ARADYA
THIRTY-SIX
Arbiter Kess speaks for the first time. She’s younger than the others, her face less lined with the weight of compromises.
“The death warden has a point.” Her gaze finds mine, and I see calculation there rather than sympathy.
“If the mourning witch can truly reach the soldiers individually, if she can give them the closure the King denies—that’s a weapon worth protecting. ”
“Or a convenient excuse to let both of them escape justice.” Meren’s smile is poison.
“Justice?” I turn on her, years of hiding, of watching my sisters burn, crystallizing into cold fury. “You want to talk about justice? How many witches have you handed over to the pyres, Meren? How many women who did nothing but give the grieving what they needed?”
“I survived.” Her smile doesn’t waver. “Can you say the same for the witches who refused to cooperate?”
Drokhar’s blade moves. Not toward Meren—toward the table between us, sinking into the wood with a thunk that silences every voice in the chamber.
“The witch and I are walking out of here.” His words carry the rumble of barely contained violence. “You can send death wardens with us, or you can send them against us. But either way, we’re going.”
“And if we refuse?”
“Then the city burns anyway, and you die knowing you could have stopped it.”
Silence stretches. The distant screaming outside seems to grow louder, as if the dead themselves are listening to this conversation.
Finally, Arbiter Thorne speaks.
“Give them an escort to the Undercroft entrance.” His words come out flat, pragmatic. “If they fail, we’ve lost a rogue death warden and a condemned witch. If they succeed, the Council claims credit for the strategy.”
Sevik’s teeth grind audibly. Grond snarls a curse under his breath. Meren’s eyes promise retribution.
But Thorne’s logic is irrefutable, and they all know it.
“Go.” Sevik’s word is a curse. “But understand this, witch—if you survive, if you manage to stop this rising, you still face trial. The Council’s judgment is merely postponed.”
I nod. I don’t bother pointing out that if I fail, there won’t be a Council left to pass judgment on anyone.
The streets are worse than before.
In the time we spent arguing with the Council, the King has intensified its assault. Bodies pour from every crack and crevice—not in the organized ranks we saw in its realm, but in desperate waves, corpses driven by hunger and grief and the relentless need to be heard.
The pyres in the Ash Pits burn brighter than I’ve ever seen them. Death wardens work in shifts, feeding bodies to flames that can’t consume them fast enough. For every corpse they destroy, two more rise from graves they haven’t reached yet.
We move through a city choking on its own dead, Drokhar’s blade carving a path while I whisper what comfort I can to the spirits that pause to listen.
Some of them respond—soldiers who remember what orders sounded like, civilians who still recognize the voice of authority.
But more and more slip past my influence, driven by a will stronger than anything I can match.
The King is everywhere now. In the whispers that follow us through the streets. In the faces of the dead that turn to track our movement. In the pressure building behind my eyes, constant and unrelenting, waiting for the moment my defenses finally give.
They’re mine, mourning witch. Every one of them. And soon, you will be too.
The brand on my collarbone burns in response—not with pain, but with denial. Drokhar’s location is a fixed point in my consciousness, the one thing that remains steady while everything else descends into chaos.
“The passage we escaped through.” He guides me around a knot of revenants clustered around a collapsed building, their hands clawing at rubble that buried a body they want. “It should still be open enough to enter, if not to escape.”
“The King will be waiting.”
“I know.”
His hand finds the small of my back again, pressing me closer as we duck into an alley that leads toward the depths beneath the city.
The touch shouldn’t be comforting—we’re walking toward the thing that wants to consume me, toward a realm where the dead outnumber the living a thousandfold—but it is.
His palm against my spine. His body between me and the worst of the chaos.
The entrance to the Undercroft yawns before us—a crack in the foundation of an old building, barely wide enough for Drokhar to squeeze through.
The stones around it bear the marks of old magic—wards that were meant to keep things in, not out.
Someone built this entrance deliberately.
Someone who needed quick access to the depths beneath Blackreach.
I don’t want to know who. I don’t want to think about how many mourning witches used this passage before me, fleeing Council justice or seeking the amplified power that comes from proximity to mass graves. How many of them made it out again?
The suppression wards of the Cinder Hall fade as we descend, replaced by the ambient whispers that haunt every shadow in Blackreach.
The dead know we’re coming.
Mourning witch. The King’s voice slides through my consciousness, no longer blocked by ward or stone. You return to me.
I don’t answer. My magic coils inside me, waiting, building toward the confrontation I can feel approaching with every step.
The passages narrow as we go deeper. Witch-lights float at irregular intervals—old magic, maintained by generations of women who needed to work in the dark.
