Chapter 29
Elsa
The explosion rattled through the stone corridor, and Elsa’s teeth clacked together hard enough to taste copper. Dust rained from the ceiling in gray sheets, and somewhere behind them—too close, always too close—the howl of feral Yzefrxyl rose like a blade through the chaos.
“Move!” Elsa grabbed Mia’s arm and hauled her forward, the younger woman’s legs barely keeping pace. Ari was already running, her dark hair whipping behind her as she navigated the narrow passage with surprising grace. Keth was somewhere behind them, guarding their tail.
The under-fortress tunnels twisted ahead of them like intestines carved from black rock.
Elsa had been mapping them in her head for hours now—counting steps, memorizing turns, noting the placement of every flickering blue crystal that lit their path.
Navigator’s habit. The kind that might save their lives if they could just make it to the extraction point.
Another tremor shook the ground. The manufactured crisis Vask had triggered was tearing through the fortress above like a fever—pit riots, sabotage, a staged Fallen breach. She’d heard the guards shouting about it before they’d been...distracted.
“Left,” Elsa called out, her voice raw from the acrid smoke that had begun seeping into the lower levels. “Thirty paces, then the tunnel splits.”
“How do you know?” Mia gasped, stumbling over loose stone.
“Because I’ve been paying attention.” Elsa didn’t slow.
Couldn’t afford to. The howling behind them was getting closer, and she could feel the wrongness of it scraping against her nerves—something in the sound that spoke of broken minds and hunger without end.
The Fallen. Or whatever poor souls Vask had unleashed to force Sylas’s hand.
They reached the split, and Elsa pulled up short. The right tunnel climbed toward the surface—toward the rescue team, toward safety. The left descended deeper into the pit levels.
Toward Rowan and Milo.
“Elsa.” Ari’s voice was steady despite everything, her hand closing on Elsa’s shoulder. “We need to go right. Ryxin’s team will be waiting.”
“They’re still down there.”
“They might already be dead.”
“They’re not.” Elsa didn’t know how she was certain, but she was. She’d heard Rowan’s voice just hours ago—hoarse, exhausted, but alive. She’d looked into Milo’s hollow eyes and told him to wait for the second alarm. “I promised them.”
“You promised us too,” Mia whispered, her face pale as bone in the crystal-light. “You said we’d get out. Together.”
Elsa’s chest tightened. She looked between them—Ari with her hard-won composure, Mia with her fragile hope—and felt the weight of the choice pressing down on her skull.
The howling grew louder. A crash echoed from somewhere behind them, followed by the scrape of claws on stone—fast, heavy, closing from the right-hand tunnel. Elsa shoved Mia behind her and braced, but the figure that rounded the corner was one she recognized.
Keth. Breathing hard, weapons drawn, blood dark on his forearms. Five Lux Sabers fanned out behind him, psyblades already angled toward the howling at their backs.
“The Alpha King sent them.” His gaze swept over them—quick, assessing, cataloguing injuries the way all of Sylas’s warriors did. “Extraction point is topside. Maintenance shafts, two levels up.”
“I know where it is.” Elsa stepped forward. “Take Mia and Ari. Get them to the surface.”
Keth’s ears flattened. “My orders are to move all three of you—”
“Your orders just changed.” The words came out hard, clipped—a voice she barely recognized as her own. The bond pulsed hot behind her ribs, lending her a certainty she hadn’t earned. “Rowan and Milo are still in the pit levels. I’m not leaving without them.”
A beat of silence, swallowed by the distant howling.
Keth’s jaw worked. His gaze shifted between Elsa and the descending tunnel, and something flickered behind those amber eyes. Not quite deference. Recognition, maybe—as if he were seeing a thing Sylas had already seen and he was only now catching up.
“The Sabers go with you.” Not a question.
“Yes.”
He turned to the two women. “Stay close. Move fast. Don’t stop for anything.”
Mia’s fingers caught Elsa’s sleeve. “Elsa—”
“I’ll be right behind you.” She covered Mia’s hand, squeezed once, then let go. “I promise.”
The lie tasted like copper. She swallowed it anyway.
There was no room for promises in a mountain steeped in aggression and betrayal, home to a monstrous species as dangerous as the Fallen they feared.
Ari gripped her wrist. “And you?”
“I’m getting our people out.”
“That’s suicide.”
“Maybe.” Elsa pulled free of Ari’s hand and turned toward the descending tunnel.
Her heartbeat was a war drum in her ears, blood rushing hot and fast. Fear, yes.
But something else underneath it—something that felt disturbingly like certainty.
