Maybe this wasn’t meant to be survived.
Maybe survivalwasthe punishment.
But somehow, we moved.
Inch by inch. Dragged by momentum, by terror, by the screams.
The gods of this place—if they existed—had left us to crawl in their absence.
And the screams… gods, the screams. They weren’t random.
They were a pattern.
A map.
A prophecy written in agony.
We followed them, step after step, deeper into the throat of the earth.
The tunnel narrowed again, the air shimmering with heat. My chains clinked once before a voice shrieked from the dark above?—
“Pour it now!”
What followed wasn’t a pour. It was a judgment.
Boiling oil rained from the ceiling in a single, roaring sheet—an avalanche of liquid flame. The torches guttered out beneath its brightness.
It struck us like divine punishment.
The hiss was deafening, swallowing every scream, though the screams persisted—rising, weaving, merging into something beyond sound.
My skin split open.
Flesh blistered. Bubbled. Burst.
The smell of roasting meat choked the corridor, thick and acrid—tar smoke mingling with burning flesh.
I arched backward, a creature made of nerve and flame, then fell—dragging Salvatore with me into the slick of boiling death that drowned the floor.
His screams weren’t human.
They tore through the air like something trying to claw its way out of the body that birthed it.
We writhed together, tangled in ruin—two bodies, one inferno. Our skin fused and tore, melted and sealed again in the same breath. The stench was alive. It coated my tongue, my teeth, my lungs. It was the smell of us—burning, dying, unmade.
The world tightened.
This was no prison.
It was a furnace.
A tomb built for the living.
Vision warped—shards of red, black, and ash flashing like broken pottery in a kiln. The chain at my throat jerked again, cutting into the flesh that was no longer flesh but pulp. I didn’t move. Couldn’t.
Pain folded in on itself.
And then—nothing.
