Chapter 1 #2
Chanting.
Deep voices in unison, speaking words that predated any language I knew.
The sound rose from somewhere far below, vibrating through the stone itself until I could feel it in my bones.
My teeth ached with it. The symbols on the walls seemed to pulse in response, writhing more actively than ever before.
I pressed myself to the window, standing on my toes to see out.
The courtyard was empty, but beyond it, from what I knew was the temple's heart, came a glow.
Sickly green-black light that pulsed like a living thing, like a heartbeat made of shadow and poison.
It cast everything in nauseating relief, making the world look infected.
The chanting grew louder.
I knew what was happening.
I bit down on my fist to keep from screaming for Penny, tasting my own blood. The crack in the wall was almost wide enough now. Almost. I went back to work with desperate fury, no longer caring about the pain in my hands or the blood that made everything treacherous.
The chanting grew even louder, so loud it almost felt like they were in here with me . . .
Then, silence.
I knew what I had to do.
I pushed through the crack.
Stone scraped skin from my ribs, my hips, my thighs. My dislocated shoulder shrieked with every movement. Halfway through, I got stuck, my chest compressed so tight I couldn't breathe. Panic clawed at my throat. I was going to die here, trapped in a wall like some forgotten ghost.
But Penny was dead, and Merit was dead, and twelve other girls were dead, and I would not be the thirteenth.
I exhaled everything, made myself hollow, and pushed.
I tumbled into Penny's cell in a heap of blood and abraded skin and dislocated joints. But I was through. And her door, carelessly left open by the Anointed Ones who'd thought their job was done, beckoned like a promise.
I was out.
The corridor stretched before me like a throat waiting to swallow. Bioluminescent fungi grew in patches along the walls, casting everything in that same sick blue-green light that had haunted my cell. The stones were cold enough to burn my bare feet, each step sending ice through my bones.
I moved by memory and instinct, three weeks of listening through stone finally paying off.
Left at the first junction—away from the guards' quarters.
Through the narrow servant passage that reeked of old food and unwashed bodies.
Past the chamber where I could hear cultists breathing in synchronized sleep, their exhaustion from the ritual making them vulnerable.
The temple was vast, so much larger than our row of cells had suggested.
Passages branched and curved in ways that defied logical architecture, as if the builders had followed some otherworldly blueprint that prioritized spiritual geography over physical sense.
Sometimes I passed doorways that opened onto rooms that shouldn't exist—chambers that seemed to extend too far, ceilings that climbed into darkness my eyes couldn't penetrate.
My shoulder throbbed with each heartbeat. I’d scratched it so badly squeezing through the crack. I could practically feel the infection taking root.
I passed an armory where obsidian weapons hung in neat rows. The blades seemed to drink in what little light existed, creating patches of absolute darkness wherever they rested. Just looking at them made my skin crawl, as if they were eager to taste blood, anyone's blood, even their wielders'.
Then I found it. A door left carelessly ajar, warm light spilling from within—actual flame light, not the fungi's corpse-glow. I peered through the gap and forgot how to breathe.
The Archive Chamber's walls were lined floor to ceiling with shelves, and on those shelves sat hundreds—no, thousands—of obsidian jars.
Each one contained a swirling mist that glowed from within, some bright as stars, others dim and fading.
They pulsed like captured heartbeats, like bottled souls, like—
I stepped inside, drawn by horrible fascination. The jars were labeled. Names, dates, origins, all written in precise script on strips of parchment.
"Catherine Voss, Age 19, Mountain Provinces, Harvest Complete."
"Lily Brennan, Age 22, River Delta, Harvest Complete."
"Merit Seaborn, Age 20, Fishing Villages, Harvest Complete."
Merit. I'd braided her hair the night before she'd been taken. She'd had a voice like silver bells.
My hands shook as I searched the newest additions. There, still warm to the touch, the mist inside thrashing like something desperate to escape:
"Penelope Marsh, Age 16, Lowland Territories, Harvest Complete."
The jar pulsed with dying light, growing dimmer even as I watched. Whatever remained of Penny was fading, consumed by something I didn't understand. Bonding magic, they'd called it.
