Chapter 43 Esme
ESME
The darkness shatters and I gasp for air.
I’m somehow on my knees, my palms flat against the cold, gritty floor of Merlin’s chamber.
My fatigues are soaked through with a sweat so cold it feels like a layer of ice against my skin.
My throat feels thick, heavy, like I've swallowed something that doesn't quite fit. When I try to swallow, the sensation intensifies—not painful, exactly, but present. Like something is lodged there, stubborn. Maybe I’ve been screaming for hours…
or something spectral has been crushing my windpipe.
I see a glass of water on the floor beside me, and my collar is too wet—like someone poured water into my mouth while I was out.
“Good. You're awake.”
Warden Blythe's face swims into focus above me. She looks older than I remember, the lines around her eyes deeper, her mouth a grim slash. But there's something else in her expression too. Something that looks like triumph.
My head feels like a vortex of fractured images. A towering bookshelf of memories. My father’s smile trapped behind glass. The impossible gold of Dayn’s eyes. My grandmother’s rage. Then…
“What...” My voice comes out as a croak. “What happened?”
“You completed the trial,” Blythe says, but her tone is clipped, rushed. “That's all that matters now.”
The chamber trembles around us, a low, constant vibration that rattles my teeth. Through the stone, I hear roars, screams.
I try to get up, but my muscles feel disconnected, my bones filled with sand. Blythe’s hand closes around my wrist with surprising strength.
“It’s time,” she says.
“Time for what?” I'm still trying to piece together the shattered remnants of the trial. There was something important. Something I was supposed to remember. But it slips away like smoke every time I reach for it.
“To finish what you started.”
She hauls me upright, and I stumble, my legs weak and uncooperative. The chamber is different now—the candles burn with an eerie blue flame, and the runes carved into the floor pulse with a rhythm that seems to match my own heartbeat. Too fast. Too urgent.
And Merlin's tomb... the granite seems to breathe, the veins within it glowing with a light, ash-white edged in blue, that wasn't there before.
“To seal the deal,” Blythe adds, withdrawing a small dagger. She seizes my left hand, turning it palm-up.
The blade feels like a line of ice across my palm.
The pain is sharp, shocking, and dark blood wells up instantly.
Before I can react, she urges me forward, forcing my bleeding hand flat against the lid of Merlin’s sarcophagus.
The stone is impossibly cold, a dead thing that drinks the heat from my blood, from my body.
A faint, crimson light begins to trace the edges of the carvings beneath my hand, feeding on the offering.
“What… What deal?” I breathe.
Blythe looks down at me, and for the first time in months, I see a smile touch her lips.
“The one that will change everything.”
A low groan echoes from the sarcophagus itself, a sound of grinding stone. The crimson light flares, blindingly bright. A crack, thin as a hair, appears in the granite directly beneath my palm. It spiders outward, fracturing the ancient seal with a sound like the world breaking.
The vibrations stop. The distant screams die. The very air in the chamber becomes thick, still, and silent. Time itself feels like it’s holding its breath within this space.
Then the tombstone cracks wide open.
And a darkness that is not an absence of light, but a presence—a solid, breathing, hungry thing—bursts from within.