Chapter 12
Lazarus
Salvatore and I were bound together like carcasses prepared for ritual—wrists wrenched behind our backs, shoulders stretched to the brink of tearing. Chains ringed our throats, thick iron biting into the flesh, and manacles crushed our ankles, so every step became a shuffling prayer for mercy.
Ninety-eight others marched with us.
Or rather, we were dragged—broken, bloodied, bound in pairs like beasts led to sacrifice.
The passage they forced us through wasn’t a corridor.
It was a throat—narrow, slick, pulsing with trapped heat and damp breath.
The walls sweated with moisture and putridity, the stench of it thick enough to choke.
Every sound—the drag of feet, the jangle of chains—echoed like the dying heartbeat of something ancient.
We were being swallowed.
The deeper we went, the hotter it became.
We emerged at last into a vast chamber where light went to die. The flames along the walls didn’t burn; they bled. Their glow was weak, sickly, coughing out fits of smoke that clung to the ceiling like dying lungs.
The walls were slick with mold and black-veined fungus that pulsed when brushed, leaving streaks across our skin.
The stone scraped flesh raw. From above, bodies hung in rows—some gutted and hollow, others twitching as if still uncertain they were dead.
Hooks pierced through their spines, pulling them into grotesque arcs of devotion.
Iron spikes jutted from the walls like the bones of the beast that had devoured us. The ground was not ground at all—it was slick, uneven, a quilt of bones and dried entrails that cracked underfoot. Skulls stared upward through layers of congealed filth, their mouths frozen mid-scream.
The stench was overwhelming—rotting flesh, bile, old blood turned to copper dust. A few men collapsed, gagging, retching. The sound was swallowed by the steady groan of the chamber walls, as if the place itself were breathing through us.
Salvatore pressed against me, shoulder trembling, voice hoarse.
“We’ve stepped into hell,” he rasped. “And it’s breathing.”
“This is only the beginning,” I whispered. I barely recognized my own voice. “The first trial was always meant to break the weak.”
Then—something shifted.
The air rippled.
It didn’t walk out of the darkness. It formed there.
Reality twisted to make space for it, bending like heat on stone.
At first, it was just a shape—manlike, but wrong in its proportions, its outline wobbling at the edges as if the world refused to hold it steady.
When it moved, it wasn’t footsteps. It was a distortion. The air folding around it.
A guard—or what used to be one.
What the Dreadhold had remade in its own image.
My eyes fought to focus, but his outline stuttered—limbs bending at wrong angles, a shadow pretending to hold weight. When he spoke, the sound wasn’t a voice at all, but a torn shriek laced with gravel and breathless decay, ripping through the chamber like a grave splitting open.
The chain snapped taut, biting against our throats. Pain detonated behind my eyes—white heat, blinding, violent. My skull thudded until sparks swam across the dark.
The air shifted.
Trial One had begun.
Mercy had been scoured out of this place long ago.
“Listen, you pit-born bastards,” the thing said. “The Gauntlet of Chains hungers in the name of the gods below. You and the sack of flesh tied to you will crawl, heave, or drag yourselves through the dark—step by step, breath by poisoned breath.”
He hawked something thick and vile and spat near his sandals. It hit the limestone floor with a wet slap and gleamed in the torch-glow like a slug’s corpse. The torches burned low, fed by pitch oil that dripped down the hafts like black tears.
“The walls will crush. The air will leech you. And if that fails, the screaming will finish the work.”
He clapped once. The sound cracked through the tunnel like a rib snapping underfoot.
I flinched. Salvatore stiffened beside me.
“Most of you die here,” the guard hissed, lips peeling back. “When you fall, you become the road. They’ll crawl over you. Your blood will oil their knees. Your teeth will splinter beneath their hands.”
A shiver ran through me like wire drawn through bone.
From the edges of the chamber, more shapes slid forward—men or something close to men. Bronze greaves dulled by grime. Goat-hide armor slick with filth. Eyes glazed like river stones. Spears pressed against our backs—cold, inevitable. They herded us forward.
Into the throat.
This corridor was narrower, carved from wet limestone.
The walls sweated; the air reeked of mold and pitch.
It swallowed sound and flame alike. Darkness clung like oiled leather lined with volcanic glass.
Fragments of clay tablets crunched beneath our shackled feet—names of the condemned, shattered into dust.
Then a voice ahead—huge, hungry—rolled through the dark—
“This is your first taste. Your first gauntlet. You will crawl. You will scream. You will break. And if fortune favors you…”
A pause.
