He did not sleep again.
Not truly.
Not with that throne behind his eyes.
Not with the soundless voice still whispering in the walls of his skull.
Kaelen sat against the cold stone, back to the altar, eyes fixed on nothing. Seralyn stirred once in her sleep. Rhess muttered a broken prayer. Alaric snored like a wounded boar. Maeve, unnervingly still, clutched her staff as if it might vanish if she let go.
But Kaelen drifted.
Not into sleep, nor into waking.
Into the space between.
This time he found himself on a broken staircase spiraling down into darkness.
Below, something pulsed.
A heartbeat not his own.
He walked — though he was certain his legs did not move. He descended until the air changed. It smelled of burned feathers and old rain. A whisper brushed his ear. Then another.
They were louder now.
Clearer.
"He was not born to darkness..."
"He chose it."
"No… he was chosen."
The final voice didn't come from around him.
It came from inside.
The chamber below was vast.
There were no torches. The light came from somewhere beneath the floor, flickering like a dying star beneath glass. Above, constellations twisted in shapes no human tongue had ever named.
In the center stood a boy.
No older than sixteen. Dressed in tattered finery soaked with rain. Black hair. Pale skin. Eyes too large for his face — hollowed, haunted.
Kaelen's breath caught.
He knew that face.
Vorath.
But not as the wraith-king who now sat upon the Throne of Skulls. Not as the godslayer. Not as the monster Kaelen had faced in shadow and nearly broken before the power swallowed them all.
No.
This was a boy.
Lonely.
Fractured.
The boy turned and looked at him.
And Kaelen was no longer himself.
He was falling.
Through memories not his own.
Through blood and grief and snow and a name spoken with reverence — Lyssara.
Through the scent of burning oaths.
Through the scream of something divine unraveling.
He saw a sword — black as oblivion — thrust into the heart of a dying god.
He saw Kael, the Lord of Death, watching with fury held behind ancient eyes.
He saw time itself recoil.
And then —
Nothing.
Kaelen gasped awake once more.
But something clung to him now.
A shape.
A silence.
A truth too large to hold.
Vorath had touched something beyond the veil.
And Kaelen felt it burning inside him now — not knowledge, not memory, but a question:
Why does death fear him?
He did not speak of it when the others awoke.
But Seralyn looked at him too long.
And said nothing.