And then, as always, he found us.
Lazarus and me.
His eyes locked on ours, and the world seemed to narrow around that stare. The air turned brittle. My lungs forgot how to move.
It wasn’t the look of a man studying strangers.
It was the look of someone remembering something he’d never forgotten.
That gaze crawled beneath my skin—cold, invasive, knowing. It stripped away the noise, the bodies, the breath of the men beside us until there was only his focus, pinning us in place.
He didn’t look at us like prisoners.
He looked at us like revenants—things that shouldn’t exist.
Things he’d known before this place ever breathed our names.
In that moment, it struck me—this wasn’t our first crossing. He’d been waiting for us all along.
His gaze lingered, unblinking, until the weight of it felt like hands around my throat. Then he turned, continuing his slow, predatory walk down the line.
“The Shadow Lord Trials,” he said, his tone steady, “will push you beyond the edge of what flesh and spirit can endure. They will peel you open. Strip away every lie you’ve ever buried in your bones until only the truth remains.”
My breath thinned, the cold scraping my lungs.
He stopped again, glancing back toward us with that same ghost of a smile—the kind that didn’t belong to a living man.
“Each trial will be worse than the one before it,” he said. “Most of you will beg for death long before the end. No one has ever survived. Maybe one of you will be the first.
“Or maybe you’ll all die screaming.”
He gestured toward the raised platform—its stone slick with old blood, the stains dark and permanent, the memory of screams still clinging to the air.
“Step forward,” he said, “if you dare to become something more than flesh and fear.”
The corner of his mouth lifted. “Or crawl back to your cell and rot in your cowardice.”
I turned to Lazarus.
He met my gaze with fire in his eyes. No fear. No hesitation.
Just that fire—the kind that could either burn the world or save it.
“We’ll rise from the shadows,” I whispered.
Lazarus nodded once.
And without another word, we stepped onto the platform.
Not as prisoners.
Not as men.
But as wolves walking willingly into the slaughterhouse—ready to tear the gods apart if they dared stand in our way.
The stone trembled beneath our feet.
Then the trials began.
