"The council ordered them closed after the cave-in killed three workers." Vex's finger traces one particular tunnel. "But stone shifts. Water finds new paths. Sometimes what's buried... resurfaces."
I memorize every line, every mark. "Where would someone hide a prisoner?"
"Somewhere the screams wouldn't carry."
The excavation consumes my nights. I work alone, hands blistered raw from moving stone and debris. Each rock I shift feels like lifting the weight of my failures. The council thinks I've lost my mind—let them. Gargan brings me food I barely touch, water I gulp down between hours of digging.
The sealed entrance reveals itself slowly. First, a gap between stones. Then the outline of an archway, choked with rubble but intact. My shoulders ache. My knuckles bleed. But I keep digging, fury smoldering in my chest like banked coals.
Between shifts, I return to her chamber. The room where I first saw her sleeping peacefully, where we made love with desperate tenderness, where I found her gone. I kneel where the ceremonial flames once burned, pressing my palms to cold stone.
"If the Plentiful God sees fit to test me..." My voice cracks in the darkness. "Then let the trial end."
The silence stretches. No divine answer. No sign. Just the weight of my own breathing and the ghost of her scent still clinging to the furs.
I'm back at the excavation site when it happens. Three days of digging have opened a gap large enough to squeeze through. I'm clearing the last of the debris when I hear it—faint, muffled by layers of stone, but unmistakable.
Soft sobbing. Her voice.
I back away from the opening, grabbing my axe, heart roaring like a caged beast.
She's still here. I'm coming.
26
SERIS
Time moves like honey through cracked stone down here. Minutes stretch into hours, hours collapse into moments. My body has become a catalog of aches—the constant throb in my lower back, the sharp cramps that seize my belly without warning, the raw burn where the shackles have rubbed my ankles bloody.
I think of Mother often in the darkness. How she used to tell me stories of women who escaped impossible situations through cleverness rather than strength. "A sharp mind cuts deeper than any blade," she'd whisper when Father wasn't listening. I wonder what story she'd tell about a pregnant translator chained in forgotten tunnels, whether the heroine would find her way out or simply fade into the stone like so many others.
Death feels closer some days. Not as a terror, but as a familiar visitor settling into the corner of my cell. I've stopped fighting the thought entirely. Sometimes I imagine what it would feel like to simply... stop. To let the baby and I slip away together, peaceful, beyond the reach of politics and hatred.
But then the little one kicks, fierce and insistent against my ribs, and I remember we're both still here. Still fighting.
The sound of approaching footsteps jolts me from my half-doze. Heavy boots on stone, purposeful and unhurried. The door groans open, torch flame dancing wild shadows across damp walls.
Zharra steps inside. She moves with predatory grace, torch held high like a weapon.
She kneels beside me, close enough that I can see the cruel satisfaction glittering in her eyes. "He chose wrong. He will see that when you're gone."
I try to pull away, but my body betrays me—too weak, too tired, muscles cramped from days of confinement. The chains clink uselessly as I struggle.
"Why don't you just kill me if you're so sure?" The words rasp from my throat like broken glass. "Why keep me here?"
Her laugh bubbles up from somewhere dark and twisted. She leans closer, torch flame casting her face in hellish relief. "I wanted to watch you suffer—to watch him suffer for daring to look your way."
The torch wavers as she gestures, sending shadows careening across the stone walls. "And now, the council has convinced him that you were never even here for him. That damned parasite was never his." Her voice is filled with hatred. "You came, lied, and left."
"You're the liar." But my voice lacks conviction. Days of isolation have worn away my certainty like water against stone.
"Am I?" Zharra's smile sharpens to a blade's edge. "He's stopped searching, little translator. Stopped asking questions. The great warleader has finally accepted what everyone else already knew—that you were nothing but a fever dream brought on by guilt and loneliness."
The doubt creeps in like poison through cracked stone. If Vargath truly cared, wouldn't he have torn Azhgar apart by now? Wouldn't the very walls be bleeding from his rage?
My hands clutch my swollen belly, fingers splayed protectively over the curve where our child grows. The baby shifts. I try to shield them from the terrible thoughts spiraling through my mind—that we're truly alone, that no one is coming, that this damp tomb will be our final resting place.
"There it is." Zharra's voice drips with satisfaction. "That pathetic expression I've waited so long to see finally cross your hideous human features."
