Chapter 8 #2
“Let me go!” I roared, thrashing until my shoulders burned.
Salvatore’s voice tore through the chaos, “You bastards! You’ll pay for this!”
They slammed him into the wall, the thud of impact echoing like a drumbeat.
Amara screamed. She tried to hurl herself toward me, but the guard locked her in place, his arm a chain across her waist. She kicked, clawed, her hair wild around her face, her brown eyes wide with terror. “Stop! He didn’t do this! None of them did!”
Her cry broke into a sob as the guard seized her by the jaw, forcing her face aside and silencing her.
The captain’s voice cut through everything. “Take them.”
This was wrong—all of it.
Who would murder my mother—and brand me her killer?
We had no enemies. No wealth. No influence.
In Ugarit, we were dust—too small to notice, too quiet to matter.
And yet, someone had chosen to destroy us.
Outside, the sun burned mercilessly over the rooftops, the light so bright it turned everything cruel. Shadows fell long and thin across the dirt.
They bound our wrists behind us with coarse hemp. The rope bit deep, cutting into skin already torn from the fight. The guards said nothing. Their silence was worse than the blows.
They shoved Salvatore and me forward, their hands like hooks on our shoulders. We were thrown into the back of a wagon—no words, no rites, no dignity. Just thrown. Like carrion.
Dust rose in choking clouds as the horses lurched forward. The wheels groaned. The air was dry enough to scrape the throat raw. My wrists throbbed. My heart felt skinned open.
Minutes passed in a silence that wasn’t silence at all—only the creak of wood, the dull rhythm of hooves, and the jingle of iron binding the condemned.
Salvatore spoke first, his voice low and ragged, soaked in fury.
“Whoever did this wanted us erased. Someone’s playing a game far bigger than us—and when I find him, I’ll feed him to the dark.”
I turned to him slowly. My throat felt like sand. “Tell me the truth,” I said. My voice barely carried above the wheels. “Did you kill your father? The others?”
The questions scraped out of me like a wound reopening. But I had to ask. The world was already burning—what was one more truth to throw into the fire?
Salvatore lifted his eyes to mine. Blood had dried on his cheek in a dark streak, split like parched earth. His gaze was rimmed red but steady, the steadiness of someone who had already stepped beyond shame.
“I swear to you, Lazarus,” he said. “My father was alive when I left him.”
But about the others—Helena, Azarel, Dagonel—he said nothing.
No denial.
No defense.
Only silence—heavy, and suffocating.
It told me everything words could never confess.
Bile rose hot in my throat. I turned from him, my jaw clenching until pain bloomed in my teeth. My friend. My brother. A murderer.
He hadn’t simply broken—he had chosen to burn.
My mother’s face flickered behind my eyes. Her last soft smile. The blood beneath her. The way her eyes had stared at nothing, dust clinging to her lashes like frozen tears.
In that moment, I knew my life had been split in two.
There was before—when hope still smoldered in me, even after the war.
And there was after—where everything I loved lay dead or rotting in my hands.
The wagon groaned onward. The city walls of Ugarit rose closer through the shimmer of heat, their mudbrick towers as impassive as the gods. The sun burned high and merciless, an eye that never blinked, watching it all.
The ropes bit deeper into my wrists with every jolt until the hemp had rubbed raw rings into my skin. Sweat trickled down my back. My grief festered, sour and hot, feeding on itself.
Dust rose in choking clouds as the horses trudged forward, their hooves striking the baked earth in a rhythm that felt like a funeral drum. None of us spoke. Not Salvatore. Not the guards. Not me.
And then—
We crested the hill.
And I saw it.
The Dreadhold.
It rose from the cliffs like something the gods had tried to bury, and the earth had vomited back into the light.
Its walls were carved from black basalt and pale limestone, fused by salt and centuries.
Bronze gates sealed its mouth—green with age, carved with symbols no one remembered.
Timber scaffolds jutted from the outer ramparts where guards watched through narrow slits, their spears flashing in the glare like shards of the sun itself.
No banners flew. No sound carried—only the sea below, beating itself to foam against the rocks.
Even from the wagon, I could smell it—the stench of rust, damp stone, and decay. The wind that touched the fortress felt colder, as if even the air feared to enter.
I had heard of the Dreadhold all my life—whispers traded around hearth fires to frighten children into obedience. But the truth was worse than the stories. This was no place of justice. It was a wound carved into the world and left to fester.
They said Morgrath Severen ruled within those walls, a warden who called himself a servant of law but worshipped only pain. His judgments were carved into flesh, his mercy, measured in screams.
A sickness stirred in me as the wagon groaned closer. Whatever life I’d dreamed of rebuilding—peace with my mother, a future with Amara—was dust now—crushed beneath the horror of this place—ground to powder like grain beneath the temple millstone.
The Dreadhold wasn’t built to hold the damned.
It was built to erase them.
And I was next.
The air thinned. My wrists throbbed against the ropes, and the world seemed to narrow until there was nothing but the fortress ahead.
This wasn’t a mistake. It wasn’t a chance.
Someone had planned this—carefully, deliberately. They hadn’t just torn my life apart; they had designed its destruction.
And whoever the fuck they were—
They would bleed for it.