“Tell Sylas where I went. If he—” She stopped herself.
If he what? Cared? Came after her? The bond between them was a live wire she didn’t fully understand, a thread of heat and awareness that had only grown sharper since Vask’s capture.
She didn’t finish the sentence. There was no need to.
Keth moved the women toward the ascending passage without looking back. Efficient. No hesitation, no argument—the way all of Sylas’s inner circle operated. Trust the order. Execute. Save the doubt for after.
Elsa turned to the Sabers. Their amber eyes gleamed in the crystal-light, blades drawn, and not one of them looked surprised to be taking direction from a human half their size.
“With me,” she said, and plunged into the dark.
The secondary passage was narrow and cold, the stone walls weeping moisture that soaked through the thin fabric of Elsa’s gown. The Sabers moved ahead of her like ghosts, their footfalls silent despite their size.
The gate loomed ahead, but something was wrong. The faint glow she’d expected from active crystals was different here—brighter, more concentrated, with an undertone of sickly purple bleeding through the blue. The air tasted of copper and something chemical. Something that made her sinuses burn.
“Rowan,” she called, keeping her voice low. “Milo. It’s Elsa.”
No response. Just the hum of equipment she couldn’t identify and a wet, rhythmic dripping that raised the hair on her arms.
The lead Saber examined the gate’s mechanism, her expression shifting from clinical efficiency to something darker. She glanced back at Elsa, amber eyes holding a warning that made Elsa’s stomach clench. Whatever lay beyond that gate was worse than a simple holding cell.
Elsa nodded.
The gate groaned open on protesting hinges, and the smell hit her first—blood and burnt flesh and the acrid sweetness of corrupted Moon Tear essence. The same wrongness she’d sensed during the bonding ceremony, but concentrated. Weaponized.
This wasn’t a cell. It was a laboratory.
Stone tables dominated the space, their surfaces fitted with iron restraints sized for human wrists and ankles.
Leather straps hung from adjustable frames, stained dark with use.
Glass vials lined the walls in neat rows—some filled with the pure blue glow of healthy Moon Tears, others clouded with the purple-black corruption that turned Yzefrxyl into Fallen.
Between them, smaller containers held something darker. Thicker.
Blood. Human blood, collected and catalogued like specimens.
“Holy shit.” The words scraped out of her, barely a whisper.
Rowan was strapped to the nearest table.
Now that she was nearer, she could see that he’d lost weight since she’d last seen him on the Stardancer—the broad shoulders that had made him security detail’s most intimidating presence now jutted like blades beneath paper-thin skin.
His eyes were closed, his chest rising in shallow, uneven breaths.
But it was his arms that stopped her cold.
Puncture wounds lined the inside of both forearms, dozens of them, arranged in neat rows like entries in a ledger.
Some were fresh, still weeping. Others had scarred over, pink and puckered against his pale skin.
The precision of it turned her stomach. Methodical.
Regular. The work of someone who had done this many, many times.
“Rowan.” She was at his side before she’d consciously decided to move, her fingers fumbling with the restraint buckles. “Rowan, can you hear me?”
His eyes snapped open. Wild. Feral. For a heartbeat, he didn’t recognize her—just saw another figure looming over him in the chemical-bright light. Then the terror drained away, leaving something worse behind.
Hope. Fragile and disbelieving.
“Elsa?” His voice was a ruin, scraped raw from screaming or disuse or both. “You’re...you actually...”
“I’m getting you out.” The first restraint gave way. Then the second. “Where’s Milo?”
Rowan’s face twisted. “Back of the chamber. They—” He stopped, his punctured arms curling against his chest. “Krix. Vask’s shadow.” He spat the name like poison. “The priest gives the orders, but Krix—” His voice cracked. “Krix enjoys the work.”
He lifted one freed hand toward the back of the chamber, and Elsa followed the gesture to find the second table. The second figure. The second horror.
Milo’s hands were the worst of it.
She’d remembered them as capable, quick—the hands of a chef who could dice an onion in seconds and plate a dish with artistic precision. Now they were swollen, the skin blistered and raw, blackened at the fingertips like he’d held them in fire.
Not fire. Corruption.
Scattered around his table, shattered vials oozed purple-black essence across the stone. The residue crawled up his wrists, leaving chemical burns in trails that looked almost like writing. Like someone had been testing how much contact his skin could withstand before it failed.
“They made us touch them.” Rowan’s voice cracked as Elsa worked on his ankle restraints. “The poisoned tears. Said we were ‘blessed’ like you. Said our touch might purify the corruption.”