Chapter 6 – Azaria
AZARIA
The door shut behind me with the finality of a closed tomb. Then, nothing. Absolute darkness. Not the dim gray of a cell with barred windows, not the flicker of distant torchlight. Complete black. I couldn’t see my hand when I raised it in front of my face.
I stood still, letting my eyes adjust. Waiting for shapes to emerge from the dark. They didn’t. I took a breath. Another. Forced myself to stay calm.
This was the Black Cell. I’d heard what it did to people. Never seen it. Never thought I’d be standing in one.
Torven.
I wouldn’t break.
I moved carefully, hands outstretched, mapping the space.
Three steps forward before my fingers met cold stone.
Wall. I turned and counted the steps. Four paces to the next wall.
Turned again. The cell was small, maybe eight by ten paces.
Stone floor, stone walls, stone ceiling I could reach if I stretched.
No bench, no window, no light. Stone and silence and me.
I sat down in the center, back against the wall, knees drawn up. The cold seeped through my clothes immediately, biting into my spine. I closed my eyes. Opened them. No difference.
Fine. I didn’t need to see.
I started counting heartbeats. Slow, steady rhythm. One. Two. Three. When I reached sixty, I marked it as a minute. Kept counting. At six hundred beats, I’d marked ten minutes. At three thousand six hundred, an hour.
My pulse was too loud in my ears. I could hear blood rushing, the faint click of my jaw when I swallowed. Every breath seemed magnified in the silence.
I shifted against the wall, trying to find a position that didn’t ache. Failed. The stone bit into my shoulders, my hips, the base of my spine. Cold crawled up from the floor, settling into my bones.
I recited patrol routes. Koulan’s eastern border, the checkpoints, the rotation schedules. Then Velmara’s. Thalor’s. Solmarin’s. Ilyen’s.
When I ran out of routes, I listed the squad. Names, affinities, strengths.
Dain. Mind magic. Second-in-command. Anchor.
Kael. Mist magic. Clever, fast, loyal.
Reyna. Fire magic. Fierce, protective, grinning even in the worst moments.
Zephyr. Lightning magic. Sarcastic, dangerous, better than he pretended to be.
Lirael. Wind magic. Precise, quiet, deadly.
Thorne. Earth magic. Silent, steady, unmovable.
Lyra. Lightning magic. Gentle, untrained, deserved better than any of this.
Elias. Water magic. Calm, observant, protective of his siblings.
Quinton. Blood magic.
I stopped.
Quinton.
The rooftop. The warmth of his hand around mine. The way he looked at me like I was the only thing that mattered.
No.
I buried the memory. Sealed it behind every wall I had.
Instead, I thought about the training yards at Tempest. Early mornings, before the sun hit the walls.
The rhythm of drills, the sound of boots on packed earth, the way the squad moved like a single body when everything clicked.
Reyna calling out formations. Kael’s grin when he pulled off something impossible.
Dain watching from the side, arms folded, already three steps ahead of everyone.
I held onto that. The discipline of it. The purpose.
It meant I hadn’t lost the edges yet.
I started reciting the prayer for the dead. The one I’d said at Eris’s grave.
The mountains watched you wander.
The water guides you home.
The earth receives you, dust to dust.
My voice sounded strange in the dark. Too small. Too fragile. I stopped, and the silence rushed back in, heavier than before.
I didn’t know how long I’d been sitting. The counting had slipped away from me somewhere around two thousand beats, and I hadn’t been able to pick it up again. Minutes and hours were losing their edges, blurring into something shapeless.
The cold had settled deep now, past my skin, into muscle and bone. I pulled my knees tighter to my chest and wrapped my arms around them.
Still controlled. Still here. Still refusing to break.
But the pressure was building. Subtle. Insidious. The kind that didn’t announce itself with pain or fear, only with absence. And absence, I was learning, could be worse.
I closed my eyes—not that it mattered—and kept counting.
Torven.