Chapter 25 #2
“Irrelevance,” she said finally. “The Lux faith has been losing ground for generations. The young males don’t attend ceremonies the way their fathers did.
They’ve started questioning the old interpretations, wondering whether the goddess who blessed their ancestors is still watching at all.
Vask needs something to revitalize belief.
Something that proves Lux is still active, still choosing, still intervening in the world. ”
“Something like a human female who carries Lux’s blessing.
” The words tasted bitter on Elsa’s tongue.
All her life, she’d been defined by her skills—her navigation expertise, her ability to calculate coordinates that machines couldn’t, her value as a trained professional.
Now she was being reduced to something she’d never chosen, a biological quirk that painted a target on her back.
“Something exactly like that.” Ari’s voice hardened.
“You’re not just leverage against Sylas.
You’re proof of concept. If Vask can demonstrate that Lux’s blessing works through you—that you can activate the old systems, the sacred technologies the ancestors left behind—he becomes the interpreter of a living miracle.
His power becomes unquestionable. The faith becomes vital again. ”
Elsa thought about the grid conduits. The security systems that responded to her touch.
The way Moon Tears flared when she was near, as if something in her blood called to something in their alien chemistry.
She’d assumed it was random—a quirk of her physiology that the Yzefrxyl found useful. Now she understood it was a weapon.
One that everyone wanted to aim.
Mia made a small sound. “And if she refuses?”
“Then he makes her cooperation unnecessary.” Ari didn’t flinch from the truth. “There are rituals in the old texts. Ways to extract blessing from an unwilling vessel. Vask has been researching them for months—I’ve seen the manuscripts in his study when Ryxin brought me to religious functions.”
Elsa filed that information away, adding it to the map she was building in her mind. Not just corridors and junctions now, but power structures. Influence networks. The topology of threat that surrounded them.
“What about the other pit administrators?” she asked. “The ones who aren’t in Vask’s pocket?”
“A few hold out. Old loyalists who remember when the crown had absolute authority over the labor systems.” Ari’s attention drifted toward the barred window again, tracking something in the corridor beyond.
“They’re not friends, but they’re not enemies either.
More concerned with their own positions than with religious politics.
If they thought backing the crown was safer than backing Vask. ..”
She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to. Elsa understood the calculation. Every power structure had fractures. Every faction had members whose loyalty was more practical than ideological. The trick was finding those fractures and applying pressure in exactly the right places.
The bond stirred in Elsa’s chest. Faint, muffled—still dampened by distance and stone and whatever residue of sedative remained in her system—but present. Sylas was moving. Searching. She could feel the edge of his fury like heat against her skin, the focused intensity of a predator tracking prey.
He’s coming.
She didn’t know whether that was reassurance or warning.
Footsteps echoed in the corridor. Not the guards—this rhythm was different. Heavier. Multiple figures moving with purpose, not patrol. Elsa rose from her crouch beside Mia, positioning herself between the door and the other women by instinct.
The sound grew closer. Passed their cell without stopping. Through the barred window, Elsa caught glimpses of movement—dark shapes, the glint of metal, something being dragged.
Someone being dragged.
She moved to the window without thinking, pressing her face against the cold iron bars to see into the corridor beyond.
The light was poor, the angle worse, but she could make out a procession of guards hauling a figure between them.
Human-sized. Human-shaped. Limp legs trailing across the stone floor, arms held by Yzefrxyl who didn’t bother to let their prisoner walk.
Dark hair. Broad shoulders. Hands that hung at wrong angles—but it wasn’t just swelling from labor. His fingertips were blackened, the skin blistered and raw in a way that spoke of burns rather than bruises. Chemical burns, maybe. Something that had eaten into the flesh rather than crushed it.
The procession moved past a torch on the wall, and the light fell across the prisoner’s face for just a moment. Just long enough.
Elsa’s heart stopped.
Milo.
Thinner than she remembered. Gaunt, really, his cheeks hollow and his skin carrying a grayish pallor that spoke of too little light and too little food for too long. But alive. Breathing. Being dragged somewhere instead of left to rot in whatever hole had held him for the past weeks.
She remembered him from the Stardancer. The sous chef who’d smuggled extra rations to the navigation crew when the captain cut their food allowances for questioning his decisions.
The quiet one who kept his head down and his opinions to himself, but always seemed to be in the right place when someone needed help.
He’d made her coffee once—real coffee, hoarded from the ship’s dwindling stores—when she’d been up for thirty-six hours straight charting a path through debris that shouldn’t have been there.
Now he was a shadow of that person. Hollowed out. Used up. Dragged through darkness by creatures who saw him as nothing more than labor.
His head lolled toward the cell as they passed. For a fraction of a second—less than a heartbeat—his eyes met hers through the bars. Recognition flickered. Surprise. Something that might have been hope before exhaustion smothered it.
His lips moved. No sound, just a shape. Her name, maybe. Or a question. Or a prayer.
Then he was past them, dragged around a corner, swallowed by the darkness beyond.
“Elsa?” Mia’s voice came from behind her, trembling with fear she was trying to hide. “What did you see?”
Elsa didn’t turn from the window. Didn’t trust her expression. Didn’t trust the storm of emotion churning in her chest—relief and fury and determination coiling together into something that felt like a blade waiting to be drawn.
“Proof,” she said quietly. “They’re close.”
Ari moved to the window, her shoulder brushing Elsa’s as she peered into the corridor. “The labor pits are that direction. They move workers through these passages when they don’t want them seen by the main fortress.”
“Milo.” Elsa forced the name out past the tightness in her throat. “They just dragged Milo past this cell. He saw me.”
Silence.
Then Ari exhaled slowly, and Elsa recognized the sound. Not defeat. Calculation. The noise someone made when a situation suddenly became more complicated and more opportunity-rich at the same time.
“If they’re moving workers through here, that means this section connects to the main pit access. Which means...” Ari trailed off, working through the implications. “Rowan might be even closer than we thought. The engineering crews work the lower systems. Those conduits run right beneath us.”
Elsa pressed her palm against the cold bars.
One hundred eighteen steps from their original cell to this one.
Left, right, down. A section where the floor changed texture.
The hum of machinery that grew louder as they descended.
A gate that sounded different from the others—older hinges, heavier mechanism.
She was building a map. Not just for escape, but for extraction.
For the moment when opportunity aligned with capability and she could do something more than survive.
For Milo. For Rowan, somewhere in these tunnels with his scarred engineer’s hands and his stubborn refusal to give up on broken systems. For every human the Yzefrxyl had taken and thrown into darkness.
“We’re not dying in this hole.” She said it quietly, a promise more than a statement. The words felt solid in her mouth, weighted with the kind of certainty that came from making a decision rather than accepting a fate. “And neither are they.”
Mia’s hand found hers in the darkness. Cold fingers, trembling, but gripping with strength that surprised them both. Ari’s shoulder pressed warm against her arm—solid, steady, the presence of someone who had made the same calculation and arrived at the same conclusion.
Three human women in a cell designed for creatures twice their size, surrounded by enemies who saw them as tools at best and obstacles at worst.
But they weren’t alone. They weren’t helpless. They weren’t the terrified survivors who had stumbled out of a crashed escape vessel weeks ago, too shocked to do anything but be herded into captivity.
They had information now. They had each other.
And somewhere above them, a king was hunting.
Elsa could feel him through the bond—distant but drawing closer, fury and focus bleeding through the muffled connection like light through cracks in stone.
He was coming. Whether for her or for the throne they’d threatened by taking her, it didn’t matter.
What mattered was being ready when he arrived.