“Family?” Severen echoed, savoring the word on his tongue. “Oh, Lazarus… if you knew what he’s done—what hewilldo—you’d carve that word out of your mouth and bury it in the dirt where it belongs.”
The wordfamilystill echoed in my skull like a dying bell—fading, twisting, devoured by the dark.
Then something landed on my head.
Not rats.
Worse.
Snakes.
“Oh fuck!” I choked as they slid over me in a whispering cascade. Cold scales pressed against raw flesh. They wrapped my neck, my arms, my chest—muscles tightening, pulsing with slow, patient hunger.
They found the burns, the open wounds, the weakness.
I gagged. Coughed. Choked.
My arms were still bound behind me—useless. The chain cut deeper as I thrashed.
They slithered into my ears, cool and slick, seeking the soft places, the openings, the mind itself.
Panic devoured reason.
“This isn’t real,” I gasped. “It’s a hallucination—it’s not?—”
But itwas.Every scale, every coil, every breath of them. Real enough to suffocate.
We stumbled forward, half-dead, half-mad, until the tunnel regurgitated us into a cavern dimly lit by torches. Their flames burned low, stuttering against walls slick with pitch and blood.
We weren’t alone.
Bodies hung from iron hooks above us—dozens, maybe hundreds—turning slowly in a wind that should not have existed underground. Their flesh sagged in gray folds, lips frozen mid-scream. Snakes wound through them—over arms, through empty sockets, around throats—caressing the dead like lovers, draping them in scales and sin.
A grotesque communion of death and what fed upon it.
And then—his voice appeared again.
Severen.
“Oh, look at you now,” he breathed, as smooth as venom, as sharp as bone. “Dancing for me in the dark. Covered in filth. Devoured by the same vermin that fester in your soul.”
The words didn’t strike my ears—theyenteredme. I felt them drive through marrow, pound into my soul’s cage.
Each syllable nailed something inside me shut.
“You see?” Severen whispered, low and coaxing. “This is what he brings you to. This is what you suffer for. All your loyalty, all your light—feeding the dark.”
The cavern breathed with him. Each torch flickered to his rhythm. Each hanging body swayed in obedience to his voice.
“Tell me, Lazarus,” he murmured, almost tender. “When will you stop saving what was never worth saving?”
I tried to shut him out, but my hands were bound tight behind me, chains grinding into raw wrists. I could only clench my teeth, press my tongue against the back of my mouth, and try to drown him out with pain.
It didn’t matter. His voice slithered through every thought, every wound.
“He’d leave you if he could,” Severen breathed, softer now, crueler. “He’d crawl over your broken body and never look back. You know it.”
“Don’t listen,” I whispered to myself, jaw trembling. “They’re lies. Just lies.”
