Chapter 20 #3
Lazarus looked at me. His eyes were set, his jaw carved from rage and resolve. Without a word, he stepped forward, the useless sword hanging at his side like an afterthought.
I followed him. The darkness reached for us, and the world fell away.
The instant we crossed the threshold, the mirror sealed behind us with a sound like bone snapping shut. The light vanished, and darkness devoured everything.
I couldn’t breathe.
The air turned heavy the moment we entered—thick with something that had never been meant for lungs.
Every inhale burned, searing my throat as if I were swallowing molten ash.
My ribs creaked under the weight of it. The walls themselves seemed to bleed, black fire crawling through veins of shadow that pulsed in time with a heartbeat not our own.
The Pit of Shadows was alive.
And it hated us.
Whispers began to stir, slick and thin, sliding through the dark. They wormed into my ears until blood trickled warm down my neck. At first, it was only noise—the sound of bone splitting, marrow hissing, the slow, viscous sigh of something dying and grateful for it. Then the noise learned to speak.
A thousand voices rose together, crowding the dark. Men. Women. Children. Some howled. Some wept. Some laughed in tones that scraped like knives over glass.
Then the mirrors appeared.
They didn’t rise—they bled out of the walls, tall slabs of black glass framed in jagged iron.
Each surface shuddered as if trying to remember what reflection was.
When my face appeared, it wasn’t mine. My mouth stretched into a grin I had never worn, teeth black and glistening.
Hollow sockets leaked pitch that seared my skin as it fell.
Beside me, Lazarus’ reflection twisted—its throat cut from ear to ear, a dark grin of ruin.
The wound gurgled, bubbling with thick blood that poured down his chest in slow ribbons.
He reached for me with hands slick and dripping—then both of our doubles slid backward, swallowed by their own darkness like beasts retreating into tall grass.
The stench hit next—rot, smoke, iron. My stomach lurched.
The air grew viscous, dragging through my lungs like tar.
I dropped to one knee, choking, every breath blistering my throat.
The shadows moved then, thin serpents of night slithering across the floor, curling up my nostrils, slipping behind my eyes, pouring down my open mouth.
Their touch was fire, a slow, devouring heat that crept through nerves, gnawed at bone, and burned the edges of thought.
“Lazarus?” I wheezed. My voice was shredded, unrecognizable.
“What?” he rasped back, but the word came broken, warped, as if something else had answered with him.
A shadow slashed past my face, hissing like steel scraping bone.
“How the fuck do we fight this with dull weapons?” I asked, spinning blind into the dark.
“Hell if I—”
His answer broke into a scream. Not human pain. Something older, something that knew where to hurt. The sound flayed the skin from my arms, drove claws down my spine.
“Lazarus!” I staggered toward the voice, but the shadows closed over him, swallowing his shape whole. I reached into the dark. My hands met nothing but smoke and heat.
“The pain!” His voice shredded itself against the air. “It’s eating me—inside—”
Then it hit me.
I gasped, and breath itself turned traitor.
Fire tore through my lungs, raced through my veins like molten glass.
My heart seized, my skin split in glowing cracks that ran like lightning across flesh.
I clawed at my throat until blood slicked my palms, but there was no stopping.
The pit wanted us breathing—wanted to feed us to itself.
The whispers slid deeper. They poured into my skull, coiling around every thought.
“This is the death you were always walking toward.”
The words tormented my mind. My knees buckled; the world tilted. I pressed my palms to my temples, nails digging until I felt the hot bloom of blood. My bones thrummed, a low vibration of things crawling inside, rummaging through memories that weren’t theirs to touch.
Then came the laughter.
Not one voice—a thousand. Twisting together. A chorus of centuries grinding bone against stone, iron dragged across teeth, wet and animal and endless. The sound filled the pit until there was nothing left to breathe but madness.
“Severen fooled you. Played you both. You bled for him. You screamed for him. All while he fed.”
I tried to roar back, but the pit devoured my voice. It swallowed it whole, turned it into another echo for the dark to play with.
The whispers pressed closer, hissing through my skull like smoke beneath a locked door.
“Salvatore Lorian. Lazarus James. Two lines of power. Two broken sons. Circling back to the beginning.”
My flesh burned.
The words carved themselves into me, branding my skin with sigils that blistered black through my veins. Smoke filled my mouth, thick and bitter, coating my tongue.
