A drop struck my cheek.
Another landed beside my ear. Water, not blood. Useful, though I couldn't have said why. My eyes were open, but the dark looked the same either way. Rock pressed against my back and left shoulder. Something harder pinned my right boot below the ankle, while my hips twisted on a slope of loose stone.
I tried to draw a full breath.
Pain closed around my ribs before my lungs were half full. A wet click sounded inside my chest. The breath escaped as a cough, driving a blade through my side and shifting grit beneath my spine.
I stopped moving.
Maybe the stones had settled because I'd coughed. Maybe the shelf beneath the lower common was still sliding. Panic had already tried to kill me more efficiently than the fall, and I wasn't inclined to offer it another attempt.
My left hand worked. The right answered slowly, fingers numb and slick. I touched my face, found blood at my temple, then traced my jaw and throat. Nothing seemed broken there. My sword belt hung empty at my hip; somewhere in the fall the scabbard had torn loose, and my blade had gone down with it. My leather jerkin had split along one side. Beneath it, my ribs felt swollen and wrong. Every pulse struck hot through my hip where the beam had caught me.
I pressed both palms against the stone and tried to straighten.
White pain tore through my chest. My arms failed. My head struck rock hard enough to scatter false stars behind my eyes, and they vanished at once.
“Fine,” I rasped. “We won't do that.”
My voice returned from close walls, thin and unfamiliar.
Sera disappeared along a route angled away from mine, alive the last time I saw her. Bram had the child near an outward cart. Kade went down on another shelf before the rest of the town vanished above me. I bit the inside of my cheek until the memories loosened their grip. They couldn't help anyone. Sera might still be somewhere in the ruin. Kade might be three arm lengths away behind a wall of stone. I had no right to bury either of them before I knew.
My breath shortened further. The wet click came again.
The healing potion.
I'd carried it long enough to resent its weight and feared wasting it because Dalla had pressed it on me for nothing, and I’d wanted to earn it first. Saving it now would be the sort of thrift carved into grave markers.
My hand crept toward my belt. Each finger's breadth dragged pain through my side. I found the belt knife first, then the pouch beside it. The fastening had twisted beneath my hip.
Reaching it meant lifting myself.
For several breaths I lay still, bargaining with a body that had no reason to trust me. Then I hooked my left elbow against the rock and pushed until I could slide two fingers under the pouch cord.
Something shifted above my shoulder.
I froze with my teeth locked together. Pebbles pattered across my chest and rolled past my ear into a hollow below. Their falling taps continued far longer than I liked.
The cord slipped free. My fingers closed around the small bottle inside. It was intact.
Of course it was. The bottle had spent the fall wrapped in leather while I'd used myself to test every stone between Brookhaven and the deep earth.
I worked the cork with my thumb. It wouldn't move. My right hand shook too badly to grip, and the left had begun losing strength. I clamped the bottle between my teeth, caught the cork against my belt buckle, and twisted.
The cork came free with a soft pop.
I nearly spilled everything. Cold liquid ran over my lower lip before I sealed my mouth around the neck and swallowed. It tasted of bitter roots and iron, so thick it clung to my tongue.
Heat followed it down, and there was no comfort in it. It spread beneath my ribs like a slow burn, finding every torn place and making each one known. I curled against the rock while something shifted inside my chest with a sickening scrape. My breath caught. The next one went deeper.
I swallowed again and again until the bottle was empty.
Air reached the bottom of my lungs. Pain still wrapped my side, broad and bruising, but the wet click was gone. Warmth settled into my hip, dulling its sharpest edge without restoring its strength. My right fingers began to sting as feeling returned.
The potion hadn't made me whole. It’d made dying optional for the next few minutes.
That would have to do.
“My name is Edrin Hale,” I whispered into the buried dark. Saying it kept the ruin from reducing me to breath and pain. “And I'm getting up.”
I rolled onto my left side by degrees. Sweat chilled beneath my jerkin. The stone pinning my boot proved loose, something I could shove aside once I could brace properly, though my hip trembled with the effort. I rested after moving it, forehead against cold grit, and counted ten careful breaths.
Then I searched by touch.
Broken paving lay behind me. Ahead, my fingers found splintered timber and a gap beneath it where air moved faintly across my knuckles. A bitter char smell lingered there. I reached into the opening and drew out a piece of wood warm at one end.
Not dead, then.
