Liam became aware of the smell before anything else.
It crept into his senses quietly, slipping past the fog of pain and exhaustion that had claimed him sometime after the last coughing fit. It wasn't the sharp, wet stench he associated with decay. Not rot—not fresh rot, at least. That had a sweetness to it, a cloying wrongness that made the back of the throat tighten.
This was different.
Dry.
Dusty.
Like stone that had forgotten it was once alive.
His nose wrinkled instinctively, breath hitching as the smell settled fully into his awareness. He tried to shift, to roll onto his side and away from whatever his cheek was pressed against—
Pain answered immediately.
A dull, protesting ache rippled through his joints as he moved even an inch. Something hard pressed into his shoulder blade, unyielding and cold.
Not stone.
Liam froze.
Slowly—carefully, as if sudden movement might anger the darkness itself—he leaned forward and extended his hand, fingers trembling as they brushed the ground beside him.
His fingertips traced a curve.
Too smooth to be rock.
Too rounded.
He swallowed and kept going, forcing himself to finish the motion his mind already understood.
Ribs.
Human ribs.
Too many of them.
His breath caught halfway in, lungs locking as panic surged up his spine. His hand recoiled, slapping back against the dirt as if burned.
"No," he whispered hoarsely, the word scraping out of a throat gone raw. "No, no, no…"
The darkness felt closer now, heavier. As his eyes adjusted further, shapes began to emerge from the black—pale arcs half-buried in packed earth, long bones stacked at angles that made no sense for a living body, skulls tilted and cracked, empty eye sockets turned toward nothing.
Not scattered.
Not accidental.
Placed.
A pile.
His stomach twisted violently.
"…Okay," he said weakly, voice thin and brittle. "That's… that's not ideal."
The understatement felt obscene, but humor—however hollow—was still his mind's last defense against panic. He focused on breathing, slow and shallow, counting the faint, irregular drip of water echoing somewhere deeper in the cellar.
One.
Two.
Three.
The inner cellar hadn't changed.
Not physically.
The walls were still damp stone, ancient and rough. The air was still cold enough to seep into his bones. But something had shifted all the same. The space felt… attentive. As if the moment he'd noticed the bones, the room had noticed him noticing.
He pushed himself upright, muscles screaming in protest. His wrists were free.
That realization came late—too late—and hit him all at once.
No chains.
No manacles biting into skin.
No iron bars within reach.
No footfalls. No guards. No muttered voices or distant orders.
The inner cellar was quiet.
Too quiet.
The kind of quiet that wasn't absence of sound, but absence of reassurance.
Liam's pulse began to climb.
Then—
Movement.
Not sudden. Not fast. Just a shift, subtle enough that he almost missed it. Like fabric brushing against stone. Like darkness rearranging itself.
His head snapped up.
At the far end of the cellar, where shadow pooled thickest and the torchlight from above failed entirely, something stood.
Tall.
Thin.
Wrapped in layers of dark cloth that drank what little light reached it. The folds hung wrong—too still, too heavy, as if gravity itself behaved differently around the figure.
Its face was hidden beneath a deep hood.
No eyes reflected the dim light.
No mouth showed.
Just the suggestion of a shape beneath the fabric—humanoid, but not convincingly so. As if the idea of a person had been remembered imperfectly.
Liam's heart slammed against his ribs.
Don't panic, his mind urged, clinging desperately to habit. You've handled worse.
He knew immediately that this was a lie.
The thing did not move.
It did not breathe.
It simply waited.
Watched.
Time stretched, thin and fragile. Liam became acutely aware of every sound his body made—the rasp of breath in his throat, the soft scrape of fabric as he shifted his weight, the faint tremor running through his legs.
He swallowed hard.
"…Hi," he tried.
The word fell into the darkness and died there, swallowed whole.
The figure tilted its head.
Not curiosity.
Assessment.
Cold and deliberate.
Every instinct screamed at him to stay still, to shrink, to make himself smaller. To become just another piece of debris in a room full of bones.
Instead, his hand drifted to his chest.
The pendant rested there, warm against his skin.
Not comforting.
Alert.
A faint vibration hummed through the chain, subtle enough that he might have dismissed it as imagination—except it grew stronger the longer he stared at the hooded figure.
A pressure answered from the other side of the room, like two magnets straining toward each other.
Recognition.
The thought surfaced unbidden, uninvited.
The thing took a step forward.
There was no sound. No scrape of stone, no whisper of cloth.
It simply was closer.
Liam's breath hitched. He forced himself upright, pressing his back against the wall, heart hammering so hard it made his vision pulse.
"Okay," he said hoarsely, forcing air past his teeth. "That's close enough."
Another step.
The air thickened, pressing against his skin like deep water. His thoughts slowed, edges blurring, a weight settling behind his eyes that made focusing feel like work.
Mana.
Not flowing.
Present.
It was nothing like the crushing pressure Akalh had unleashed in the hall above. That had been overwhelming, brute force made manifest.
This was different.
Sharper.
Colder.
A blade instead of a hammer.
"I don't know what you are," Liam said, words dragging as if pulled through mud, "but if you're here to kill me… you're late. That already happened."
The hooded head tilted again.
Then the figure raised one hand.
Long fingers slid from the sleeve—pale, thin, wrong in ways his mind struggled to catalog. Too many joints. Too still. They looked less like flesh and more like an imitation carved from memory.
The hand reached for him.
The pendant flared.
Heat flooded his chest, sudden and violent. Liam barely had time to register the warning before the world broke.
Pain exploded through his left arm.
Brief.
Total.
Absolute.
There was no impact. No tearing sensation. No moment of transition.
One moment his arm was there.
The next—
It wasn't.
His scream ripped itself from his throat, raw and animal as his body staggered backward. He slammed into the wall, stone biting into his spine, and slid down helplessly.
He stared.
His arm lay on the stone several feet away.
Severed cleanly at the shoulder.
Blood pooled slowly, dark and obscene against pale bone.
Shock surged up, cold and numbing, threatening to pull him under. His vision narrowed, edges dimming, but terror—pure, incandescent terror—kept him upright.
Kept him conscious.
Kept him staring.
His mouth opened and closed soundlessly before sound returned in a broken, gasping sob.
The hooded figure lowered its hand.
It had not attacked him.
It had interrupted something.
The crushing pressure vanished, leaving behind a hollow ringing in his skull. Liam slid fully to the ground, back against the wall, clutching the ruined stump of his arm as blood soaked into his sleeve.
"…what," he choked, voice barely a whisper, "the hell… are you?"
The figure regarded him in silence.
Then—
It spoke.
Not aloud.
The voice slid directly into his mind, bypassing ears and language alike. Cold. Vast. Layered with something that felt older than words, older than fear.
—You should not exist.—
Liam barked a weak, hysterical laugh that dissolved into a cough.
"Yeah," he rasped. "I'm… getting that a lot today."
The figure stepped closer, looming over him, its presence bending the space between them. The air seemed to thin, reality stretching like skin pulled too tight.
—Remain conscious, Other Worlder.—
The pendant burned against his chest.
And in that moment—through the pain, the blood loss, the creeping dark—understanding finally took root.
This thing was not a monster.
It was not a jailer.
It was not even an executioner.
It was a function.
A response.
An answer.
Something that death itself avoided.
And Liam Lockwood had just been noticed.