Burrowed into the familiar covers of her bunk at the Keep, Wyn should have gotten the best night of sleep she’d gotten in weeks. Even the impending encounter with Nerophax—the clock was set; they knew the outer limits of the timeline, if not the details—should not have impeded her rest. Even the lingering questions about the sword were only a minor annoyance as she crawled into her bed, exhausted from the long day but reassured that all at least seemed well at Dawnglory, that the Dragonhawk’s warden was alive and well, that the Eye had not returned to those lands—at least not yet.
Sleep should have been easy. It came easily. It clung to her like a lover’s embrace too long denied.
But, like the worst of scorned lovers, the comfort of sleep was no comfort at all.
The nightmares—old and new—came an hour after her head hit the pillow.
All she could smell was death, but it no longer affected her. Where once the bitterness of bile crowded her throat, threatening worse, there was only numbness. It had been too long and she’d grown used to the stench of death and dying, of blood and ichor and decay. In the corner hung a half-assembled abomination, strung on hooks, black dripping from a dangling coil of entrails. It was one of their half-abandoned projects, forgotten in the midst of others.
It had been a long time, but she no longer counted the hours, the days—the weeks. It was too hard when she could only number her existence by meager meals, experiments, and the trackless comings and goings of her tormentors.
Tormentors was too kind a term.
Pain spiraled through her arm as a finger twitched. For a second, she squeezed her eyes shut, pressing her cheek against the rough wood of the table she could not escape. She’d been lying there for days, she guessed. Even the gnawing hunger had passed, leaving her numb but for the pain. Maybe they had finally abandoned her, too, like the abomination in the corner. Maybe she would die here. Maybe it was punishment for the ice she’d thrown at them the moment before they’d broken her fingers.
There had been a fel-green tint to that ice that had left her queasy, but at least her magic had worked. She had been voiceless and powerless for so long that she’d feared magic lost to her. It wasn’t.
But what could it mean? If she died, would she become one of them?
Death would have been a mercy if not for that fear.
Voices echoed in the hall, bouncing along the stone walls and coming closer. She squeezed her eyes shut.
They’ve not forgotten after all.
The door creaked on hinges that needed oil, the sound of the wood and metal discordant, setting her teeth on edge. Tears threatened for a second—frustration, discomfort, even fear—but she would not let them come.
The one that still had a jaw had come today and he crouched down enough to grin at her and look into her eyes. If not for the gray-green pallor of his flesh and a gaping rent in his cheek that offered glimpses of ivory cheekbone, he might have passed for something still human—a horrible, twisted one, but still human.
“Still with us, Mistress Ilthyrii,” he purred softly in a voice that perhaps had once been comforting, maybe even alluring—assuming one had not grown used to his lies or his purpose. There was nothing but the promise of pain in that voice, in his gaze.
She just stared back at him. He did not deserve the satisfaction of a response, nor did he deserve to see her pain, pain she buried behind a blank mask.
He stroked a gloved hand over her hair as he straightened, smiling. “You’ve done far better than any of the others. It’s a good thing. A very good thing.”
“I’m so glad I could please you,” she rasped. Her throat was raw, ached. Her voice came as nothing more than a whisper, but at least it was a voice.
“A lie, but a pretty one. Soon enough, though, it will be truth.” He glanced back toward the door. “Amos, did you bring it?”
The Forsaken’s hand drifted to her back, scraped against the raw flesh there in a way that could be nothing other than deliberate. Pain splashed through her nerves like acid, molten, spreading down to the marrow of her bones and arcing like lightning.
The scream came without prayer of stopping it, like it had so many times before.
It was so cold, cold enough that she should have been numb, curled in on herself. But her hands throbbed as they had when they’d been broken—long ago, now, and long since healed. The memory, though, was sometimes too much.
The days were trackless, though she knew that many had passed since the night when her mother had told her to flee, to run, to be quick and silent and escape the men who had come to kill them all.
How long had it been since she’d failed?
