6. Aradya
SIX
ARADYA
What they want.
I stare at him, this man I’ve been taught to fear, and I see the question beneath the demand. He’s not hunting me. He’s not following orders from the Council. He heard the dead speak his name, and it shook him.
He wants to understand.
“They want to be heard.” I don’t know where the words come from. They rise from deeper than conscious thought, drawn out by the intensity of his gaze. “The dead you burn without rites. The soldiers dumped in mass graves, forgotten by everyone who should have mourned them.”
His expression doesn’t change. But his eyes do—a flicker of recognition, maybe guilt, passes through those ash-gray depths before he locks it away.
“That’s what mourning witches always say.” His voice is flat. “The dead deserve closure. The dead deserve voice. Meanwhile, the dead rise and kill and spread their grief until there’s no one left to mourn.”
“And burning them without letting them speak is better?” The anger surprises me. Cuts through the fear, the exhaustion, the guilt. “You think silence is mercy? You think erasing people before they can say goodbye is kindness?”
“I think it keeps the living alive.” He doesn’t raise his voice. Doesn’t need to. The conviction in his words is enough. “Which is more than your magic did for Ira Genn.”
The words hit like a blow. I step back, but there’s nowhere to go. My shoulders press against rough stone.
He’s right. He’s absolutely right, and I hate him for it.
“I didn’t know.” The anger drains out of me, leaving nothing but the hollow ache of guilt. “I’ve done that rite a hundred times. There was a darker current beneath the whispers—something more coercive, more final. I had always sensed it and always refused to surface it. Nothing like that has ever—”
“The circumstances changed.” He studies me with those cold eyes, and I feel exposed. Stripped bare. “What?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know. The rite was normal. Kellan Venn started speaking through me, saying the things the dead usually say—apologies, regrets, unfinished words. Then his voice changed. Deepened. Became a chorus instead of a single soul.”
“A chorus.” His brow furrows.
“Hundreds of voices. Maybe thousands. Speaking in unison, using Kellan as a doorway.” I wrap my arms around myself, suddenly cold despite the heat radiating from the death warden’s body. “They talked about being dumped in pits. Covered with lime. Burned before anyone could mourn them.”
His fists tighten. A muscle twitches in his cheek.
“Mass graves.” The words are barely audible. “They were talking about mass graves.”
“Your mass graves.” I meet his gaze, holding it despite the fear coiling in my gut. “The ones you’ve burned for twenty years. The ones beneath this city, beneath every city in the Veillands, filled with soldiers who never got to say goodbye.”
The silence stretches between us. Thick and heavy, filled with truths neither of us wants to acknowledge.
He’s still staring at me. Still assessing. But the hostility in his posture has shifted—not softened, exactly, but changed. Redirected. He’s not looking at me like a threat anymore.
He’s looking at me like a puzzle he needs to solve.
“The presence that spoke through you.” He speaks slowly, choosing his words. “It called itself a king. A gravetide.”
I nod. “I heard that too. Before—” I stop. Swallow hard. “Before Ira died.”
Before I can say anything else, the floor trembles.
A vibration runs through the stone beneath my feet, subtle at first, then growing. The walls shudder. Dust sifts from the ceiling, catching in the faint witch-light that seeps through the open doorway.
The Ashwalker’s hand moves to his blade, fingers curling around the hilt. “What is that?”
“I don’t—”
The whispers start.
Not from a corpse this time. Not from a single source I can identify. They pour from the walls themselves, from the ceiling, from the very stones of the Undercroft—a chorus of voices rising from the depths, speaking words I can’t quite make out.
The chamber grows colder. The temperature drops so fast my breath clouds in front of my face, white wisps against the darkness.
No. Not now. Not here.
“It found us.” My voice comes out strangled. “The presence—it’s here. It followed me, or it was already here, waiting—”
The Ashwalker draws his blade. Enchanted iron gleams in the dim light, humming with power I can feel against my skin. He positions himself between me and the doorway, his body blocking my only escape route.
Protecting me. Or keeping me from running.
I don’t have time to figure out which.
The floor splits.
Not a small fissure—a fault line tearing through the packed earth, running from wall to wall, widening with every heartbeat. The whispers crescendo into a roar, hundreds of voices harmonizing into a single demand that I feel in my bones.
LISTEN.
Hands burst through the floor.
Skeletal fingers claw at the stone, dragging bodies upward from depths that shouldn’t exist beneath a safe house. One corpse. Two. A dozen. More, emerging in a wave of rotting flesh and rusted armor, their empty sockets fixed on the living who have intruded on their domain.
The Ashwalker moves.
His blade sings through the first corpse before it fully emerges, severing the thread that binds it to animation.
