Chapter 8
Selen’s sudden surrender makes my stomach drop. I expected her to fight harder—to stand by her decision, defend it. But she doesn’t. She’s letting us go without a word. Just like that. Like we never mattered at all.
Voss gestures to his handlers. “You heard her, take them.”
The handlers move quickly, surrounding our small group. One grabs my right arm roughly, fingers digging into the muscle. I resist the instinct to fight back, knowing it would only make my situation worse.
As I’m dragged past Selen, I hear her quietly say, “Remember what you learned,” but I’m pulled past too quickly to see her face.
Anger flares inside me. What did I learn?
Nothing close enough to prepare us for this, I’m certain.
She got us into this mess and didn’t follow through with what she started.
We're forced through a different set of tunnels, tilting downward, and the heat and thickness quickly return to the air, tainted with the smell of blood and sweat. The sounds of combat echo through the stone: grunts, shouts, the clash of metal against metal.
“Where are they taking us?” the bald woman whispers to no one in particular.
“Obviously the veteran training pits,” Sariah answers, her voice strained. “Where the advanced prepare for the arena.”
“We're not ready,” Lira murmurs.
“That's the point,” I breathe.
The tunnel opens into a massive chamber carved from the mountain's heart.
Unlike the juvenile enclosure we visited above, this space is designed for violence—tiered stone rings form fighting pits of various sizes, each occupied by recruits engaged in brutal combat.
The walls are lined with weapon racks holding real steel.
Blood stains the sand covering the floor of each pit.
My gaze passes over massive iron eyelets embedded in the ground at intervals.
I prefer to not imagine what those are for.
My skin tingles uncomfortably just looking at them.
I suddenly spot a familiar, unmissable, face amidst a group of male recruits in the ring nearest to us. Zeriel Caelith. “Current champion of the Ironhold. Son of the disgraced House Caelith.” Tomas’s words come back to me.
Up close, he seems more like something hewn from the old courts than a man of flesh and blood.
Scars score his arms like runes of violence, each one a mark of battles survived, the most brutal cutting across his throat and jaw as if war itself had tried to silence him and failed.
Torchlight glances off his bronzed skin, the sheen of someone who’s lived too close to fire.
He looks untouchable—inevitable. His hair falls unbound, dark as raven feathers, scattering wildly across his brow.
His ears taper to the familiar sharpness of our kind, though on him the angle seems keener, harsher.
His eyes are a deep, feral brown—earth churned and blood-soaked, seeming merciless in their judgment.
He moves with the lethal grace of a predator born, not trained, every strike fluid and deliberate, as if he were cutting through the memory of foes long dead.
The other trainees watch in reverence laced with fear.
I wonder what his heritage is. Once, the noble houses bred mostly true to their bloodlines, each court marked by its own stamp: mountain fae with their stone-forged strength, desert fae burnished by the sun, frost fae cold as their northern peaks, storm fae swift and mercurial, river fae pale and cunning, dusk fae cloaked in omens…
At least a hundred bloodlines in all, each carved from the land and elements they ruled.
Zeriel could belong to any of them—or none.
Too tall for a river-born, too swift for a mountain scion.
Perhaps a fusion of lines, as noble houses sometimes schemed through marriage.
A weapon forged of fallen courts… honed for destruction.
Our handlers shove us forward, drawing the attention of everyone in the chamber. Conversations halt mid-sentence. Training pauses. All eyes turn to our small group of women in our gray recruit uniforms, starkly out of place among the veterans in their black training garb.
“What's this?” demands a broad-shouldered trainer, striding toward us. I notice Selen at the edge of the room, coldly observing.
“Handler Voss's orders,” our handler replies. “These recruits are to join veteran combat training.”
The broad-shouldered trainer's eyebrows raise, but he nods curtly. “Divide them,” he orders, pointing to different pits.
A handler grabs my arm, dragging me toward the closest—and largest—pit, where the steely figure of Zeriel Caelith stands, now glaring at us.
My heart hammers against my ribs as I'm shoved forward, stumbling into the sand.
Barely ten feet in front of me, I see Krall's massive form, his nose still swollen from our encounter yesterday.
His eyes narrow when he spots me, recognition followed by hatred flashing across his scarred face.
“What is this?” Zeriel’s voice slices through the murmurs, cold and honed as a blade. He turns to the handler who brought me in. “We don’t train with frail meat.”
“Trainer Voss's orders,” the handler repeats, already backing away. “Said they needed real combat experience.”
Zeriel’s dark eyes meet mine directly for the first time, his gaze brutally assessing—and dismissing me—in a single heartbeat.
“She won’t last five minutes,” he snaps.
“I’ve survived worse than you,” I fire back before I can stop myself.
