The heavy door closed with a sound of grinding metal that ended in a solid click. The lock was set. Sineus turned from the sound, his first thought already formed. Escape. He scanned the chamber, a high, circular room with no windows. A single, sourceless light pulsed from the ceiling, casting long, distorted shadows that clung to the curved walls.
The walls themselves were wrong. They were a deep, polished black, like obsidian, but they were not still. A thin, oily fluid, blacker than the stone, wept from invisible pores, tracing slow, greasy paths downward. The air was cold, thin, and carried the scent of ozone and something else, something like damp, turned earth. This was the heart of the Tower of Agony.
Fedor Sokolov, the captain of his guard, moved past him. He ignored the weeping walls, his focus on the door. He pushed against the seamless black surface with his shoulder, the one that was not still numb from his useless charge against the acolyte. The door did not budge. He struck it with his gauntleted fist. The sound was a dull, dead thud, a sound with no echo, as if the wall had swallowed it whole.
He stepped back, flexing his hand.
“It gives,” Fedor grunted, his voice low. “Like hitting flesh over bone. But it does not break.”
He moved to the wall, running his gloved fingers over the weeping surface, his expression a mask of grim disbelief. He pressed his palm flat against it, then pulled back quickly.
“And it’s cold. A cold that bites.”
Alani Vainu, their guide from the Forest Folk, had not moved from where she’d slumped against the far wall. Her face was pale, a sheen of sweat on her brow despite the chill. The deep claw wounds on her arm, now bound in clean linen, seemed a distant, lesser injury. Here, the wounds were to the spirit. She had her eyes closed, her hands pressed to her temples.
“It’s drinking,” she whispered, her voice a dry rasp. “It drinks the warmth. The life. Every memory of sunlight.”
Sineus went to her side, unstopping the waterskin from his belt. It was a simple thing of cured leather, a familiar weight from a world of wind and sky. He knelt.
“Alani. Drink.”
She shook her head, a small, tight motion. “The water will remember this place. I will taste the agony.”
Fedor made a low sound of disgust. He understood a locked door, a strong wall. He did not understand a prison that could poison water with a feeling. He turned his back on them and began a slow, methodical circuit of the room, testing every meter of the wall for a flaw his axe could find.
Sineus looked from his stoic, unyielding warrior to his fading, sensitive guide. The physical approach was useless. The psychic one was a fatal vulnerability. The lock on this door was not made of iron. It was made of something else. The responsibility fell to him, to the third way of seeing.
He had to find the seam.
He closed his eyes, shutting out the weeping obsidian and the sourceless light. He let the cold of the room settle into his bones, a familiar anchor. He ignored the low hum that vibrated through the floor, the hum Alani had identified as the tower’s pain. He let his own world fall away.
The dull ache behind his eyes, a constant companion, sharpened into a clear, piercing spike.
The Pod-sloy, the under-layer of what was, rushed in. It was not the gentle, ghostly overlay of Belogorod’s history. This was a maelstrom. A chaotic, violent storm of creation. He saw not a finished room, but the memory of its making.
He saw figures in robes of dried blood and ash, the same acolytes who had taken his blood. They were not building with stone, but with something captured. He saw shimmering, screaming threads of memory being forced together, hammered into shape by tools that glowed with a cold, malevolent energy. The air filled with the phantom stench of burned-out minds and the silent screams of stolen despair.
This chamber was not a construction. It was a scar. A wound given form, its edges stitched together with pure will.
The pain in his head intensified. The sheer volume of agony was a physical force, threatening to overwhelm him. He saw flashes of the memories being woven into the walls. A Khevsur warrior’s dishonor. A trader’s ruin on the Golden Road. A child’s terror in a blighted village. Each one a brick in this prison. Rostislav Kurov did not discard the pain he stole; he used it. He built with it.
Alani was right. The walls were alive with agony. Fedor was right. They were like flesh. They were both correct, and both truths made the prison stronger.
He could not fight the thousand memories that made up the walls. That would be like trying to fight the ocean. He had to find the single memory that commanded the others. The memory of the oath that bound them. The foundational lie.
He pushed past the storm of stolen moments, the cacophony of a hundred different sorrows. He searched for a single point of origin, a signature, a will. The mind of the architect. The Master. Or the one who spoke for him.
He was hunting for the memory of the lock.
The chaos of the past swirled around him, a vortex of pain. He saw the final thread being woven into place, the last stolen scream sealing the structure. And behind it all, he felt a flicker. A single, coherent thought. A point of malevolent, binding will. It was not a memory of making a thing. It was the memory of an oath. An instruction. A command for the pain to hold its shape. To become a cage.
He had it. A single point of hateful, unwavering light in the screaming dark.
He focused his entire being on that one point.
The cold of the unbreakable prison seeped into him, a mirror to the fading warmth of Alani's life. He had to find a weakness not in the stone, but in the memory of its creation.
