The crossbow bolt stood quivering in Eris's shoulder, black-feathered and cruel. She didn't scream. Didn't stagger. Her fingers closed around the shaft, and for a heartbeat, Kael thought she'd rip it free—but then her eyes locked onto the six figures emerging from the dark.
"You didn't really think you woke up, did you?"
The voice belonged to a ghost.
Jeren—the initiate who'd vanished during Kael's Gauntlet, the one whose face had haunted his fever-dreams beneath the Shade's influence—stood before them, grinning. But his eyes were wrong. Not the warm brown Kael remembered, but the same sickly green as the corrupted.
Eris spat blood. "You're supposed to be dead."
"We all are," Jeren said, spreading his arms. The others fanned out, crossbows steady. "But the Hollow King gives gifts to those who kneel."
Kael's fingers twitched toward his stolen dagger.
"Ah-ah." Jeren tutted. "Draven's little tracker still sings in your hand, brother. One wrong move, and the next bolt goes through her throat."
They took Eris first.
Two of the corrupted gripped her arms, wrenching her backward as she snarled. The bolt snapped deeper into her shoulder, and this time, she did cry out—a raw, furious sound. Kael lunged, but Jeren was faster. A blade pressed against Kael's ribs before he'd taken two steps.
"Don't," Jeren murmured. "You'll see her again. If you cooperate."
They marched him through the ruins, toward the well. No—into it. The stones were slick, the darkness swallowing the torchlight as they descended. The air thickened with the scent of wet earth and something older, something that coiled in the back of Kael's throat like rot.
At the bottom, a tunnel yawned open.
Eris was gone, dragged ahead. Kael's pulse hammered. "Where are you taking her?"
Jeren's smile didn't reach his eyes. "To meet the king."
The tunnel opened into a cavern so vast Kael's mind rebelled.
Ribs of black stone arched overhead, but between them pulsed veins of something alive, glistening in the half-light. The ground sloped downward, toward a dais where a throne sat—not carved, but grown, its surface shifting like muscle beneath skin.
And on it lounged the Hollow King.
He was beautiful. Terrible. A man-shaped wound in the world, his skin so pale it seemed translucent, his hair a spill of ink down his shoulders. But his eyes—
His eyes were pits of green fire.
Eris knelt before him, held down by two corrupted. Blood streaked her temple, her breath ragged.
"Kael," the Hollow King said, and his voice was honey and razors. "We've been waiting."
The Hollow King rose. His bare feet left no prints in the damp stone.
"You think the Order tests you," he murmured, circling Kael. "But the Gauntlet was never about skill. Never about strength." A cold finger traced Kael's jaw. "It was about hunger."
Kael jerked back. "What do you want?"
"The same thing Draven does. The same thing Eris does." The king's smile widened. "A weapon."
He gestured, and the corrupted hauled Eris forward. The Hollow King gripped her chin, forcing her to meet his gaze. "You've done well, little hound. But your brand is failing."
Eris shuddered. Black veins crept from beneath the rune on her ribs, spiderwebbing toward her heart.
Kael's stomach turned. "What's happening to her?"
"The Hollow claims what it's owed," the king said. "Unless you take her place."
Eris wrenched free. "Don't listen—"
A backhand sent her sprawling. The corrupted seized her again, but not before Kael saw the terror in her eyes.
The Hollow King loomed over him. "Serve me willingly, and I spare her. Refuse..." He shrugged. "Well. Draven will find another candidate eventually."
Kael's fingers curled around the dagger. Draven's dagger. The tracker.
A gamble.
He met Eris's gaze—and saw the barest flicker of understanding.
Kael lunged.
Not at the king.
At Jeren.
The dagger took the corrupted initiate in the throat, and the cavern erupted into chaos.
Eris moved like a shadow unleashed.
She tore the bolt from her shoulder and drove it into the eye of the guard holding her. The remaining corrupted surged forward, but Kael was already moving, dragging Eris toward the tunnel.
The Hollow King's laughter followed them.
"Run, little weapons. But my mark is in your blood now."
They fled through the dark, the walls pulsing around them. Eris stumbled, her breath wet. Kael hauled her up, his own veins burning with something foreign, something alive.
Aboveground, the moon hung like a blade.
Eris gripped his arm. "The brand—it's spreading."
Kael looked down.
Black veins curled beneath his own skin.
The Hollow King's gift.
Draven found them at dawn.
He stood at the edge of the ruins, arms crossed, as Kael and Eris staggered from the undergrowth. His gaze flicked to Kael's black-veined hands.
"I see you've met our mutual friend," Draven said dryly.
Eris bared her teeth. "You knew."
"Of course." He tossed a wrapped bundle at their feet. Inside: two fresh blades, a vial of milky liquid, and a map. "The Order moves against you at noon. I suggest you be elsewhere."
Kael stared at him. "Why help us?"
Draven's smile was thin. "Because the Hollow King isn't the only one who needs weapons." He turned to go. "Oh—and Kael? Try not to die before the fun begins."
The vial's liquid burned going down, but it slowed the black veins' crawl. For now.
Eris traced the map's winding path. "The Ashen Wastes. There's nothing out there but dead things."
Kael flexed his fingers. The Hollow King's power hummed beneath his skin. "Then we'll fit right in."
Somewhere, deep in the earth, something laughed.
And in Kael's dreams, the throne of flesh waited.
The Ashen Wastes lived up to their name.
Kael's boots sank into fine gray powder with every step, the remains of some long-dead forest ground to dust. The air smelled of lightning and char, though no storm brewed on the horizon—just an endless, sickly yellow sky that pressed down like a fevered palm.
