Her brow furrows. “You want to burn more of them?”
“I want to stop whatever’s dragging them up.”
I grab her wrist.
Her skin is cold against my palm. Colder than the underground air should make it. Colder than anything living should be. She’s been drawing on her own life force to fuel her magic, spending herself to buy us seconds we barely used.
Her pulse flutters beneath my fingers. Rapid. Thready. The heartbeat of someone who’s pushed past the edge of collapse and kept going anyway.
She’ll kill herself if she tries that again.
The thought brings an unfamiliar twist behind my ribs. Not tactical concern. Not the cold calculation of asset preservation that I’ve used to justify a thousand difficult decisions.
An actual, physical reaction to the idea of her dying.
I don’t have time to examine it.
“Run now.” I drag her toward the far exit—the one leading up, toward the surface, toward the Ash Pits and whatever passes for safety in a city built on graves. “Argue later.”
She doesn’t argue. For once in what I suspect is a lifetime of stubborn defiance, she lets herself be pulled.
We run.
The dead follow.
EIGHT
DROKHAR
The corridor ahead slopes upward, packed earth giving way to stone as we leave the deepest levels of the Undercroft behind. The witch-lights that once illuminated these passages have gone dark—extinguished by the presence that woke the dead, or simply overwhelmed by the death magic saturating the air. We navigate by the faint glow of my blade and the luminescence rising from the earth itself—an eerie green light that casts wrong shadows on the walls.
Corpses claw through the floor behind us. Skeletal hands reach through fissures in the walls, grasping at our clothes, our hair, our skin. The whispers follow.
I fight as we move, cutting down anything that gets too close. My free hand stays locked around her wrist. Her fingers have curled around mine—not pulling away, not fighting the grip, but holding on like I’m the only solid thing in a world that’s coming apart.
A corpse lunges from a side passage. I take its arm at the elbow, its head at the neck. Aradya makes a sound behind me. Not a scream. A sharp intake of breath.
She channels the dead. She doesn’t destroy them.
She’s seeing it now. The violence. The brutality. The necessity that becomes its own kind of cruelty when you stop letting yourself question it.
“Keep your eyes forward.” My voice comes out rougher than I intend. “Keep moving.”
She doesn’t obey. Her gaze fixes on my blade as I carve through another corpse—watching the enchanted iron sever whatever she sees with her witch-sight. The threads of animation. The bonds of unfinished grief.
“They’re in pain.” Her voice is hoarse, barely audible over the whispers. “Angry because they’re in pain.”
“They’re trying to kill us.”
“Because no one else will listen.”
I don’t have an answer for that. I don’t have an answer for any of this—the corpses screaming my name, the witch who speaks for them, the growing certainty that everything I’ve built my life around might be the very thing that created this nightmare.
So I do what I’ve always done.
I keep moving.
I keep fighting.