### Chapter 18 – The Room Without Light
The cell was built not for confinement but for erosion. Stone walls wept with damp, the air held a metallic tang of rust and blood, and the iron door closed with the kind of finality that gnawed at resolve. Rennick was thrown in, wrists bound, his face pressed against the grit of the floor. When the guards left, silence followed like a second jailer.
He counted his breaths. One. Two. A hundred. He waited for pain, for blades, for the theater of torture. None came. Instead, a thin line of water trickled from the ceiling, drop by drop, a rhythm meant to strip time away.
By the second hour, he realized: this was not punishment. This was *prelude*.
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When Kael came, he did not come with chains or tools. He came alone, his cloak folded neatly, silver eyes glowing faintly in the lamplight. He sat on a stool opposite Rennick, not speaking, not moving. The silence stretched until Rennick, raw from his own heartbeat, finally asked, "Why?"
Kael leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "Because I want to see how long it takes before you beg. Not for freedom—no, freedom is a myth we have burned—but for *certainty*. Men die from confusion faster than from knives."
He smiled faintly, and that smile was worse than a blade.
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The next visitor was Selara. Where Kael had used silence, she used voice. She entered with the scent of perfume clinging to her like a mockery of gentleness. She crouched beside Rennick and brushed a stray lock of hair from his forehead, the way a mother might calm a fevered child.
"You remind me of someone," she whispered, her tone almost kind. "A man who thought courage could bloom in filth. He died believing it mattered. It didn't."
She pressed her lips to his ear. "Tell me the names. Not because it will save them. But because then, when I kill them, you will know it was your breath that signed their fate. That's a power few men ever touch."
Her hand lingered against his cheek before she rose, and the gesture was so intimate that Rennick felt dirtier than if she had carved him open.
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But Tharos—the executioner—was different. He did not come to question. He came to demonstrate. In the chamber adjoining Rennick's cell, three captured rebels were displayed behind an iron grate. Each was bound upright, their bodies lit by torchlight.
"You'll hear them," Tharos said simply, his voice like gravel poured into water.
The execution began with no screams—only the steady rhythm of flesh being cut. Rennick tried to block it out, but the grate had been designed to amplify, to turn each wet sound into a sermon of despair. When the first voice broke, it was not a cry of pain but a child's name shouted into the dark. The sound carved deeper than steel.
Kael returned midway, watching Rennick's clenched fists. "We're not asking for loyalty," he said softly. "Loyalty is brittle. We want surrender. A quiet, hollow acceptance. Once you taste that, you'll never rise again."
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Hours blurred. Days, perhaps. Time unraveled until Rennick's sense of self thinned. He muttered prayers into his knees. Sometimes, when his strength wavered, he almost believed Selara's voice when she promised him release. Other times, Kael's silence cracked him more than screams could.
Yet, in the pit of his chest, Rennick kept a single ember alive. He thought of the boy Kael had lifted in the street, crying, and of Liora's hand shaking as she shielded the child. He thought of the red handprints on stone walls, multiplying like blood blooming in water. The ember was small—but it burned.
When Kael leaned close one night and whispered, "All men fold," Rennick's lips split into a broken smile. "Then you haven't met me."
Kael studied him a long moment, then chuckled—not in mockery, but in genuine intrigue. "Good. Then we will take our time."
The door shut. The darkness deepened. The ember smoldered on.
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