Chapter 66: The Weight of Silence
In that instant, I was met with an immediate sense of panic.
Not the kind that flails, or howls, or throws itself to the ground in some gloriously messy show of grief. No, this was the worst kind of panic. The kind that moves quietly, gliding in like a silk-draped executioner. It breathes down the back of your neck and murmurs ugly things into the soft, frightened parts of your brain. And me? I’d been kissed by panic before. I’d let it take me to bed, let it whisper my name in the dark. But this—this was different.
This was the kind that tasted like prophecy.
My boots slammed against the jagged stone as I ran, the sound echoing up through the haze like a choir of angry bells. My coat billowed behind me, theatrical and tragic all at once, as I tore across the balcony toward the towering palace doors. I didn’t think. Couldn’t. My mind was a hive of angry bees—all sting and no honey—buzzing and ricocheting from thought to thought in a mad, looping frenzy. The blood. The trail of blood. And the smell. Gods, the smell—
And yet beneath all of that buzzing chaos...was a silence.
A silence in my chest, settled like old dust. Because some part of me, ancient, cold, and cruelly perceptive, already knew what I’d find on the other side of those doors.
The Tower didn’t lie. It didn’t bluff. It simply...waited.
I reached the doors and didn’t hesitate to press against them. My hand gripped the blackened iron ring-handle and pushed. The door groaned open with the slow, shuddering creak of an old god exhaling its final curse.
And then the world changed.
I found myself in a throne room stretching out before me like a mausoleum dressed for a wedding. A vast cathedral of despair, dimly lit by windows high above that pierced the gloom with long, narrow sunbeams. Each column that lined the chamber was carved in obscene detail—twisted limbs, screaming faces, bodies bound in shapes that no mortal could survive. Art, in the way torture can be art if you squint hard enough and ignore the blood.
The air was cold. Reverent. Like even the sunbeams above had been shushed into silence.
And the blood—gods. The blood.