Something buried in her bones twisted, pain splashing and running like hot oil. She grit her teeth, curled aching hands into fists. It felt like something was there that shouldn’t have been, but she couldn’t—
She heard screams somewhere beyond the room where she lay, screams that echoed off the walls. They sounded familiar, like something from long ago—something from before this. But it wasn’t possible.
They’re all dead and I am here.
She squeezed her eyes shut against the bitterness of tears.
She couldn’t let sleep come. Her tormentors could come back and catch her unawares and that was the last thing she—
What had happened the last time?
Bile rose in her throat and she swallowed it down hard. Don’t. Just don’t.
There were voices in the hall. The echoing screams seemed more distant now, as if they were a memory from a dream or perhaps something else—a hallucination? It was possible. Anything was possible.
She could just barely make out a few words from her captors. Something about phase one being completed. Something about what was required. Something about displeasure. Reassurances.
Darkness nibbled at the edges of her vision.
The door creaked open as it closed in around her.
The shouts of rough men echoed off stately walls and through the well-tended gardens, steel ringing off steel. The cries of the dying overpowered the sounds of battle, of rushing footsteps. Her older brother gripped her hand tightly as they ducked through a hidden door into those gardens, each breathing ragged, searching for an escape.
Her eyes lit on the gazebo where her mother stood, defiant and shouting. A man in dark clothing stood before her, blade bare, gaze steady.
“Never,” her mother said. “Tell him that the answer remains the same. I will never join him.”
Gone were the sounds of combat. Gone were the men that had killed her family all those years ago. The feeling of her brother’s hand around hers was gone.
The old blood stood on the stones, though, bright crimson as if it was fresh.
“You have a choice, sister.”
She spun, staring blankly at Atila.
“No,” she whispered. “No, I don’t.”
“You can chose a different way,” Atila said. She seemed washed-out, even in the darkness, her armor hanging heavy on a thin frame—too thin, frighteningly thin. “You don’t have to walk that path.”
“I have already made my choice.”
“It is the wrong one,” Atila said, stepping closer. “You know it’s the wrong one.”
Flesh seemed to flake away from her friend’s face. Wyn fell back a step, swallowing hard.
“I assure you, sister,” Atila said softly, her approach inexorable. “I am quite real.”
The scent of charnel and rotting flesh started to fill her nostrils. Wyn fell back another step. Atila’s form continued to melt, flesh falling away, hair falling away, armor hanging loser and loser on her form. Her lips blackened, her eyes began to bleed.
Wyn swallowed hard, knees buckling over the edge of the dry fountain. She barely caught herself before she toppled.
Atila was there. Her eyes were gone, now, replaced by a swirling mist of gray and silver and violet. Her teeth clacked against each other, bones of her jaw scraping against her skull, barely held in place by wisps of flesh, her voice echoing from somewhere far beyond the grave. She leaned in. “Make a different choice. Tread a different path. Join them and save the rest.”
Another voice boomed from somewhere beyond the gardens. “You will not be allowed to make the mistake your mother made.”
Atila reared back, began to shake. She stumbled back, one leg folding beneath her, then the next. Tremors wracked her and she seemed to both melt and fade into dust all at once. One hand reached out toward Wyn, toward her friend.
Wyn’s heard lodged in her throat and she lunged for that hand, which for a second seemed real, seemed alive.
Her fingers passed through the space where it had been just as it faded to dust.
Shadows closed around her as she crashed to the knees on the brick path of her family’s gardens—roiling, slippery things like oil on glass, like smoke in a bottle. Faces flickered through the mist—some dead, some still living.
Her heart lodged in her throat.
“You will fail them all,” the voice said. “Just as you have failed everyone who came before. You are weak and sentimental. That will be your downfall.”
“That’s what gives me strength,” Wyn rasped, fingers curling into fists. The very marrow of her bones felt like it was on fire, like the screws were still there, trying to melt their way through her.
“We shall see. I look forward to seeing you broken. As does he.”
Shadows swallowed her whole. The Light she had called vanished. Every fiber of her being screamed in pain, as if something was trying to drag every ounce of her magic, of her very essence through each pore.
“Until then, our regards to your family. We shall see how much you have to lose.”
She heard something crack distantly, heard a scream, then knew nothing at all.
