6. Saige
Saige
Everything about the Azkari in the shadows screams danger.
I can only see his silhouette, but his is a towering, muscular figure as he stands for the first time and approaches the bars of his cell.
He ripples with power; it seems to shift around him in restless layers of chaos, longing and fire, until he comes face to face with the creature approaching on the other side of the iron.
My scream gets lodged in my throat and my knees buckle as an enormous hand, gloved in black metal grips the bars with a primal hiss. The monster wears an obsidian mask with hollow eye sockets that reveal nothing but glimpses of empty darkness flickering with sickly green light.
“If you hunger for a fight…” Archer’s deep voice is rough and menacing as he draws the beast’s attention. “You already know I make for a far more satisfying meal.”
The silence hits first. A peculiar, loaded silence that tells me everyone in the prison has just heard something they can’t explain.
Despite the monster, I become suddenly, acutely aware of eyes—not on him, but on me.
Measuring. Recalculating. Not because I’ve done anything.
Because of the way he’s protecting me. The weight of that realization settles over me strangely, something between relief and dread pulling at my ribs.
I haven’t earned this. I don’t know what it means.
A bead of sweat rolls down between my shoulder blades as the creature tilts its head as though sizing up its prey and hisses again, the sound strange and elongated—a language I don’t understand.
My skin crawls as it turns its attention back to me and my legs go weak.
My heartbeat is thrashing in my ears, and all I can think of is Raven and Yevna, held hostage in Thorne’s compound because of me.
If this thing kills me, I know what becomes of them. I can’t bear it.
I’m as far back as possible, but it’s not nearly far enough as the souldren glides towards my cell. Nausea hits me as I take in the rest of it… besides its tarnished and twisted plate mail and the rotting regalia around it, a fleshy foul limb emerges from gaps in the corrupted armor.
It feels like one of those nightmares where you’re trying to scream but no sound comes out. I’m choking on my own fear, unable to make a sound, my fingers digging into the grimy stone of the wall behind me as it reaches between the bars—
My chest feels like it’s being crushed as an image of Yevna and Raven materializes before me.
My mind cycles through an endless loop of horrific scenarios of what they might be facing—torture, pain, death…
The terror sits in my stomach like swallowed glass, sharp and wrong, cutting me from the inside.
I desperately try to push the visions away as I try to focus on…
What am I trying to focus on? All my thoughts dissolve back into them, whether it’s been hours or days, wondering if they’re already dead, if I’m too late.
I’m out of options, out of time, as are my friends—my family.
The guilt is all-consuming, that I couldn’t protect them, that they’re Thorne’s captives because of me.
That their lives depend on my cooperation with a tyrant.
The question “Are they alive?” repeats so many times it stops being words, just a wound that keeps reopening.
Cold sweats wrack my body, alternating between chills and feverish heat as I try to claw my way out—
“Your master wants her in one piece,” Archer’s voice cleaves through the air and with it, comes a ripple of power, a rush of heat that washes over the prison in a great sudden wave.
There’s a moment, even in fog of terror, where I see a flash of shock on his face, as though the heat catches him off-guard before it’s snatched away.
He stares the monster down. “Leave her. Or she cannot do what he requires.”
The rich timber of his words anchors me. I blink and find the corpse-like appendage frozen mere inches from my face.
I realize I’m shivering as the sweat dries on my skin and the souldren hisses again, this time more savagely, turning in Archer’s direction. The noise is so unnatural, so malicious, that all the hairs on my arms stand on end. It seems to be speaking with him directly, if you can call it that.
“You can fucking try,” Archer mutters in response, with a look of disgust. He stares the creature down, until its tendril retreats from my cell, its armor creaking and groaning as it glides away with a final guttural hiss.
When I’m certain it’s gone, I slide down the stone wall into a heap on the filthy floor, my left side burning with familiar pain. I practice my breathing. I focus on the ground beneath me. I dig my fingernails into my palms. I can’t let this happen, not now.
Whispers finally break out across the prison, and a voice I recognize as the one that initially warned us says, “You’re a fool, Ke-Vor.”
“No one asked you, Cahir.” Archer’s retort is a sharp dismissal.