Eris limped beside him, her shoulder bound with strips torn from her cloak. The milky draught had slowed the black veins creeping from her brand, but every hour they stretched farther, like roots seeking water. Kael caught himself rubbing his own forearm where the corruption had begun its slow crawl beneath his skin.
"You're staring," Eris muttered through clenched teeth.
"You're dying."
"So are you." She kicked a half-buried skull from the ash, sending up a small gray cloud. "Difference is, I knew what I signed up for."
The map led them to a spire of blackened bone jutting from the wastes like a broken finger pointing accusations at the sky. At its base, someone had carved a symbol into the stone—the same twisted rune that marked Eris's ribs.
Kael's skin prickled. "This is one of Draven's safehouses?"
Eris ran a finger along the carving, her nail catching in the grooves. "Not Draven's."
The ground gave way beneath her touch.
They dropped into darkness, landing hard on a slope of loose shale that carried them deeper underground in a rattling slide of stone and curses. When the slide finally stopped, Kael found himself staring at walls covered in familiar script—the same mad scribbles that had haunted his cell walls during the Gauntlet.
Eris struck a spark-light. The sudden flame revealed a chamber lined with cots, each occupied by a shriveled corpse. Their mouths hung open in silent screams, hands frozen in their final act—clawing at their own ribs where flesh had been peeled back to reveal—
"Gods," Kael breathed.
Every corpse bore the Hollow King's brand.
"Visitors."
The voice came from above. A figure perched on a stone ledge like a vulture, wrapped in tattered Order robes that might have been white once. His face was a ruin of scars, one eye milky white, the other gleaming with that same sickly green as the corrupted.
Eris had her dagger out before the echo faded. "You."
The man tilted his head, the motion too smooth, too fluid. "You remember me, little hound? I trained you, before they sent me here to tend the failures." His gesture encompassed the corpses. "Though 'tend' may be too generous a word."
Kael stepped forward, his hand drifting toward his own blade. "You're Order."
"Was." The caretaker tapped his ruined eye. "The Hollow King gives gifts to those who serve, but he takes payment too. I keep watch over those who couldn't bear the price." His good eye fixed on Eris with terrible familiarity. "Like you will be, soon."
Eris's blade didn't waver. "We're not here for a history lesson."
"No," the caretaker agreed. He dropped to the floor with unsettling grace, landing soundlessly. "You're here for the weapon."
Beyond the death chamber lay a door of black iron, its surface pitted and scarred. The caretaker pressed his palm to it, and the metal groaned open to reveal—
A sword.
It floated at the center of the vault, unsupported, its blade the color of a fresh bruise. The air around it shimmered like heat off desert stone, warping the light in unsettling ways.
"The Order calls it Mercy," the caretaker said. "The Hollow King calls it blasphemy." His grin showed blackened teeth. "I call it your only chance."
Kael reached for it.
The moment his fingers brushed the hilt, the world exploded.
He stood in the Gauntlet again, but this time through the Shade's eyes—watching his younger self stagger through the trials, seeing the exact moment the corruption first took root in his blood like a seed finding fertile soil. Seeing Draven observing from the shadows, taking notes in that meticulous hand of his.
Worst of all, he saw Eris.
Not as she was now, but years younger, kneeling before the Hollow King as the brand seared into her flesh. Her eyes were empty in a way that had nothing to do with resignation—they'd been erased, scrubbed clean like a slate waiting for new words.
The vision shifted.
The Hollow King stood over a map of the realm, moving pieces like a general planning a campaign. But the pieces were people—initiates, corrupted, even high-ranking Order members. And there at the center: Kael and Eris, their icons pulsing with that same sickly green.
The king looked up, through time and space, as if sensing Kael's presence.
"You begin to understand," he murmured, his voice slipping into Kael's mind like smoke. "This was never a war. It's a culling."
Kael woke choking on ash.
The vault was in ruins. The caretaker was gone. Only Eris remained, crouched beside him with Mercy in her hands—though the sword clearly fought her grip, its blade twisting like a living thing trying to escape.
"You screamed," she said flatly. "For hours."
Kael's mouth tasted of blood and burnt metal. "I saw—"
"I know what you saw." She offered him the sword, her fingers trembling with the effort of holding it still. "Now you understand why we have to burn it all down."
Outside, something howled. Not an animal's cry, not anything human—this was a sound like bones dragged through broken glass, a sound that set teeth on edge and raised the hair on Kael's arms.
The caretaker's voice echoed from the tunnels beyond, fading into the dark: "Run or fight, it matters little. Mercy always collects her due."
Eris hauled Kael to his feet. Blood dripped from her reopened bandage onto the sword's bruise-dark blade. Where it struck, the metal hissed and smoked.
"Then let's give them mercy."
She thrust the sword toward Kael. As his fingers closed around the grip, fractured images tore through him—
The Hollow King smiling as cities burned beneath a green-tinged sky.
Draven placing a black crown on a faceless throne that pulsed like a living thing.
Eris falling, her eyes swallowed by green fire, her mouth forming his name.
Kael wrenched himself free, gasping as if he'd been drowning. "It shows the future. Or... what could be."
Eris stared at the blade, her face gone pale. "Can it be changed?"
Another howl ripped through the wastes, so close the walls trembled. Mercy pulsed in Kael's hand like a second heartbeat, insistent and hungry.
"We're about to find out."
Shadows detached themselves from the tunnel walls. Not men. Not anymore. Their limbs bent at impossible angles, their mouths stretched into rictus grins filled with thorns of broken teeth. Mercy sang in the silence between breaths, a high thin note that vibrated in Kael's bones.
Kael stepped forward.
The darkness stepped with him.