Farther in, my hand found a cracked clay lamp sealed with blue wax. The wick was gone, but a thin shaving from the timber would serve. I peeled wax from the rim with my belt knife, pressed it around the shaving, and tried to make the buried coal catch.
It failed twice.
On the third attempt, a tiny flame rose between my cupped hands.
Its light showed broken stone powdered gray with dust, crushed beams wedged against the sloping roof, and blood smeared where I'd lain. Nothing resembling a way upward remained.
To my right, beneath two leaning slabs, a narrow passage descended beyond the reach of the flame.
I'd wanted a way out. Brookhaven had left me only a way deeper.
The flame bent when I breathed near it, so I set the burning shaving in a hollow between two stones. It wasn't much, but it was light I could govern, the closest thing underground to a loyal companion.
I eased beneath the leaning slabs feet first, then turned onto my stomach where the gap narrowed. Stone pressed close above my back. My broken jerkin caught on every splinter, and dust worked down my collar as if the ruins meant to bury me by handfuls now that dropping a town on me had failed.
Behind me, the flame dwindled to a trembling stain of gold. Ahead, nothing.
“Kade!”
My shout struck stone and came back thinned. I held my breath, straining for a cough, a groan, the scrape of a boot.
Only grit moved.
I crawled on before the quiet could harden into certainty. The passage dipped steeply. Broken paving gave way to older fitted stone beneath the lower common, broad blocks worn smooth before Brookhaven had laid floorboards over them. One wall still stood shoulder-high, its mortar pale and crumbling. The other had folded inward beneath roots, beams, and shattered foundation.
Cold air crept along the floor. Somewhere farther down, water tapped irregularly.
I dragged myself through until the roof lifted enough to crouch, then returned for the little flame. Its glow found a smear across the dust on one paving stone.
Fingers.
Four marks and the heel of a palm, dragged toward the descent.
“Kade?”
My voice dwindled against the curve.
A faint patter of falling grit came from below. A boot had scuffed the next stone. Another mark showed beyond it, then a shallow groove where something heavy had been pulled or slid.
Hope rose, quick and stupid. I let it. Stupidity had kept better men alive than good sense ever managed.
“Sera!”
Her name went farther. The passage caught it and returned a broken piece of the sound.
“Sera, answer me!”
I held still until my knees shook from crouching. The stones offered only small disturbances, settling and releasing dust. No body showed in the debris. No hand reached out. No voice came close enough to separate from the passage's own echoes.
She could’ve found another gap. She could’ve gone farther down. I called her name once more and crawled on before the silence could answer for her.
The flame guttered as I rounded the bend.
Beyond it, the passage widened into a crushed junction. One branch ended beneath packed soil and snapped timbers. The other continued downward between blocks tilted like rotten teeth. Bits of Brookhaven had spilled into the older stonework: a roof tile, a bent nail, the broken handle of a cup.
A pebble clicked below.
Then another.
I lowered the flame and followed the marks through the descending gap. The roof rose abruptly beyond it. A shaft of gray daylight pierced a crack far overhead, too narrow for a hand, yet it let me see dust turning through the air.
Afternoon still existed up there.
I hated it for continuing without us.
Something dark lay beyond the flame's reach.
“Kade?”
The shape didn't move.
I crossed the tilted floor, slipped once, and caught myself against the wall. A boot emerged first, then a leg pinned beneath fallen masonry. His sword lay close to one outstretched hand, its edge giving off the weakest blue glimmer.
Iron-gray hair showed beneath the dust. The long pale scar ran from his jaw to his collarbone exactly as it always had.
Kade lay beneath the stone.
My knees folded before I decided to kneel.
Stone pressed through my jerkin. One hand landed beside Kade's shoulder, the other against the slab pinning him, and for a while that was all I could manage. Water struck somewhere behind me at uneven intervals. Dust drifted through the thread of daylight and settled on his open eyes.
Nothing moved beneath the stone.
I put two fingers against Kade's throat.
His skin was cool beneath the grit. No beat answered me.
“Come on,” I said.
The words sounded small beneath the broken arch.
I shifted my fingers and pressed harder, as if a pulse might hide from poor technique. Kade would’ve struck my wrist away. Find the place. Trust what your hand tells you. Don't squeeze a man's neck and call it medicine.
There was nothing to find.
My palm hovered over his mouth. No warmth touched it. His chest couldn't have risen even if breath remained in him. The slab had crushed the shape of his ribs, leaving one shoulder lower than the other. Dark blood had soaked into the dust beside his back and hardened to a black crust. More marked the corner of his mouth.
