Seris did not sleep.

  The tower breathed around her.

  That was the only way she could describe it. The vast spine that formed its core creaked intermittently, a slow expansion and contraction like ribs drawing air. Pale, red-tinged light seeped through the apertures in the bone walls; an endless twilight suspended between life and rot.

  She lay on the bed fully clothed, staring at the curve of vertebrae overhead.

  A gilded cage, she thought. No, worse.

  A hauntingly beautiful one.

  She didn’t understand how something so repulsive could feel so magnetic. Like pleasure drawn from a wound. Like laughter where there should only be screaming.

  At some point, the distant murmur of the city softened. The bells ceased their low tolling; even the shifting bulk that moved across the tower’s exterior stilled.

  Silence. Careful silence.

  Seris pushed herself upright.

  The shadows were there, as always. Threaded along the walls, coiled near the threshold before pooling faintly at the balcony’s edge.

  Watching her.

  Seris wondered what would happen if she moved.

  She slid one foot from the bed.

  Nothing.

  Then both.

  Still nothing.

  She crossed the chamber, her pulse quickening as she anticipated a force knocking her down, or the Harrower to enter her room in anger.

  Instead, silence continued as the doorway stood open. No guards. No bars. No visible lock. Just the stair spiraling downward between ribs.

  She stepped toward it, and the shadows thickened slightly - but not enough to stop her.

  Her jaw tightened. “Am I really safe here,” she murmured to the empty room. She winced as she feared the answer, but none came through the bond. That, in turn, unsettled her even more.

  She placed her foot on the first step, and the tower still did not resist. So step by step, she descended.

  The air cooled as she spiraled lower, the scent of incense giving way to mineral damp and something older. The murmur of the city grew clearer, bone against stone, low voices, the scrape of something heavy being dragged across a courtyard far below.

  At the base of the tower, an archway opened into a narrow terrace carved into the curve of an enormous rib. Beyond it, she could see the Deadlands stretched vast and pale beneath the bruised sky.

  Her heart pounded.

  Was she truly doing this? Truly about to step back into the Empire’s reach?

  Would they hunt her? Would they believe her?

  Would killing him kill her too?

  And would it even be that simple? He said leaving would kill you now. But how?

  She stepped forward.

  The instant her boot crossed the threshold, something shifted.

  A tremor rippled outward from her body, subtle but unmistakable. The pale ground below seemed to shudder in response. The pale red light lining the city’s walls flickered once.

  Then—

  The bells began, different this time. They were sharp and fractured. High and discordant. And there were dozens of them. Wait, no, hundreds.

  She looked below, as a sea of movement rippled across the Deadlands, heads lifting in unison to look up at her. Oh, gods.

  She felt horror wash over her, the hunger written on the dead beings faces as they stared. The sensation struck her like heat on bare skin. Her lungs seized, every nerve in her body flaring as something ancient and feral turned toward her presence.

  Living.

  The word wasn’t spoken out loud, but it spread.

  The pale plain shifted. Shapes detached from the bone-strewn horizon. Low, elongated forms that moved wrong, limbs bending too many ways, skulls dragging along the earth like plows. From the terraces below, figures rose from kneeling positions and began to turn, moving in sync towards her.

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  "No, no... no!" she cried, as she stumbled back, falling onto the stairs she'd just walked down. How could she be so stupid, to think that she could just walk out of the Deadlands alive and back to normality. No, the Bone Harrower had meant what he said. She would die leaving, and now that was about to happen.

  She took in a breath and before screaming out, she felt the bond ignite.

  It tore through her chest like a hook, yanking backward as the world around her inverted. Shadows slammed around her in a violent surge, crushing tight as iron bands. The terrace vanished in a storm of black and she felt herself dragged; not across stone, but through it.

  Then she hit the floor of the chamber.

  Hard.

  Air burst from her lungs as the scream she'd been forced to pause came out.

  The shadows pinned her down, swallowing the scream from her throat. Cold pressure locked her wrists to the ground, her knees, her throat. She could still breathe, but the pressure made her breath come shallow and ragged.

  Footsteps approached. Measured, with purpose and above all... furious.

  The Bone Harrower stepped into view.

  He was not cloaked in calm now. The shadows around him churned violently, splitting the air with thin fractures of darkness that snapped and recoiled like struck whips. The red light dimmed as he moved, as though the tower itself feared proximity.

  “You were told,” he said aloud, shocking Seris so much she automatically shuffled backwards towards the wall in fear.

  She tried to speak. “I just—”

  The pressure increased, enough to silence.

  “You crossed the boundary, Seris.”

  The bells were still ringing. Distant, but insistent.

  Below the tower, something howled. A long, splintering sound that vibrated through the spine of the structure.

  Her fear crystallised. “What are they?”

