"Torture does not create obedience, it only reveals who refuses to yield."
Rook left the great hall with the metallic taste of anguish still in his mouth. The corridor opened into a square training yard where the air smelled of iron and oiled leather. Two rows of youths—many not yet fifteen—struck at wooden posts, repeated guards with short swords, practiced falling and getting back up as though that extra second meant the difference between life and death. A pair of Fenn instructors walked among them, hands clasped behind their backs, correcting wrists, footwork, breathing. They did not shout; their voices were calm and precise, and that alone was enough to keep anyone from disobeying.
Rook froze for a moment. He was struck not only by their discipline, but by how young they were. Back in Briholm, at that age they still fought over bread crusts or argued about who would fetch water from the river. Here, they were being shaped for things common folk did not even dare to name. And in all their eyes burned that same sharp focus, that seriousness one only sees in children who have already witnessed too much.
He carried on to the stables. The roof was low, the beams blackened with age, the straw smelling of beasts and clean hay. Elv was there, tightening the girth of her mount—a chestnut mare with a white blaze down its face and alert ears. She turned at the sound of his steps: sky-blue eyes, hair tied back in braids that cleared her neck, her body clad in light leather, ready to ride and to fight. Beautiful, Rook thought.
- "Take one from that side," she said, nodding to the right row of stalls. "That gray gelding is steady, won't hate you for your leg."
Rook nodded, grateful. As he ran his hand along the horse's neck, he glanced back at the yard."How long have you been here?" he asked quietly.
- "Since I was a child," Elv answered without pausing her work. "I learned to read before I learned to sleep more than four hours a night."
Rook almost smiled."Many of those"—he gestured toward the yard—"look younger than you were when you arrived."
Elv tugged the girth, tested the stirrup, then stopped for a breath. When she spoke again, her voice was lower."Most come because their families can't handle them: too many mouths, too little land. Others come because something… left them without a place in their homes." She shrugged. "It may not be a better life. But at least it's a life."
Rook heard the edge of pain beneath her words. It cut him as if it were his own. He wanted to ask more, but bit his tongue. Not out of lack of curiosity, but respect. Some memories belong only to the ones who carry them.
They mounted. Elv set off at a confident trot; Rook followed with concentrated clumsiness, feeling the pull of the bandage under his trousers. They passed through the Dun's north gate and took the stony path that snaked down the mountainside. The world widened as they descended.
Rook pulled the reins to look back. At the summit, the small fortress of Argenholt—the Dun—was etched against the pale sky. Not grand, nor beautiful in a king's way, but with a stark beauty of its own: stone the color of the mountain, as though it had grown from the rock itself; low walls meant not to impress, but to endure; dark timber roofs glistening with dew.
It blended into the crest of Mount Argenfal, wrapped in violet heather and whispering pines that moved even when the air was still. From up there, the valley spread in a mosaic of fields, silver streams like veins across the earth, and tiny villages scattered like seeds. An eagle traced circles overhead. The faint scent of salt from the far coast reached him, so delicate it might have been imagined. Beyond the ridge, on the other side of the fortress, the capital itself could be seen: Thar'Vallos, imposing and beautiful, ringed by massive walls like a shield, with a vast cathedral rising above the skyline. Barely an hour's ride from the Dun, yet a world apart.
- "Either you decide to follow," Elv called over her shoulder with a smile, "or you'll fall off at the first bump."
Rook cleared his throat, pressed his legs, and the gelding obeyed.
The light shifted abruptly.
A blow of reality: darkness with a ceiling, stinking of iron, blood, and rancid grease.
Sett hung from iron rings—not high, but enough for the ropes to bite into his wrists. His feet were bound, his legs numb. Blood trickled down his forehead, crossing his eyebrow, soaking his cheek. He heard something—not words, more like breathing—and forced his eyes wider.
The cell was the twisted offspring of workshop and altar: tables with instruments he could not name, bowls of powders and pastes that stank both sweet and rotten, hooks and straps, a wall covered in symbols daubed in something too dark to guess. On the floor, a half-erased circle of chalk and salt sketched an enormous eye that watched without a pupil. In one corner, wax had dripped and hardened into stalactites like teeth. Everything was strange, wrong, suffocating.
A figure peeled itself from the shadow. Tall, slender, cloaked—but the hood left most of her face uncovered. From her temples sprouted two short horns, polished like obsidian. Her skin, pale with a gray cast, was almost translucent at her throat, blue veins running beneath like roots. Her eyes—impossible to pin down, too light and too dark at once, as if something alive writhed inside them.
And yet… she was mesmerizing. The cloth clung to pronounced curves: firm hips that swayed as she moved, a neckline that hinted at full, heavy breasts that seemed to defy the logic of her demonic frame. Her lips, lush and sharply defined, looked made to tempt, and every step had the rhythm of a slow, dangerous dance. When she leaned closer, heat radiated from her body, and a heady scent—honey, sweat, and smoke—washed over him, forcing him to hold his breath.
