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PROLOGUE

Long After 1730…

Time has lost all meaning…

Life is only pain…

Death is the only relief…

Cerberus Maddox XI growled,choking on dust and rubble, entombed by the crushing weight of clay-hardened earth that slowly compacted with time. Roots and gravel bound his mutilated body—enough to trap, paralyze, suffocate, and kill him again and again.

Unsure how long he’d been suffering or how many times he’d died only to return to this eternal torture, Cerberus clung to what was left of his decaying sanity, though his mind fragmented long ago. Immortality had no power here, and longevity had become a curse. With noblood to alleviate the endless pain or speed his recovery, existence was insufferable.

Sensory deprivation left Cerberus deaf, blind, and incapable of movement. He sometimes suffered the sweet relief of hallucinations where the fixed memories of his past also tortured him.

Those agonizing memories became his mirrored reality, his escape from the physical suffering that was his endless existence until he died once more.

Again.

And again.

And again, only to be brought back to this living hell.

Awareness came like baptism through fire. Sharp pain pulsed and surged through every wasted shred of him. The cycle never ended. It couldn’t. And by the thousandth time he died, he was certain immortality was a curse and his desire for vengeance would live forever inside of him.

His body hummed in agony. Each throbbing beat of his heart radiated awareness as tortured nerves buzzed and burned.

Echoes of muscle memory faded. Wounds deliberately healed and the dead cells withered away. Rotting. He was rotting.

Gone were his arms. Gone were his legs. Torn flesh and muscle left him a fraction of the warrior he once was. All he had was breath and pain, but there was no air left to breathe, so the pain inevitably won.

Dampness chilled his bones, stiffening every torn joint and shredded muscle into a tough, ossified husk. His decaying body became a raw nerve with time, exposed and infected, tingling with haunting twitches as he decomposed into a living corpse—buried alive for a long, possibly eternal, restless repose.

The stench of his rotting arms and legs reached his nose. His tormentors left his severed limbs with him so he could suffer the slow decay of his own muscle and flesh.

This deep in the earth, sand dampened to mud and slowly solidified into cold clay. Fossilized in time, encased in agony with no limbs left to claw his way out, nothing existed beyond his tortured mind.

The odd sensation of wrigglers and beetles nibbling the decay became a constant torment and comfort. So long as the worms were with him, composting his body's organic matter, he was never truly alone.

Trapped in the nothing.

No space.

No time.

Only pain.

His agonizing existence repeated on a steady loop of suffering and death.

Suffering and death.

The ricochet of time was lost in the darkness.

His disoriented mind forgot what it was to walk and breathe without agony. After years of this relentless imprisonment, he struggled torecall the wholeness he celebrated before his limbs had been torn clean—amputated by force with the excruciating purpose of punishing him.

Punishing him for her. He inwardly snarled.

She was nothing! A whore, like her mother…