Mira's POV
-
The feeling hits me before I even turn around.
One second I am sitting quietly, working through what just happened with the small creature and its fear, and the next second something slams into my chest like a wave _ heavy and cold and vast. Not pain. Not anger. Something that takes me a full three seconds to name because I have never felt anything this large before.
Loneliness.
Not the ordinary kind. Not the kind I feel on quiet nights when the house is full of people who don't see me. This is something older. Something that has been going on for so long it has stopped feeling like a wound and started feeling like weather. Like a permanent condition. Like something this being has simply accepted will never change.
It nearly takes my knees out.
I grab the wall with one hand and breathe. The feeling is coming from behind me. From something that has been standing there long enough that the smaller creature in front of me went rigid with a very specific kind of fear _ not fear of attack. Fear of interruption. Fear of being caught doing something without permission.
I let go of the wall.
I stand up slowly.
I turn around.
-
He is enormous.
That is the first thing. Not just tall _ enormous in the way that certain things are that make you immediately understand why every other living thing in the space has gone completely still. He stands at the edge of the cavern where the main path meets the entrance and the glow from the walls lights him from below and above at the same time. His eyes are amber _ not flat, not animal _ lit from within, cracked through with something that looks almost like thinking.
He is watching me.
Not the way the others watched me when I first arrived _ curious, cautious, collective. He watches me the way you watch something you don't have a category for yet. Like I am a problem he is in the process of solving.
The court behind him is frozen. Every creature. Every figure in the shadows. The whole enormous space has inhaled and is holding it.
I know what I am supposed to do. Every story, every piece of passed-down information about the dungeon says the same thing: bow, beg, make yourself small, perform your fear cleanly so they know you are not a threat. Give them what they expect. It is the only thing that has ever given humans even a small chance.
My brain runs through all of that very quickly.
Then it notices something.
He hasn't moved.
He walked in here and stopped. He could have crossed the cavern in ten steps _ I can tell by the length of him that ten steps would do it easily. He hasn't taken one. He is standing at the far edge and watching me from there, and the wave of feeling coming off him is so specific, so honest, so completely unguarded that I understand something without being able to explain how I understand it.
He didn't come here to see a sacrifice perform their fear.
He came here because Vrael told him I was different and some part of him, beneath all of that cold stillness and all of that enormous power, needed to see it for himself. Needed to know if it was real.
He is lonely in the way that only happens when you have been powerful for so long that no one around you has ever once told you the truth.
The bow dies in my throat.
The begging never makes it that far.
What comes out instead is the most honest thing I can think of in the moment _ not because I have calculated it, not because I have decided it is a strategy, but because the feeling coming off him is so raw that anything false feels like an insult.
"What do you actually want?"
-
The silence is immediate and total.
It lands on the whole cavern like a physical thing. I watch it happen _ watch every creature freeze harder than they were already frozen, watch the air change, watch something flicker across the face of the enormous being at the edge of the room.
He goes very still.
Not the stillness of before, which was controlled and measuring. This is different. This is the stillness of something that has been caught off guard and is trying not to show it.
He studies me.
I study him back.
The wave of loneliness coming off him hasn't stopped. If anything it is stronger now, sharpened somehow by the question, like I have accidentally pressed on something that has been numb for a long time and the feeling is coming back into it all at once.
"You felt something," he says. "When you looked at me."
His voice is low and it carries without effort the way voices do when the body producing them is built entirely differently from a human body. It is not unkind. It is not a threat. It is a statement being checked against something.
I don't lie.
"You're the loneliest thing I've ever felt," I say.
Someone in the court behind him makes a sound. Half gasp. Half the sound of someone who has just watched something irreversible happen.
He looks at me for a long moment.
I look back.
I don't know if I am about to die. I genuinely don't know. I have just told the most powerful being in this underground world that I can feel his loneliness and I have said it out loud in front of his entire court. That is either the bravest thing I have ever done or the most catastrophic.
Then he says, "You stay."
He turns and walks away.
Just like that. Two words and his back and the sound of the court slowly beginning to breathe again.
I stand there with my ring pressed between my fingers in my pocket and I realize my legs are shaking. Not my hands _ my legs, finally, the ones that carried me a hundred steps and kept going. They have decided now is a reasonable time to remind me that I am a human person and I just did something extraordinary and my body would like a moment.
I don't sit down because I will not give the court the satisfaction.
I stand.
-
A creature approaches from the left. Not the small one from before _ this one moves with authority, with direction, like someone who has a job and is doing it. It stops a few feet away and looks at me with an expression I am starting to learn means I have been told to do something and you are the something.
It gestures toward a corridor on the right side of the cavern.
I look at the corridor. Then back at it.
"He said stay," I say. "So I'm staying. But I'm going to need to know the rules."
The creature stares at me.
Then it does something I was not expecting at all.
It makes a sound that, if it came from a human throat, I would call a short, disbelieving laugh.
It gestures again toward the corridor and this time starts walking, clearly expecting me to follow.
I follow.
We are halfway down the corridor when it stops abruptly. I nearly walk into it. It turns its head slowly toward the left wall.
I look.
There is a marking on the wall. Fresh _ still faintly glowing at the edges like it was just made. A shape I don't recognize, carved into the rock in a single line.
The creature looks at it. Then at me.
Then it takes one deliberate step away from the wall.
And I understand, with a drop of cold dread in my stomach, that the marking was not there when we entered this corridor.
Someone made it while we were walking.
And the message, whatever it means, is meant for me.