Chapter 14
Lazarus
The first two trials shattered me—left pieces of myself scattered somewhere between the screams and the silence.
Men didn’t just die in the Trial of Reflection.
They unraveled. Some clawed their own throats open before the guards dragged them away.
I stopped counting. Survival was all that mattered.
Now, sitting in my cell, the echoes of Severen’s whispers still crawled through my head.
They were his voice. Always his voice.
He showed me visions in the mirrors—memories that were mine and lies twisted between them until I couldn’t tell the difference.
I saw myself as a boy, barefoot and starving, the ribs showing through my skin.
The other children had mocked me, spat on me.
They had fathers who came home, mothers who didn’t sell their dignity for bread. I had none of that.
He made me see her again—my mother. The way she’d worked to keep us alive. The men, the nights, the shame I tried to bury. He whispered that I’d hated her for it. That deep down, I blamed her.
And then he spoke of my father.
“If only you knew who he was,” Severen had said, his tone almost kind. “I do. A man of wealth and freedom. He could have changed everything for you—but he chose his own life instead. He chose freedom over you. He never loved your mother. He never loved you.”
Those words had burned themselves into my skull, and now they wouldn’t stop replaying.
I pressed my palms against my temples, trying to push the sound out. “Stop,” I muttered. “Just stop.”
But the voice was gone now, replaced by the heavy drip of water and the clink of chains. And in that quiet, the poison Severen left behind kept spreading.
I didn’t know what to believe anymore—what was true and what was illusion. Were those really my memories? Or had he built them to break me?
Across our cell, I caught a glimpse of Salvatore. He sat in the corner in the half-light, head bowed, shoulders tense. Since his second trial, he’d barely spoken to me. There was something different about him now—something closed off.
Now, we were just two prisoners breathing the same air and pretending not to notice each other falling apart.
I wanted to ask if his whispers still followed him, too.
If Severen had shown him things he couldn’t forget.
But the distance between us was heavier than chains.
My thoughts tangled—what Severen said, what the mirrors showed, what I remembered. None of it lined up anymore.
I couldn’t tell where the truth ended and the lies began.
I leaned my head back against the wall and closed my eyes. I was starving, bruised, burned—and yet what hurt most wasn’t the pain.
It was no longer knowing who I was.
The whispers had done their work.
And I feared they were right.
The reek of blood, sweat, and decay clung to the air like a second skin. A guard’s leather sandals scraped against the floor, the sound echoing through the chamber. He was broad-shouldered, his teeth filed to jagged points, and his laughter carried the hoarse rasp of smoke and rot.
“Well, look at you two,” he said. “A pair of limp-dicked miracles.”
He spat on the ground and crushed it beneath his sandal. “Didn’t think you’d last this long, but here you are—still breathing, still twitching. Like maggots that refuse to die.”
He paced before us, his shadow sliding across the wall. “Don’t get too proud of yourselves. You’ve only made it through two trials—two. That was the warm-up.”
He rubbed his hands together, the sound like rough hide grating against itself. “Now we begin the fun.”
The room fell silent.
“Next,” he growled, “is the Trial of Starvation and Cannibalism.”
My stomach lurched. Cannibalism?
He grinned at my reaction. “That’s right. No food. No water. Only time—and the scent of rotting flesh. Let’s see which of you starts chewing first.”
The bile burned my throat.
“Maybe you’ll dine on your best friend’s liver,” the guard said, his eyes flicking toward Salvatore. “Or gnaw your own fingers to the bone. The gods love a good show.”
He threw back his head and laughed, the sound bouncing off the stone like the crack of a whip. When his laughter died, he held up a rusted iron key, dangling it from a finger slick with sweat.
“No one leaves until someone feasts,” he said. “So go on, champions. Let’s see what kind of animals you truly are.”
Whips lashed. Chains clattered. We were driven forward like livestock toward slaughter.
They herded us through an iron door and down a narrow slope slick with filth. The air grew heavy with the smell of old blood and damp stone. I slipped once, caught myself, and kept going. Only a few of us reached the bottom without falling and being trampled.
The pit was carved deep into the rock, round and windowless, the air so thick it felt alive.
I crouched low, drawing my knees against my chest. Around me, the others sank into silence—waiting, breathing, trembling.
Salvatore was among them. He didn’t look at me.
Then the door above us clanged shut, sealing the world away.
And we waited.