  His mask tilted slightly, as if listening.

  “What hunts when I do not.”

  The words dropped between them like stones. The shadows lifted her upright without gentleness, her feet now barely touching the floor.

  “You think this city bows because it loves me?” he continued. “You think the Deadlands kneel because they are tame?”

  Another howl. Closer this time.

  The tower shuddered.

  “You are not hidden here because you are precious,” he said. “You are hidden because you are alive."

  Her stomach dropped.

  “The living are not permitted to walk my domain unbound.”

  A crack split through the air, as sharp as lightning. For a split second, she saw it: a sigil flaring beneath the edge of his collar, burned into whatever lay beneath the armor. Skin, maybe? Surely not. It pulsed once, white-hot, before vanishing.

  He stiffened almost imperceptibly, and Seris reminded herself he could hear her thoughts. But there was something else in his reaction.

  Pain.

  Not hers. His.

  “You felt that,” she whispered.

  His head snapped toward her. The pressure on her throat tightened just enough to steal the rest of the words.

  “When you stepped beyond my claim,” he said slowly, “the wards recognised it.”

  “The wards?” she rasped.

  “The wards enabled by the curse.”

  Silence fell heavier than before, the bells ceased all at once. Below them, the howling stopped, but the hunger did not recede. It lingered at the edges of the city like breath against glass.

  He released her abruptly. She collapsed to her knees, gasping.

  For a moment, neither of them moved.

  “You can’t just leave me here forever,” she said hoarsely. "I'm not meant to be here. That is your curse, not mine!"

  It wasn’t a question and he did not answer.

  The shadows around his shoulders shifted, just slightly, and she saw it again. She looked at him intently.

  “You're bound to this place. But I don't need to be. This curse...” she said.

  The bond surged, warning her to stop. But she didn’t.

  “You didn’t choose to rule it. You’re chained to it.”

  The air went very still. When he spoke again, his voice was stripped of all resonance and grandeur.

  “The curse is who I am.”

  That was not an answer she understood, but it seemed to be the truth.

  He turned away from her, stepping toward the balcony. "Wait!" she called, fearing his response if he answered, but seeking it all the same.

  The shadows recoiled from the threshold, pulling tight against him as if resisting the open air. He did not cross it.

  “I cannot leave the Deadlands,” he said at last. “Not permanently. Not without consequence.”

  The sigil at his throat flared faintly again, then dimmed.

  “And now you,” he continued, “are tied to what binds me.”

  Her blood ran cold.

  “If you are devoured beyond my claim, well, Seris, you will not live to know what will happen.”

  "What will happen?"

  He faced her again.

  She tried harder to look this time, to really look at him. To face the face of death itself. Was he a man? Was his skeletal features actually his, or was there something else under there? His words from earlier that night echoed in her head. I wasn't always this, Seris.

  He stared back at her, a slight tilt of his head. But nothing in his exterior moved.

  “You think the Empire fears me because I am cruel?” he asked.

  Another distant howl answered.

  “They fear what waits if I fail.”

  The implication hollowed her out.

  The things she had seen rising across the bone plains. The shapes that turned at the scent of her.

  “They’re not yours,” she breathed.

  “No. Well, yes. But only for now.”

  For the first time, she heard something like hatred in his voice.

  “They are just remains.”

  A tremor rippled through the tower. He stepped closer.

  The shadows coiled gently around her shoulders now, heavy with warning.

  “You will not cross the boundary again,” he said.

  She gulped as she stared directly at him.

  “If you do,” he continued, “I will not drag you back.”

  Her throat tightened.

  “You’d let them take me? Even if it means I die?”

  “I would not reach you in time. And your fate would be worse than death.”

  The distinction was razor thin, as silence settled between them.

  She realised, slowly, that he was not furious because she disobeyed, he was furious because the bells had rung.

  Because the curse had stirred.

  Because the Deadlands had answered.

  “I didn’t know,” she whispered.

  “No,” he agreed.

  His voice had returned to its colder register.

  “That is why you are still alive.”

  The shadows retreated to their usual watchful distance, the tower resumed its slow, breathing creak.

  He moved toward the stair.

  “At dusk tomorrow,” he said without turning, “you will be presented.”

  “To who?” she demanded.

  “The Black Synod.”

  Her stomach dropped. The who?

  “You will learn the rules of survival properly.”

  He paused at the archway as she trembled.

  “And they will learn why you are here.”

  Then he was gone.

  Seris stayed kneeling on the bone-cold floor long after the bond settled into uneasy quiet. Far below, something scraped along the outer wall of the tower.

  She had thought the Bone Harrower was the worst thing in this world, but now knew there was more.

  He was the boundary to something worse than death itself.

  And she had nearly stepped beyond him that night.