Sett wanted to look away, to hate himself for noticing. But it was as though she knew exactly how to snare him—with every curve, every whisper of fabric against her skin. Forbidden, repulsive, and yet magnetic.
He swallowed hard, and then smiled—that same smile that had saved him from fights back in Briholm, and won him others.- "Shame you're not a real woman," he rasped. "I'd take you dancing."
The figure tilted her head.- "Humor is a mask," she whispered, her voice honey sliding over blades. "It will not serve you here."
She approached slowly, brushing the back of her hand against his cheek. Her skin was cold, but her presence burned.- "Play the man all you like," she breathed in his ear. "Here there are no heroes. Only flesh that learns."
Then steel flashed. A flick of her wrist, and the blade sank into his side. Not deep, but enough to rip a roar from him and split the world in two.
- "Bitch," Sett spat, grinding his teeth until they cracked.
Around him, voices not in the cell but close: choked cries, the splintering of something like wood, the repeated sob of someone counting numbers under their breath.
- "What do you want from us?" The words came jagged. "Why bring us here? Why—?"
- "Questions are a luxury," she said, leaning so close he could see her lips, cruelly straight. "And you, boy, are poor."
A grinding of iron, a heavy breath. The door swung inward.
A brute entered—broad-shouldered, belly sagging, skin with a bluish cast under the filthy light. His teeth were so large they jutted past his lips, as if his mouth were a broken cage. He dragged a studded club, wore a leather loincloth, and at his belt dangled a string of small skulls, no beast Sett could name. He loomed over two meters, maybe three.
- "Naèvira," he growled at the woman. "Hurry. Most of them are dying. Finish this one. We march in two days. Another village. More meat."
Sett sucked in air. The pain clouded his vision, but sharpened his tongue.- "And what about you, fatso?" He grinned through broken breath. "Don't tell me you're the cook."
The brute hefted the club like a broom. Naèvira didn't even glance at him. The blow landed flat, direct. The crack of bone was as sharp as a branch snapping in winter.
Sett's world narrowed to a thread. His right arm dangled at an impossible angle. He vomited bile, coughed, dragged breath like drowning.- "I'll… I'll tear you apart…" he spat, tears of fury cutting his face.
- "Out," Naèvira ordered, her tone dripping disdain. "Leave us."
The brute snorted, pointed the club at Sett like marking property, and lumbered out, slamming the door behind him.
Naèvira turned to a table. She opened a wooden case, pulled small vials, a copper bowl, a pinch of blue powder. With ritual precision she retraced the circle with salt, drew simple runes that knotted in unsettling symmetry. She lit a candle with a greenish flame that gave no heat.
- "Your neighbors, your friends," she said as if reciting a lesson. "Pathetic. Weak. Some did not even endure the questions. Others…" She tipped the bowl, and a red line scored the salt. "Others burst the moment the ritual touched their names."
Sett clenched his jaw. Nausea swelled like a wave.
- "Don't worry," Naèvira added sweetly. "For you, it will be over soon. Alive, or dead—it makes no difference. The door opens either way."
A scream tore through the next chamber. Not a child. A man. Sett knew, without knowing how, that it was the baker. He remembered the man's flour-caked hands. Remembered the way he saved scraps of crust. Remembered his daughter's laugh.
Sett dug his nails into his palms. The agony of his broken arm left fire in his throat.
Rook. The name struck him like a hammer from far away. Had they taken him too? Was he alive? Two, three days? Time was boneless here, slipping through his fingers.
- "I'll rip your head off," he swore, voice ragged yet fierce. "I'll rip it off, whore."
Naèvira laughed. Not loud—soft, sticky, like honey clinging to skin.- "Only if you survive, darling," she purred, leaning close again. "And even then… even then you'll have to resist my charms."
She set the bowl in the circle; the green flame flickered. Blue dust scattered across the salt in constellations that shifted as if alive. Naèvira began to chant—not loud, not soft, but steady, impossible to ignore. The words were not human, though some sounded like they might have been, centuries ago. With each phrase, the air thickened.
- "What… what do you want?" Sett forced out, clawing for any crack.
- "Doors," she said, as if naming a color. "Keys. Names."
- "You're nothing but—" he tried to curse her again, but the word vanished.
The candle bent toward him, as if sucking his breath. Naèvira stopped. Her impossible eyes fixed on him. She smiled, lipless.- "Don't fight the pain. Learn from it."
The circle pulsed, faintly. The symbols on the wall seemed to tense.
Sett, breathing like a stabbed bull, lifted his head with the pride he had left.- "You… won't use me."
- "We'll see," she whispered. What might have been tenderness in a human mouth, in hers was a cruel promise. "Let's begin."
Sett ground his teeth. He did not pray. He did not beg. If he was to cross a door, he would kick it open. If he was to die, he would do it staring. And if he was to live, he would rip that smile from her face the first chance he got.