And at its feet, crumpled on ground stained with centuries of blood, lies Aradya.
She’s unconscious. Pale. Her hair spreads across the soil like spilled ink, and her bare feet are dirty from the descent. The mark on her collarbone glows faintly, responding to my presence, but her eyes don’t open. Her hands don’t move. She looks fragile here—smaller than she seemed in my quarters, smaller than she seemed when she commanded an army of revenants to speak their truths. Breakable in a way that makes my grip tighten on my blade.
The brand over my heart burns hotter.
She’s alive.
I can feel it through the brand—not her thoughts, not her emotions, but her presence. The steady pulse of her heartbeat matching mine. The certainty of her existence pressing against my awareness like a hand on my shoulder.
Alive, but trapped. In a realm where the living forget themselves, where starvation and exhaustion become weapons, where death is permanent. If I can’t get her out?—
I stop at the edge of the throne’s shadow.
“You came.”
The voice emerges from everywhere at once—from the corpses in the field, from the weapons in the ground, from the very air that refuses to carry sound properly. A thousand mouths open across the battlefield, speaking as one, their harmonized words rattling my bones.
The Gravetide King rises from its throne.
Fifteen feet of fused soldiers, armor grown into flesh, faces embedded in its torso and arms and back. Every victim it has absorbed over three centuries is still partially visible, their features surfacing and submerging in the composite body like drowning swimmers. Its head is a nightmare of merged officers—jaws overlapping, eyes of different colors blinking at different times, a crown of broken sword blades fused to its skull.
“I wasn’t certain you would come.” The King descends from its throne, each step sending tremors through the blood-soaked ground. “Men like you usually run from what they’ve done. Hide behind duty and necessity. Tell themselves the dead don’t matter.”
“I came for her.” I don’t look at the King. I’m looking at Aradya, at the faint rise and fall of her breathing, at the mark that glows on her skin in answer to mine. “Release her, and I’ll hear whatever you want to say.”
“Such a generous offer.” The King circles me, its composite body flowing around itself in ways that shouldn’t be possible, faces appearing and disappearing as it moves. “But I’m afraid I need more than your attention, Ashwalker. I need your blood. Your guilt. Your acceptance that what you’ve done is wrong.”
“I know it’s wrong.”
The admission costs me nothing. Not anymore. Not after hearing Torval’s forgiveness through Aradya’s lips. Not after watching soldiers find peace on the battlefield above, their final words finally spoken after centuries of silence.
“I’ve known for years.” I face the King now, meeting its dull silver eyes with my own ash-colored gaze. “Every pyre I lit without rites. Every name I didn’t record. Every body I reduced to ash before anyone could say goodbye. I knew. I did it anyway, because the alternative was letting the dead rise and devour the living.”
“A convenient excuse.”
“A terrible truth.” I take a step forward, my blade still drawn but held low. “You think I enjoyed it? You think I wanted to spend my life silencing grief because no one else would do the job? I’m not a monster who delights in burning the dead. I’m a man who does what’s necessary to protect the living. And if that makes me guilty of crimes against the forgotten—” I raise my blade, not to attack but to offer. “Then judge me. But let her go first.”
The King laughs.
THIRTY-TWO
DROKHAR
The sound echoes across the battlefield, sending ripples through the corpse-filled plain. The waiting soldiers sway as one, a wave of dead flesh responding to their master’s amusement.
“You don’t understand, Ashwalker.” The King gestures toward Aradya’s unconscious form with a hand made of fused soldiers. “She’s not my prisoner. She’s my anchor. As long as she exists in my realm, I can speak to the living world. As long as she dreams of the dead, I can reach through her dreams.”
The King’s many mouths curve into identical smiles.
“I’m not keeping her because I want revenge. I’m keeping her because she’s the key to everything I’ve ever wanted.”
The words hit me like a blade between the ribs. I knew the King wanted her as a channel, a voice. But an anchor—a permanent tie to the living world, allowing it to extend its influence beyond this battlefield, to reach into Blackreach and beyond?—
That’s not vengeance. That’s conquest.
“Then take me instead.”
The words leave my mouth before I’ve fully thought them through. The King goes still, its thousand faces frozen in variousstages of surprise. Even the waiting soldiers stop swaying, their empty eye sockets fixed on the man who has burned more of their kind than any other death warden in Blackreach’s history.