“Tell us an interesting fact about the place you grew up in,” Markus read aloud from the tiny slip of parchment in his hand, his tone flat with disinterest.

  Outside, the carriage lay tucked against the side of the road like a resting beast, surrounded by a disciplined ring of a few hundred soldiers. Within, however, order had long since collapsed. Tom, Markus, and I sat on worn leather seats, the only illumination coming from the faint bluish glow of a magical lamp overhead. Its gentle hum filled the silence between questions, a strangely calming noise in contrast to the storm of boredom that threatened to engulf us.

  I plucked a question from the bowl nestled on my thighs, just as Markus’s dull voice faded. With a lazy smirk, I tilted my head and answered:

  “Torture isn’t as commonplace as you think.”

  They both paused, blinking at me like I’d spoken in tongues.

  “…That’s your fun fact?” Markus finally asked, his expression contorting into a perfect blend of confusion and exhaustion. “Why are all your answers like that? It’s either weird, disturbing, or both.”

  “Oh come on, it is interesting,” I said, shrugging. “Most people assume growing up in a vampire settlement involves daily blood rituals and chain-rattling screams. It’s not that theatrical.”

  Markus grunted, unimpressed. “We were made to train at the age of six.”

  I stared at him.

  “That late?” I asked, genuinely baffled.

  Before Markus could fire back, Tom leaned in, voice low and strangely composed. “My sister killed my father. Who killed my brother.”

  That brought both of us up short. I raised my eyebrows, genuinely intrigued.

  “…Okay, that’s a power play,” I muttered, then snatched another parchment from the bowl to break the silence before Markus could wallow in whatever emotional tar pit that answer had cracked open.

  “Pancakes with honey or syrup?” I read with far more enthusiasm than necessary.

  Markus groaned like he was physically in pain. “Why are your questions always about food?”

  “Because food,” I replied smugly, “is food.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, and you die when you get killed.”

  I blinked slowly at him, frowning in mock confusion. “That… that’s not the same thing.”

  Tom snorted, obviously enjoying the show. Then, with devilish glee, he plucked a new slip from the bowl. “Alright, how about this one—‘With how many people have you slept?’”

  Markus froze for a moment. Then, almost grudgingly: “…Four.”

  He might as well have shouted “I’m secretly a prince” for the way Tom and I stared. In this world, four wasn’t just a number—it was an autobiography.

  “Zero,” I snapped immediately, narrowing my eyes at Tom. “And just knowing you wrote that question makes me want to gut you. Slowly.”

  Tom only shrugged with exaggerated innocence. “Fourteen, I think.”

  Markus looked at him like he’d just confessed to licking doorknobs for fun. “Fourteen?!”

  Tom held up both hands in a calming gesture. “Not all of them were… meaningful.”

  “You know what? I’ve had enough,” Markus said suddenly, his voice strained. He reached for the door of the carriage like a man escaping a collapsing mine.

  Instinct took over. I launched myself across the cramped space and slammed into him, clutching at his tunic like a barnacle. “You are not ditching!”

  His hand gripped the iron handle like his life depended on it, and despite my weight, he began to force it open inch by inch.

  “Help me!” I shouted toward Tom, who had leaned back with all the amusement of a cat watching two dogs fight.

  “You always said there’s a choice,” he said thoughtfully, studying his nails. “I’m thinking of applying what I learned… right now.”

  That little rat. Oh, he was going to pay for that—later.

  Markus growled, straining against me. I held on as best I could, but my grip slipped as his shoulder twisted, and I fell backwards from his lap with a thud that echoed through the carriage.

  “This is insub… insu—insubord—” I sputtered from the floor, utterly robbed of authority as I fumbled the word like a fool.

  The door clicked open—and I braced myself for the worst—but instead of being flung out, someone caught the collar of my cloak and gently lowered me down like a misbehaving cat.

  I lay there for a moment, staring up at the magical lamp’s quiet glow. Maybe, just maybe… boredom wasn’t the worst thing in the world. It was the sun.

  * * *

  Purgatory. A wasteland of jagged stone and scattered bone, sunless and still, where the wind didn’t blow so much as whisper sins back into the ears of the damned. Great boulders, long weathered by divine disinterest, jutted from the ashen ground like broken teeth. And somewhere out there, winding through the silence like a sullen serpent, was the River Styx.

  Just the thought of that place gave me chills.

  Luckily, I hadn’t woken up next to that cursed water this time. No, today’s dreamy misfortune dropped me into the belly of a prison buried deep within Purgatory itself—the divine oubliette where the gods locked away the truly vile, the eternally inconvenient, and the kind of creatures even nightmares tried to avoid.

  But oddly enough, I wasn’t in a cell. That alone should’ve worried me.

  Instead, I stood alone in a dim corridor lined with barred chambers. The air stank of blood, mildew, and something older than rot—divine punishment perhaps, thick in the air like smoke. Just a handful of the cells were occupied, but their inhabitants were anything but forgettable.