Maps covered a central table, huge and detailed, marked with the seven territories of the Dragon Lords. Three had been crossed out in red ink—Davoren of Fire, Sereis of Ice, Garruk of Stone. Beside each crossed name was a note: "Bonded. Neutralized. No longer viable."
Four territories remained unmarked: Caelus of Wind, Zephyron of Storm, Morgrith of Shadow, and a seventh name that had been scratched out so violently the parchment was torn.
Hundreds of pins studded each unclaimed territory, and when I looked closer, I saw they marked locations.
Cities. Villages. Even individual houses.
The pins were potential brides. Girls like me, identified and catalogued, waiting their turn to be harvested.
The ledgers made it worse. Twenty years of abductions documented in neat columns.
Test subjects in the early years, before they'd perfected the extraction process.
Failed rituals that had killed dozens before they'd learned the proper incantations.
Notes on bloodlines, magical potential, virginity, age—all reduced to data points in their terrible experiment.
And then I found the architectural plans.
The ritual chamber at the temple's heart, built above a natural fissure that went down, down, down into the earth itself.
Notes in the margins described it as a prison, a cage for something called "The Unnamed.
" The autumn equinox ritual would use all the stored bonding magic to break that prison. To wake what slept below.
"The Dragon Lords believe themselves gods," one passage read.
"But they are merely inheritors of a broken world.
The Unnamed is the true power, the original power, the consumer of light itself.
When it rises, their age ends. When it rises, all bonds will break, and the world will return to its proper state of beautiful darkness. "
I was so absorbed in reading that I missed the footsteps until a shadow fell across the table.
An Anointed One stood in the doorway. His obsidian mask reflected my face in a dozen fracmented angles—eyes wide with terror, blood still painting my hands, looking like the ghost I was about to become.
His hand went immediately to the alarm crystal at his belt, a red stone that would shriek our location to every guard in the temple.
I didn't think. My hand found Penny's jar, still warm with her fading life, and I hurled it at his face with all my desperate strength.
The jar shattered against his mask in an explosion of glass and light.
The released magic—Penny's magic, her potential, her stolen future—erupted outward in a burst of silver-white fire.
The Anointed One screamed as it burned through his mask, into his face, his eyes.
He clawed at himself, trying to escape the beautiful, terrible fire of a sixteen-year-old girl's unlived life.
I ran.
Behind me, his screams turned to rage, and I heard the sharp crack of the alarm crystal activating. Red light flooded the corridor as every crystal in the temple began to pulse in response, their shriek building to a crescendo that made my teeth ache.
They knew I was free. They were coming.
And somewhere in the chaos, I could have sworn I heard Penny's voice one last time—laughing, wild and free as her magic burned through the man who'd helped kill her.
The temple erupted like a kicked anthill. Cultists poured from every doorway—Anointed Ones with their obsidian masks, guards in leather armor that creaked with each step, even broken prisoners who'd been turned into servants, their eyes empty of everything but obedience.
I ran without thinking, without planning, pure instinct driving me through corridors I'd never seen.
My body moved wrong—too fast, too fluid, dodging hands that grabbed for me before I consciously saw them reaching.
When a guard swung his obsidian blade at my head, I ducked under it with impossible grace, as if I'd known the arc of his swing before he did.
Something was happening to me. My body was changing, responding to danger with abilities I didn't have three weeks ago.
My bare feet found purchase on stones that should have been too smooth to climb.
My fingers caught holds that should have been too small to grip.
When I jumped to avoid a cultist's tackle, I cleared his head entirely, landing six feet away in a crouch that should have shattered my knees.
I didn't understand it, but I didn't question it. Gift horses and open mouths and all that.
A servant's door appeared on my left—wooden, ordinary, marked with the same symbols as the kitchen passages. I shoulder-checked it open (wrong shoulder, white-hot agony, vision going black at the edges) and stumbled into morning sunlight that hit me like a physical blow.
The courtyard spread before me, and beyond it—the cliff.
The Hollow Shrine was built into the mountain's face, carved from living rock.
From here I could see the path I'd only glimpsed from my window: a narrow track switchbacking down the cliff face, barely wide enough for single file, with drops that would turn bodies into paint smears on the rocks below.