“The bastard at your side binds your fate. If he stumbles, you go down with him. If he dies, you carry him. You will drag his weight through every chamber that follows until your own skin strips away in ribbons.”
The laughter that followed split open like thunder inside the pit—wild, feverish, exalting. It echoed until it no longer sounded human at all.
Then the crowd surged—not as men, but as meat.
Limbs flailed, slick with sweat and grime from weeks of labor. Panic moved us where thought could not. Elbows jabbed. Chains rattled. Bare feet slipped through filth. We were no longer human—just bodies pressed into motion, one breathing carcass forced forward.
The air curdled into a stew of breath and carnage, thick enough to chew.
Blood, piss, bile, and smoke churned together until breathing felt like drowning.
The stench grew aware of itself.
Urine. Vomit. Decay.
It didn’t just cling—it crawled. It moved between us, slid beneath our tongues, crept into our lungs. The air itself was a parasite.
Behind me, someone gagged—a full-bodied heave—and then the wet slap of vomit struck my back. Hot, sour, viscous. It rolled down my spine like glue, reeking of bile and despair.
Salvatore muttered a curse, his voice little more than a rasp.
I bent double, my stomach convulsing. Nothing came but a dry wheeze, like death trying to clear its throat.
Then Salvatore’s leg gave out.
The chain snapped tight.
A brutal jerk.
Pain shot through my knees as I was dragged sideways into him.
He hit the wall first—shoulder meeting stone with a crack that made my teeth ache. I crashed into the sludge coating the floor.
Salvatore gasped. The sound came shallow, frantic—like a man drowning on dry land. His chest hitched with every breath, the noise of it a rattle that spoke of endings.
Maybe the guards were right.
Maybe this wasn’t meant to be survived.
Maybe survival was the punishment.
But somehow, we moved.
Inch by inch. Dragged by momentum, by terror, by the screams.
The gods of this place—if they existed—had left us to crawl in their absence.
And the screams… gods, the screams. They weren’t random.
They were a pattern.
A map.
A prophecy written in agony.
We followed them, step after step, deeper into the throat of the earth.
The tunnel narrowed again, the air shimmering with heat. My chains clinked once before a voice shrieked from the dark above—
“Pour it now!”
What followed wasn’t a pour. It was a judgment.
Boiling oil rained from the ceiling in a single, roaring sheet—an avalanche of liquid flame. The torches guttered out beneath its brightness.
It struck us like divine punishment.
The hiss was deafening, swallowing every scream, though the screams persisted—rising, weaving, merging into something beyond sound.
My skin split open.
Flesh blistered. Bubbled. Burst.
The smell of roasting meat choked the corridor, thick and acrid—tar smoke mingling with burning flesh.
I arched backward, a creature made of nerve and flame, then fell—dragging Salvatore with me into the slick of boiling death that drowned the floor.
His screams weren’t human.
They tore through the air like something trying to claw its way out of the body that birthed it.
We writhed together, tangled in ruin—two bodies, one inferno. Our skin fused and tore, melted and sealed again in the same breath. The stench was alive. It coated my tongue, my teeth, my lungs. It was the smell of us—burning, dying, unmade.
The world tightened.
This was no prison.
It was a furnace.
A tomb built for the living.
Vision warped—shards of red, black, and ash flashing like broken pottery in a kiln. The chain at my throat jerked again, cutting into the flesh that was no longer flesh but pulp. I didn’t move. Couldn’t.
Pain folded in on itself.
And then—nothing.
I rose above it.
Weightless.
Drifting.
The screams below dulled, fading into something almost holy in its horror. I floated above them, beyond the furnace, beyond the stench, beyond the skin that no longer belonged to me.
Men’s bodies writhed below—skin blistering open like sunbaked clay. Their flesh slid from bone in soft folds, pooling beneath them.
I knew I was one of them.
Knew my back was nothing but ribbons of meat and blood.
Yet the knowledge no longer reached me.
Something colder had taken hold—detachment, or death.
I hovered there, hollow, watching the remnants of what once was human.
For a breath, I thought I saw the fire watching back—faces forming inside the smoke, shifting like spirits carved from heat.
“Salvatore… we have to get out,” I rasped.
The sound that left me wasn’t a voice. It was air scraping through a ruined windpipe, the whisper of a corpse trying to speak.
He groaned beside me—faint, brittle, more breath than sound.
“Salvatore,” I hissed, forcing flame into my throat. “Move.”