I wiped the dust from one eye with my thumb.
It stayed fixed.
I pressed my fingers to his throat again. Then a third time.
I braced both hands beneath the nearest edge of stone and pulled.
The slab didn't shift. Grit tore beneath my nails. My boots slid down the sloping floor before I stopped, breath burning in my throat.
“You always did choose the heavier work.”
The ruin gave me back my own voice.
My forehead came to rest against the stone. Cold sank through my skin while the passage continued around us. A grain of mortar fell from the arch. Water tapped below. Somewhere overhead, something wooden creaked in an afternoon that had no right to keep going.
Sera's hands vanished again when I closed my eyes. Then Maren's red shawl vanished under the stones, the torn strip still caught around my wrist. Maren's absence opened behind both. Perin was gone somewhere among the broken shelves of earth, and Bram had vanished with the child. I couldn't decide which name to hold first, so they crowded together until breathing became work.
Kade had always been the man who told me where to put my feet.
Nobody was going to do that now.
His right hand lay open a short distance from the longsword. The fingers curled slightly, thick with old calluses, but hadn't reached the grip. Perhaps the fall had thrown the weapon clear. Perhaps he'd tried for it after landing. Kade wasn’t going to correct me.
I crawled past his arm and closed my hand around Kade's old adventuring blade.
His belt came free of the rubble with the scabbard still fixed to it. I threaded it onto mine and let the empty one fall.
The grip knew the shape of him better than mine. Its leather had been darkened and smoothed by years of use, the guard nicked where whetstone and battle had taken their share. The longsword was well used without being neglected. Kade had never permitted steel the luxury of looking pretty when it could look ready.
A faint blue shimmer traced the edge.
It wavered as I raised the weapon into the daylight, thin in places and nearly gone in others. The old enchantment still clung to the steel, weakening but present. It was the sword's own remnant, worn down through years of service. Nothing passed into me. No strength arrived with it. The weight dragged at my wrist, familiar in kind and wrong in every other way.
Taking it felt like theft.
Leaving it’d have been worse.
“I need this,” I told him.
Kade's face gave me neither permission nor blame. Death had taken even his disapproval, and that seemed needlessly thorough.
I moved back to his side and brushed the worst grit from his iron-gray hair. There wasn't room to free him, nowhere to carry him, and no earth I trusted to stay where I put it. The ruin had made a grave without asking either of us.
My hand settled on his shoulder.
“You got me this far.”
The words broke on the last syllable.
A soft crack sounded inside the leaning half of the arch. Powdered mortar streamed from the split. I stayed one breath longer.
Then I stood.
The longsword remained in my right hand. Its faint blue shimmer trembled along the worn edge as I turned toward the descending break beyond the arch. I tightened my grip and took the passage down.
The passage narrowed within a dozen steps, forcing me sideways between a tilted foundation wall and a bank of broken stone. Afternoon reached through cracks overhead in pale slanting threads, but none touched the way ahead. Every footfall loosened grit beneath my boots.
Behind the nearest bend, the last spill of daylight vanished.
I stopped longer than I needed to. My fingers still remembered Kade's shoulder. The grip of his sword pressed unfamiliar ridges into my palm, and the faint shimmer along its edge showed dust hanging motionless in the close air.
No scrape followed me. No dry rebuke told me to stop staring backward. That absence settled between my shoulder blades and made the narrow way ahead seem almost merciful.
I turned the worn steel inward and used the little light remaining along its blue edge. It showed fractured mortar, packed clay, and stones crushed together by the collapse. Some had once been dressed blocks. Others were raw slabs torn from deeper ground. Brookhaven had landed on something built beneath it, and whatever hands had shaped these walls were beyond my guessing.
The fissure descended sharply. I tested each foothold before trusting my weight to it, keeping the sword close so the blade wouldn't strike stone. My broken jerkin caught on a jagged corner. The leather gave with a soft rip that sounded indecently loud.
Then the blue edge flashed against something smooth ahead.
The glint leapt down the passage.
A scrape answered from beyond it.
Not falling rubble. This had rhythm.
I caught the shimmering edge between folds of torn leather and pinched out the light.
The dark closed so completely that distance ceased to exist. I shifted my grip, grabbed the sword beneath the guard, and felt along the rubble with my free hand. My fingers found a crack between two fallen stones, narrow enough to reject any sensible man.
Fortunately, sense had suffered badly of late.
