The words charred as they left my lips.A bitter taste coated my tongue.I had come for five lives; instead, I found only silence.
Anger simmered within me, a slow-building fire.The room was too clean, too empty.They hadn’t merely taken the prisoners.They had erased them.A cold, methodical execution.
I moved deeper into the labyrinthine corridors, my every step echoing against the stone.And then?—
I found them.
A chamber deeper within, their bodies strewn across the cold floor like discarded remnants of a life that no longer mattered.The Timeborne prisoners—silent, unmoving, their last breaths stolen before I could reach them.
A slow exhale escaped me, controlled—because if I let the rage take over, it would consume everything.
I knelt beside the nearest fallen man, his face frozen in the stillness of death.Reaching out, I closed his sightless eyes with a gentle touch.
“Forgive me,” I murmured, the words falling like ash.
“I was too late.”
A door loomed at the far end of the chamber, slightly ajar—a silent, ominous invitation—a maw of darkness beckoning.
My pulse hammered as I strode toward it, rage thick in my veins.With one swift motion, I thrust it open.
Smoke.
A thick, choking cloud billowed out, swallowing me whole.My vision blurred, my throat ached, and my eyes stung with the acrid sting of something unnatural.Poison.
Coughing, I staggered forward—just as the door slammed shut behind me.
Click.
A lock.A trap.
“Fuck—” The curse barely left my lips before realization struck.
Belladonna.
A slow-burning assassin’s toxin, crafted for cruelty.It was designed to paralyze, incapacitate, and leave its victim aware just long enough to savor their impending doom.
And now it was in my blood.
I reached inward, grasping for the shadows that had always been mine to command—but they were distant, slipping through my fingers like mist.
Laughter—low, mocking—echoed from the smoke-filled abyss.A voice thick with malice, one I knew far too well.
“The famous Black Wraith.”
Mathias.
I forced my body to move, but every limb felt heavier than the last.The air thickened, and the walls closed in.
“Did you truly believe you could outsmart us?”His voice slithered through the darkness, close now, a whisper against my fading senses.
I tried to respond, summon some rebelliousness, but the words collapsed on my tongue?—
—as did my body.
I hit the cold stone floor, breath ragged, limbs failing.
The shadows that had always been my refuge—gone.
