15. Aradya
FIFTEEN
ARADYA
The Mausoleum Prison is worse than death.
I lie in an iron-barred sarcophagus, suppression wards carved into every surface, my magic dampened to a trickle that barely lets me breathe.
The metal hums with contained power—a low vibration that seeps into my bones and makes my teeth ache.
Above me, the ceiling is close enough to touch if I lift my arm.
I don’t lift my arm. I stopped moving hours ago. Maybe days.
Time has no meaning here.
The silence should be a relief.
Now the wards have stolen that pressure. Muffled it. Hands pressed over a screaming mouth, smothering the voices that have been my constant companions since childhood.
I should feel free.
Instead, I feel like I’m drowning in empty air.
The dead are still there. I can sense them—thousands of spirits pressed against the barriers that cage me, their grief a weight I can feel even if I can’t hear their words. They beg for acknowledgment. Plead for release. Scream for the closure the wards won’t let me provide.
And I can do nothing but lie here and listen to silence that isn’t silence at all.
I turn my head, cheek pressing against the cold iron.
The cell is barely wider than my shoulders, the bars close enough that I can see the runes etched into each one.
The script is ancient—pre-Blackreach, maybe older—designed by someone who understood exactly how to cage a mourning witch.
Every symbol is a denial. Every ward a wall between me and the power that defines me.
Beyond the bars, the corridor stretches into darkness.
No windows. No natural light. The only illumination comes from witch-lights mounted at irregular intervals, their pale glow casting shadows that pool wrong in the corners.
The walls are lined with names—previous prisoners, scratched into the stone by hands that trembled with fear or rage or resignation.
Most of the names are crossed out.
The crossed names mark those who were burned.
I find myself counting them. A dozen in the section of wall I can see. Then two dozen. Then more. Names layered over names, some so old they’ve worn nearly smooth, others fresh enough that I can still see the scratch marks left by desperate fingernails.
How many of them were mourning witches? I wonder. How many of them died for the crime of giving grief a voice?
The thought should terrify me. I’m one of them now—a condemned practitioner, waiting for judgment, my fate resting in the hands of a Council that has burned hundreds of my sisters.
But terror requires energy I don’t have. The magic I spent in the Undercroft carved pieces out of me that refuse to grow back. My body feels hollow. Empty. A vessel that poured out everything it contained and found nothing left to fill the space.
The only heat I feel throbs beneath my breastbone.
The mark.
It pulses with slow, steady rhythm, a heartbeat that isn’t mine.
Even through the suppression wards, even with my magic choked to nearly nothing, I can feel him.
Not his thoughts—the mark doesn’t work that way.
Not his emotions. His presence. A pull at the edge of my awareness, telling me exactly where he is.
Above ground. Moving. Pacing, maybe, or arguing with someone.
The Council is deciding my fate. He said he would lie for me. Said he would protect me until his last breath. I believed him—or at least, I believed that he believed it.
But the Council doesn’t care about mating marks. The Council doesn’t care about anything except maintaining the balance they’ve built on the ashes of the forgotten dead. If High Arbiter Sevik decides I’m too dangerous to live, all the orc magic in the Veillands won’t save me from the Judgment Pyre.
I close my eyes. Try to focus on the mark instead of the silence. The heat beneath my ribs holds steadier than my own heartbeat—a constant reminder that somewhere above this prison, a man I should hate is fighting for my life.
The Ashwalker.
Now I remember his hand on my jaw. Gentle. Desperate. The heat of his skin against mine, and the look in his ash-gray eyes—not the flat assessment of a monster, but the raw terror of a man who has found the one thing he can’t bear to lose.
Instead, I find myself thinking about his hands. The scars across his palms. The calluses worn into patterns I could trace blindfolded. The way they trembled when he touched me—not from cold, not from fear, but from the effort of restraint.
The mark responds to the direction of my thoughts, heat spreading outward from my sternum.
Stop it, I tell myself. He’s not here. Thinking about him won’t help.
But I can’t stop. The silence presses in, and the only anchor I have is the pull of a mating mark I never asked for, leading to a man I shouldn’t want.
Time blurs.
Guards patrol the corridors at irregular intervals, their footsteps echoing off the stone.
They don’t look at me. Superstition says the condemned can curse you with a glance, and the guards have been working these cells long enough to believe it.
They slide trays of food through a narrow slot at the base of my sarcophagus—thin gruel, stale bread, water that tastes of iron—then move on without a word.
I eat mechanically. Not from hunger, but from the dim awareness that my body needs fuel if I’m going to survive long enough to be burned.
The thought should be funny. It isn’t.
I count the meals. Three so far, which means at least a day has passed.
Maybe more. The witch-lights don’t dim or brighten to mark the hours, and my body’s rhythms have been disrupted by the wards.
I sleep in fits and starts, waking to the same unchanging darkness, the same crushing silence, the same thousand names scratched into the walls.
The mark holds steady through it all. A beacon. A reminder.
He’s still up there. Still fighting.
I don’t know if that comforts me or terrifies me.