I stare at him, this man I’ve been taught to fear, and I see the question beneath the demand. He’s not hunting me. He’s not following orders from the Council. He heard the dead speak his name, and it shook him.
He wants to understand.
“They want to be heard.” I don’t know where the words come from. They rise from deeper than conscious thought, drawn out by the intensity of his gaze. “The dead you burn without rites. The soldiers dumped in mass graves, forgotten by everyone who should have mourned them.”
His expression doesn’t change. But his eyes do—a flicker of recognition, maybe guilt, passes through those ash-gray depths before he locks it away.
“That’s what mourning witches always say.” His voice is flat. “The dead deserve closure. The dead deserve voice. Meanwhile, the dead rise and kill and spread their grief until there’s no one left to mourn.”
“And burning them without letting them speak is better?” The anger surprises me. Cuts through the fear, the exhaustion,the guilt. “You think silence is mercy? You think erasing people before they can say goodbye iskindness?”
“I think it keeps the living alive.” He doesn’t raise his voice. Doesn’t need to. The conviction in his words is enough. “Which is more than your magic did for Ira Genn.”
The words hit like a blow. I step back, but there’s nowhere to go. My shoulders press against rough stone.
He’s right. He’s absolutely right, and I hate him for it.
“I didn’t know.” The anger drains out of me, leaving nothing but the hollow ache of guilt. “I’ve done that rite a hundred times. There was a darker current beneath the whispers—something more coercive, more final. I had always sensed it and always refused to surface it. Nothing like that has ever?—”
“The circumstances changed.” He studies me with those cold eyes, and I feel exposed. Stripped bare. “What?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know. The rite was normal. Kellan Venn started speaking through me, saying the things the dead usually say—apologies, regrets, unfinished words. Then his voice changed. Deepened. Became a chorus instead of a single soul.”
“A chorus.” His brow furrows.
“Hundreds of voices. Maybe thousands. Speaking in unison, using Kellan as a doorway.” I wrap my arms around myself, suddenly cold despite the heat radiating from the death warden’s body. “They talked about being dumped in pits. Covered with lime. Burned before anyone could mourn them.”
His fists tighten. A muscle twitches in his cheek.
“Mass graves.” The words are barely audible. “They were talking about mass graves.”
“Your mass graves.” I meet his gaze, holding it despite the fear coiling in my gut. “The ones you’ve burned for twenty years. The ones beneath this city, beneath every city in the Veillands, filled with soldiers who never got to say goodbye.”
The silence stretches between us. Thick and heavy, filled with truths neither of us wants to acknowledge.
He’s still staring at me. Still assessing. But the hostility in his posture has shifted—not softened, exactly, but changed. Redirected. He’s not looking at me like a threat anymore.
He’s looking at me like a puzzle he needs to solve.
“The presence that spoke through you.” He speaks slowly, choosing his words. “It called itself a king. A gravetide.”
I nod. “I heard that too. Before—” I stop. Swallow hard. “Before Ira died.”
Before I can say anything else, the floor trembles.
A vibration runs through the stone beneath my feet, subtle at first, then growing. The walls shudder. Dust sifts from the ceiling, catching in the faint witch-light that seeps through the open doorway.
The Ashwalker’s hand moves to his blade, fingers curling around the hilt. “What is that?”
“I don’t?—”
The whispers start.
Not from a corpse this time. Not from a single source I can identify. They pour from the walls themselves, from the ceiling, from the very stones of the Undercroft—a chorus of voices rising from the depths, speaking words I can’t quite make out.
The chamber grows colder. The temperature drops so fast my breath clouds in front of my face, white wisps against the darkness.
No. Not now. Not here.