I couldn’t tell where I ended and he began.
Salvatore’s breath hitched—jagged, rasping.
He sagged against me, as heavy as grief, trembling like a man who’d reached the cliff’s edge with nothing left behind him.
“I don’t… I don’t think I can stand much longer,” he said, voice torn to threads of gravel—and something worse.
Defeat.
I felt it beneath his skin, fracturing like bone under strain. A buried scream that could no longer rise.
His flesh was slick and cold; his pulse fluttered like a trapped bird.
“We have to keep going,” I whispered. My voice came out hollow—dry wind through a split reed.
“We stay standing… or we die crawling.”
He didn’t answer. Only swallowed—slow, uneven—and gave a single nod. Even that looked like it might break him.
There were fewer of us now.
The shuffling around us had thinned. Those behind us were gone—burned, broken, or left to rot in the passage we had escaped.
We moved on, bent low, chained throat to throat like oxen dragged toward sacrifice.
The tunnel twisted ahead—narrow, suffocating. The walls flexed inward, alive with moisture and the low hum of something feeding on our despair. Every breath scraped. Every heartbeat stung.
And still, the laughter followed.
It crawled along the stone and multiplied.
It learned our rhythm and mimicked it, step for step, breath for breath—until it sounded like the prison itself was moving with us, mocking our persistence.
Then another voice joined the laughter.
Not a voice—something worse.
It was apresence.
A ghost born of decomposition and memory, threading through the cracks of my mind like ink through water. Cold. Venomous. Impossible to wash away.
Morgrath Severen.
The warden.
The Shadow Lord himself.
His words slid through the dark, smooth and unsettling, like a serpent tasting the air beside my ear.
“Why do you chain yourself to that coward?”
My blood froze.
“Get out of my head, Severen!” I shouted.
“Oh, Lazarus…”
He drew my name out, savoring it like poison on his tongue.
