“What?”
I remember the story. Fragments of it, overheard in whispered conversations between death wardens in the streets. The Ashwalker’s brother, killed in the last major war. The grave that was sealed before Drokhar could reach it. The pyre that burned before he could say goodbye.
Torval is among us now. The King’s voice drops to a caress. One of thousands who make up our collective. He has been waiting decades for the chance to speak to his brother.
My stomach turns.
“You’re using his grief as a weapon.”
We are giving him what he was denied. The King’s voice carries no apology. The chance to finish what was interrupted. The chance to say the words that have been building in his throat for longer than you’ve been alive.
The suppression wards flare again, the crack narrowing to a hairline fracture. The King’s voice grows distant, muffled, but its final words slip through with terrible clarity.
Tell him we offer absolution. Tell him if he comes to us willingly, we will spare the city.
A pause. The pressure in my skull builds to a crescendo.
Tell him his brother waits among us. And his brother has so much to say.
The wards slam shut.
The King’s voice vanishes, leaving me alone in the silence of my iron cage with a message I can’t deliver and a truth I wish I didn’t know.
Drokhar’s brother is part of the Gravetide King.
Drokhar’s brother has been waiting decades to speak to him.
And the King is going to use that grief to drag the Ashwalker into its realm, whether I warn him or not.
I press my hands against the mark beneath my collarbone, feeling it pulse in time with a heartbeat somewhere above ground. He’s still up there. Still fighting. Still believing he can protect me from the forces gathering against us both.
He doesn’t know what’s coming.
He doesn’t know that the King holds his brother’s spirit like a card up its sleeve, ready to play at the moment it will hurt the most.
And I’m trapped in an iron box, surrounded by wards designed to silence me, with no way to warn him that the dead don’t want blood.
They want him.
Specifically, personally, inevitably.
The Gravetide King has been building toward this moment for centuries. Every pyre Drokhar lit. Every grave he sealed. Every name he failed to record. It was all feeding the entity that now demands his surrender as the price of peace.
And his brother—the brother he never got to mourn, the brother whose grave was burned before he could say goodbye—is part of the trap.
I curl onto my side in the narrow sarcophagus, pressing my forehead against the cold iron bars. The mark throbs beneath my ribs, a steady pulse of heat that tells me exactly where Drokhar is even though I can’t see him, can’t hear him, can’t do anything but lie here and wait for a judgment that might end with fire.
I have to warn him.
The thought circles in my head, relentless and desperate and useless.
I have to find a way out of this cage. I have to tell him what the King said. I have to?—
The mark intensifies.
Not with heat this time. With awareness. A pull at the edge of my consciousness, stronger than before, insistent in a way that makes my breath catch.
He’s coming.