Chains bit deep into my wrists, their iron frozen from years untouched by sunlight. My arms ached, long past the point of numbness. Blood mixed with sweat as it traced crooked paths down my fingers and across my chest. The stone behind me was damp and cold. Old. Older than memory. It smelled of rot and rust and something worse—failure.
The torches had long since gone out. They only lit them when someone came to watch me suffer. Or when it was time to die.
I thought I'd be afraid when the end came. That I'd scream, cry, beg the gods for mercy. But no prayers would pass these lips.
I wasn't the villain they said I was.
But I wasn't a hero either.
I was simply a man—forced into a role someone else refused to play.
Footsteps echoed beyond the cell. I heard them long before I saw her. Soft-soled boots on ancient stone, careful but certain. A rhythm I knew. Trusted. Feared.
The door creaked open.
And there she was.
Auralia.
Her cloak fluttered in the torchlight like a whisper of midnight. The same long, dark hair she'd always had, tied with a crimson cord. The same silver pendant gleamed at her throat—the one I'd given her when we were sixteen. The last gift before everything unraveled.
She looked like a dream, beautiful and untouchable. But there was a shadow clinging to her eyes, one I'd never seen before.
"You came," I breathed, my voice nothing more than cracked stone.
"I had to," she said, stepping into the cell. Her voice was soft. Tired. Like something inside her had already died.
I tried to move, the chains groaning. Pain flared through my shoulder. "You have to help me. They're wrong, Auralia. I didn't—"
"They're not wrong."
She looked at me with something colder than hate.
"They just finally saw the truth."
I froze. The words didn't make sense. Not from her.
Not from the only person I ever trusted.
Her hand moved beneath her cloak. Slowly. Deliberately.
She drew a blade.
Elven-forged. Ritualistic. The one she always wore at her hip but never once unsheathed in my presence. Not even when we were hunted.
My breath caught in my throat.
"Auralia...?"
She stepped forward.
The blade gleamed in the light—silver and sorrow.