“They will tear your body. Shatter your mind. Feed on your fear until nothing of you is left but the truth beneath.”
He paused—just long enough for the silence to ache.
“Most of you will die.”
He smiled again, and the motion sat ill on his face—slow, unnervingly calm.
“But those who endure,” he said, “those who crawl out of the darkness alive… will rise reborn. They will wear the night like armor. They will command the unseen. They will be what the world dreads and the gods envy.”
His gaze swept the tiers of prisoners—murderers, thieves, ghosts of men—and stopped on me.
“You will become what the world will remember,” he said. His voice carried through the air like a curse. “You will become power itself—unbroken, unending, eternal.”
The words rolled over us like heat before a storm.
Severen turned away, his cloak dragging behind him like liquid shadow.
“But know this,” he said, his tone softening to something far more dangerous. “The trials do not reward the strong—they consume them. They do not test courage—they carve it out. You will not rise because you are worthy. You will rise because everything human in you is gone.”
He lifted his head. The air thickened. Torches bent toward him as if drawn by the gravity of his words.
“If you wish to participate, the trials begin at dawn tomorrow. Make your choice, you worthless animals.”
The shadows rose around him, folding inward like a tide pulling back to sea—and then he was gone. The place where he’d stood was still trembling, the air quivering with the echo of his voice.
For a heartbeat, no one moved.
The silence that followed felt sacred and profane, as if the world itself were holding its breath in fear of him. Even the torches hesitated to burn.
Then the whispers began—low, fevered, desperate. They crawled from mouth to mouth like an infection, the wordfreedomtwisting into something unholy.
Lazarus turned toward me. His face was pale in the dim firelight, his eyes too steady.
“You heard him,” he said quietly. “It’s real.”
“Real or not,” I muttered, my voice colder than the stone beneath us, “it’s a death sentence.”
“Maybe,” Lazarus said. His jaw clenched. “But staying here is one too.”
I looked at the pit where Severen had stood, the air still rippling from the void he’d left behind.
And in that silence—thick, electric, alive—I understood what real fear was.
It wasn’t dying.
It was surviving him.
Night settled over the Dreadhold like a curse.
The cold was bitter tonight—biting, searching, finding its way through skin and bone until it felt like it was burrowing straight into the soul.
Somewhere far down the corridor, someone screamed. The sound didn’t echo. It just died—like the prison had swallowed it whole.
I sat with my back to the wall, chains biting into my wrists. My body ached, but my thoughts hurt worse.
Across from me, Lazarus paced like an animal cornered. The chain at his neck scraped the floor with every turn. His eyes burned—feverish, determined.
“You’re not actually thinking of joining the trials,” I said, my voice low.
