Page 75 of What Lies Within Blood & Heirs

Someone was screaming—screaming.

Not someone but … hundreds of painful, roaring screams—the same voice. Some close, some distant. Young. Others were recognizable as the warm voice she missed now.

Garrik. Stars, it was all Garrik.

Eyes adjusting, the shadows guided her to a ledge. To a deep pit of inky dark. Fear should’ve gripped her, but it wasn’t an option. Because instead of marble. Instead of a hallway leading to Kaine’s bedchamber and his cruel hands …

This placewasGarrik.

And that winding staircase was where the source of the screaming wailed from. Fromthousandsof iron-barred doors lining the walls.

This wasn’t just his mind.

This terrible place … this awful pit …was a prison.

Every door, a piece of him. Shackling him inside agony and pain. Living daily, screaming inside with no way out. Loud and tormented and earth-shattering.

Alora’s nose stung at the realization, warring off the burning tears threatening to fall.

Was this what he lived with? The pressure. The constant rumble like water coming to a boil. The trembling ground, a tinderbox fit to burst at any moment.

Her knees threatened to buckle, but the shadow guided her forward. Onto the staircase.

She would not be afraid. For Garrik, terror didn’t exist. Alora wanted—needed—to take each one of those steps.To find him—save him—from this misery.

Down and down and down into the depths. Deeper and deeper the shadow led. Passed doors chained and shackled and nailed closed. Past others wide open with not an ounce of light.

Doors ahead slammed closed. Another opened. Each with a presence of foreign darkness—adifferentkind to the hand guiding her.

“Garrik!”That was a voice of death. A female. Viciously shrieking through a door. She sounded like she was falling, her voice drifting away the longer she screamed until there was nothing?—

“Mother!No!”

Alora slammed her eyes shut, denying Garrik’s memories, and focused on the feeling of the shadow. On the feeling of every step.

“He is nothing to me. Do with him what you wish.”Though she had never heard the High King’s voice, never allowed past the throne room doors with Kaine, somehow Alora knew. Three doors down, that was Magnelis.

Down another, a whip cracked, followed by an evil snicker. “No more screams? Come now,boy.Just one more and I will stop.”

She hadn’t realized she had stopped until shadows enveloped her. Exactly like Garrik’s embrace, they held her until her buckling knees could stand.

With every looming step, a slithering presence crawled behind them, making her hair stand on end like Garrik’s shield over camp. Black and evil and wretched. It clawed against her boots, against her neck, ringing warning through her bones as if it owned the space she walked in. As if it guarded its property.

That foreign darkness stung like wasps. Sending pings of pain through her veins. But she didn’t stop. Not even as slithering darkness pumped lightning in her veins.

Venom. Poison.

The serpent’s magic.

Hate flooded through her, so cruel and endless that she didn’t balk as she lifted her free palm. Thatthing. That vile thing was going to die—she vowed to kill it—her,all of her.

An orb of starfire ignited, radiating vital light through Garrik’s mindspace. Alora turned to see the darkness slithering away into the shadows, cowering at the feathered edge of starlight.

Something sinister twisted Alora’s mouth, sneering at it, “That’s right.Be afraid.” Because she was coming for it next.

At last, the shadow brought her to the last step and offered up a door a few feet from them. Only this wasn’t a door but an iron fortress.

Barbs of sharpened steel and razored edges and mangled metal. Awful and vicious. Thousands of layers of gruesome barriers that not a tickle of breath could penetrate.

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