I followed their gaze.
At first, I saw nothing—only darkness pressing against the rough-cut stone. Then, slowly, my eyes began to adjust.
A figure sat against the wall. Still.
So still, I thought he might already be dead.
He was shackled, like the rest of us, but the chains looked older—corroded green with age, the bronze links fused into the rock itself. His head was bowed, long hair hanging in tangled ropes across his face. He didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Didn’t even seem to breathe.
“That’s him,” Rian whispered. “The one who’s been here the longest.”
“How long?” I asked.
Orin’s jaw worked. “Long enough that even the guards don’t remember when he came.”
Rian shifted uncomfortably, his chains scraping stone. “They call him Navir. Used to be a scholar, they say. Before he took the brand.”
Navir.
The name hung in the air like a prayer that no one believed in anymore.
“Has he ever spoken?” I asked.
Tarek nodded once, as slow as a man remembering a dream. “To some,” he said. “Not to most.”
I hesitated, then stepped forward. The chain between my ankles rattled, the sound echoing through the chamber like a death rattle.
The man’s head lifted. Just slightly.
Even through the gloom, I saw his eyes—clouded, unfocused, but alive. Alive in a way that felt wrong.
“You shouldn’t have come,” he said. His voice was low and mangled, but it carried easily over the mutter of the cave. “Curiosity dies faster here than the body does.”
“I needed to know,” I said. “About the Shadow Lord Trials.”
He tilted his head. The movement was small, calculated. His lips curved into something that might once have been a smile, but there was no warmth in it—only pity.
“The Shadow Lord Trials,” he murmured, tasting the words like poison. “They don’t just test you. They dismantle you. Piece by piece. First the body, then the mind. It isn’t sudden. It’s premeditated. A slow unmaking.”
He shifted, the chain around his neck scraping against stone. “They know exactly how much to take, how much to leave, how far a soul can stretch before it breaks. They strip you until you no longer know what pain is—only that you’d do anything to make it stop.”
He leaned forward, voice dropping to a whisper as rough as sand. “And when you’ve bled enough, they offer you a choice. One so vile, so corrupt, it twists you until you can’t remember who you were before it. You take it—or you die wishing you had.”
The air in the cave thickened. Every breath felt heavier. The walls seemed closer, closing in, sweating under the horror of his words.
“And if I survive?” I asked, my throat dry, heart pounding.
The old man’s gaze met mine, calm and grave. “Then you become untouchable,” he said. “A force even the Dreadhold fears to chain.”
I swallowed hard. “And if I fail?”
His voice turned to dust. “Then you forget who you are,” he said. “And what’s left of you… begs to forget the rest.”
A chill moved through the cave—colder than any winter wind, colder than stone or saltwater.
And in that breath, I understood—death was not the worst fate the Dreadhold had to offer.
I looked down the corridor.
