BATISTA POV
The seer's words led us to the place—a ruined abbey on the edge of human territory, a skeleton of stone eaten away by moss and silence. Once it must have been holy, but now it was nothing more than a carcass of cracked arches and broken glass.
The air grew colder the deeper we went. We found a stairwell hidden beneath a slab of stone, and the steps spiraled down into the earth. The smell hit first—damp stone, rusted iron, and something older, something dry and brittle.
An ossuary.
The chamber opened wide beneath the abbey, a vault of the forgotten dead. Stone shelves lined the walls, stacked with skulls and bones, their hollow eyes staring at us through the darkness. Dust drifted in the torchlight like restless spirits.
And in the center of it all, chained to a thick stone pillar, was Rain.
Her wrists and ankles were bound in heavy iron, the chains bolted deep into the rock.
