Chapter Forty-Nine - Nothing Answers

(Adelaide)

The palace had gone… quiet.

Not the normal kind of quiet— not the hush of a late hour or the pause between screams from some distant torture chamber.

This was different. Heavy. Smothering. A padded sort of silence that soaked into stone and bone alike, as if someone had thrown a shroud over Hell and told it not to move.

Adelaide lay on her back atop the oversized bed, staring up at the dark stone ceiling as if it might crack open and let real air through. The faint red veins in the stone pulsed lazily, like the whole palace had a heartbeat of its own, but even that seemed slower now. Muted.

Something had changed. She could feel it in the walls. In the way the bedframe occasionally hummed with a distant, muffled tremor, then went utterly still, as if the entire structure was trying not to be heard.

At first, she thought it was just in her head. A trick of nerves and exhaustion. But as the days slid past— if days even meant anything down here— the silence settled deeper.

Fewe