What in the hells am I saying?
The champion stills. Something flickers in his gaze—not disbelief, but surprise, quickly tempered into something sharper, hungrier.
“Have you now?” His voice drops, low and deliberate, each word weighted like a challenge. He stalks closer, the air seeming to narrow with him, and I force myself not to retreat. His scars speak in a language I don’t want to understand. “What’s your name, new recruit?”
“Veyra,” I reply, deliberately not using my number.
“Well, Veyra,” he says, my name sounding like an insult in his mouth, “welcome to real training.”
One of the handlers turns to address the pit at large. “Pair up. Full-contact drills. The new arrivals need to understand what they're facing.”
Krall immediately steps forward, a savage smile splitting his face. “I'll take the street rat.”
“No.” Zeriel's voice splits the air like a whip. “You're with Milor.” His eyes return to me. “I’m with this one.”
His words send ice threading through my veins, but I fight to keep my expression neutral. I’ve wounded the fragile ego of the most lethal gladiator in the chamber, and I have only my sharp mouth to blame.
Around the pit, veterans pair with my fellow special training recruits—Nessa with a lean fighter whose arms are covered in ritual scars, Vex with a woman whose face is partially hidden behind a leather mask.
“Weapons rack,” Zeriel snaps at me, jerking his head toward the wall. “Try choosing something you won't immediately kill yourself with.” His voice drips with derision.
I approach the rack warily, scanning the array of blades, staves, and more exotic weapons. Most are unfamiliar to me—designed specifically for dragon combat, I assume. I recognize only a few from the selection Selen showed us.
I choose a short spear with a barbed tip, running my hand along the haft, testing its weight. The wood is cold, the iron cruel.
“Are you certain of that choice?” Zeriel asks as I return, one dark brow arching in faint challenge. He spins a pair of curved blades with effortless grace, the arcs they carve through the air gleaming like silver sigils. Every movement promises death. “Most recruits cling to what they know.”
“Nothing here is familiar,” I manage, forcing steadiness into my voice. “Might as well learn something new.”
A shadow of a smile cuts across his mouth, quick and sharp, but his eyes remain merciless. “Very well… Let us begin.”
I barely have time to set my spear before he strikes. His blades whistle through the air with unnerving precision, singing as they meet the shaft in my grip. The clash rattles through my bones, the impact violent enough to send me stumbling, sand spilling beneath my boots.
“Too slow.” He circles me like a predator toying with prey, eyes fixed and unrelenting. “A dragon would have already taken your head.”
I adjust my grip, trying to recall the fragments of instruction Selen drilled into us about dragon-killing techniques. The spear needs to be angled to penetrate between scales, aimed at vulnerable points—
But Zeriel doesn’t give me time to think. He strikes again, a blur of motion too fast for my eyes to follow. I manage to parry one blade, but the second halts just shy of my throat.
“Dead,” he murmurs. His breath ghosts hot across my cheek, though his gaze is ice, piercing straight through me.
My throat tightens around the breath I can’t quite draw. Even when he steps back, the chill of his stare clings like frost. I force myself upright, spine locked against the tremor in my legs, as he allows me the smallest pause to gather myself.
Around us, the pit is alive with chaos. Veterans toy with recruits the way cats toy with mice.
Nyx holds her own longer than most—her tavern-brawler instincts enough to deflect blows—but even she’s dismantled in moments by her opponent’s ruthless precision.
The bald woman lies already motionless in the sand… blood spreading dark beneath her skull.
“Again,” Zeriel commands, low and cutting. The steel in his tone drags my eyes to his, a compulsion I can’t resist. His gaze pins me as surely as a blade through flesh—cold, relentless, inescapable.
I steady my breathing, forcing ragged gasps into rhythm. Survival takes over. I stop watching his weapons and start reading the man. The subtle coil of muscle, the shift of his weight, the tilt of his shoulders before he moves.
When he lunges, I pivot aside, letting his first blade carve only air where I stood a heartbeat ago.
The second arcs low, hungry for my abdomen.
I catch it on the shaft of my spear and thrust toward his chest. He deflects effortlessly, but something shifts in his face—a flicker, brief as lightning, of reassessment.
“You’ve fought before,” he observes, circling me with the patience of a wolf. There’s the faintest crack in his impassive mask, a ghost of surprise. “Not trained, but blooded.”
“Street survival,” I answer, breath harsh between words. “Different kind of education.”
A crash from across the pit snaps my attention. Fatal mistake. Zeriel’s leg sweeps mine out in an instant. I hit the sand hard, lungs emptied, dust stinging my throat. His blade is at my neck again before I can draw air.
“Distraction equals death,” he breathes, his weight pressing me into the sand. “Your street education won’t save you here.”