The chamber did not sleep.
Stone walls sweated with the damp of Hell, torches burned low in iron sconces, and yet Atlas lay awake beneath their guttering light, his body heavy with exhaustion, his mind unyielding.
He had fought battles greater than this, gods and demi-gods whose blows could split mountains, and yet the silence now pressed on him more crushingly than any war-hammer.
In his hand, the Key.
He had tried to set it aside — on the table, on the stone at his bedside, even tucked away beneath folded cloth. But always, in the depths of night, his fingers reached for it again. As though his blood remembered what his will tried to forget.