“Lazarus!” I screamed again, but the sound broke apart, a ragged hiss more than a voice.
His voice was gone. His presence ripped from the air like an oil lamp overturned in the wind. I felt the shadows seize him, dragging him down into some private abyss.
I was alone.
The pit pulsed around me, alive and watching. The walls bled black fire, the ground thrummed beneath my knees like the inside of a great beast. My own shadow peeled itself from the floor, its grin stretching too wide, its teeth long and dripping black venom.
The voices gathered, merging into one.
“You will not walk together. You will not fight together. Each of you will be unmade—alone. Broken. If you endure, you will rise. If you fail, you will be ours.”
The pit convulsed, its hunger erupting outward as the darkness surged at me. It swallowed the air, the sound, even the light burning inside my eyes.
“Salvatore Lorian… son of Marianna Lorian.”
My breath stopped cold. My heart faltered in my chest.
“Your mother stepped into this pit long ago. She surrendered herself to the shadows… and rose as the first Mistress of Shadows. She became Severen’s rival—her power matching his.
Unstoppable. Defiant. When she grew stronger, he bound her.
He took what he could of her power… and sealed the rest inside her tome, trapping her far away. ”
The words struck like iron across bone. My vision blurred; I could taste blood as my teeth clenched so hard my jaw trembled.
“Tell me,” I rasped, my voice splintering. “Tell me how to undo it. Where can I find her?”
The shadows did not hesitate.
“Do you know why you are the way you are?
“Why your hands drip with blood, why your heart is hollow?
“You think it was a chance. You think it was your father’s fists, his curses, his hate. But it was never only him.”
My knees buckled. The air shuddered. My body trembled as though the pit itself was crawling beneath my skin. “Then who?” I gasped, my throat tearing open on the sound.
“It was Severen.”
The words twisted deep.
I staggered back, bile burning up my throat. “What do you mean?” I rasped, but the dark only laughed.
A thousand throats. A thousand echoes. The laughter of something that had never been human.
“Severen watched you from the moment you were born,” the voices whispered, weaving together until they spoke as one. “From your first breath. Your first scream. Your first step. He shaped the path beneath your feet so that one day, you would return here… to his prison… to feed him.”
The whispers pressed closer. I felt them curling around me, cold and slick, pressing against my temples until I swore they would split bone.
“You are Severen’s plan made flesh.”
The words sank deeper, burrowing beneath my ribs, twisting through the heat of my veins.
“Severen loved your mother, Marianna Lorian. But she did not choose him. She chose another. She chose your father. For that, Severen destroyed her. He bound her soul into her tome, chained her power, and made her a prisoner forever.”
The pit hissed. The sound rolled through the chamber, the walls shivering with the force of a thousand serpents moving through stone.
“Severen was the one who killed your father.”
The voices tore through me, merciless, unrelenting.
“He hated him from the start. Hated him for being chosen, for having what he never could. But Severen found a better purpose. Your father became the perfect vessel for his rage. The perfect weapon to break you—to forge you in misery until you were too broken to be anything else.”
My stomach heaved. I fell to my knees, shaking, my nails clawing bloody furrows into my scalp.
“No… no—”
“And Julian,” the voices crooned softly, almost tender now. “Sweet, loyal Julian. Did you think he died by chance?”
Images crashed through me—Julian’s laughter, his unwavering strength, the way the army followed him without question. My father’s finest son. The one no one thought could fall.
“He heard the whispers first,” the shadows continued, winding their way through my thoughts like a parasite. “Severen fed to him slowly. A word here. A doubt there. Night after night. He was never meant to survive them.”
The noise in my head intensified, echoing, overlapping screams layered over screams.
“Julian fought it,” the shadows admitted. “He tried to be stronger than what Severen placed inside him. But minds fracture before bodies do. By the time he fell on the battlefield, he was already hollowed out. His death was merely the final act.”
I sucked in a ragged breath, bile burning my throat.
“You think this prison exists by accident?” the voices whispered. “The Dreadhold is a grave long before it becomes a cell. Some of the men rotting here carry ancient blood—Shadow Lord blood.”
The truth landed with sickening clarity.
“Your father. Your brother. Severen killed them. The others here in this prison that you’ve watched break, scream, disappear. Severen brought them here, to erase them all.”
My vision blurred.