Drokhar
FORTY-FOUR
The King screams.
But it’s not a scream of rage.
I’ve heard the dead scream before—revenants rising from mass graves, soldiers tearing themselves free of the earth to demand vengeance for forgotten deaths. Those screams are hunger. Hatred. The fury of those who have been denied too long.
This is different. This is release.
Aradya’s magic wraps around the King like chains of light, invisible but irrefutable.
She’s forcing it to do what she forced the soldiers to do—acknowledge the grief that created it, say the words it’s been holding onto for three centuries.
Her nose is bleeding freely now, her eyes streaming red tears, her entire body trembling with the effort of commanding power that should be beyond any mourning witch’s reach.
She’s tearing herself apart.
The King’s voice fractures.
“I WAS AFRAID.”
The words emerge from the formless mass in a thousand tones—individual soldiers, individual voices, speaking simultaneously for the first time since they fused into this monstrous whole. Not the King anymore. The dead that form it.
“I WAS ALONE. I DIED BEFORE I COULD—”
More voices. Overlapping. Tumbling over each other in an uncontrolled flood.
“I NEVER TOLD HER I LOVED HER—”
“I WAS WRONG ABOUT THE WAR—”
“I DIDN’T MEAN TO LEAVE—”
“I’M SORRY—”
“I’M SORRY—”
“I’M SORRY—”
The words keep coming. An avalanche of confession and regret, of love never expressed and apologies never given. Every soldier trapped in the King’s core is speaking at once, pouring out final truths that have been festering for centuries.
And at the center of it all, Aradya holds firm.
She’s the eye of the storm. The stillness at the heart of the chaos. Magic pours through her—not from her anymore, but through her, channeling the King’s enforced release into truths that can finally be heard.
Her knees give out.
I catch her before she hits the ground.
Her magic is still flowing, still pulling confessions from the King’s dissolving form, but her body has nothing left.
She weighs almost nothing in my arms—a shell emptied by the demands of power she was never meant to wield.
Her eyes are half-closed, her breath coming in shallow gasps, her fingers clutching weakly at my armor.
“Not yet—” Her whisper is barely audible over the King’s ongoing flood of truths. “It has to say—”
“That’s enough.”
I cup her face in my hands. Force her to meet my eyes. She’s pale beneath the blood that stains her cheeks, but those dark eyes are still burning with determination. Still trying to give the dead what they need even as it kills her.
“Aradya. That’s enough.”
She shakes her head weakly. “It has to—”
“It’s said what it needs to say.” I press my forehead to hers. The mark on my collarbone blazes in response to the one on hers—matched brands, matched claims, burning brighter than they’ve ever burned. “Now let it go. The same way you told the soldiers to let go. Let it rest.”
Her eyes search mine. Looking for permission. Looking for the certainty she’s lost somewhere in the flood of grief she’s been channeling.
I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. Let go.
She holds my gaze for a long moment. Then she nods.
Her lips move. Form a single word.
“Rest.”
The King dissolves.
Not screaming. Not fighting. Not raging against the end it never believed would come.
The formless mass of grief and death magic simply...
releases. The darkness drains from it like water through cupped hands, dissolving into mist that rises to join the golden light still ascending from the battlefield.
The soldiers that formed the core—the ones too lost to remember their own names, too angry to accept the peace I offered—they’re speaking now. Individually. Finally.
I loved my children.
I miss the sunrise.
I wish I’d been braver.
I forgive you.
Their voices fade as they rise. One by one, joining their comrades in whatever peace waits beyond the Veil. The King doesn’t scream as they go. There’s nothing left of it to scream. The rage that held it whole has dissolved into individual grief, and individual grief can be released.
The Battlefield Beyond the Veil begins to collapse around us.
The blood-red sky fades to gray, then to the pale nothing of a realm that no longer has a reason to exist. The corpse-strewn plains dissolve into mist—soldiers, weapons, centuries of accumulated war, all of it unmade in the span of heartbeats.
The ground beneath us loses substance. The air grows thin.
I pull Aradya against me. Her face presses into my neck, her arms locked around my shoulders, her body limp with exhaustion. Her heartbeat flutters against my ribs—weak but steady. Alive.
She’s alive. We’re alive.
The Veil closes around us.
Not gently. It’s pushing us out—up, through layers of dissolved reality, toward the world of the living that never stopped existing while we fought a war in the land of the dead. The pressure is immense. My ears pop. My vision whites out.
Then we’re falling.
Stone against my back. Cold air in my lungs. The smell of ash and ancient earth.
The depths beneath Blackreach.
I gasp for air that tastes of the mortal world—dust and decay and the distant smoke of pyres that are still burning somewhere above us.
We’re lying in a tunnel I recognize, one of the passages that leads from the Undercroft toward the Mourning Crypts.
The crack in reality we stepped through is gone.
Sealed so completely I can’t even feel where it used to be.
It’s over.
I push myself up on one arm. Look around at the tunnel—narrow, dark, lit only by witch-lights that flicker uncertainly in the aftermath of magic that should have destroyed us both. The walls are still standing. The ceiling hasn’t collapsed.
The dead aren’t screaming anymore.
I realize it slowly. The silence. Since we entered the King’s realm, there’s been a constant pressure of voices—the whispers of the forgotten, the demands of the denied, the chorus of grief that formed the entity we destroyed.
Now there’s nothing. Not silence exactly, but... peace. The absence of rage.
Aradya stirs in my arms.
“Is it over?”
Her voice is a rasp. Raw and broken from channeling power that should have killed her. But she’s looking up at me with those dark eyes, and her lips are curving into the ghost of a smile.
“It’s over.”