A tear slid down her cheek, glimmering in the torchlight. She didn’t answer. She only leaned forward until her forehead met mine. Our breaths mingled—fragile, uneven, alive despite everything.
For a long moment, the world narrowed to that stillness. Two broken bodies in the bowels of the Dreadhold, buried deep beneath the city of Ugarit. The closeness pressed in, heavy with damp stone and the lingering scent of things that had suffered in this place.
The Dreadhold could grind men into bone dust.
It could drink their hope, bleed them slow.
But it would not unmake this—this small, impossible mercy we had stolen from its hunger.
Eventually, I let her hand slip from mine.
Moments later, the iron door scraped open.
A guard filled the threshold, torchlight glinting off the bronze studs of his leather cuirass. My heart clenched—but he didn’t look twice. He cast only a passing glance toward the dying prisoner on the cot, then gripped my arm and dragged me into the corridor.
The air outside was colder, wetter—the breath of the earth itself. Torches hissed in their sconces, their smoke curling along the limestone ceiling like the fingers of something watching.
Thank the gods—we had gone unseen.
For now.
The only witness to that moment was a dying man already halfway to the grave.
I left that chamber half-mended, half-whole.
But burning with a single truth?—
They could break my body.
They could flay my skin and call it penance.
But they would not touch my will.
Not while Amara still lived.
I would finish the Shadow Lord Trials.
I would crawl through every torment the Ugarit underworld could conjure.
And when I reached the end—when the last chain fell, and Severen’s shadow turned to face me?—
I would not just survive.
I would make the earth remember what it meant to tremble.
Starting with Severen.
Ending with the Dreadhold itself.
Let the darkness prepare.
Because I was coming.
Not as a man?—
But as the reckoning it had made.
Chapter13
