Chapter 23
Time lost its edges—day bleeding into night, night dissolving back into day, until it all felt like one endless stretch of gray. Elara, alongside Reynnar, drifted through their days like ghosts occupying the same space.
Life had settled into a numbing routine, a continuous loop of mundane tasks punctuated only by the sporadic arrival of meals too scant to sate any hunger.
The occasional appearance of the jailers, heralded by the metallic scrape of trays and the shuffling of the weary souls throughout the Pit, marked the only variance in the monotony that had become her reality.
Each captive was allotted two buckets: one for bodily relief and the other for washing, a situation that was as degrading as it was disgusting.
The water they provided for bathing was always dirty and cold, and no matter how vigorously Elara scrubbed, each attempt to wash seemed only to embed the dirt further into her skin.
When she redressed in the same grimy, sweat-soaked clothes, it felt as though she would never rid herself of the filth—or the shame.
And Elara did feel shame. So much of it.
Shame for endangering the Keepers by bringing a ring into their midst, shame for her role in Edgar’s death, shame for deluding herself into thinking she could be anything other than what she was.
How stupid—how painfully naive—to believe her darkest days were behind her.
Her cell was a prison in every sense. Her hair clung to her scalp, clothes sticking to her skin with a dampness that never left.
Raw patches had formed at her wrists and ankles from constant friction, and her fingers, swollen and blistered, bore the beginnings of sores.
Every inch of her body felt like it was slowly decaying, making sleep impossible.
Her nights were spent twisting and turning, searching for even a sliver of comfort that never came.
The weak torchlight would flicker against the walls, playing tricks on her, turning shadows into monsters that lurked just out of sight.
But it wasn’t just the walls trapping her—it was the crushing sameness of it all.
Day after day, nothing changed, nothing shifted.
The repetition was worse than the bars, worse than the stone.
It was the slow death of everything she’d once been. An erosion of her spirit.
In those first days, she searched the prison for any sign of Godfrey, holding onto the faintest hope of catching a glimpse of him.
She even tried to request another visit with Saria, praying it might give her a chance to see more of the Pit and map out its layout in her mind.
But she’d been right—seeing a healer was a rare privilege down here, one even the sick and dying didn’t receive.
Every day, the air would reek of death, and bodies—so many bodies—were carried out of this wretched place.
Almost always, they came from the tunnel where the Fae were held.
Each night, like clockwork, Elara’s mind drifted back to the binding ritual.
To the way the Hunter’s seal had been hers to command, how she’d held it in her grasp, feeling his power throb beneath her control.
It was intoxicating, that rush. But now, after hearing Avis’s excuses, it left a sour taste in her mouth.
She didn’t know what to feel. Edgar had ordered them to control her?
Fine. But they could’ve at least had the decency to tell her what they were doing.
To explain it. Make her understand. Instead, they hid behind their lies, protecting themselves, and left her to piece it together, left her to rot in the dark.
After what felt like hours of twisting beneath the covers, Elara would finally give in, curling into herself, knees pulled tight to her chest. Sleep was elusive, always just out of reach, so she spent those endless nights chasing it through the only way she knew—ritualized control.
Over and over, she walked that familiar mental path, searching for any trace of the seals, pushing herself until exhaustion finally dragged her under.
But even in her dreams the memory of that force, that blinding light kept replaying on a loop.
It had been pure instinct, an impulse that flared to life in the heat of the moment.
And now, she didn’t have the faintest idea how to call it back.
A fragile connection with Reynnar offered her a sliver of contact with the world outside her cage.
It wasn’t much, but it kept her tethered, kept her from drifting entirely into despair.
Alongside this, she became an expert observer, gathering scraps of information like a squirrel hoarding nuts for winter.
From fragmented whispers to the soft shuffling of bodies in the dark, she pieced together that this place was filled with Faeries.
So many of them.
She had always assumed the prison was filled with rebels, yet she seemed to be the only human captive here.
She thought back to that small group of Keepers she’d traveled with and the knot in her stomach twisted tighter.
Had they survived? If her suspicions were right—if Osin had used that dagger, sent his shadows crawling inside her mind, picking apart her memories—then he’d seen them.
He’d seen their faces, marked them all. The traitor prince, he’d called Dominic.
Elara’s heart clenched. She could only hope they’d made it out alive.
But hope felt thin, fragile—especially in a place like this.
Tortured screams echoed through the tunnels every night. On some occasions, the sound was so unbearable that Elara could only curl into herself, sobbing until exhaustion finally dragged her into a fitful sleep.
Reynnar, though—he never broke. Night after night, he stood at the front of his cell, motionless, as if he were carved from stone.
His eyes never closed, his body never sagged with exhaustion.
He stayed like that, silent, as if he could feel every scream, every cry, like a blade cutting into him.
Elara couldn’t fathom why they’d locked him away from the others, why his cell was placed in this nearly abandoned tunnel.
But maybe that was the point—a twisted form of torture, making him listen to his people’s suffering, knowing he couldn’t reach them. Couldn’t help.
Osin’s audacity baffled her. Why risk the Mothers’ fury?
What need did Latheria have for captive Fae?
And most concerning of all, how had he done it?