They respond to me, brightening as I pass, illuminating walls that shift from worked stone to raw earth to ancient bone.
Compressed remains. The dead forming the very structure around us.
The Undercroft exists in the space between the living city and the corpses it was built on.
Every step takes us closer to that boundary.
Every step takes us closer to the King.
“There.” Drokhar’s murmur is barely audible. His blade catches the faint glow of the brands on our collarbones, reflecting light that shouldn’t exist in this darkness.
Ahead, the tunnel opens into a cavern. And at the cavern’s center, where the passage we escaped through once stood, a rift runs through reality itself—a tear in the Veil that pulses with the blood-red light of the Battlefield Beyond.
The dead stand in ranks around it. Hundreds of them.
Thousands. Not attacking, not advancing.
Watching. Waiting. Soldiers in rusted armor, their faces frozen in the expressions they wore at death.
Civilians in burial clothes, their hands clasped in the positions someone arranged them in before sealing their coffins.
Children—gods, there are children—their eyes empty and patient.
Bearing witness to what comes next.
Welcome home, mourning witch.
The King’s voice echoes from every dead throat simultaneously. A chorus of the forgotten, the silenced, the denied. Three hundred years of accumulated grief given terrible voice.
Did you think running would save you? Did you think the Ashwalker’s mark could protect you forever? You belong to me. You have always belonged to me. Every witch who speaks for the dead is mine eventually.
I step forward. My boot crunches on bone fragments that litter the cavern floor—fragments of the passage we destroyed in our escape, pieces of the realm we damaged by refusing to submit.
“I’m not here to run.” My voice echoes in the stillness. “I’m here to give your soldiers what you’ve denied them.”
Denied them? The laughter that follows is horrible—a thousand voices, all of them hollow, all of them hungry. I gave them purpose. I gave them unity. I gave them the strength to demand the acknowledgment they deserve.
“You gave them a cage.” I take another step. Then another. Drokhar moves beside me, his blade raised, his body steady. “You gave them a king who speaks for them instead of letting them speak for themselves. That’s not acknowledgment. That’s another kind of silence.”
The ranks of the dead shift. I can feel their attention focusing on me—not the King’s attention, but theirs. Individual souls still trapped inside the collective. Individual griefs still burning beneath the surface of the entity that absorbed them.
They’re listening.
“Last chance to run.” Drokhar’s breath ghosts across my ear.
I turn in his arms. Cup his scarred face in both hands. Rise on my toes to press my mouth to his—a kiss that says everything I can’t find words for. Gratitude. Terror. A love that has no business existing between a mourning witch and the man who should have burned her.
He answers with the same desperate intensity.
One hand fists in my hair while the other pulls me hard against him, crushing our brands between us.
His tongue traces the seam of my lips, demanding entry, and I give it willingly.
For a moment—one perfect, impossible moment—we’re not standing at the threshold of a realm built from death.
We’re just two people choosing each other in spite of everything.
The dead watch us. Hundreds of empty eyes tracking the way we cling to each other, the way our bodies press close despite the horror surrounding us.
Touching. The King’s voice drips with contempt. But love won’t save you here, mourning witch. Love is another form of grief waiting to happen.
I pull back from the kiss. Square my shoulders. Face the rift in reality with the knowledge that my mate stands beside me, his blade drawn, anchoring me to the world of the living.
“You’re wrong.” I keep my words steady. The fear is still there—it will always be there—but it’s not in control anymore.
“Love isn’t grief waiting to happen. Love is the reason grief matters.
The reason farewells need to be spoken. The reason the dead deserve closure.
” I take a breath. “Your soldiers loved people. They wanted to say goodbye to people. And you’ve spent three hundred years denying them that because you were too focused on vengeance to remember what grief is truly for. ”
The ranks of the dead shiver. Not from the King’s command. From recognition. From the memory of what they lost.
“No running.” I reach for Drokhar’s hand. His fingers close around mine, rough and scarred and steadier than anything has a right to be. “Not anymore.”
The dead part before us as we approach the tear in reality.
The rift in the Veil grows wider, its light shifting from red to orange to pale gold.
Beyond it lies the Battlefield Beyond the Veil—endless fields of broken weapons and rotting bodies, a sky that bleeds like an open wound, and a throne built from fused soldiers that has waited three centuries for this moment.
Behind us, the city continues to burn. The dead continue to rise. The Council continues to argue about policy and politics and all the comfortable lies they’ve told themselves for centuries.
But ahead of us lies the only path that matters.
The Gravetide King.
And the chance—the desperate, impossible chance—to give every soldier in that realm the closure they’ve been denied for three hundred years.
I squeeze Drokhar’s hand.
We step through the Veil.
The dead follow.