Sevik’s teeth grind audibly. Grond snarls a curse under his breath. Meren’s eyes promise retribution.
But Thorne’s logic is irrefutable, and they all know it.
“Go.” Sevik’s word is a curse. “But understand this, witch—if you survive, if you manage to stop this rising, you still face trial. The Council’s judgment is merely postponed.”
I nod. I don’t bother pointing out that if I fail, there won’t be a Council left to pass judgment on anyone.
The streets are worsethan before.
In the time we spent arguing with the Council, the King has intensified its assault. Bodies pour from every crack and crevice—not in the organized ranks we saw in its realm, but in desperate waves, corpses driven by hunger and grief and the relentless need to be heard.
The pyres in the Ash Pits burn brighter than I’ve ever seen them. Death wardens work in shifts, feeding bodies to flamesthat can’t consume them fast enough. For every corpse they destroy, two more rise from graves they haven’t reached yet.
We move through a city choking on its own dead, Drokhar’s blade carving a path while I whisper what comfort I can to the spirits that pause to listen. Some of them respond—soldiers who remember what orders sounded like, civilians who still recognize the voice of authority. But more and more slip past my influence, driven by a will stronger than anything I can match.
The King is everywhere now. In the whispers that follow us through the streets. In the faces of the dead that turn to track our movement. In the pressure building behind my eyes, constant and unrelenting, waiting for the moment my defenses finally give.
They’re mine, mourning witch. Every one of them. And soon, you will be too.
The brand on my collarbone burns in response—not with pain, but with denial. Drokhar’s location is a fixed point in my consciousness, the one thing that remains steady while everything else descends into chaos.
“The passage we escaped through.” He guides me around a knot of revenants clustered around a collapsed building, their hands clawing at rubble that buried a body they want. “It should still be open enough to enter, if not to escape.”
“The King will be waiting.”
“I know.”
His hand finds the small of my back again, pressing me closer as we duck into an alley that leads toward the depths beneath the city. The touch shouldn’t be comforting—we’re walking toward the thing that wants to consume me, toward a realm where the dead outnumber the living a thousandfold—but it is. His palm against my spine. His body between me and the worst of the chaos.
The entrance to the Undercroft yawns before us—a crack in the foundation of an old building, barely wide enough for Drokhar to squeeze through. The stones around it bear the marks of old magic—wards that were meant to keep things in, not out. Someone built this entrance deliberately. Someone who needed quick access to the depths beneath Blackreach.
I don’t want to know who. I don’t want to think about how many mourning witches used this passage before me, fleeing Council justice or seeking the amplified power that comes from proximity to mass graves. How many of them made it out again?
The suppression wards of the Cinder Hall fade as we descend, replaced by the ambient whispers that haunt every shadow in Blackreach.
The dead know we’re coming.
Mourning witch. The King’s voice slides through my consciousness, no longer blocked by ward or stone. You return to me.
I don’t answer. My magic coils inside me, waiting, building toward the confrontation I can feel approaching with every step.
The passages narrow as we go deeper. Witch-lights float at irregular intervals—old magic, maintained by generations of women who needed to work in the dark. They respond to me, brightening as I pass, illuminating walls that shift from worked stone to raw earth to ancient bone. Compressed remains. The dead forming the very structure around us. The Undercroft exists in the space between the living city and the corpses it was built on. Every step takes us closer to that boundary.
Every step takes us closer to the King.
“There.” Drokhar’s murmur is barely audible. His blade catches the faint glow of the brands on our collarbones, reflecting light that shouldn’t exist in this darkness.
Ahead, the tunnel opens into a cavern. And at the cavern’s center, where the passage we escaped through once stood, a riftruns through reality itself—a tear in the Veil that pulses with the blood-red light of the Battlefield Beyond.
The dead stand in ranks around it. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Not attacking, not advancing. Watching. Waiting. Soldiers in rusted armor, their faces frozen in the expressions they wore at death. Civilians in burial clothes, their hands clasped in the positions someone arranged them in before sealing their coffins. Children—gods, there are children—their eyes empty and patient.
Bearing witness to what comes next.
Welcome home, mourning witch.
The King’s voice echoes from every dead throat simultaneously. A chorus of the forgotten, the silenced, the denied. Three hundred years of accumulated grief given terrible voice.
Did you think running would save you? Did you think theAshwalker’smark could protect you forever? You belong to me. You have always belonged to me. Every witch who speaks for the dead is mine eventually.