Chapter 45
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
IN SMOKE AND RUIN
The guards had returned me to my cell without ceremony after the bath, their eyes carefully avoiding mine as though they’d witnessed the way Valen washed my hair.
I knew they hadn’t, but it did not stop my mind from whispering that they had.
I settled onto my straw mattress, the rough fibers poking through the thin blanket beneath me, and tilted my head back against the cool stone wall. My hair was still damp, hanging loose around my shoulders where Valen’s fingers had combed through the tangles with his unexpected gentleness.
I closed my eyes, but the darkness behind my lids couldn’t hide me from my thoughts.
Valen in the bathing chamber, his voice stripped of its usual sharp edges as he spoke of his creation, of his loneliness.
I kept imagining him as he must have been—newly formed, filled with wonder, creating life because the emptiness around him was too vast to bear.
I shuddered, disturbed by the parallel between myself and this god. What did it say about me that I could look at the monster who had done such terrible things and feel even a flicker of understanding?
My gaze caught on our shared thread. As if beckoned by my thoughts, it emerged brighter, twining crimson and silver in a spiraling pattern that pulsed with undeniable strength.
I no longer questioned where it led. I could feel it tugging, practically yanking me toward the direction of Valen, wherever he might be in the vast expanse of the palace above.
I examined it. The crimson strands within it glistened, like freshly spilled blood caught in lamplight. But the silver—the silver gleamed with the same moonlit radiance as my other threads, pure and untainted. How strange that something connecting me to Valen could harbor anything but ruin.
I reached toward it, my fingers trembling with a desire I couldn’t name.
What would happen if I touched it? Would I see his thoughts, feel his emotions, know the truth of what bound us together?
The rope twisted in response to my nearness, the crimson darkening, the silver brightening, as though anticipating my touch.
I hesitated, every instinct screaming at me to pull back, to leave well enough alone.
But the urge was too strong. The need to know, to understand, overpowered everything else. I pressed my finger against the rope.
For an instant, nothing happened. The rope was cold beneath my skin, smoother than silk, harder than steel. Then, with a jolt that sent my entire body arching off the mattress, I was pulled under.
The transition was violent. One moment I knelt on the cold stone of my cell, my hand outstretched.
The next, I was falling through an endless void.
The air rushed from my lungs as if I’d been thrown from a cliff, my stomach lurching in sickening free-fall.
The darkness pressed against my eyes, my ears, my mouth—a living thing that sought to consume me.
I tried to scream, but the sound was swallowed by the void.
For a heartbeat, I thought I had gone blind, that the thread had somehow stolen my sight. But then shapes began to emerge from the darkness, hazy at first, then sharpening with terrible clarity.
Stone walls. Iron bars. A high grating that let in a sliver of pallid light.
My cell. But not as it was now.
The straw that littered the floor was rotted, black with mold and what looked horribly like the stains of forgotten blood.
The air hung thick with the stench of waste and decay and despair.
The walls were marked with hundreds, perhaps thousands of tally marks—crude scratches that, I knew, mapped the passing of time. Years of time.
And there, hanging from the manacles that had so often held me for Valen’s pleasure, was a woman.
No. Not just any woman.
Me.
The figure suspended from the chains was so changed I almost didn’t recognize myself.
Her hair—my hair—had grown past her hips, the once-glossy black now lank and matted, streaked with gray.
Her body was gaunt, all sharp angles and protruding bones, the skin stretched taut over her frame like parchment over a drum.
She hung limply in her chains, her arms stretched high above her head, shoulders dislocated from the strain. Her skin bore a network of scars both old and new, layered one atop another like a grotesque palimpsest of torture. There were so many. Too many to count. Too many to comprehend.
The thin shift she wore was gray with filth and torn in places, revealing more scars, more wounds, more degradation.
Her feet barely touched the ground, forcing her to stand on tiptoe or hang from her wrists—a position I knew from experience grew agonizing within minutes, let alone the hours, days, perhaps years she—I—must have endured.
But it was her eyes that horrified me most. Sunken deep into hollowed sockets, they were dull, vacant—the eyes of someone who had long ago retreated from the world, who existed only in the most technical sense of the word.