I scan my cell for water, suddenly parched. “What did it say?” I rasp.
“It said what they always do,” Archer tells me darkly. “Eternal praise upon my true king, Malevron. Forever, we shall defend and conquer in your name. Blessed is the one house, blessed is the one family… blessed is the mirror. We were made for war.”
“And didn’t it tell you that it would return to carve you up into little pieces for interfering?” calls out another voice.
I stare in disbelief. “You goaded it…?”
I see a flash of green eyes, eyes that I could swear I’ve seen before but cannot place… “Things were getting a little dull around here, Grayson.”
“Can you… Can you stop it? Fight it?” I ask.
“No.” He is gruff and dismissive. “Not in here.”
“And outside of here? Is it different?” I press, craning my neck to glimpse more of him.
He hesitates, and I guess he decides that there’s no harm in sharing with a dead woman walking. “Perhaps,” he allows.
“Outside of here he’d be nothing but ash the moment he approached,” someone chimes in from another cell.
“Rook, shut it,” Archer calls out.
“You’re touchy today, Ke-Vor,” the Azkari responds.
“Ke-Vor,” I repeat the word turning to Archer. “Is that you?”
“Not anymore.”
“You’re a fantastic conversationalist, has anyone told you that?”
“On occasion,” he replies wryly.
“So you do know what it means.”
A loud noise rattles in the distance and I flinch, making myself as small as I can once more.
“They won’t be back for a while yet,” he says quietly. “You should rest while you can.”
“I can’t.” I hate that my voice wavers, that my eyes sting with tears threatening to spill down my cheeks.
After everything that monster showed me, how could I?
I’m trapped here, helpless, while Yevna and Raven endure gods know what at the hands of Thorne.
I pull my satchel into my lap and rifle through it for my paring knife.
It’s a long shot, but perhaps I could use it on the lock?
Or at the very least, have a weapon at the ready.
“If there’s one thing this place teaches you, it’s what you can and can’t endure,” he tells me.
“What have you learned?” I ask softly.
“Two hundred years of feeling nothing but pain, and yet here I stand. I’ve learned there’s not much I can’t endure. Malevron. Guards. Souldren.”
“What do they show you?” I ask Archer. “The souldren?”
I can just make out Archer tipping his head back to rest against the bars, his voice full of bitterness.
“Everything and nothing at all: me. As I am. With no form. With no power. Just chained to this godsforsaken place for centuries on end. When I wander the realms above, I am a ghost. I do not exist. And no matter how hard I try to warn the realms that he is back. No one can see me.”
“I can see you,” I murmur.
“So it seems.”
“Archer,” I whisper into the dark sometime later, in attempt to wrench myself from loop of horrors in my mind. “There’s a mouse in my cell.”
“Catch it,” he mutters, without turning towards me. “You’ll be starving before long.”
I gag, watching the rodent scurry along the perimeter of the far wall. “You want me to eat it?”
“If you don’t, someone else will.”
“I’d actually kill for a slice of roast vermin,” the voice I recognize as Rook chimes in from nearby.
“But I named him Gregor,” I say, stretching my legs out before me and massaging the twinge in my left thigh.
Silence.
“He’s not bad company…”
Rook snorts. “A blink of an eye in Gravereach and the mortal is madder than the lot of us.”
But there’s nothing from Archer. I hadn’t expected anything.
I turned back to Gregor. “I don’t think he likes you.”
I pull my knees up and keep my gaze from my neighbor’s cell. He doesn’t owe me anything—and I don’t need an audience; I just needed to keep the questions, the fear for Yev and Raven at bay until I work out what to do.
Which is how I almost miss it.
The smallest exhale. Not quite a laugh. Quickly, ruthlessly suppressed, like he’s caught himself doing something dangerous. When I glance over, Archer’s looking at the opposite wall, jaw set, expression perfectly neutral.
A muscle jumps in his jaw. That’s all. But I tuck it away carefully, that almost-laugh, like finding a coin in a gutter. Small. But there.
Despite everything, my chest feels a little lighter for a moment. But the reprieve is fleeting as the nagging pain in my leg blooms into something more. Blanketed in silence, I curl up on my side and hug my knees to my chest, where sleep thankfully drags me under.