A name has never felt more fitting. This place doesn’t just scorch but transmutes. It reduces every person to their most primal reflexes, strips civilization straight from the bone. Descent may be a choice, but once you enter, something else decides what comes back out.
The corridor vibrates with magic and mayhem, spells rupturing against stone walls, boots pounding into packed earth, chains raking over concrete. The air reeks of blood-mineral and predator musk. Every inhalation coats my throat in iron and dread.
Handlers race past, their boots leaving wet prints in red, black, and shades I don’t want to identify. Most wear the brands of the Lower Rings seared into their necks, marking them as expendable as the creatures they control. Yet there’s pride in their rhythm, in the way they pivot from snapping maws and swinging tails with calculated fearlessness. Down here, even the lowest can rise if they’re willing to bleed for it.
“Watch it!” Dom jerks me back as two handlers haul chains thrumming with containment spells. Behind them, a Chimera paces, muscle coiled in a lion’s body, a goat’s head snarling atop its spine, and a serpent’s tail weaving hypnotic patterns through the air.
Three sets of eyes lock onto me, and despite my anger at Dom, I find myself pressing closer to him. The creature’s presence awakens something in my blood, a pull I’ve felt since childhood but never quite understood.
We weave deeper into the warren of preparation rooms and holding cells. A Bloodmist Wraith churns in its specialized containment sphere, its crimson vapor condensing and expanding in sync with some unfelt heartbeat. Within the mist, fragments of its true form flicker: scaled sinew, blade-sharp ridges, and fangs glowing with the dull gleam of charred gold. I should be revolted. The thing feeds by dissolving its prey, stealing memories as it digests, but I can’t look away. My father’s reports never captured this elegance, this terrifying grace.
“Fascinating, isn’t she?” Dom’s voice threads through the chaos, noticing my fixation. “Excavated from ruins beneath Eclipsera. Cost me a small fortune, but worth every lume.”
Rowe would be sickened. He’d see exploitation and suffering, a thousand ethical violations stacked to the rafters. But I can’t deny the dark thrill that runs through me as we pass each cell. Every beast here represents power in its purest form—unchained, breathtaking, lethal.
The next cell houses a Nightmare Sphinx, all corded muscle and necrotic glamour. Its lion’s frame shifts with unnatural grace, flesh patchworked where fur has been burned away. Tattered wings drip acid in slow, hissing trails that scar the spelled barriers. Its face is almost human, but too symmetrical to be real, with hollow, gleaming eyes that pulse. It smiles as we pass, a grotesque mockery of warmth. The psychic ability lancing from its gaze drills into my skull, and the pressure behind my temples spikes hard until a nosebleed slides hot down my lip.
“Easy,” Dom steadies me, his hand sliding to my waist. I shrug him off, feigning interest in the data crystal hovering by the barrier. His restrained sigh behind me is almost enough to make the bleeding worth it.
Suddenly the Sphinx lunges, and the barrier flares as the snarl rattles my eardrums, fangs stopping inches from my throat. Hot breath reeks of scorched marrow and cloying decay. Patches of fur peel back on its skin to reveal pulsing muscle beneath, each contraction sending out a fresh burst of fear magic. The spell matrix strains, cracking light across the walls as the creature’s soundless screech sends the lights stuttering.
“The wards will hold,” Dom says certainly. “They always do.”
His touch should revolt me after tonight, yet in the middle of monsters and mayhem it sparks something else. Not safety or trust, but a raw surge of vitality, the way standing barefoot in a storm forces you to feel every pulse of its power even as it threatens to kill you.
The corridor opens into a vast preparation chamber. A fighter dips his head respectfully as we pass, while another holds Dom’s gaze with quiet defiance, her victories tattooed across her arms in glowing ink. She earned that right, just as she earned the ruby gleaming at her wrist.
“Mr. Blackwood!” A handler scrambles forward, betting tablet clutched to his chest. “The odds on Chen’s match—” Dom fixes him with a stare, and the man stumbles back, swallowed by the shadows he never should’ve left.
Near the spelled mirrors, a woman flows through combat forms with precise and deadly movements. Her eyes flick to us and I note the calculation behind it, wondering if catching Dom’s attention might be worth it. Across the room, three fighters cluster around the healing station, passing a vial of something viscous and electric. Their veins ignite with bioluminescence, but they never look up. Survival leaves little energy for spectacle.