The spark of defiance, of life, that I still carried despite everything—it was gone from her.
Extinguished, like a candle snuffed between cruel fingers.
Those eyes that were previously full of silver, that always caused such distrust, such isolation, now shown with nothing but despair.
I wanted to look away. Could not look away.
This broken thing, this hollow shell of a woman—this was my future.
This was what awaited me if I remained in Valen’s grasp.
Not death, not release, but this slow, endless erosion of self until nothing remained but an empty husk, a living corpse that breathed and bled but did not live.
I took an involuntary step forward, bile rising in my throat. This couldn’t be me. I would die before I allowed myself to become this.
As if finally sensing my presence, the woman’s head tilted slowly, the movement requiring visible effort. Her gaze, unfocused at first, sharpened as it found mine. Recognition dawned in those dead eyes, followed by something worse—a flicker of pity.
Her cracked lips moved. A sound emerged, barely audible, a rattling whisper that seemed to bypass my ears and lodge directly in my mind.
“You,” she croaked, her voice like stones grinding together. “You’re still whole.”
I couldn’t speak. My tongue felt swollen in my mouth, useless as a dead thing.
“You still have time.” Her head lolled forward, the effort of speech clearly draining what little strength she possessed. “Don’t trust him. He doesn’t change.” She took in a breath that seemed to rattle against her lungs. “You must escape.”
“How?” I managed, the word a strangled gasp.
A sound from beyond the cell drew her attention—heavy footsteps approaching with measured pace.
Footsteps I knew. Panic flashed across her ravaged features, and as we stared at each other, she must have seen the same look mirrored across mine.
“He’s coming,” she whispered, true terror animating her face. “Run. Fight. Die. Anything but this.”
The footsteps grew louder. A low, hungry chuckle echoed through the corridor.
“Please,” she begged, tears cutting clean tracks down her filthy cheeks. “Don’t become me. Promise me.”
She lifted her head fully then, and I saw something I had missed before—a heavy iron collar around her neck, crusted with old blood.
“I promise,” I whispered, reaching toward her.
As my fingertips brushed her cheek, she disintegrated not into dust or ash, but into threads. Thousands of them, silver and crimson, twisting and unraveling before my eyes until nothing remained but a single silver strand that wound around my wrist like a manacle of light.
The darkness rushed back in, and I was falling again, tumbling through an endless void. The silver thread tightened, cutting into my flesh until I screamed—
I jerked back to reality with such violence that my head slammed against the stone wall behind me.
No sound came from my mouth, though I could feel the scream trapped in my throat like a living thing clawing to get out.
My chest heaved as I gasped for air, my heart hammering against my ribs with such force I thought it might shatter them.
The cell around me looked exactly as it always had—clean straw, solid walls, no blood-stained scratches marking endless days of torment. But the vision clung to me like a second skin, the memory of that broken woman’s hollow eyes burned into my mind.
I looked down at my wrist where the silver thread had wrapped around me in the vision. Nothing. Just pale skin marred by the faint bruises Valen had left during our last encounter. But I could still feel it—a phantom weight, a reminder of what I had seen.
Don’t become me.
The woman’s—my—plea echoed in my skull, bouncing off the walls of my mind until I wanted to claw at my temples to make it stop. Was that truly my future? Years of slow degradation, of having my spirit carved away piece by piece until nothing remained but an empty shell hanging in chains?
I wrapped my arms around my knees and rocked forward, trying to make myself as small as possible.
The motion did nothing to quiet the chaos in my mind.
If anything, it made the vision more vivid—I could still smell the rot and decay, still hear the rattle of chains, still see those dead eyes that had once been mine.
I tried to shift my focus anywhere else, tried to think beyond the horror I had just unveiled, and my eyes caught on the silver-white thread.
It seemed to be vying for my attention, its silver and white strands intertwining and twisting together in a pattern that seemed to whisper rather than shout, to gently pull rather than demand.
The white had softened, no longer the harsh brightness of sunlight on snow, but the luminescence of the moon through clouds, the gleam of bone polished smooth by time. It had a stillness to it that the crimson-silver rope lacked, a certainty that felt ancient rather than violent.