Prince Althur POV
The moment consciousness returned, darkness pressed in from every direction. I was tired. Bleeding. Dizzy in a way that made the world tilt even when I lay still. Every breath scraped my lungs, shallow and uneven, as if my body no longer remembered how to exist without pain.
But this darkness was… different. Not the familiar, suffocating black of the basement that had swallowed me for days—no, weeks—but something alive. The shadows moved. They flowed. They breathed.
They rolled across the stone floor like a living sea, thick and deliberate, devouring the runic wards carved into the walls—the very magic that had kept me trapped, silenced, sustained just enough to suffer. The runes flickered, screamed in dying light, then vanished as if erased by an unseen hand.
For one fragile second, I thought I was dreaming. That my mind—starved, beaten, fractured by endless torment—had finally splintered beyond repair. Hallucinations were common here. Mercy never was.
