The dead follow. Crawling up through the floor behind us, reaching through gaps in the walls, their skeletal fingers grasping at our clothes, our hair, our skin. The Ashwalker fights as we move—striking, cutting, destroying anything that gets too close—while I pour what little power I have into the whispers, trying to calm them, trying to make them understand that we’re not their enemies.
It doesn’t work. The presence controlling them is too vast, too hungry. It doesn’t care about my good intentions.
It only cares about being heard.
We burst through a final doorway and into a larger chamber—one of the junction points where multiple tunnels meet. The ceiling is higher here, the walls more stable. The dead emerge slower, their bodies having to crawl further to reach us.
The Ashwalker slams the door behind us and jams his blade through the mechanism, wedging it shut. It won’t hold for long, but it’ll buy us a moment.
He turns to face me. His body heaves with exertion. His blade is still buried in the door, which means he’s unarmed.
We stare at each other in the dim glow of the luminescent earth.
“Whatever is waking beneath this city,” he says, his voice rough with exertion, “neither of us can stop it alone.”
I nod. My own breath is ragged, my body screaming with exhaustion.
“No.” I meet his eyes—those cold, ash-gray eyes that hold more pain than I expected to find there. “We can’t.”
Behind the barricaded door, the dead begin to pound. Skeletal fists striking stone, bone shattering against metal, the rhythm of a thousand hands demanding entry.
The Ashwalker extends his hand. Not to grab me this time. An offer. A choice.
“The Ash Pits.” His palm faces upward, scarred and open. “If there’s a mass grave stirring beneath the city, it’ll be connected to what we burn above ground. We can seal it. Cut off the flow.”
“You want to burn more of them?”
“I want to stop whatever’s pulling them up.” His hand remains extended, steady despite the chaos, despite the pounding on the door, despite everything.
I look at his hand. Scarred palm. Calloused fingers. The hand of a man who has burned thousands of bodies without letting them speak.
The hand of my enemy.
I take it.
His grip closes around mine—solid, surprisingly gentle. He pulls me toward another exit, retrieving his blade from the door as we pass, and we plunge into the darkness.
Behind us, the dead break through. Their whispers follow us up through the tunnels, filling the air with the voices of the forgotten, the abandoned, the burned-without-rites.
And beneath our feet, deep in the heart of Blackreach, the vast and hungry presence stretches awake.
Waiting to be heard.
SEVEN
DROKHAR
The dead keep coming.
I’ve been fighting since the Undercroft collapsed behind us—cutting, burning, severing threads of animation as fast as I can reach them—but for every corpse I drop, three more drag themselves upright. The chamber is full of them now, shoulder to shoulder, their empty sockets fixed on the woman who stumbled out of the tunnels at my back.
Then Aradya’s voice cuts through the chaos.
“Be still.”
It’s barely a whisper. Barely audible over the screaming of the dead and the pounding of blood in my ears. But it carries power—harmonics that vibrate in my bones, frequencies that burrow into my skull with an ache I can’t shake.
“Be still and speak your truth.”