I turned sideways and jammed myself into it.
Knife-edged rock dragged across my chest. Another point pressed beneath my ribs as I forced one shoulder deeper, then twisted my hips after it. My boots scraped once. I froze with the sword trapped lengthwise against my body and my left cheek ground into cold stone.
The sound ahead stopped.
My lungs wanted a full breath. I denied them.
Air entered through my nose in a thread, paused, then left more slowly. Kade had taught breath for the training yard, for keeping strength after panic began stealing it. I'd never understood how much discipline could fit inside the simple act of not gasping.
Something shifted beyond the crack.
Dust rolled over me before the thing reached my hiding place. It carried a smell like stagnant water trapped beneath metal. The pressure changed next, filling my ears and tightening the air against my skin. Whatever approached displaced enough of the passage to make the rubble draw inward around it.
A hard surface scraped along the stone outside.
The vibration entered through my cheekbone.
I shut my mouth before my teeth could click together. One breath. Hold. Let it escape without sound.
The thing passed inches from me.
I caught no whole shape, only a deeper absence moving across the slit before my face. A blunt ridge dragged against the outer stone. Fine grit sifted into my hair and down the back of my jerkin. Heat followed, not the warmth of blood or flame, but a damp exhalation that touched my knuckles and left them slick.
The sword lay useless against my ribs. If I tried to draw it free, steel would rasp on rock. If I managed that miracle, there still wasn't room to swing. Kade's sword would become one more piece of metal buried beside me, and my great achievement would be giving the thing indigestion.
My thigh began to tremble.
I pressed harder into the crack until sharp stone filled every thought. I wanted only to be smaller, quieter, beneath notice.
The scrape continued past. Weight settled somewhere behind me with a muffled impact. Loose stones shifted, then held.
One slow breath.
Another.
The pressure eased so gradually that I couldn't tell whether the thing had moved away or merely stopped listening. I stayed wedged between the stones, every muscle locked around the need to run. Sweat cooled along my spine despite the trapped air.
I counted fifty breaths, then fifty more, because numbers were safer than hope.
Nothing returned.
I stayed crouched until my calves shook. The thing could’ve been anywhere.
I eased my left hand off the stone.
Nothing answered the faint rasp of skin against grit. The crack still held me like a clenched fist, but the rock ahead dipped low and left room to crawl through. Behind me, somewhere beyond the rubble, the thing that had passed was either gone or listening better than I was.
I shifted one knee.
Wait.
The word arrived without sound.
I stopped with my cheek against the rock. Bad air could make a man hear things. Fear could do worse. I’d have preferred either explanation to the certainty with which that voice had spoken.
Ten breaths passed.
I moved again.
Above you.
Dust sifted over my face. The hunter tested the slab directly over my spine: one careful tap, then another farther along. A hooked point slid through the gap ahead and withdrew. The tapping wandered into a side fissure and faded.
I stayed flat.
The warning had been right. Madness, apparently, had excellent hearing.
When the tapping faded, I dragged Kade's sword through the crack. The old blue shimmer along its edge showed an opening three body lengths ahead.
“Was that you?” I breathed.
When it crosses the lower stones…
The voice broke off. A scrape sounded behind me.
I shoved forward. Rock tore the split edges of my jerkin and opened a line of skin across my ribs. The fissure widened without becoming generous. I crawled until squared blocks replaced raw stone beneath my hands.
Edrin Hale.
My name closed around my throat more effectively than any hand.
“Who are you?”
Forward. Then left.
“That wasn't the question.”
The hunter struck the bend. A stone shifted against my boot.
I went forward.
The masonry changed as I crawled. Brookhaven's broken foundations gave way to blocks taller than my torso, fitted so closely that my knife point couldn’t enter the seams. Lines of metal ran through them in broad curves. Wherever Kade's blue edge passed, letters appeared inside the metal and faded behind me.
This was no cellar and no forgotten drainage tunnel. Someone had built it to remain after everything above was gone.
The passage turned left and rose until I could stand. My hip objected. I leaned against the wall until the potion's borrowed strength steadied, then lifted the sword.
A point of amber light appeared over my left hand.
It didn’t come from Kade's blade. Blue held to the worn steel. Amber floated above my skin and moved when I moved, two separate magics sharing the same dark.
“Your name,” I said.
The light drifted ahead.
Astarra.
“What do you want?”
For you to reach me alive.
The corridor opened.
