My throat is dry. My hands are shaking. The power coursing through me feels like fire and ice and the weight of every funeral I’ve ever attended, all at once.
“Who are you?” The words come out as a rasp, barely audible even in the silence of the cell. “What do you want?”
I am theGravetideKing. The voice wraps around me, intimate and terrible. I am every soldier denied a funeral. Every name forgotten. Every farewell unspoken. Every ending that was stolen before it could be complete.
A pause. The pressure in my skull builds, and I feel the King’s attention focusing on me—a weight vast enough to crush mountains, now concentrated on a single mourning witch in an iron cage.
And I want what you want, mourning witch. I want the dead to find peace.
“Then why are you raising them?” The words tear out of me, fueled by days of silence and terror and the desperate need to understand. “Why are you attacking the city? If you want peace?—”
Because peace requires payment. The King’s voice hardens. TheAshwalkerhas burned ten thousand bodies without letting them speak. The Council has ordered ten thousand more silenced before their time. The debt is vast, mourning witch—and it must be paid in blood.
The suppression wards flare.
The crack in my containment slams shut with force enough to knock me backward against the iron bars. My magic drains away as quickly as it returned, leaving me gasping and empty and cold.
But the King’s voice doesn’t stop. Quieter now, muffled by the wards, but still present. Still speaking.
TheAshwalkerhas silenced the dead since before you were born. He has fed me with every pyre he lit without rites. He has made me stronger with every name he failed to record, every farewell he cut short, every grief he smothered before it could be expressed.
I press my hands against my ears, but it doesn’t help. The voice isn’t coming from outside. It’s resonating in the place where my magic lives—the hollow space that has been silent since the suppression chains closed around my wrists.
He doesn’t deserve your protection, mourning witch. He doesn’t deserve the mark that burns in you.
“You don’t get to decide that.” The words come out stronger than I expect, echoing off the iron bars of my prison. “The mark isn’t yours to judge.”
No, the King agrees. It is not. But the dead have waited centuries for justice. We will not wait longer because an orc’s magic claims our only channel.
My stomach drops.
Our only channel.
The King doesn’t want to kill me. It never wanted to kill me. It wants to use me—to make me its permanent voice in the living world, a bridge through which it can force every city built on mass graves to hear the demands of the forgotten dead.
“I won’t serve you.” My hands curl into fists, nails biting into palms still tender from the blood-price I paid in the Undercroft. “I speak for the dead because they deserve closure. Not because I want to be a weapon.”
You already are a weapon. The King’s voice softens. Almost gentle. Almost kind. You have been a weapon since the day your power manifested. The question is not whether you will be wielded—only by whom.
The words land with the force of a blow. Because the King is right. I’ve spent my entire life being used—by grieving families who paid in blood and memory, by the dead who demanded voice whether I was willing or not, by a gift I never asked for and can never escape.
I am a conduit. A channel. A tool.
The Gravetide King is offering me the same thing the living have always offered: the chance to be useful. The chance to matter. The chance to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves.
The only difference is the scale.
No. That’s not the only difference.
SEVENTEEN
ARADYA
The King doesn’t want closure. It wants vengeance. It wants to drown the living in the grief they tried to ignore, to force them to feel every ounce of suffering they’ve been avoiding for centuries.
That’s not peace. That’s a different kind of war.
“The dead I speak for choose to be heard.” I straighten against the bars. “They ask for my help. They trust me to carry their words. You’re not asking, are you? You’re demanding.”