Then the dead pull harder, and my hand slips from his grasp.
The last thing I see is Drokhar’s face—those ash-colored eyes wide with terror, his blade raised against enemies he can’t reach, the brand over his heart blazing with desperate light through his half-buckled armor.
The last thing I hear is the King’s voice, echoing through my skull and through the realm of the dead and through every grave beneath Blackreach:
Come for her,Ashwalker. I’ll be waiting.
Then darkness swallows me whole, and I feel the pull of my mate’s presence growing distant as I descend into the depths where the forgotten dead have been gathering for centuries.
The King has taken me.
And Drokhar is going to follow.
That, I realize as consciousness fades, was the plan all along.
THIRTY-ONE
DROKHAR
Ifollow her into the dark.
The passage the King’s soldiers opened leads down through layers of stone and soil, past the foundations of buildings that were old when Blackreach was young. The walls are packed earth at first, then bedrock, then material that isn’t rock at all—compressed remains, bones fused into the very structure of the descent. Mass graves. I’m crawling down through the bodies of soldiers who died before my grandfather was born.
My blade is drawn. The enchanted iron casts no light, but the mark does—blazing beneath my armor, bright enough to illuminate the narrow passage in pulses that match my heartbeat. Every pulse shows me another few feet of descent. Every pulse tells me exactly where Aradya is.
Twenty feet ahead.
Fifty.
A hundred.
Deeper and deeper into the realm of the forgotten dead.
The passage widens. The packed earth gives way to open space, and I stumble out onto ground that squelches beneath my boots—saturated with old blood that has never dried, that willnever dry, because this place exists outside the normal rules of decay and ending.
The Battlefield Beyond the Veil stretches before me like a nightmare given form.
Endless fields of corpses frozen in their death-poses, reaching toward horizons that shimmer red beneath a sky the color of dried blood. Broken weapons rise from the earth like gravestones—swords and spears and axes planted in soil that has drunk the last breaths of a thousand armies. The stench is indescribable: old death preserved by magic that refuses to let anything truly end, the accumulated rot of centuries held in suspension.
I’ve burned battlefields. Tended the pyres that consumed the aftermath of wars that scarred the Veillands for generations. I thought I understood what mass death looked like.
I was wrong.
This isn’t a battlefield—it’s a graveyard that refuses to admit what it is. Every corpse here died without rites. Without names. Without anyone to mourn them. They were dumped in pits and covered with lime, their identities erased, their final words unspoken. And now they wait in this crimson twilight, trapped in the moment of their ending, unable to move on because no one ever gave them permission to rest.
Flags from a dozen different armies hang limp in air that doesn’t move. I recognize some of the insignias—border skirmishers, heavy infantry, cavalry units that were disbanded before I was born. Others are older, stranger, belonging to conflicts that predated Blackreach itself. All of them forgotten. All of them meaningless now.
The dead stand in ranks among the corpses. Soldiers who have been waiting for orders that will never come, fighting battles that ended before their grandchildren were born. They turn as I pass, their empty eye sockets tracking my movement,but they don’t attack. Not yet. They’re waiting for their King’s command.
I keep walking.
The mark pulls me forward, that compass-needle awareness guiding me toward Aradya through a landscape that tries to confuse, to disorient, to make me forget why I came. Time moves strangely here—I see a distant sword swing before I hear the clash of metal, sound arriving late like an echo that precedes its source. The ground shifts beneath my feet, trenches appearing and disappearing, fortifications rising and crumbling in the span of heartbeats.
But the mark doesn’t waver. She’s ahead of me. Always ahead.
The Throne of Grief materializes out of the crimson haze like a tumor growing from the battlefield’s heart.
It’s built from fused weapons and merged corpses—a grotesque seat rising from a mound of the honored dead. Swords jut from its arms like armrests. Skulls form its backrest, their jaws open in silent screams. The whole structure pulses with death magic so concentrated I can feel it pressing against my resistance, testing the immunity I’ve built over years of exposure.