Page 101 of Thunder's Reckoning

I WOKE TOdarkness.

Not the kind that fades with sunrise, but the kind that waits. Heavy. Dense. Unmoving. It pressed in from every direction, thick as wool and cold as stone. Breathing felt like inhaling shadows.

The air was stale, but not lifeless. It carried the faint musk of damp linen, ash, and something metallic, like iron left too long in the rain. A room that had been sealed, preserved, used too many times to ever wash clean. Above me, a single window—too narrow for escape—let in a sliver of gray light that sliced across the wall like a scar.

My wrists weren’t bound, but I didn’t need ropes to remember captivity. My body knew what it was to belong to someone else’s will. My heart was already racing before I even sat up.

The room was small. Intentionally so. A cot shoved into the corner, no sheet, no pillow. A basin tucked inside a niche carved with symbols I would always see in my dreams, flames inside circles, the old mark of the prophet. The whitewashed walls looked blank at first glance, but I saw them. Faint scratches. Claw marks. Lines gouged into plaster by nails and desperation. Words etched and rubbed away by time and bleach.

My gaze dropped to the grate in the floor. A square of black iron where they’d build fires beneath, flooding the chamber with unbearable heat. Smoke without flame. Heat without mercy.

This wasn’t just a cell.

It was a cleansing chamber.

A punishment room.

And I had been here before.

I was fourteen when Gabrial locked me inside one.

Jolana, Malik’s mother, had told him she caught me slipping out of a closet with Aden. We were the same age, friends who shared stolen laughs in a place where joy was dangerous. But in that world, rumors were gospel, and lies cut deeper than truth.

I can still remember Gabrial’s face, his fury smothered under calm, his eyes burning with something worse than disappointment. It was pure rage and it terrified me. He ordered me locked in the chamber.

The door shut, and silence swallowed me whole.

The first day, no food. My stomach twisted so hard I thought I would break in half. The second, only a cup of water, metal-tasting and warm. My lips split, my tongue thick in my mouth, but I didn’t beg.

Through the walls, I’d heard others in their own chambers, young voices unraveling, confessing to anything just to be freed. Pleas that turned to sobs, then silence.

But I never confessed. I whispered nothing. I curled on the cold floor and made myself endure.

On the third day, I expected the flames beneath the grate, the final stage of purification. But they never came. Gabrial hadn’t ordered it. He loved me in his way, so he withheld the fire. He starved me, broke me with silence, but never gave me the full punishment.

It was mercy meant to wound, because it reminded me I was different. That I was his.

When he finally let me out, he tilted my chin, studied my face. Not to see if I was guilty, but to check if I was still strong enough to be what he wanted.

Jolana was punished instead. When he learned she lied, he had her feet burned. Her screams haunted the halls. That was the beginning of her madness.

She had thought herself clever, once. She believed she could bind him by blood, that a child would tie his power to her. Malik was the trap she set, the proof of her defiance. But all it bought her was his loathing. He despised her for it. For trying to steal what was his to give only when he chose.

That loathing festered, and Jolana twisted with it until she turned on me with a knife in her hand. She wanted me to pay for the truth she couldn’t bear, that he would never love her. That her trap only chained her to his contempt.

That was the day I learned: in Gabrial’s world, love and cruelty were inseparable.

Now, standing in this room again, every scratch on the walls whispered back to me. My legs trembled, but I forced myself toward the door.

It loomed ahead—iron, reinforced, no handle on my side. A flame encased in a circle carved deep into the surface. The Children’s mark. Watching. Judging.

I pressed my palm against it anyway.

Locked.

Of course it was.

I wrapped my arms around myself, trying to contain the fear, but it pressed harder, filling the chamber until it felt like I was breathing panic instead of air.