My little light couldn’t find the ceiling. It climbed a wall of black stone crossed by iron bands, then vanished into height. The corridor had delivered me onto a bridge no wider than a cart, suspended over a circular gulf. Pillars descended into darkness on either side. Each was carved with the same figure: a crowned woman kneeling inside a ring while faceless soldiers held the ring shut.
At the far end stood a door built for a giant.
Three slabs of pale stone met beneath an arch. Iron crossed them in widening circles, every circle crowded with writing. None of the marks glowed. They didn’t need to. The pressure behind the door settled against my skin like deep water.
Astarra's amber light stopped at the first carved circle.
I’m beyond this door.
Behind me, the hunter entered the ancient corridor and scraped one hooked limb across the fitted stone.
I looked at the door, then at the dark bridge I’d crossed.
“Of course you are.”
The hooked limb scraped the corridor again.
It hadn’t crossed onto the bridge. Perhaps the old stone troubled it. Perhaps it’d learned patience from something worse. Either way, the dark behind me had acquired a shape and a deadline.
I approached the door.
Up close, the iron circles were wider than roads. The lowest passed through a stone panel at chest height, where a shallow handprint had been cut into the pale surface. Brown stains darkened its center.
“You're imprisoned.”
Yes.
“And you brought me here to open the door.”
I brought you here to hear my offer.
The hunter tested the bridge with one limb. Stone gave a low groan beneath its weight.
“You could make the offer from where you are.”
You’d hear a whisper and die before believing it.
I disliked how precisely that fit the morning.
The handprint waited. Its fingers were longer than mine, but unmistakably human in shape. A thin groove ran from the palm down the door and vanished beneath the floor.
“What opens it?”
Living blood. Freely given.
“Convenient.”
Not for me.
That landed differently. The builders had made a prison a living person could enter only by choosing to bleed for whatever waited inside. It was either a mercy, a test, or the sort of cruelty ancient people called wisdom after everyone responsible was dead.
The hunter shifted farther onto the bridge.
I put Kade's sword down within reach and drew my knife. The blade rested against my left palm. I hesitated, proving I understood the stupidity, then pulled.
Pain opened cleanly. Blood filled my hand.
I pressed it into the carved print.
The entire door struck once beneath my palm.
Not a sound. An impact. It traveled through my arm, across my teeth, and down into the bridge. One iron circle brightened amber. Then the next. Light climbed the door in widening rings until the arch burned far above me.
The hunter stopped.
Letters moved beneath my bloody hand. The groove drank what I’d given it. Every instinct told me to pull away, but the stone had closed around my fingers without moving.
Say that you enter by your own will.
“I enter by my own will.”
The wards released me.
Three slabs drew apart with the slow violence of cliffs separating. Hot air rushed through the opening and dried the blood on my palm. My tiny amber guide-light vanished into a flood of the same color.
Astarra stopped being a whisper.
Her presence struck through me from face to spine. Heat filled my mouth with the taste of oranges burned black at the peel. Something vast moved across every nerve without belonging to any of them. My knees hit stone. Kade's sword rang beside me, its blue edge briefly drowned in amber without changing color.
I could feel her on the other side of my skin.
Not thoughts. Not memories. Scale.
The chamber beyond the door descended in enormous rings. Pillars rose past the reach of light. Bridges crossed the open center at different heights, many broken, all aimed toward a platform suspended over a depth I couldn’t measure.
A woman stood there inside bands of amber light.
I saw her only in pieces: curved horns, midnight hair moving in air that touched nothing else, pale hands held open at her sides. The bands passed through the platform and disappeared into the walls. When she lifted her face, her eyes burned red at the center and amber around it.
The sight should’ve made kneeling feel appropriate. I resented that immediately and forced one boot beneath me.
“Astarra.”
Now you understand where I was.
Her voice came from the chamber, the stone, and the space behind my heart. The opened door had let her presence reach me, but the bands around the platform remained bright.
“Did you bring Brookhaven down?”
No.
One word. I had no reason to trust it and wanted to believe it. The wanting embarrassed me.
“How long have you been here?”
For centuries. I learned the tunnels by what moved through them. I know the thing behind you’ll cross the bridge.
A hard point touched stone outside the door.
I looked back. The hunter's shape filled the far end of the bridge, too large for my light to complete.
“Then make the offer.”
The woman on the platform raised one hand. The amber bands tightened around her wrist.
A bond. My power carried through you. My voice within reach. The strength to leave this place alive.
“And you?”
