16. Aradya
SIXTEEN
ARADYA
Sometime during what might be the second night—or the third, or the fourth—the voices change.
Not the guards. Not the distant rumble of the city above. The dead.
They’re still muffled, still pressed against the wards that cage me.
But now their chaos has shifted. Where before they screamed and pleaded and wept in a cacophony of individual grief, now they speak in unison.
Hundreds of voices harmonizing into a single message that vibrates through the suppression wards and settles into my bones.
Mourning witch. Hear us.
I sit up so fast my skull nearly cracks against the iron bars above me. Pain lances through my forehead, but I barely notice. The voices are clear. Clearer than they should be with the wards at full strength.
We are the forgotten. The dumped. The burned without rites.
My hands press flat against the sides of my sarcophagus, fingers splayed, searching for the source of the sound. The runes carved into the iron still glow with suppressive power. The wards haven’t failed.
But the King is pushing through them anyway.
We are the foundation this city was built upon. We have waited centuries for a voice.
The words resonate with a vastness that makes my ribs ache. Every soldier who died without rites in the Veillands’ endless wars, united by a consciousness that has been growing in the darkness beneath Blackreach for longer than the city has existed.
The Gravetide King.
I knew it would find me. Knew it the moment those corpses in the streets began chanting my name. The King wants me as its channel—its permanent voice in the living world—and prison wards built by humans were never going to keep it out forever.
The suppression flickers.
For one heartbeat—two—three—the wards weaken. A crack in the containment, hairline-thin but enough.
My magic surges back to life.
I gasp at the sensation. Heat floods through veins that have been cold for days, power rushing back like blood returning to a limb that fell asleep.
The dead press against my consciousness, thousands of voices pouring through the gap in the wards, and for a moment I can hear them all—the pleas, the confessions, the accumulated grief of centuries demanding acknowledgment.
We don’t want to destroy. The chorus resolves into a single voice, vast and ancient and hungry. We want to be remembered. We want to speak our final truths. We want—
The voice deepens. Becomes singular. Becomes the Gravetide King itself, speaking directly into the hollow space behind my eyes.
—we want the Ashwalker to answer for what he’s done.
My throat is dry. My hands are shaking. The power coursing through me feels like fire and ice and the weight of every funeral I’ve ever attended, all at once.
“Who are you?” The words come out as a rasp, barely audible even in the silence of the cell. “What do you want?”
I am the Gravetide King. The voice wraps around me, intimate and terrible. I am every soldier denied a funeral. Every name forgotten. Every farewell unspoken. Every ending that was stolen before it could be complete.
A pause. The pressure in my skull builds, and I feel the King’s attention focusing on me—a weight vast enough to crush mountains, now concentrated on a single mourning witch in an iron cage.
And I want what you want, mourning witch. I want the dead to find peace.
“Then why are you raising them?” The words tear out of me, fueled by days of silence and terror and the desperate need to understand. “Why are you attacking the city? If you want peace—”
Because peace requires payment. The King’s voice hardens. The Ashwalker has burned ten thousand bodies without letting them speak. The Council has ordered ten thousand more silenced before their time. The debt is vast, mourning witch—and it must be paid in blood.
The suppression wards flare.
The crack in my containment slams shut with force enough to knock me backward against the iron bars. My magic drains away as quickly as it returned, leaving me gasping and empty and cold.
But the King’s voice doesn’t stop. Quieter now, muffled by the wards, but still present. Still speaking.
The Ashwalker has silenced the dead since before you were born. He has fed me with every pyre he lit without rites. He has made me stronger with every name he failed to record, every farewell he cut short, every grief he smothered before it could be expressed.
I press my hands against my ears, but it doesn’t help. The voice isn’t coming from outside. It’s resonating in the place where my magic lives—the hollow space that has been silent since the suppression chains closed around my wrists.
He doesn’t deserve your protection, mourning witch. He doesn’t deserve the mark that burns in you.
“You don’t get to decide that.” The words come out stronger than I expect, echoing off the iron bars of my prison. “The mark isn’t yours to judge.”
No, the King agrees. It is not. But the dead have waited centuries for justice. We will not wait longer because an orc’s magic claims our only channel.
My stomach drops.
Our only channel.
The King doesn’t want to kill me. It never wanted to kill me. It wants to use me—to make me its permanent voice in the living world, a bridge through which it can force every city built on mass graves to hear the demands of the forgotten dead.
“I won’t serve you.” My hands curl into fists, nails biting into palms still tender from the blood-price I paid in the Undercroft. “I speak for the dead because they deserve closure. Not because I want to be a weapon.”
You already are a weapon. The King’s voice softens. Almost gentle. Almost kind. You have been a weapon since the day your power manifested. The question is not whether you will be wielded—only by whom.
The words land with the force of a blow. Because the King is right. I’ve spent my entire life being used—by grieving families who paid in blood and memory, by the dead who demanded voice whether I was willing or not, by a gift I never asked for and can never escape.
I am a conduit. A channel. A tool.
The Gravetide King is offering me the same thing the living have always offered: the chance to be useful. The chance to matter. The chance to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves.
The only difference is the scale.
No. That’s not the only difference.