“Lazarus,” I whispered. My voice rasped like a saw through wood.
“What?” he murmured back. His tone was flat, empty.
“What do you think they’re planning?”
I shifted on the stone, my back scraping against the wall. The damp had turned it slick. The chill had sunk into my bones.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I’d rather be breaking rock than lying here listening to my own thoughts.”
“Feels like the world’s holding its breath,” I muttered. “Like the god of death himself is waiting.”
Lazarus gave a dry sound, almost a laugh. “If he is, he’s late.”
Neither of us spoke after that.
The silence pressed closer, as thick as water. The walls sweated around us. The air felt old—as though a thousand last breaths had been trapped here and were still circling, waiting for ours to join them.
I lay back and closed my eyes, but there was no sleep—only the drip of water somewhere down the corridor, counting out the time until something broke.
And when it did, I wasn’t sure whether it would be the silence… or us.
Finally, the silence broke like glass.
A clash of bronze on stone echoed down the corridor, followed by the scrape of guards’ sandals through grit. Voices rose—guards barking orders, the sound of chains, and the guttural rhythm of command.
The cell door swung open. “On your feet.”
Lazarus and I obeyed. The air outside our cell, was colder than I remembered, thick with the scent of oil and old smoke. We followed the guards through the winding tunnels, the sound of dripping water echoing off the walls. The deeper we went, the heavier the air became—dense and weighted, laced with the taste of earth and rust.
Then the tunnel opened.
I stopped breathing.
Before us stretched a vast underground hall—an amphitheater carved straight into the bones of the world, its tiers spiraled upward, crowded with prisoners. Hundreds of them. Faces pale and hollow, eyes glinting in the low firelight like shards of broken glass. The heat of their bodies filled the space, sour and human. The air was thick with it—fear, sweat, the smell of blood.
For the first time, I saw how many of us there really were. Not dozens. Hundreds. Maybe more.
The guards drove us down to the lower tiers. My footsteps rang against the stone, the echoes swallowed almost at once by the vastness of the hall. Orders were barked from above, as sharp as whips, and the sound of movement rippled through the amphitheater—chains scraping, bodies shifting, hundreds of voices collapsing into breathless stillness.
Then the noise drained away until only the hiss of torches remained.
The walls rose high around us, streaked with soot and salt, carved by hands that would never touch sunlight again. Firelight licked across the stone, painting everything in the colors of rust and blood.
Somewhere above, a door groaned open.
The sound rolled through the chamber like the death rattle of something ancient.
Every spine straightened.
Footsteps followed—measured, heavy. They grew louder, closer, until the air itself seemed to flinch.
Then he appeared.
Descending the steps with the calm of a god summoned to his altar?—
Morgrath Severen, warden of the Dreadhold.
He moved as though the air parted for him, each motion slow and exact, inevitable. His presence spread through the chamber like pressure, pressing down until silence became instinct.