It shouldn’t have been possible. The Mothers had decreed that neither race could cross into the other’s realm. Yet, there they were, defying the very laws of their existence. And Elara was hellbent on figuring out how.
When Elara did find sleep, she would dream strange, unsettling dreams. They weren’t nightmares, but they left her with the same feeling of being unmoored.
Like the visions the river spirit used to give her—fleeting images, fragments of something just beyond her reach.
She felt adrift, searching for something she couldn’t name.
And then, always—him.
The Hunter.
Every single night.
Sometimes he appeared as a boy, standing in the court with eyes too knowing for someone so young.
Other times, she saw him as the warrior, cutting his way through the forest, the crackling flames at his back as if they answered to him alone.
But it was the other vision that haunted her most—the man on his knees, surrounded by ash, his hollow eyes fixed on her, empty and waiting.
Each time she woke, her heart thundered in her chest, her skin damp with sweat. The dreams left her shaken, so rattled that she’d stumble to the murky, foul water in her cell just to splash some sense back into herself. But it never helped.
In the mornings, when the first round of guards would dole out tooth-cracking bread alongside a questionable, fishy-smelling soup, Reynnar would quietly slide a portion of his food across the cold floor to her.
He seemed to think she needed it more than he did.
After a while, she stopped arguing and accepted it.
Their shared mornings became something of a sacred routine, a quiet communion in their imprisonment.
His voice became her dawn, the exotic cadence of his native tongue weaving a spell of comfort around her frayed edges.
The stories he told, indecipherable as they were, carried a beauty that didn't need translation, their rhythm a lullaby that coaxed her into a semblance of peace she hadn't known since being trapped.
In return, she would whisper stories of Aewora’s towering mountains, how she’d spent hours in the Sanct, watching the sun bathe their golden peaks and dreaming of scaling them, just to capture the entirety of Latheria in one sweeping gaze.
She spoke of her longing for the ocean, of the pull she felt toward the endless stretch of blue, imagining what it would be like to dive beneath the waves and taste the sweet freedom they promised.
Reynnar listened intently, his eyes never leaving hers, offering soft, empathetic hums, and quiet smiles that kept her grounded, kept her from slipping away into the dark.
In a place where it would have been so easy to lose herself, his steady presence kept her tethered to something real. Something that still felt like hope.
By the fourth or fifth week in captivity—Elara couldn’t be sure—she watched in horror as the guards dragged Reynnar from his cell.
His brief struggle barely made a difference, a flicker of defiance snuffed out almost as quickly as it sparked.
She had yelled at them to stop, rattled her bars like he had done for her on that first morning.
But Elara quickly learned why the others stayed silent, why they didn’t interfere.
For this was a place where voices died on bruised lips.
Malak had burst into her cell, cutting off her plea with a brutal backhand that whipped her head to the side, pain exploding in her jaw.
Before she could even recover, his boot slammed into her ribs, knocking the air from her lungs and leaving her gasping, crumpled on the floor.
He stormed out without a word, and in the throbbing silence that followed, a cold realization settled over her.
Osin hadn’t just caged them—he’d somehow stripped the Fae of their power.
Reynnar's words should have been imbued with the strength of the ancients, but they were empty, hollow, drained of the ether that was rightfully his.
But it couldn't just be him; it had to be all of them.
Osin must have robbed every Fae of their birthright, reducing them to mere husks of themselves, powerless against their shackles.
When they tossed Reynnar back into his cell, broken and bruised, Elara had to force herself not to look away, swallowing the sob that threatened to escape.
His body was a map of suffering, slashed, and smeared in deep purples, blacks, and blues, each mark screaming of the torment he'd endured.
She stood by the bars that separated them, gripping the cold iron as if it could somehow bridge the distance between them, watching helplessly as he fought to breath, his chest rising and falling in a jagged rhythm.
Time felt like it dragged on, the seconds heavy and painful, until finally, he stirred.
But when his gaze met hers, there was a trace of something shattered in his expression, a fracture deep within that hadn't been there before. And seeing him like that broke something inside her too.
Their eyes met, locked in a silent exchange of shared pain, until he dragged himself closer, inch by agonizing inch, to where she knelt.
All Elara could offer was the small comfort of running her fingers through his hair while applying salve to the wounds within her reach. A gesture that felt so pitifully inadequate for the magnitude of his suffering.
But when her hand touched him, his eyes fluttered shut, a pained smile tugging at his cracked lips, reopening the scab on his mouth.
And in that moment, she knew. It hit her with a force she couldn’t ignore—her purpose, her path, crystallized with a clarity so sharp it cut through everything else she had ever known.
It wasn’t just about escaping her pain or finding freedom. It was about them—the Fae, Reynnar, all those crushed beneath Osin’s power, just as she had been. For so long, she had fought in silence, trapped in her own suffering, numb to the world around her.
Their pain reflected her own, but Reynnar’s presence stirred something deeper—something she’d never felt when fighting for herself. He reminded her that she wasn’t in this battle alone anymore. She wasn’t the only one clawing her way out of the darkness.
And that changed everything.
So, she would play Osin’s game. She would learn, grow, and then turn the game on its head.
She’d make them pay.
Every single one of them.