ARADYA
THIRTY-FIVE
The suppression wards protecting the Cinder Hall are the strongest in the city. As we approach the gray stone walls, I feel my magic dampen, the whispers in my mind fading to a distant murmur. The relief is immediate and overwhelming.
For a few precious breaths, I can’t hear the dead at all.
“Inside.” Drokhar steers me toward the iron-banded doors, his hand finding the small of my back. The touch is proprietary. Protective. Mine, it says, to anyone watching. I lean into it without thinking, my body seeking his the way flowers seek sun.
The guards recognize him—of course they do. He’s the Ashwalker. They step aside without question, though their gazes linger on me with undisguised suspicion.
The mourning witch who should have burned days ago.
The mourning witch who’s now wearing the Ashwalker’s claiming mark.
I lift my chin and meet their stares. Let them look.
The Council Chamber is chaos barely contained.
Five high-backed chairs of black iron face the central speaking platform, their occupants stripped of the cold composure that usually defines them.
Maps cover the curved walls—burial grounds, cemetery plots, mass grave locations—and every one of them glows with red markers indicating revenant activity.
The city is drowning in the dead it’s spent centuries creating.
High Arbiter Sevik stands at the viewing window, his aged face illuminated by the distant glow of pyres burning in the Ash Pits. He’s signed more burn orders than anyone in Blackreach’s history. Tonight, those orders are coming home.
“Triple the pyre crews.” His voice shakes with barely controlled terror. “Conscript civilians if we must. Every corpse that rises needs to burn before—”
“Burning won’t work.”
My whisper cuts through the argument. Every head turns toward me—the Arbiters, their aides, the gray-uniformed guards stationed around the room. Drokhar’s hand tightens on my elbow, steadying me.
“Explain yourself, witch.” Arbiter Grond snarls the words.
He’s an orc, his green skin darker than Drokhar’s, his tusks filed to points that speak of barely contained aggression.
I know his story—lost his entire family to a revenant uprising when he was young.
His hatred of the dead runs deeper than policy. Deeper than reason.
I step forward, moving onto the speaking platform even though no one invited me.
The suppression wards carved into the floor press against my magic, but they can’t silence what I’ve become.
Not completely. The claiming burned more than flesh—it burned pathways into my power that no ward was designed to close.
“The dead aren’t rising because of residual magic. They’re being called.” I let my gaze travel across each Arbiter in turn. “Pulled up by a force that won’t stop until it gets what it wants.”
“Which is?” High Arbiter Sevik’s question is more demand than inquiry.
“Me.”
Silence falls. Even the distant screaming seems to fade.
“The Gravetide King wanted me as its permanent voice.” I keep my tone steady, refusing to let them see how much those words cost. “A living channel through which it could speak to the entire Veillands. Through me, it planned to address every city built on mass graves—to demand acknowledgment, to force the living to hear what the dead have been screaming for three centuries. I refused. This”—I gesture toward the window, toward the chaos consuming the city—”is the King’s response.
If it can’t have me, it will destroy everyone I might have helped. ”
“Preposterous.” Arbiter Meren’s words slice through the silence.
She’s a witch—one who sold out her own kind for political power, who identifies mourning witches for execution in exchange for immunity.
The silver pins in her hair mark her as council-sanctioned.
The cruelty in her eyes marks her as a traitor to her own blood.
“The Gravetide King is a legend. A story we tell to keep the lower classes afraid of tampering with graves.”
“It was a legend.” Drokhar moves closer, his massive frame radiating threat. “It stopped being a legend when it dragged us both into its realm and tried to claim her as its anchor.”
“And yet here you stand.” Meren spreads her hands. “Unclaimed. Unconsumed. How convenient.”
“The claiming saved her.” His hand finds my waist, pulling me against his side. “The mating mark anchored her to the living world. The King couldn’t complete the absorption because she already belonged somewhere else.”
Meren’s eyes narrow. “Belonged. An interesting choice of words, Ashwalker.”
“Then give yourself up.” Sevik’s words slice through the chamber. “Surrender to this King. Save the city.”
