Chapter 1 

Vicky

The wind here does not howl; it screams.

It is a distinction you learn quickly in the Causadurn Ridge. A howl implies a beast, something living and breathing that might eventually tire or die. But a scream—thin, high, and endless—is the sound of the mountain itself rejecting you. It is the sound of ice flaying stone, of warmth being siphoned from your marrow until you are nothing but a hollow husk waiting to shatter.

“Garnil, sir,” a dark elf guard asks the dark elf Sargent. “We’re running out of time, there’s a white storm coming in fast from the north east.”

“Then these useless scum need to get a move on.” Garnil replies as he cracks his whip. 

I adjust the iron collar around my neck, the metal so cold it burns the skin, and lean into the gale. The chain connecting me to the girl ahead pulls taut, snapping my head forward. I don't cry out. Crying wastes moisture, and in the Spire of Whispers, thirst is a slower, crueler death than the cold.

"Move, you useless wretches!" Garnil bellows and the dark elf guards push us forward through the deep snow. 

We trudge up the final stretch of the black stone causeway. Ahead, the castle looms like a needle piercing the grey belly of the sky. It is not a castle in the stories my mother used to tell—no banners, no golden light spilling from welcoming windows. 

It is a fortress of jagged rock that seems to weep, its walls slick with freezing moisture that never quite turns to ice. It looks like a wound in the world.

My feet are wrapped in rags I scavenged from a corpse in the wagon, stiff with dried blood that isn't mine. Every step sends a shock of pain up my shins, but I force the leg down. One step, I tell the screaming wind. One breath. Just one more.

I stumble as the girl ahead of me falls, her bare feet slipping on the rime-slicked stone. She is new, like me. Stolen from a trade caravan near the border three days ago. She still has soft hands. She still cries.

Garnil is on her in an instant. He doesn't use the whip this time; he uses his boot. A sharp kick to the ribs that elicits a wet crunch. He doesn't shout in anger; he just rolls his eyes, exhaling a cloud of white breath toward the grey sky.

"Fuckin' humans," he mutters. "Always breaking before the work even starts." Then, louder: "Get up. The master does not tolerate lag. If you freeze here, I will leave you here."

The girl sobs, trying to push herself up, but her limbs are blue with cold. I look away. It is the first rule, whispered to me by the skeletal woman who chained me up in the holding pens: Look away. If you look, you care. If you care, you break.

I focus on the black rock beneath my feet. I dissociate from the sound of her weeping, turning my heart into something as cold and hard as the mountain. I cannot help her. I can only survive her.

We reach the massive iron gates. They swing open silently, moved by magic I cannot see and do not want to understand. We cross the threshold, and the transition is violent. 

The screaming wind vanishes instantly, replaced by a crushing, unnatural silence. The courtyard is still, the air stagnant and dead. It isn't warmer here, but the quiet feels heavier than the storm. It feels like the silence of a tomb before the lid is sealed.

"Kitchen line, to the left!" Garnil barks, his voice echoing too loudly against the wet stone walls. "Scrubbers to the right! Don't mix, or I'll have you gelded and fed to the hounds."

The line splits. I am shoved to the left. The girl who fell is dragged to the right by two guards in dark armor. She is screaming now, begging, but her voice is thin and meaningless here. The Scrubber line is shorter. The slaves there look... wrong. Hollowed out. I don't know what happens in the place, but I know I never want to find out.

We are marched down a ramp into the bowels of the castle. The air grows heavy with the smell of sulfur, unwashed bodies, and something metallic—like old blood and ozone. The heat hits me next, a wall of humid, greasy warmth radiating from the massive hearths of the kitchens. It should be a relief after the ridge. Instead, it makes me nauseous.

The kitchen is a cavernous nightmare of noise and steam. Dozens of slaves, gaunt and grey-skinned, scurry like rats between boiling vats and sizzling spits. There is no talking, only the clatter of pans and the hiss of fire.

Garnil stops us in the room. He walks down the line, inspecting us like livestock. He stops in front of me. He smells of roasted meat and stale wine, a scent of gluttony that makes my empty stomach cramp.

"You," he says, grabbing my chin with greasy fingers. He tilts my head side to side, inspecting my teeth, my eyes. "Too skinny for the spit. Too plain for the Lord’s bed." He releases me with a shove. "Scrubbing. The scullery needs new meat. The last girl dissolved her hands in the lye."

He laughs, a short, barking sound. "Welcome to the castle, girl. Work hard, and you might live long enough to wish you hadn't."

He moves on. I don't watch him go. I look at the stone floor, slick with grease and grey water.

I am Vicky. I was a healer’s daughter. I used to grind herbs and hum songs about the sun.

Now, I am a scrubber.

But the work doesn't start yet. 

“This way to your penthouses,” a dark elf guard mocks. 

He leads the way, we walk behind, exhausted and thankful that soon we will be able to lie somewhere and close our eyes to this horror.  

It opens a large iron door that moans like a dying man.

The smell hits me first—rotting straw, unwashed bodies, and the copper tang of sickness.

I am in a cold stone room, barely large enough for ten people, but crammed with twenty. Men and women are packed together on the floor like sardines in a tin. The air is thick and suffocatingly warm, moist with the breath of too many people slowly dying.

I scan the room, looking for a corner, a space, anything. My eyes land on a mattress in the far corner. It is filthy, stained with fluids I don't want to identify. A man is dragging a body off of it—a woman, her eyes open and glassy, staring at the ceiling. She must have died minutes ago. The mattress is still indented with her shape. Still warm.

"Fresh meat," a voice rasps from the shadows.

I turn. A woman with grey hair and no teeth is watching me. Her eyes are cold, calculating. She isn't looking at my face; she is looking at my rags, assessing if they are better than hers. Calculating how long until I die so she can take them.

But the men are worse.

Three of them, huddled near the door, stop their whispering to look at me. Their gazes are heavy, sliding over my shivering frame with a terrifying casualness. They undress me with their eyes.

“This ones had it,” one of the men tell the guard kicking the dead woman on the floor. 

“Fresh enough for the pot,” the dark elf guard says. He motions a couple of his men who lift the dead woman up and carry her out. “Don’t fret, you’ll see her again at supper.”

He laughes and closes the moaning door behind him. 

I back away until my spine hits the cold stone wall. There is no privacy here. No safety. The door is locked, and the guards are gone.

I slide down the wall, pulling my knees to my chest, trying to make myself small. The heat of the room presses against me, cloying and gross.

I was wrong. The cold outside was better. The wind was honest. The scream of the mountain was clean.

This silence—filled with heavy breathing and shifting bodies and cruel eyes—is worse. This is where hope goes to die.

I shut my eyes and listen to the sound of the dead woman being dragged across the stone floor.

One breath, I tell myself, though the air tastes like poison. Just survive one breath.