The prison can’t follow me through a willing soul. I leave with you.
The hunter's hooked limb came down on the bridge.
The hunter stepped onto the bridge.
Its weight traveled through the chamber floor. One of the outer wards flashed, and the creature recoiled, but a hairline crack appeared in the nearest iron circle.
The prison had survived centuries. Brookhaven’s collapse had cracked it.
“Terms,” I said. “Before it reaches us.”
Astarra stood within the amber bands, pale and still while her hair moved around her. Nothing in her face promised kindness.
You carry my mark. My power passes through the bond when you call it. I may speak to you and perceive what crosses strongly between us.
“Can you command me?”
No.
“Take my body?”
No.
“Search my memories?”
I may witness what rises through the bond. I can’t reach backward and select memories as possessions.
“Can you lie?”
The amber light tightened around her. For the first time since the door opened, Astarra looked away from me and toward the hunter testing the bridge.
Within the bond, I can lie.
My cut palm went cold against my chest.
“And you tell me now?”
I choose to.
She'd handed me a reason to doubt every word after this one.
Another crack crossed the outer ward.
“Why me?”
You were falling and still reached for people you couldn’t save. You found your dead teacher and kept moving. You refuse helpless death with more than words.
Kade lay beneath the split arch. Maren was under the cottage. Sera had been alive when the earth tore us apart.
“You need that refusal.”
I need a living will strong enough to carry me beyond these bands. You need power, a path, and time.
“You leave. I live.”
Yes.
The hunter struck the threshold. One iron circle split with a flash that left a black scar across the door.
I wanted a third choice. The chamber gave me a prisoner and the thing coming across the bridge.
“My life joined to your power,” I said. “Your presence carried in me until death severs it. You leave this prison through the bond, and you don’t command or possess me.”
Agreed.
“Then I consent.”
Every amber band broke at once.
The sound entered through my bones. Light ripped free of the platform, crossed the chamber in a single impossible distance, and struck my bloody palm.
I’d thought opening the door let Astarra flow through me. That had been only breath beneath a keyhole.
This was the whole storm.
Heat drove up my arm. My teeth slammed together. I fell onto one shoulder as pressure forced itself behind my breastbone and spread through every rib. Something vast narrowed without becoming small, pouring through the cut in my palm while my body discovered it hadn’t been built as a doorway.
I tried to pull my hand closed.
Don’t resist the passage.
Easy counsel from the thing passing through me.
My left hand seized. The cut opened wider without bleeding. Black lines pushed outward beneath the skin of my palm, branching around the wound and climbing the inside of my wrist. Each line burned its own path. By the time they reached halfway to my elbow, I could no longer tell whether the pain belonged to the mark or the arm containing it.
The hunter forced its head through the broken outer circle.
I reached for Kade's sword and missed.
Amber light vanished from the chamber. The platform stood empty. The carved rings along the walls cracked, one after another, and the pressure that had filled the prison collapsed inward through my palm.
A second heartbeat landed inside mine.
I vomited between my hands.
No strength rose in triumph. No perfect knowledge appeared. My skin felt badly fitted, my lungs burned, and Kade's sword remained an arm's length beyond fingers too unsteady to close.
But the outer ward blazed behind me.
The hunter recoiled from the empty chamber as if Astarra's departure had turned every remaining seal outward. Light struck its plated head and drove it back across the bridge. Stone broke under its weight. The dark swallowed it before I heard an impact.
I crawled to the sword. Its faint blue enchantment still belonged only to the steel, worn and weakening. When my marked palm finally closed around the grip, a different current answered through me, deep, dark, and too large for my shaking hand.
I let it go before it could become another mistake.
“Is it done?”
The voice came from nowhere in the chamber.
It came from inside me.
Yes.
I looked toward the empty platform. “Where now?”
Shadowmaw.
“A cheerful name.”
It’s the cavern system beyond the western passage. I felt its creatures for centuries through the prison walls. The upper ways are crushed. The lower tunnels continue toward open air.
“And you know the route?”
I know where things move, feed, gather, and die. I know which way the tunnels deepen. Your eyes and feet remain your responsibility.
I wrapped my cut palm with a strip torn from my jerkin and stood using Kade's sword as a brace. Behind the empty platform, one of the broken rings had exposed a narrow opening into raw limestone. Cold air moved through it carrying water, mineral rot, and something faintly sweet.
Silk.
I stepped out of the dead prison and into Shadowmaw.
A pale strand crossed the passage at throat height.