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The shadows shift subtly, responding to the weight of expectation returned. Of command. Of violence in service to something greater. I can feel myself transforming with each step forward. Features hardening, spine straightening, thoughts sharpening into the strategic clarity that once guided a rebellion.

Somewhere in the abyss between prisoner and lord, I’ve lost something precious—the brief moment when Ellie looked at me and saw only a prisoner, a man, and not a weapon. Not a legend.

I push the thought aside. Such luxuries belong to another life. One I never truly had.

Chapter Twenty-Three

ELLIE

“Control must be absolute to be effective. Doubt is a contagion.”

Authority Codex

The passage swallows us whole.After the bright mountain sunlight, the stronghold's entrance plunges us into near darkness. The air changes, becomes cooler, damper, carrying unfamiliar scents of smoke and oil. Scattered torches cast long, dancing shadows across rough-hewn walls. Shadows that now make me flinch.

But I can't stop what Sacha did from playing out on repeat inside my head.

He moved through those soldiers like a living nightmare. Darkness not just flowing but pouring from his skin, an extension of himself. The absolute silence of their deaths. No screams, no chance to fight back, just bodies collapsing in his wake. My stomach threatens to rebel again, bile rising in my throat for the third time since it happened. I swallow it back, tasting acid.

This is the man I’ve been traveling with.

The man I released from a tower.

A killer who doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t blink, doesn’t feel.

The guard inside tenses at our approach. I hang back, keeping distance between myself and Sacha, my body still remembering the horror on the mountainside. Then Sacha pulls back his hood, and I stumble backward.

It's as if someone has peeled away a mask I never knew was there. The man I thought I knew dissolves before my eyes. Where his skin had been normal,human, now darkness seeps out like living ink, creating strange, flowing patterns that remind me of ancient tribal markings. His eyes change too, deepening until they seem bottomless, reflecting nothing, absorbing everything.

The transformation isn't just physical, it's like watching someone shed a disguise they've worn for so long even they forgot it wasn't real. It’s similar to what happened after he said he reconnected with his familiar, and then again during our argument, but not quite.

Not tothisextent.

The guard's reaction is visceral. A sound escapes him that makes the hair rise on my arms—not quite terror, not quite awe, but something caught between both. His weapon hand freezes mid-movement, his body caught in the limbo between combat readiness and surrender. Then something shifts in his expression, recognition dawning.

"Shadowverin," he whispers.

I don't need someone to translate for me to understand the reverence in his tone. He drops to his knee, not the reluctant bend of obligation but the immediate collapse of someone encounteringsomething beyond their comprehension. His fist presses against his heart with such force I can see the tendons straining in his wrist.

Sacha touches his shoulder, and says something. It seems to settle the man a little, and he gets back to his feet. They talk for a second or two longer, with Tisera adding a few words, and then the guard seems to recover enough to lead us deeper into the mountain.

The narrow passageway gradually widens, opening into a vast chamber carved directly from rock. Torches illuminate a space buzzing with activity. People training with weapons, studying maps, preparing equipment.

A fighter stops mid-swing, her practice blade hanging forgotten in the air. A man drops a stack of maps, the parchment scattering across stone unnoticed. Conversations die mid-word. The clink of weapons ceases. The entire cavern falls under a spell of stunned silence.

First comes disbelief. Eyes widen, heads shake.

Then recognition. Mouths drop open, bodies turn rigid.

An older man presses a trembling hand to his mouth. Another backs against the wall. Some collapse to their knees without seeming aware they've moved. Others appear paralyzed, frozen between standing and kneeling, trapped in their own shock.

"Shadowverin," someone whispers that word again, and it catches fire, passing from mouth to mouth in a building wave.

They're not just surprised. They're behaving like they’re witnessing the impossible.

I knew he was important back in Ravencross, but the reactions here … this isn’t just another man from their cause returning. This issomething else. Resurrection made flesh, a revenant stepping out of legend.

The naked devotion on their faces terrifies me more than his violence did. These hardened men and women are looking at him like he’s salvation itself, while I still smell the copper tang of blood on his clothes.