His hair was a chaotic thicket of gray and white, sticking up in every direction, and his eyes were wide, bloodshot, and rimmed with a madness born of isolation. Dust coated his skin like a second layer of clothing.
He looked like a ghost dragged up from the earth.
I turned back to the man in the corner, my gaze snagging on the familiar geometry of his face beneath the layers of grime.
The distinctive, hooked slope of his nose. The heavy brow now shadowed by a shaggy thicket of graying hair.
“Who are you?”
He let out a rattling cough, his hand, little more than skin stretching over trembling bone, coming up to wipe his mouth.
“Meliory,” he croaked. “Apologies. It has been a lifetime since I have used my voice for anything other than screaming.”
I gaped at him, the world tilting. The posters in Leona’s infirmary flashed before my eyes—the charcoal sketches of a brilliant healer who had vanished into the shadows decades ago.
“You are alive,” I whispered, my voice trembling with shock. “They said you were gone.”
“I was stolen,” he said, his eyes momentarily clearing as he looked at me.
I thought of the High Court’s impossible accuracy—the way their soldiers navigated the shifting obsidian corridors of Umbral as if they were walking through their own gardens.
“You guided them,” I said quietly, the weight of the realization making my stomach turn.
A mix of agony and shame flooded his features. He gave a single, jerky nod, the movement causing his chains to clink rhythmically. “Not by my own will, but yes, I guided the vine.”
His hair was a matted, shaggy thicket that shadowed his face, but as he tilted his head, a memory fractured in my mind. The dream. The collapsing battlefield. The man who had stood amidst the fire and told me to wake up.
“You warned me,” I whispered. “You visited me while I slept. You told me they were coming for me before I even knew the High Court had breached the gate.”
His dry lips pursed. “I did.”
“Why?” I pressed, resting my bound hands against my knees. “You knew I was a fugitive. You knew I was committing crimes against the High Court just by being near Talon. You could have stayed silent and let them take me.”
Meliory let out a dry scoff that shook his skeletal frame. “I have rotted in this hole for a lifetime, child, but the ink on my skin does not fade with the light. Talon is still my Master. I will not let those silver-clad butchers use my soul as a map to hurt him. Or you.”
I looked at my own bound wrists, the skin chafed raw by the iron, and then back at his wasted form. He was a ghost of the man on the posters, but the fire in his eyes was real.
“I am going to help you. I am going to get us both out of here.”
Meliory let out a wheezing laugh. “I appreciate the effort, child. Truly. But there is no way out. No weapon in this realm can pierce walls built to starve the spirit.”
I looked around the barren cell, searching for a weapon, a tool—anything at all. “We do not need a weapon. We just need to outsmart them.”
The stone offered nothing. No cracks, no loose mortar, not even a stubborn weed daring to grow between the seams.
My gaze snapped back to the narrow gap in the wall.
“Do you have a leaf?” I asked suddenly.
Meliory blinked in confusion.
“Green,” I added. “Anything alive.”
Slowly, he reached down and tugged at the ragged sock on his foot. From within the fabric he withdrew a single browned leaf, curled and brittle with age.
“I have kept this,” he said quietly. “Though I doubt it still lives.”
“That will do.”