I pause beside a fighter mid-bond. He presses his ruby to his palm, letting blood thread into the gem. It flares immediately, accepting the essence as a conduit, but its light stutters, unstable. These quick-pairings never quite settle. This is nothing like the formal bonding ceremonies I grew up with. No ancestral halls, no weeks of preparation, no guided rituals. Just desperation, a rush of magic, and a whispered vow offered too quickly for the stone to truly understand him.
“Hold still,” a sponsor snaps at his charge, a boy with skeletal wide eyes, trembling as he slices deeper into his palm. First timer. Probably straight from the Lower Rings, dreaming of glory. “More blood. Scratches don’t bond. You want it to accept you. Make itfeelyou.”
The kid obeys, lips moving in a frantic litany as he smears his blood over the gem’s surface. The ruby flares to life—it always does, it’s a tool after all—but the glow is unsteady, untethered. No time for it to learn his magic or mirror his style. Not that it matters. Looking at the match board, I already know he’s dead. They’ve put him against a Bloodmist Wraith.
Rumors say this is how Kian shows mercy to those who cross him. A chance to die fighting instead of execution in some dark corner. At least in the arena, they can pretend they chose their fate. The boy’s probably grateful, even knowing his chances. Better to chase glory than beg for mercy in the dark.
Dom’s tension from upstairs seems to melt away with each step deeper into his kingdom of controlled violence. The raw energy of the place feeds him, smooths his edges. His hand stays possessively on my waist, but I notice how fighters and handlers alike drop their eyes as we pass, how even the creatures fall quiet under his gaze. Here, in the heart of his empire of blood and spectacle, he is absolutely in his element.
The corridor opens into the arena, and the wall of sound makes my ears ring. Screens flash overhead, crimson glyphs ticking throughstats and odds. Marcus Chen’s kill count glows at twenty-seven. His opponent’s acid potency rated, “lethal plus.”
“Ten thousand lumes on the Scorpid!” A man in a tailored jacket slams a palm onto the betting console, his voice drunk on bloodlust. “Double if it sprays venom!”
Dom’s fingers press into my hip as we move through the swarm, past the shouting gamblers and desperate sponsors. A man raises a glass of something gold-dusted in salute, but Dom’s chin barely dips in acknowledgment. His stride never breaks as we weave through the crowd toward the private viewing boxes.
A hostess glides past, barely dressed in strips of black silk. Her tray carries shimmering glasses in different colors, but it’s her eyes that hold me, wide and dilated, and glassy from whisper-dust.
A man’s hand slides up her thigh, fingers bruising soft flesh, and she doesn’t even flinch. The drug makes sure of that, numbing until pain blurs into sensation and sensation into fog. Dom started offering it years ago, said it was kindness. Better to float through your shift than register every grab, grope, and lingering hand pretending it owns you. But the pay is obscene and the dust is free. There’s always a line of girls begging to work the private boxes. One night down here can cover a month’s rent.
“Miss Ellis.” Xavier’s oily voice cuts through the din. He sprawls in his private box, fingers heavy with ruby rings. As the Vale family’s lead medical coordinator, he oversees their more unorthodox procedures. The kind that require test subjects no one files missing reports for. “Always a pleasure to see you embracing our little entertainments.”
I offer the barest curve of a smile, even as revulsion prickles across my skin. If my parents could see me now, watching bloodsport, chasing the high of violence . . . My mom, the brilliant and revered Dr. Elyra Ellis, would be appalled. But I never told them about this place. Never breathed a word to Luna about where I disappeared to some nights. The Inferno was mine alone. A secret I carved out of rebellion and hunger.
Dom’s hand tightens possessively on my waist, steering me past Xavier’s knowing smirk. These viewing boxes are reserved for Kian’s favored inner circle, men and women who’ve bought their way in with obscene wealth, dangerous favors, or secrets too valuable to waste. A few, Xavier among them, secured membership by providing services the Blackwoods prize most: fresh bodies for the Pit, untraceable drug exports, and discreet medical care when the fights go wrong.
Membership doesn’t come with a badge but a binding. Magic woven into the contract that seals the tongue, twisting any attempt to speak of this place into static and blood.