Drokhar moves. One moment he’s beside me, the next he’s between me and the Council, his massive frame blocking their view of me entirely. The brand over his heart pulses with light visible even through his armor.
“She’s not a bargaining chip.” His words carry the same quiet certainty that once terrified condemned prisoners. “She’s the only one who can stop this.”
“Explain.” Arbiter Thorne speaks for the first time. He’s a pragmatist—neither cruel nor kind, simply efficient. His gaze calculates rather than condemns.
Drokhar glances at me. A question in those ash-colored eyes. Can you do this? Can you make them understand?
I step around him, placing myself beside him rather than behind. He lets me, though his hand finds mine again, our fingers interlacing. The Arbiters watch the gesture with expressions ranging from disgust to calculation.
“The Gravetide King is a composite entity.” I speak slowly, choosing each word with care.
“Thousands of soldiers who died in the Veillands’ wars, buried without rites, without names, without anyone to mourn them.
Their unfinished grief accumulated over centuries until it achieved consciousness.
The King doesn’t speak for itself—it speaks for all of them.
Every soldier it absorbed. Every farewell that was never said. ”
“What does that matter?” Grond’s snarl carries decades of old pain. “The dead are the dead. We burn them to keep them quiet.”
“That’s exactly the problem.” I turn to face him directly.
“Every time you burn a mass grave without letting the dead speak, you feed the King’s power.
Every time you silence grief before it’s ready to be silenced, you give that grief to an entity that has been collecting it for three hundred years. ”
Arbiter Meren shifts in her chair. Looking at her, I feel the familiar burn of hatred beneath my sternum.
“You’re suggesting we should have let them speak?” Her voice drips with false sweetness. “Let every corpse whisper its final words while the living waited for permission to move on?”
“I’m suggesting that the alternative created a monster.” I don’t bother hiding my contempt. “One you helped feed.”
Her eyes narrow.
“Enough.” Sevik cuts through the tension. “What do you propose, witch? If burning won’t work and the King wants you specifically—what exactly do you suggest we do?”
I take a breath. The words I’m about to speak feel like stepping off a cliff.
“I have to go back.”
Drokhar’s hand tightens on mine. Warning.
“The King’s realm,” I continue. “The Battlefield Beyond the Veil. That’s where its power comes from—the accumulated grief of every soldier it’s absorbed. If I can reach those soldiers directly, speak to them individually instead of letting the King speak for them—”
“You’ll be giving yourself up.” Drokhar’s rumble is rough. “Walking straight into its domain.”
“I’ll be doing what I was born to do.” I turn to face him, reaching up to cup his scarred cheek in my free hand. The gesture is intimate—deliberately so. Let the Council see that the Ashwalker belongs to a mourning witch now. Let them understand that burning me means burning him.
“I’ll be letting the dead speak their final truths.” My voice softens, but I don’t look away from those gray eyes. “Not the King’s truth—theirs. And when they’ve spoken, when they’ve been heard, they won’t need the King anymore. They’ll be able to rest.”
“And if the King stops you?”
I don’t have an answer for that. But I can feel the dead pressing against my consciousness even through the suppression wards—not the King’s puppets, but the real soldiers, the real people, the accumulated grief of centuries begging for release.
They don’t want to destroy. They want to be remembered.
I can give them that. I have to try.
“Then I’m coming with you.”
Drokhar’s declaration rings through the chamber. He draws his blade—the curved enchanted iron that has destroyed a thousand revenants—and the metal gleams in the firelight from the viewing window.
“The King wants my blood. Fine. Let it try to take it.” His free hand finds my waist, pulling me against his side. Claiming me publicly, deliberately, in front of everyone who would see me burn. “But I’m not letting you face this alone.”
“Death warden.” High Arbiter Sevik’s words cut like ice. “You would abandon your post? Your duty?”
“My duty is to keep the dead from destroying the living.” Drokhar doesn’t flinch. “The witch is the only weapon we have against the King. Protecting her is protecting the city.”