Chapter12
Lazarus
Salvatore and I were bound together like carcasses prepared for ritual—wrists wrenched behind our backs, shoulders stretched to the brink of tearing. Chains ringed our throats, thick iron biting into the flesh, and manacles crushed our ankles, so every step became a shuffling prayer for mercy.
Ninety-eight others marched with us.
Or rather, we were dragged—broken, bloodied, bound in pairs like beasts led to sacrifice.
The passage they forced us through wasn’t a corridor. It was a throat—narrow, slick, pulsing with trapped heat and damp breath. The walls sweated with moisture and putridity, the stench of it thick enough to choke. Every sound—the drag of feet, the jangle of chains—echoed like the dying heartbeat of something ancient.
We were being swallowed.
The deeper we went, the hotter it became.
We emerged at last into a vast chamber where light went to die. The flames along the walls didn’t burn; they bled. Their glow was weak, sickly, coughing out fits of smoke that clung to the ceiling like dying lungs.
The walls were slick with mold and black-veined fungus that pulsed when brushed, leaving streaks across our skin. The stone scraped flesh raw. From above, bodies hung in rows—some gutted and hollow, others twitching as if still uncertain they were dead. Hooks pierced through their spines, pulling them into grotesque arcs of devotion.
Iron spikes jutted from the walls like the bones of the beast that had devoured us. The ground was not ground at all—it was slick, uneven, a quilt of bones and dried entrails that cracked underfoot. Skulls stared upward through layers of congealed filth, their mouths frozen mid-scream.
The stench was overwhelming—rotting flesh, bile, old blood turned to copper dust. A few men collapsed, gagging, retching. The sound was swallowed by the steady groan of the chamber walls, as if the place itself were breathing through us.
Salvatore pressed against me, shoulder trembling, voice hoarse.
“We’ve stepped into hell,” he rasped. “And it’s breathing.”
“This is only the beginning,” I whispered. I barely recognized my own voice. “The first trial was always meant to break the weak.”
Then—something shifted.
The air rippled.
It didn’t walk out of the darkness. Itformedthere.
Reality twisted to make space for it, bending like heat on stone.
At first, it was just a shape—manlike, but wrong in its proportions, its outline wobbling at the edges as if the world refused to hold it steady.
When it moved, it wasn’t footsteps. It was a distortion. The air folding around it.
A guard—or what used to be one.
What the Dreadhold had remade in its own image.
My eyes fought to focus, but his outline stuttered—limbs bending at wrong angles, a shadow pretending to hold weight. When he spoke, the sound wasn’t a voice at all, but a torn shriek laced with gravel and breathless decay, ripping through the chamber like a grave splitting open.
The chain snapped taut, biting against our throats. Pain detonated behind my eyes—white heat, blinding, violent. My skull thudded until sparks swam across the dark.
The air shifted.
Trial One had begun.
Mercy had been scoured out of this place long ago.
“Listen, you pit-born bastards,” the thing said. “The Gauntlet of Chains hungers in the name of the gods below. You and the sack of flesh tied to you will crawl, heave, or drag yourselves through the dark—step by step, breath by poisoned breath.”
He hawked something thick and vile and spat near his sandals. It hit the limestone floor with a wet slap and gleamed in the torch-glow like a slug’s corpse. The torches burned low, fed by pitch oil that dripped down the hafts like black tears.