The body crumbles to dust. He pivots, strikes again, takes down a second, a third.
His movements are precise, economical, the practiced efficiency of a man who has done this thousands of times.
But more keep coming. Crawling up from the earth, filling the small chamber, pressing toward us with mindless hunger.
I have no weapon. No strength to run. My magic is drained, my body exhausted, my mind reeling from the impossibility of what I’m seeing.
But I’m still a mourning witch. And the dead are still speaking.
I reach for the whispers. Not to channel them—I don’t have the strength for that—but to hear them. To understand what they’re saying.
We were forgotten. We were burned without rites. We want to be HEARD.
The dead aren’t attacking randomly. They’re trying to communicate. Desperately, violently, but their intent isn’t destruction—it’s expression.
“Stop!” My voice comes out hoarse, barely audible over the cacophony. I push harder, forcing power I don’t have into my throat. “STOP! I’m listening! I HEAR you!”
The corpses pause.
Not for long. A heartbeat, maybe two. But long enough for the Ashwalker to cut down three more, long enough for the wave of rising dead to hesitate before surging forward again.
He glances back at me, sweat beading on his brow, his blade dripping with ichor. “What did you do?”
“I listened.” I move toward him without thinking, putting myself at his back, facing the corpses still emerging from the broken floor. “They want to be heard. They’re not attacking—they’re screaming.”
“They can scream while I burn them.” He cuts down another corpse, kicks the remains aside. “We need to move. This room is compromised.”
He grabs my arm. His grip is iron, his palm calloused against my skin. The contact sends a jolt through me—unexpected, electric, a spark of heat in the midst of the freezing chaos.
I don’t have time to examine it.
He drags me toward the doorway, blade flashing in his other hand, clearing a path through the bodies still clawing their way up from the earth.
I stumble after him, my exhausted legs barely cooperating, my free hand pressed against my nose as blood starts flowing again from the strain of touching even a fraction of my power.
The corridor outside is no better. The walls have buckled, the floor heaved, and the witch-lights have gone out—replaced by an eerie luminescence that seems to rise from the earth itself.
The whispers are louder here, echoing from every surface, filling the air with the desperate cries of the forgotten dead.
“Which way?” The Ashwalker’s voice cuts through the noise.
I point. Left. Toward the passage that leads up, toward the city, toward fresh air and open sky and the pyres that never stop burning.
We run.
The dead follow. Crawling up through the floor behind us, reaching through gaps in the walls, their skeletal fingers grasping at our clothes, our hair, our skin.
The Ashwalker fights as we move—striking, cutting, destroying anything that gets too close—while I pour what little power I have into the whispers, trying to calm them, trying to make them understand that we’re not their enemies.
It doesn’t work. The presence controlling them is too vast, too hungry. It doesn’t care about my good intentions.
It only cares about being heard.
We burst through a final doorway and into a larger chamber—one of the junction points where multiple tunnels meet. The ceiling is higher here, the walls more stable. The dead emerge slower, their bodies having to crawl further to reach us.
The Ashwalker slams the door behind us and jams his blade through the mechanism, wedging it shut. It won’t hold for long, but it’ll buy us a moment.
He turns to face me. His body heaves with exertion. His blade is still buried in the door, which means he’s unarmed.
We stare at each other in the dim glow of the luminescent earth.
“Whatever is waking beneath this city,” he says, his voice rough with exertion, “neither of us can stop it alone.”
I nod. My own breath is ragged, my body screaming with exhaustion.
“No.” I meet his eyes—those cold, ash-gray eyes that hold more pain than I expected to find there. “We can’t.”
Behind the barricaded door, the dead begin to pound. Skeletal fists striking stone, bone shattering against metal, the rhythm of a thousand hands demanding entry.
The Ashwalker extends his hand. Not to grab me this time. An offer. A choice.
“The Ash Pits.” His palm faces upward, scarred and open. “If there’s a mass grave stirring beneath the city, it’ll be connected to what we burn above ground. We can seal it. Cut off the flow.”
“You want to burn more of them?”
“I want to stop whatever’s pulling them up.” His hand remains extended, steady despite the chaos, despite the pounding on the door, despite everything.
I look at his hand. Scarred palm. Calloused fingers. The hand of a man who has burned thousands of bodies without letting them speak.
The hand of my enemy.
I take it.
His grip closes around mine—solid, surprisingly gentle. He pulls me toward another exit, retrieving his blade from the door as we pass, and we plunge into the darkness.
Behind us, the dead break through. Their whispers follow us up through the tunnels, filling the air with the voices of the forgotten, the abandoned, the burned-without-rites.
And beneath our feet, deep in the heart of Blackreach, the vast and hungry presence stretches awake.
Waiting to be heard.