Page 28 of Wicked Vows (Cursed Darkness (DarkHallow Academy) #1)

Verik

T he transition is a brief, violent wrench.

Reality tears and reseals. The air on the other side is thick enough to chew, tasting of dust and time.

I’m standing in a vast cavern, not a natural one.

The walls are carved with runes so ancient they hum with a power that has long since bled out.

In the centre of the chamber, a spiral staircase of black, load-bearing stone descends into a deeper darkness.

The pounding I felt in the pit is here. That steady beat hammering up through my boots.

The forge, whatever it turns out to be, is close.

Dathan appears behind me in a ripple of displaced air. “Cosy,” he says, drinking in the oppressive gloom.

Then Lysithea arrives, her hand clutched in Evren’s. Her eyes are wide, her face pale in the faint light filtering from the open portal. Her chin is up. Always defiant.

I wave a hand, and the fiery archway collapses into a shower of dying sparks, plunging us into a darkness broken only by faint, phosphorescent moss clinging to the walls. The way back is gone.

“This way,” I say, my voice echoing in the vastness as I nod towards the staircase. “It’s waiting.”

“What’s waiting?” Lysithea asks.

“That’s what we’re here to find out.” I take a step down and feel out with my hands in the darkness before bringing an orb of fire to my palm. It hovers in front of me, showing me the way. “Single file.”

The steps are worn smooth, spiralling into a blackness that swallows the light from my hand. I lead the way down the elegant, suicidal curve of the staircase. Behind me, I hear the soft scuff of Dathan’s boots, followed by the near-silent tread of the other two.

The air grows heavier with each turn, thick with the pressure of the earth and something else. An ancient, sleeping power. The rhythmic humming intensifies, no longer just a sound, but a physical vibration that rattles my teeth. It’s a heartbeat in the stone.

The Scar on my arm throbs in time with it. A sympathetic resonance. A connection. I feel a flicker of her power, a sharp note of her anxiety mixed with a cold, stubborn resolve. She’s scared, but she’s not breaking.

My firelight dances across runes carved into the central pillar of the staircase. They are so old and not anything I can read. I doubt the others can either.

After what feels like an eternity, the staircase ends. It opens into a circular chamber, its ceiling lost in the oppressive darkness above. The floor is a mosaic of obsidian tiles. The walls are made of black glass that glimmers faintly in the light from the hellfire orb.

“The Blood Court?” Lysithea murmurs.

“Possibly. We don’t really have much to go on.”

“What is it supposed to be here for?”

“Justice.”

The faint rasp from Evren causes Lysithea to snap her head towards him.

“That’s what your ghosts said, yeah?” I say. “Beneath the foundations. Beneath the forge. Justice is buried there. It is hungry.”

“So, then this isn’t the Blood Court,” Lysithea says slowly. “Beneath the forge. Justice is buried there. Is this the forge?”

“I don’t think so,” I say equally as carefully. “A forge implies something is made there. This is an empty room.”

“Unless it’s not talking about something physical being made,” Dathan says. “Or it’s the making of someone into something else.”

“Could be,” I reply, looking around.

“We don’t know shit,” Lysithea snaps, her agitation echoing around the room. “This is a wild goose chase.”

Evren grips her hand and brings it to his chest. He shakes his head.

“We are here for a reason; we just need to figure this shit out,” I say what he can’t.

Evren nods.

“We need that book,” I add.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear like a good little bookie. So, we are on our own.

“Okay, so let’s consider this is an ante chamber of some kind. A waiting or staging area. There are levels below us, we know that from the ghost. We need to find how we go down from here.”

“You,” Lysithea says. “You create a door.”

I nod slowly. “It’s not as easy as that. There has to be something that gives me a thread to pull on, and there isn’t.”

My fingers trace the seamless join between floor and wall. Nothing. It’s a perfect design. A flawless trap. “It’s a dead end.”

“We came all this way for nothing?” Lysithea’s voice is sharp with accusation.

“I didn’t say that,” I snap back. “I said I can’t make a door.”

The rhythmic thumping from below gets louder. It wants something.

“Then we’re stuck,” she says, her arms crossed. She lets out a low, frustrated hum, a single, pure note of sheer annoyance.

And the room answers.

The black glass walls bleed light. Invisible runes flare to life, a complex web of silver energy that was hidden in the darkness. The light reflects off the obsidian floor, trapping us in a cage of glowing script. The beat from below intensifies, a hungry, answering pulse.

“What did you do?” Dathan mutters.

Lysithea looks just as stunned as we are.

I grin. It wasn’t waiting for a key. It was waiting for a frequency. Her frequency.

“She just gave me the blueprint,” I say, stepping towards the centre of the room where the runes converge. The silver light is a thread of ancient power I can finally grasp. “Hold on.”

I grab the light. Reality screams and tears open at my command.

Spires of black ice shoot up through the floor, causing us to dodge them as their random patterns are impossible to predict.

The grating from the centre of the room reveals a plinth that rises out of the ground.

On it lies a book, its pages flicking wildly back and forth.

“Uhm,” Lysithea mutters, steadying herself on the wall as she stares at the book. “What is that?”

Evren is already staring down at it and nodding. He picks it up and shows it to us. It’s the book he found in the library that told him about the other book.

“Has it added anything to it?” I ask, moving closer as the disturbance dies down.

Evren nods. The letters are the same spidery scrawl, but the words are new, etched in what looks like dried blood.

A price for passage. A sacrifice of truth.

“What the fuck does that mean?” Dathan asks, voicing the thought rattling around my own head.

“It means it wants something from us,” I say, my gaze scanning the runes still glowing on the walls. “A toll.”

Lysithea lets out a noise of frustration that shakes the room.

“Easy there,” I say, moving closer to her. “We want to get out of here alive.”

The book slams shut in Evren’s hands with a crack that echoes in the vast chamber. He stares at it, then at Lysithea, his expression unreadable.

The pounding from below stops. The sudden silence is disturbing.

“Now what?” she whispers, her defiance faltering.

The runes on the wall fade, one by one, like dying stars. The room is sinking back into absolute darkness.

“It wants a truth,” I say, my mind racing. “A secret. From all of us.” My gaze lands on Lysithea.

The last rune dies. My hellfire orb is the only thing keeping the crushing blackness at bay.

“Okay,” I say, my voice a low challenge in the dark. “Who wants to go first?”