Chapter One

When Wilder Hawthorne came to in the cold, damp cell of the Scarlet Tower, his first thought was of Thea: fierce. Unflinching. His.

‘We don't say those words again until we're on the other side. Until we can say them Warsword to Warsword,'he had told her, the warrior who had stolen his heart and soul, who had walked into the swirling mist of the Great Rite to face her fate and the Furies themselves.

She would light up the midrealms with her storms, and the thought comforted him as he rolled onto all fours and dry retched over the wet stones. The oppressive magic of the Scarlet Tower pressed down on him, making him dizzy and nauseous. The proximity to the sea and the Veil left everything wet. The cell stank of rot. There was no window to hear the crash of waves beyond, or taste the briny air.

The sounds of the prison changed with each passing moment. Sometimes there were a thousand prisoners just outside his cell, desperately clamouring for something, the noise overpowering. The next moment it was as silent as a graveyard. Worst of all, there was no way to tell what was real and what was a figment of his imagination, or some illusion woven beyond the confines of this wretched place.

Goosebumps rushed across his skin as he realised he'd observed the same thing before. How long had he been in this cell? How many times had he woken with the same thoughts, the same physical reactions? There was an eerie familiarity to it.

Manacles rubbed his wrists and ankles raw, treated with a recognisable form of alchemy; a more potent rendition of what Wren had concocted. Once, he'd been able to break iron chains with a simple brace of his body. But not here. Not now.

The restraints rattled as Wilder shifted stiffly to a sitting position, resting his bare back against the sodden wall, the sensation cold and shocking against his fevered flesh. He had been stripped of everything but his undershorts, including his shitty armour, though he couldn't remember when he'd been relieved of his weapons and clothes. He couldn't remember the journey here at all, only that he'd been so crazed with the effects of the arachne venom that he'd almost prayed for death. He shuddered at the memory of the monsters creeping towards him and Thea, a grotesque fusion of spider and human and darkness. One had sliced his forearm open with its pincers, leaving a translucent film of poison behind, burning him from the inside out.

The only thing that had stopped him wishing for his end was Thea, and the longing to see her again, as the Warsword she was always meant to be. For he knew in his bones that she would emerge victorious, Naarvian steel in hand, vows of vengeance on her tongue.

And that she would come for him.

The thought dragged a hoarse laugh from his chapped lips, the slight motion causing his body to seize in several places. The arachne venom hadn't killed him, but the acute pain in his kidneys and ribs told him that he'd been handled roughly on the way here.

Bruised, but not broken, he mused bitterly, for he knew they wanted him whole to experience the nightmares of this gods-forsaken place. And there would be many.

A sour taste lingered on his tongue and his gut was tight with hunger pains. He couldn't recall the last time he'd had food or water, not that he was sure he'd be able to stomach them now.

The bars of his cell were made of jagged rock, and beyond them, he could see the shadows of guards moving closer…

‘Get up,' spat a poisonous voice.

Wilder did no such thing.

The door to his cell swung inward and two enormous howlers clamped their meaty hands around him, hauling him to his feet. They were bigger than the cursed men that roamed the midrealms, their voices stolen and replaced by blood-curdling howls, their forms mutilated by shadow magic. He lashed out, but his blows met only air – another horror of the tower: no matter how hard an inmate tried, there was nothing they could do to defend themselves against their keepers.

As Wilder was dragged from his cell, fighting with all his might against his chains and captors, he wondered if he'd been drugged. He'd surely been through this before. In a daze, he recognised the twists and turns of the thick stone walls, and the links of iron that wrapped around the structure, shifting and clicking as though they had minds of their own. He glimpsed the rows of cells; some empty, some filled with humans and monsters alike. Every pair of eyes he met was deadened, as though whatever had existed inside was long gone and all that remained was a husk. Wilder himself had put some of these creatures here. Now he was just another inmate alongside them.

He grunted, his already aching body barking in protest as he was thrown into another cold, dark cell, utterly indiscernible from the last, save for the bolts of lightning scratched into the wall. He'd been here before.

