But I can’t stop. The silence presses in, and the only anchor I have is the pull of a mating mark I never asked for, leading to a man I shouldn’t want.
Time blurs.
Guards patrol the corridors at irregular intervals, their footsteps echoing off the stone. They don’t look at me. Superstition says the condemned can curse you with a glance, and the guards have been working these cells long enough to believe it. They slide trays of food through a narrow slot at the base of my sarcophagus—thin gruel, stale bread, water that tastes of iron—then move on without a word.
I eat mechanically. Not from hunger, but from the dim awareness that my body needs fuel if I’m going to survive long enough to be burned.
The thought should be funny. It isn’t.
I count the meals. Three so far, which means at least a day has passed. Maybe more. The witch-lights don’t dim or brighten to mark the hours, and my body’s rhythms have been disrupted by the wards. I sleep in fits and starts, waking to the same unchanging darkness, the same crushing silence, the same thousand names scratched into the walls.
The mark holds steady through it all. A beacon. A reminder.
He’s still up there. Still fighting.
I don’t know if that comforts me or terrifies me.
SIXTEEN
ARADYA
Sometime during what might be the second night—or the third, or the fourth—the voices change.
Not the guards. Not the distant rumble of the city above. The dead.
They’re still muffled, still pressed against the wards that cage me. But now their chaos has shifted. Where before they screamed and pleaded and wept in a cacophony of individual grief, now they speak in unison. Hundreds of voices harmonizing into a single message that vibrates through the suppression wards and settles into my bones.
Mourning witch. Hear us.
I sit up so fast my skull nearly cracks against the iron bars above me. Pain lances through my forehead, but I barely notice. The voices are clear. Clearer than they should be with the wards at full strength.
We are the forgotten. The dumped. The burned without rites.
My hands press flat against the sides of my sarcophagus, fingers splayed, searching for the source of the sound. The runes carved into the iron still glow with suppressive power. The wards haven’t failed.
But the King is pushing through them anyway.
We are the foundation this city was built upon. We have waited centuries for a voice.
The words resonate with a vastness that makes my ribs ache. Every soldier who died without rites in the Veillands’ endless wars, united by a consciousness that has been growing in the darkness beneath Blackreach for longer than the city has existed.
The Gravetide King.
I knew it would find me. Knew it the moment those corpses in the streets began chanting my name. The King wants me as its channel—its permanent voice in the living world—and prison wards built by humans were never going to keep it out forever.
The suppression flickers.
For one heartbeat—two—three—the wards weaken. A crack in the containment, hairline-thin but enough.
My magic surges back to life.
I gasp at the sensation. Heat floods through veins that have been cold for days, power rushing back like blood returning to a limb that fell asleep. The dead press against my consciousness, thousands of voices pouring through the gap in the wards, and for a moment I can hear them all—the pleas, the confessions, the accumulated grief of centuries demanding acknowledgment.
We don’t want to destroy. The chorus resolves into a single voice, vast and ancient and hungry. We want to be remembered. We want to speak our final truths. We want?—
The voice deepens. Becomes singular. Becomes the Gravetide King itself, speaking directly into the hollow space behind my eyes.
—we want theAshwalkerto answer for what he’s done.