I step forward. My boot crunches on bone fragments that litter the cavern floor—fragments of the passage we destroyed in our escape, pieces of the realm we damaged by refusing to submit.
“I’m not here to run.” My voice echoes in the stillness. “I’m here to give your soldiers what you’ve denied them.”
Denied them? The laughter that follows is horrible—a thousand voices, all of them hollow, all of them hungry. I gave them purpose. I gave them unity. I gave them the strength to demand the acknowledgment they deserve.
“You gave them a cage.” I take another step. Then another. Drokhar moves beside me, his blade raised, his body steady. “You gave them a king who speaks for them instead of lettingthem speak for themselves. That’s not acknowledgment. That’s another kind of silence.”
The ranks of the dead shift. I can feel their attention focusing on me—not the King’s attention, but theirs. Individual souls still trapped inside the collective. Individual griefs still burning beneath the surface of the entity that absorbed them.
They’re listening.
“Last chance to run.” Drokhar’s breath ghosts across my ear.
I turn in his arms. Cup his scarred face in both hands. Rise on my toes to press my mouth to his—a kiss that says everything I can’t find words for. Gratitude. Terror. A love that has no business existing between a mourning witch and the man who should have burned her.
He answers with the same desperate intensity. One hand fists in my hair while the other pulls me hard against him, crushing our brands between us. His tongue traces the seam of my lips, demanding entry, and I give it willingly. For a moment—one perfect, impossible moment—we’re not standing at the threshold of a realm built from death. We’re just two people choosing each other in spite of everything.
The dead watch us. Hundreds of empty eyes tracking the way we cling to each other, the way our bodies press close despite the horror surrounding us.
Touching. The King’s voice drips with contempt. But love won’t save you here, mourning witch. Love is another form of grief waiting to happen.
I pull back from the kiss. Square my shoulders. Face the rift in reality with the knowledge that my mate stands beside me, his blade drawn, anchoring me to the world of the living.
“You’re wrong.” I keep my words steady. The fear is still there—it will always be there—but it’s not in control anymore. “Love isn’t grief waiting to happen. Love is the reason grief matters. The reason farewells need to be spoken. The reason the deaddeserve closure.” I take a breath. “Your soldiers loved people. They wanted to say goodbye to people. And you’ve spent three hundred years denying them that because you were too focused on vengeance to remember what grief is truly for.”
The ranks of the dead shiver. Not from the King’s command. From recognition. From the memory of what they lost.
“No running.” I reach for Drokhar’s hand. His fingers close around mine, rough and scarred and steadier than anything has a right to be. “Not anymore.”
The dead part before us as we approach the tear in reality. The rift in the Veil grows wider, its light shifting from red to orange to pale gold. Beyond it lies the Battlefield Beyond the Veil—endless fields of broken weapons and rotting bodies, a sky that bleeds like an open wound, and a throne built from fused soldiers that has waited three centuries for this moment.
Behind us, the city continues to burn. The dead continue to rise. The Council continues to argue about policy and politics and all the comfortable lies they’ve told themselves for centuries.
But ahead of us lies the only path that matters.
The Gravetide King.
And the chance—the desperate, impossible chance—to give every soldier in that realm the closure they’ve been denied for three hundred years.
I squeeze Drokhar’s hand.
We step through the Veil.
The dead follow.
THIRTY-SEVEN
DROKHAR
The Battlefield Beyond the Veil has changed.
When we escaped, the realm held order—corpses arranged in ranks, weapons planted in the blood-soaked earth like memorials, a terrible beauty to the preservation of death. The King’s soldiers stood in formations that stretched to every horizon, waiting for commands from an entity that had been collecting them for three centuries.
Now there’s chaos.
Soldiers wander the blood-red plains in aimless clusters, their weapons dragging, their empty eye sockets searching for faces they can’t remember. Some of them collide with each other and keep walking, as if they’ve forgotten what bodies are for. Others stand frozen mid-step, trapped in loops of memory they can’t escape—reliving their deaths, reliving their battles, reliving moments that ended before they were ready.
The order that defined this place is gone. Where before the dead moved in formation, responding to the King’s will like fingers on a hand, now they drift. Wander. Search for purpose that no longer exists.