I stiffened, the hairs on my arms rising.
And then—I saw it.
A glint in the wall.
A pair of eyes—shadowed, deep in the rock, unblinking. Watching.
“Gods help us,” I muttered. “They’re so dark they just… blend in. I never noticed them before.”
Tarek gave a slow, grim nod. “That’s the point. He doesn’t want you to know how closely he’s watching.”
Silence settled over us, as weighted as the air itself.
Then Rian spoke, his voice barely more than a breath.
“They say the trials aren’t meant to test your strength—or prove your worth. They’re meant to bleed you out. To starve you. To strip away everything you are.”
He turned toward me, and I saw the emptiness in his eyes once again.
“Then they give you a choice so twisted, so foul, you forget who you were before it.”
I pulled my arms close against my chest. “What kind of choice?”
Orin’s gaze darkened. “The kind that gives you everything you ever wanted—at the cost of who you are.”
“But no one survives to talk about it,” Rian said, his tone flat.
“No one?” I asked, my fingernails digging into my forearm.
All three of them shook their heads.
“That’s the second joke of this place,” Orin said. “The trials are a promise—a rope out of the pit. But it’s a lie. A pretty lure before the slaughter. Every man who’s taken them has died screaming.”
“They don’t walk out,” Rian added quietly. “They just stop making noise.”
Orin gave me a long, thin smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
“Welcome to the waiting room of hell, Lazarus.”
He paused—then leaned closer, his voice dropping to a rasp.
“But if you want truth, not rumor—there’s one man you should speak to.”
My pulse quickened. “What man?”
Tarek’s gaze flicked toward the far end of the cave, where the shadows seemed thicker—like they resisted the light.
“He’s been here longer than anyone,” Tarek said. “Too long.”
“He’s never taken the trials,” Orin added. “But he’s seen what happens to those who do. Says he’s watched every man who enters that gate vanish one by one. Says he knows what waits beyond it.”
Rian’s voice dropped, barely more than a whisper. “Some say he’s mad. Some say the Dreadhold lets him live because he already belongs to it.”
The three men fell silent, their eyes turning toward the darkness.
Their eyes stayed fixed on the far end of the cave, where the light thinned and the shadows gathered like smoke.
