Chapter 58: THE SLEEPER CELLS
The candlelight flickered across the bloodstained floor of Reed’s private interrogation chamber. The room—buried three levels beneath his fortress’s main dungeons—existed on no official blueprint. Its walls, lined with sound-dampening enchantments, had witnessed methods Reed had once sworn never to employ again.
Yet desperate times bred desperate measures.
The cultist’s body hung limply from iron shackles, his once-pristine ceremonial robes now tattered and crimson-splashed. His breathing came in ragged, wet gasps—the sound of a man whose lungs had begun to fill with fluid. Despite his condition, a fevered smile twisted his features.
"You still don’t understand," the man wheezed, bloody spittle flecking his cracked lips. "Every drop of blood you spill... every moment of pain... feeds Them. Your very resistance... strengthens Their coming."
Reed wiped his blade clean on a white cloth, the methodical motion betraying nothing of the disgust churning in his stomach—disgust not only for the broken man before him, but for what he himself had become.
"You’ve named three ritual sites," Reed said, his voice clinically detached. "The Whispering Grotto in Valencia’s domain, the Obsidian Spire in the Eastern Wastes, and beneath the Temple of Ascension in the capital itself. Where is the fourth?"
The cultist’s laughter turned into a choking cough. "So close... yet blind. The fourth has always been... with you."
Reed’s hand moved with practiced efficiency. The blade flickered once in the candlelight before finding its mark. The prisoner’s laughter ceased abruptly, replaced by a gurgling sound as blood fountained from his opened throat, painting the stone floor with arterial spray.
Magnus, who had observed in silence from the shadows, finally stepped forward. "Seven cultists captured from the gathering, five dead by their own hand before questioning, one yielding nothing of value, and this one..." He gestured toward the now-still body. "Speaking in riddles until the end."
Reed cleaned his blade again, more carefully this time. "Not riddles. Confirmation."
The old warrior’s eyes narrowed. "You knew?"