The stones were wet, and they drank her heat with merciless thirst.

Maeve lay there, pressed to the cold flagging as though the prison floor itself wanted to swallow her whole. Her veins burned. Every beat of her heart felt like embers scattering through her blood, pricking every limb, every joint. The poison in her blood—her own bioarcanic essence left unsheathed without the system's leash—throbbed hotter and hotter until her skin itched raw.

She wanted to claw herself open just to let it all bleed out, but without the Blood-Draining Knife, she'd just kill herself doing it.

How long… has it been?

Time felt slow down here. Above her, through one small slit high in the wall, a vein of moonlight trickled down. Weak, thin, fractured, it painted her cheek in silver. All else was shadow and the stench of mold—not at all conducive to helping her keep her head clear and her mind awake.

The sounds made it worse.

She couldn't hear it before, but from the neighboring cells, dozens of men and women groaned, begged, and whispered their debts into the dark. Some promised coins, others their labor, and a few their own children. All to Lorcawn. None were answered. Their voices tangled with the drip of water from the ceiling until the dungeon felt like a throat full of pleading, and behind her, still, her mother cried quietly.

"Maeve…" Alana's voice was thin as a reed. "I'm sorry… I'm so sorry."

Maeve didn't turn her head. Not even slightly. Her cheek was stuck to the damp, and she couldn't move her body.

"I knew," her mother whispered, coughing between words. "I knew what kind of man he was, but I… I wanted to believe. I thought if I just… if I just obeyed, if I did what he asked, he'd let us go. That he'd keep his word."

... And she wanted to believe him so badly.

Because what else could she do?

As her mother's voice cracked into incomprehensible sounds, tired sobs breaking over the stones, Maeve clenched her jaw.

There were too many things she wanted to say—and ask—but right now, all she could think was how familiar this was.

The cold. The stone. The drip of water, the press of dark, the single window of the moon high above her.

She'd been here before.

The catacombs of Vharnveil had smelled moldy and dusty, but so were the cells beneath headquarters.

At best, the Purity Tribunal was going to give her and her mother the 'negligent' verdict. Six killed trainees and twenty-four years' worth of training lost wasn't anything to scoff at, so her cell was small, wet, and perpetually cold. One slit in the ceiling let the moon down, and the moon was her only companion. There was no bed. No table. All day long, she'd press herself to the corner and wait, shivering, as the voices above debated whether they should just execute her or bother with her re-training.

Until then, the cells beneath the Tribunal Court were her home.

Stale bread, bitter water, no word of her mother, and no word of the others—that was the silence Maeve had grown used to after three weeks in her cell. The only entertainment she had were the books her guard would occasionally slide through the bars: old horror chronicles printed decades ago, when the city still bothered writing of monsters instead of killing and surviving them. Half of them were so old their authors were dust, but…

She read because there was nothing else. She read and sniffled, curling in her thin blanket, her stomach empty, her eyes stinging.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

Tonight, she read about a Raven.

The Plagueplain Doctor, black-beaked and robed in ash, had his beloved chained and condemned by cultists, for she bore within her veins a strain of the night's poison. The Raven pleaded at their doors, begged on his knees, and offered to take her curse upon himself—but they scorned him. They mocked his beak, spat upon his mask, and called him carrion come too late.

So the Plagueplain Doctor wept. He wept until his tears boiled in the mask, and when his weeping ended, he drew the sigils of blight upon the earth and opened his satchels of pestilence.

Bharncair's streets bloomed in glass. Flesh became salt. Men, women, and children stiffened in their final screams, their eyes shattering like crystal panes, until the entire ward stood frozen as a grotesque reliquary. They became an offering of corpses to the love he could not save, and for three days and three nights, the Raven wandered those lifeless avenues, touching the shoulders of the dead, whispering her name into their empty faces, before he set himself alight amidst the ruin. They say he did so, cursing Bharncair's name. They say he vanished in the blaze, and only his mask remained, lingering to haunt those streets that would never be walked again.

'… What a childish tale', was what she thought.

So idealistic.

So hopeful.

Yet her small hands trembled as she held the book. The words swam as her vision drowned in tears. She snapped it shut, pressed it to her chest, and curled into herself on the stone floor.

She wanted to leave.

She wanted to see her mother again.

She wanted…

She wanted to see the clinic.

She wanted the warm lanterns. She wanted the smell of chitin boiling in broth and herbs steaming on random desks. She wanted to see the statue of the crooked Saintess. She wanted to hear Evelyn squabbling with Liorin while Fergal and his goons struggled to tame the hellhounds. She wanted to hear Cara humming as she brushed and cleaned the prayer hall under stained moonlight.

What did she want?

… Something that I threw away?

Her throat closed. She gulped hard, trying to stifle the burn of tears in her eyes. It was her fault. All of it. She'd been so certain that if she just obeyed her mother's plea—if she just left the clinic and followed her into this ruined quarter—things would work out somehow.

Instead, she no longer had her system. Poison burned unchecked in her veins. Her body was off-balance, her strength was uncontrolled, and worst of all—she'd abandoned them.

The thought sliced her deeper than any blade could.

Hot tears blurred the cracks in the stone. She pressed her forehead against the ground, shuddering as she tried not to cry loud enough for the other prisoners to hear.

I left them.

I left him.

I…

…

It was then that she saw it.

A small green sprout curled from the corner stones, stubbornly breaking through stone and mortar that had no right to give life. It looked such a small, fragile thing: thin stalk, damp leaf, and trembling against the draft that wafted through the cracks.

But she blinked slowly, still, as she stared at the little herb.

She may not recognize it by look, but by that horribly bitter, herbal smell, she knew it instantly.

… What'd you always say, Plagueplain Doctor?

'In Bharncair, if there's a will'?

Her jaw clenched.

This wasn't it.

This wasn't going to be her end.

She crawled forward slowly, one inch at a time, until her nails dug into the dirt by the sprout.

The stone was cold. The cell was black. The poison burned her veins—but her resolve to fix the mess she started, weak as it seemed, burned hotter still.

There were still many, many conversations she still needed to have with Alana—mostly loud and shouting conversations—but if there was one thing she learned about Bharncair the past half a year, it was that the Bharnish liked to talk as they drank themselves to death.

They were not going to have those conversations down here in this shitty, rundown cell.

... I'll get us both out of here, mom.

Whether you think you deserve it or not—whether you think it's too late or not—you'll beg to apologize to him. You'll bleed for his forgiveness, and even if he doesn't accept you, you'll keep trying until the day you die.

And I'll be right there with you.

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