The first day wasn’t so bad. My stomach rumbled, but I’d known hunger before. I could endure it.
By the second day, I tried to sleep through the ache—to pretend the emptiness inside me was something distant, something that didn’t belong to me.
But on the third day—
That was when desperation began to sing.
It started as a low grumble in my gut, then grew louder, sharper, until it was all I could hear.
My tongue felt like sandpaper, dry and cracked against the roof of my mouth.
My lips split when I tried to speak. Every sound became agony—the moans of the men, the scrape of chains, the dull thud before someone fell.
I leaned against the wall, breathing slowly, trying to steady the spinning world. Hunger became a living thing inside me, clawing upward, demanding to be fed. My belly had gone quiet now—not from peace, but from exhaustion. It ached like a dying lamb.
Then I heard it.
Rain.
It fell in a torrent, drumming against the earth. I lifted my head, searching. There was no rain—only memory. The sound of it beating on the thatched roof of the hut I’d once called home. Wind had howled through the cracks in the mudbrick walls, carrying the salt from the sea.
I remembered washing my only tunic in a cracked basin of cold rainwater, my fingers going numb as I scrubbed away the smell of sweat and smoke.
When my mother was gone, I would wait for her.
Sometimes days.
Sometimes longer.
She worked as a prostitute.
Even now, I could barely make myself think the word.
She sold her body to keep us alive, and I hated the men who came to her—and I hated myself for hiding behind the wall, listening. I was only a boy, but I knew what it meant. I knew the shame that came with it, the whispers in the streets, the looks from the neighbors.
There were nights she came home bruised, trembling, her hands shaking so hard she couldn’t light the lamp. And still, she’d try to smile for me. She’d tell me she was fine, that she’d buy bread in the morning.
I never told Salvatore about her work. About the nights when hunger kept me awake, my stomach eating itself alive.
When she was gone too long, he would come.
The rich boy who slipped past the city gates with food hidden under his tunic. He’d find me waiting outside the hut and press half his meal into my hands.
I was ashamed to take it, but I was more ashamed of how grateful I felt.
He never made me feel small for it. He never said a word.
It was what we did.
Amara and I would tend his wounds when his father’s temper struck him. And in return, he fed me.
Back then, it had felt like a balance—fragile but whole.
Now, sitting in this pit—my stomach shrunken, my thoughts fraying—I wondered if that bond between us was already gone.
“Poor little Lazarus…”
The voice slithered through the dark like a serpent made of smoke—silken, venomous, poisonous. It didn’t echo. It breathed straight into my ear, damp and hateful.
Severen.
“You always knew your mother sold herself,” he whispered, each word soft but molding at the edges. “You just never knew to whom.”
My stomach turned over as if it meant to crawl out of me. I pressed my palms to my ears, digging my nails into my skin, as if I could crush the voice between them.
“Stop it!” I shouted.
But nothing stopped Severen. He was inside my head.
I blinked—once—and the world warped.
The cavern melted into a pit of decay. Men sprawled around me, their eyes rolled white, their spines bent at impossible angles. Some twitched like animals caught in snares; others were already still; mouths open to the dark. The stench of blood and rot thickened until it coated my tongue.
Their groans were wet, bubbling, the sound of flesh choking on its own blood.
And there—moving among them like a phantom—was Salvatore.
He didn’t speak.
He didn’t touch them.
He only paced, slow and deliberate, like a lion waiting for the weakest to twitch.
And I—I was the only one who heard the monster.
“You want the truth?” Severen’s tone turned syrup-smooth and sickly sweet. “Salvatore lost his purity to your mother. She was well known, remember? He paid for her like the rest. He took what the others took.”
My lungs refused to work. My vision burned. “No…” I whispered, curling into myself. “He wouldn’t.”
“He’ll feast on you before this trial ends,” Severen murmured, amusement slick in his voice.
“No,” I rasped, throat raw. “He would never.”
“You think he’s loyal?” the voice spat. “You think he cares for you? He’s a butcher, Lazarus. A taker. He devours everything he touches.”
His laughter crawled under my skin. It wasn’t in my ear anymore—it was under my tongue. I could taste it.
I forced my head up.
Across the pit, Salvatore stood motionless. His face was carved from shadow, unreadable, his eyes catching the faintest light.
For one heartbeat, I didn’t know which was worse—the voice whispering in my skull, or the silence coming from him.