TEN ARADYA
TEN
ARADYA
The burned-out building smells of endings.
I slump against the wall, my legs finally surrendering now that there’s nothing left to run from.
The plaster at my back is stained permanently black, decades of pyre-smoke baked into its surface until the original color has become a memory.
Ash coats everything here—the floor, the charred beams overhead, the shattered remains of what might have once been furniture.
A fine gray layer settles over my hair, my clothes, my skin. Every breath tastes of cremation.
We’re at the edge of the Ash Pits. Through gaps in the ruined walls, I can see the iron pyres standing in silent rows, their metal frameworks blackened by decades of fire. The smell drifts in on the night air—bone char, chemical ward-herbs, the indescribable stink of death made fuel.
And I am so, so tired.
My magic is depleted—gutted to a thin flicker I can barely feel.
I reach for the familiar whisper of power that has lived inside me since childhood and find it there, but faint, a candle where a bonfire used to burn.
The effort I spent in the Undercroft carved pieces out of me.
Simple words feel like labor now, each syllable dragged up from the bottom of a nearly empty well.
The dead should be pressing at the edges of my consciousness.
They always are. Wherever I go, I feel them—the weight of unfinished grief, the pressure of spirits wanting to be heard.
It’s been that way since I was eight years old and first heard my grandmother’s voice speaking through my own throat.
Now there’s nothing.
The silence of a woman who has poured out everything she had and discovered that it still wasn’t enough.
I press my hand against my sternum, searching for a flicker of power. My palm comes away tacky with dried blood. I must look like a creature out of a nightmare—pale skin, dark hair wild with ash, blood marking my face like twisted war paint.
I study him in the dim light.
He carried me out of the Undercroft.
I remember that. The strength of his arms around me. The steady beat of his stride even as the dead pressed in from every side. The heat of his body against my cheek when consciousness blurred and I couldn’t tell if I was awake or dreaming.
He could have left me. Should have left me. A witch drained of power is dead weight, and the dead were calling his name, demanding his blood. Leaving me behind would have given him a distraction, bought him time to escape.
Instead, he carried me.
Why?
“You should burn me.”
The words rasp out of my throat before I’ve decided to speak them. My voice sounds like sandpaper on stone.
He doesn’t move. Doesn’t turn. His hand tightens on his blade, knuckles going pale against the green of his skin, but his gaze stays fixed on the pyres.
“That’s what you do with witches who disturb the dead.” I manage to push myself more upright against the wall, every muscle screaming. “I’ve seen the pyres. The Judgment Pyre, where condemned practitioners are executed by fire. You’ve probably burned dozens of my sisters.”
Silence stretches between us. Long enough that I wonder if he heard me. Long enough that I wonder if he’s pretending I’m not here, already deciding how best to drag me to the flames.
Then he speaks.
“You didn’t disturb them.”
His voice is a low rumble, rough from smoke and silence. He still doesn’t turn around.
“You let them speak. There’s a difference.”
I laugh before I can stop myself. It comes out harsh, broken, nothing like humor. “Is there? You heard what they said. I gave them voice, and they used it to attack you. To accuse you. To demand your blood.”
“They attacked me because I’ve been burning them without letting them finish.”
The words come slow. Heavy. Dragged up from a place deep inside him, a place he’s spent years trying to bury.
“I’ve been silencing grief that wasn’t ready to be silenced.” A long pause. His free hand rises to press against the leather armor over his heart. “And now an ancient force has figured out how to use that silence against us.”
My exhaustion recedes, pushed back by the urgency of his words. I force my trembling legs to support me, pushing away from the wall, crossing the ash-covered floor toward him.
“What do you mean?”
He turns.
The movement is sudden, almost violent—one moment facing the window, the next facing me, and I’m close enough now to see the exhaustion carved into his features.
The lines around his eyes. The gray threading through the black hair at his temples.
The set of his jaw, tight with tension that has nothing to do with the revenants we left behind.
His gaze fixes on me with an intensity that steals the breath from my lungs.
I don’t step back.
“The dead who rose tonight weren’t random.
” His voice is flat, controlled—the voice of a man giving a report.
“They were soldiers. All of them. War dead from the old conflicts—the Third Border War, the Siege of Thornwall, the Ashfield Massacre. The ones we’ve been cremating for generations without rites or names or anything but fire. ”
I think of the corpses in the Undercroft. The rotted uniforms from wars that ended before either of us was born. The rusted armor bearing insignia I didn’t recognize. The way they moved in unison, like an army remembering its training even in death.
“You’re saying they’re organized.”
“They’re not random restless spirits.” His jaw tightens. “They’re being gathered. Shaped. Turned into a weapon.”