The dungeon was quiet. Not the comforting kind. The kind that seeps,like guilt through stone, like rot through bone.I could feel it in the soles of my boots.Every step I took sounded like it was happening somewhere else,in a memory I didn’t choose to remember,in a nightmare I refused to wake up from.My boots clicked softly against the floor, but inside, I was weightless.Hollow.Like something had been scraped out of me and left behindon a blood-stained blanket that still smelled like lullabies.Ivan looked smaller than I remembered.Sunken.Shivering, not from cold, but from the absence of meaning.His skin clung to the angles of his face like it had given up on him.The bravado was gone.The madness, too.Just a man now.Or the leftover shape of one.But when I entered,when he heard me,his chin lifted.“Emilie,” he rasped.That half-broken voice I once mis
Last Updated : 2025-08-14 Read more