Chapter 40
FORTY
ZRYNOK
I’ve seen prisons before.
Dungeons beneath warlord keeps where men rot for decades before anyone remembers they’re there. Pit cells carved into mountainsides where the condemned wait for execution. Iron cages hung from city walls, their occupants left to the elements until death claims them.
A long life of serving authority has shown me every method humans and orcs have devised for storing the inconvenient.
The Confessional Cells are different.
The prisoners here aren’t criminals waiting for judgment. They’re not enemies of the state or threats to public order or condemned men counting their final hours. They’re victims. People stolen from their lives and locked away until they forgot that freedom was possible.
And now I’m opening their doors.
The east wing stretches before me—a honeycomb of small stone chambers, each barely large enough for a person to lie down.
Iron doors line both sides of the corridor, fitted with small slots at eye and waist level.
The smell hits first: unwashed bodies, stale air, and underneath it all, that particular rot that belongs to the Bloom—years of it settled deep into the stone, into the mortar, into the grates that delivered spores along with filtered light.
Everything coated in a fine crimson dust.
Arwen moves ahead of me, her shoulders tight with tension I can read from a dozen feet away. She knows these cells. Lived in them. Survived what happens behind these doors.
I reach for her. My fingers brush her lower back—brief, light, a touch that says I’m here without demanding her attention. She doesn’t turn, but I feel some of the rigidity leave her spine.
“The locks are standardized.” Her voice carries the clinical flatness she uses when discussing horrors. “Iron bolts, no keys required from the outside. The Abbot believed that making escape obviously impossible would break resistance faster than complicated mechanisms.”
“How many cells?”
“Forty-seven in this wing. More in the basement levels.”
Forty-seven people. Minimum. Locked away in darkness, fed through slots in their doors, their only light the grates that deliver the Bloom’s spores along with filtered illumination.
I start with the nearest door.
The first prisoner doesn’t move when I throw open the bolt.
The cell beyond is exactly as Arwen described—a stone box barely eight feet by six, no furniture except a thin mat on the floor, no decoration except scratch marks climbing the walls in desperate tallies.
The woman inside sits in the corner, knees drawn to her chest, eyes fixed on a point somewhere beyond the physical world.
“You’re free.” I keep my voice low. Controlled. The way I’d speak to a frightened animal. “The Abbot is dead. The Keepers are gone. No one is going to hurt you anymore.”
She doesn’t react. Doesn’t blink. Just sits there, breathing in shallow gasps that make the spore-dust swirl around her face.
Arwen appears at my shoulder. “Millicent. Can you hear me? It’s Arwen. I escaped, remember? I came back.”
Something flickers in the woman’s expression. Recognition, maybe. Or fear—fear that this is another test, another trick, another cruelty disguised as hope.
“It’s not a trap.” Arwen crouches at the cell’s entrance, making herself smaller, less threatening. “The monastery is ours now. You can leave. You can go home.”
“Home.” The word comes out cracked, broken, a sound that barely qualifies as language. “I don’t... there isn’t...”
“Then somewhere else. Anywhere but here.” Arwen extends her hand. Palm up. An offer, not a demand. “Take your time. We’ll be here when you’re ready.”
We move to the next cell. And the next. And the next.
Some of them can’t accept it.
A man in the seventh cell—middle-aged, gray threading his hair, his arms covered in the faded scars of self-inflicted wounds—refuses to leave. He presses himself against the far wall when I open his door, eyes wild with terror that has nothing to do with me.
“Close it.” His voice cracks on the words. “Please. Close it. I can’t—I don’t know how to—please.”
“You’re free.” The words feel hollow. Useless. “You don’t have to stay.”
“I don’t know how to be free.” Tears stream down his face, cutting tracks through the spore-dust coating his skin. “The Abbot told me what to feel. What to want. When to eat, when to sleep, when to—” He chokes. Sobs. “Who will tell me now? Who will decide?”
I look at Arwen. She meets my gaze with an expression I can’t read—sorrow, maybe, or the resignation of someone who has seen this before.
“We’ll leave the door open.” Her voice is gentle. “You don’t have to leave today. But the door stays open. When you’re ready—if you’re ever ready—you can walk out.”
We move on.
The next cell holds a woman who screams when light touches her face.
The one after that, a teenage boy who tries to attack me with his feeding bowl—the only thing in his cell besides the mat.
I catch his wrist before the blow lands, hold him still until the fight drains out of him, then release him without a word.
Cell after cell. Door after door. Each one a separate horror, a unique manifestation of what happens when people are stripped of choice for too long.
I check every face as the doors swing open—an old habit, one I thought I’d killed.
People I once knew, looking back at me from cells I can’t open fast enough.
These break pieces of me I didn’t know I still had.
Others are different.
A young woman emerges from cell twenty-three blinking against the corridor’s dim light—dim, but still brighter than the darkness she’s lived in for however long she’s been imprisoned.
Her face is wet with tears she doesn’t try to hide.
Her hands shake as she reaches for the doorframe, as if confirming that it’s real, that the iron isn’t going to slam shut the moment she crosses the threshold.
“Thank you.” The words come out as a whisper. “Thank you, thank you, thank you—”
She can’t stop saying it. Just repeats the phrase over and over as she stumbles into the corridor, as she passes other cells where other prisoners are making their own choices about freedom.
An older man—Oben, according to Arwen’s murmured identification—walks out of his cell without a word.
His expression is blank, unreadable, the look of someone who has forgotten how to feel anything at all.
He moves past me without acknowledging my presence, past Arwen, past the other freed prisoners.
“Oben.” Arwen reaches for him. “Wait—”
He doesn’t wait. Doesn’t respond. Just keeps walking, his pace steady and purposeful, moving toward the wing’s exit with the single-minded determination of someone who has been dreaming of this moment for two decades.
“Should I stop him?” I reach for Arwen’s hand. Find it. Intertwine my fingers with hers.
“No.” She watches him disappear through the archway leading to the main courtyard. “Let him go. He needs to see the trees.”
I don’t ask what she means. I think I understand.