They liked to do this, he recalled. Move the prisoners from cesspit to cesspit, with no rhyme nor reason.

‘Give him another dose,' that same poisonous voice said.

Definitely drugged, then. Wilder staggered to his bare feet, his palms and knees stinging where they'd scraped against the rough stone. He peered through the darkness, spotting a familiar gemstone nasal piercing. The inquisitor from Harenth's dungeons.

‘Got a promotion, did you?' Wilder taunted thickly.

Bronze bangles chimed as the man in question gestured to someone Wilder couldn't see. ‘Make it a double,' he ordered.

Wilder tensed, waiting for the impact of a dart, the slash of a poison-laced knife, to have his head forced into a barrel of liquid and held under – all things that seemed distantly familiar. What he was not expecting was the whisper of sickly-sweet breath washing over him like a wave.

It threw him bodily into an onslaught of nightmares and memories entwined, so visceral that he could taste the metallic tang of blood on his tongue, could smell the burnt-hair scent of the reapers, could feel the weight of his swords in his hands once more.

Wilder didn't know where one horror ended and another began, only that he knew every moment intimately. Slowly, agonisingly, he lost track of how many times he watched Malik break across the white rock at Islaton, or how many times he heard Talemir's scream as the reaper's black talons pierced his heart.

At least a hundred times he cradled Thea in his arms, begging her to drink his Aveum springwater, to heal the claw marks in her chest as shadows coiled around her body, draining the life from her.

A hundred times more he walked through his hometown of Kilgrave, or the burnt remains of it, tasting ash in his mouth. Horses screaming in the blazing stables. His parents lifeless and charred beyond recognition in the dirt.

A myriad of images plagued him with no reprieve. He saw the pleading eyes of the shadow-touched before he plunged his blade into them, over and over, until it wasn't the gaze of strangers he met, but Talemir's hazel stare, going wide beneath the carving motion of his swords.

Wilder watched as healers peeled away the bloodied bandages from Malik's swollen face as he thrashed beneath their hold, upsetting tables and trays, knocking assistants off their feet, bellowing in pain.

Wilder's memory took him to his own Great Rite – the red-hot slash of blades through his own flesh, the snap of bones and the blunt impact of trauma to vital organs. He couldn't breathe. There was no air to be had, no fight left in his ragged lungs. He felt every blow again and again, each more vividly than the last.

He cried out as the pain and images compounded. A broken body and a broken mind – that was their intent: torture at its finest.

And just when he could take no more, just as he considered cracking his own head upon the stone to make it stop, he was shown something else. Something good.

His cabin.

Home.

And Thea waiting for him inside, a simple band of fine silver on her fourth finger, a smile on her full lips.

‘There you are,'she said.

He wanted to acknowledge that he knew this wasn't real, but couldn't bring himself to speak, to break the reverie. For any moment with her was a blessing, real or not. He fought the lump in his throat, wanting to say those words they'd denied themselves before she entered the Great Rite. What if it was now or never? What if he never saw her again? As the Warsword he knew she'd become?

He clawed at his neck, a ragged gasp escaping him as he realised that these moments of reprieve from the violence and memories were designed to break him just as much as any pain.

Icy water rained down on him, his chains rattling again as thick hands clamped around his arms once more.

Everything was distant – the flickering torchlight, the terrified screams, the fetid smells, the rough handling – as though it were happening to someone else far away. This time, when Wilder was dragged from one cell to the next, he understood the husks staring back out at him from behind the stone bars, for they looked how he felt: hollowed out, a fragile shell of what had come before.

When he was thrown into a new cell, as dank and wet as the last, he didn't fight, didn't get back up. He sprawled there across the stone, rebelling against the voice in his head that told him to stand —

Until he saw a pair of eyes blinking at him from the darkness.

Still strung out and disoriented, Wilder scrambled to his feet, raising his fists, meaning to use the manacles as a weapon.

But his cellmate made no move to attack. Instead, he moved into the dying torchlight and said, ‘You don't remember me, do you?'