  One prisoner was screaming.

  Not just shouting, but shrieking like his entire soul was being unraveled thread by thread. Curious, I wandered over, peering through the bars. Inside lay a man—or what remained of one. His head rested on the floor beside his body, and his arms were conspicuously absent.

  He looked up—or rather, at me—wild-eyed.

  “You! It’s you!” he howled, like I was the devil come to finish the job.

  I tilted my head, squinting. His voice rang with just enough hatred to stir a flicker of recognition. “Me? Wait… oh! You’re that guy who wouldn’t shut up about being immortal! Right. How’s that working out for you?”

  His eyes bulged in rage. “You bitch! I’ll kill you! This is your fault! You did this to me!”

  I frowned slightly, rubbing my chin in mock thought. “I think… I beheaded you, didn’t I? The hands… oh right. I might have fed them to someone. Something with too many teeth, I think. Sorry about that.”

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  I glanced around the nearby cells as if I might stumble across a pair of severed hands tucked away like misplaced socks. No luck, not that I could retrieve them. The cell barriers shimmered with divine protection—too strong for even me to tamper with without Aska’s help.

  “Sorry?!” he screeched, raw and furious.

  “Hey, it wasn’t personal,” I said, already walking away, waving cheerily over my shoulder. “Try not to take it to heart—well, whatever’s left of it.”

  His shrieks followed me down the hallway like some kind of deranged fanfare. I let them fade into the background hum of purgatory’s eternal misery.

  A few cells down, I passed another familiar sight.

  “Hey, Face. What’s up?”

  A mound of raw, quivering flesh, vaguely cube-shaped, loomed inside the cell. Its entire surface was dominated by a grotesquely large human face, lips drooping, eyes glassy, oozing something that wasn’t quite tears. A failed experiment or divine joke—I never really figured out which.

  “It… hurts,” the thing moaned.

  Yep. Still the same conversational brilliance as always.

  “I know,” I said with exaggerated sympathy. “I’ll ask Aska to toss you some drugs again, okay? Should keep you dulled for, what, fifty years? Give or take.”

  The last time Aska and I passed through, we had, admittedly, used Face as our personal experiment in long-term sedative overuse. Turned out even abominations could develop addictions. Who knew?

  “It… hurts,” he repeated, as if on a loop.

  Right. Great talk.

  “I really must be going now,” I said, backing away quickly. “Hang in there!”

  I bolted down the hallway before he could repeat himself again. But his voice echoed after me anyway, warped by the acoustics of purgatory’s hollowed halls:

  “It hurts… it hurts…”

  Goddamn.

  The next time I stopped wasn’t because some poor soul wailed for attention—no, this time, it was something else that caught my eye.

  Along the hallway, the monotony of stone, bone, and divine enchantment gave way to something unusual: scorched markings along the walls. Deep striations in the dust-covered floor, small flecks of char. Even the ceiling bore the telltale signs of a blast—a violent, contained explosion that had forcefully swept dust aside in a wide radius.

  That alone was strange. Nothing ever disturbed the dust in Purgatory. Stillness was practically sacred. But here… something had moved.

  Something had happened.

  I followed the trail in silence, my boots tapping against the now-cleared floor as I made my way deeper. For several minutes, the corridor continued without any sign of what had caused the disturbance. No ruptured barriers. No damaged runes. Every cell I passed flickered softly, their holy seals undisturbed.

  But the air felt wrong. Like static before a storm.

  Eventually, I reached what I estimated to be the blast’s epicenter. I stopped. Knelt. Studied the floor closely.

  I rose slowly and turned, inspecting the nearby cells with narrowed eyes. And then I saw it.

  One of the barriers—flawless from a distance—had the faintest distortion. A tiny rupture, barely noticeable. A shimmer, a thinning of the veil. I leaned in closer, holding my breath.

  A slit. No wider than a pinky finger. But enough.

  And the cell?

  Empty.

  Utterly, impossibly empty.

  I frowned. That wasn’t just forbidden. That was impossible. The gods themselves designed these cells to hold things that even the divine feared. A break like this… it shouldn’t exist. I searched my memory for who had been imprisoned here, but no face came to mind. Then again, I hadn’t been the only visitor to this cell.

  And then… I felt it.

  A presence behind me.

  I turned.

  And found myself looking at—myself.

  Same clothes. Same eyes. Same casual smirk that didn’t quite reach the eyes. It was like looking into a polished mirror, if the reflection decided to step out and introduce itself.

  “Heyho,” she said with my voice, tone bright and sharp as a dagger’s tip.

  I blinked. Not because I was shocked—surprise died in me long ago—but because I was already trying to catalogue possibilities. Illusion? Doppelg?nger? Shapeshifter?

  “Salve,” I replied smoothly. “Are you the baby… or the deer?”

  A grin tugged at her lips.

  That was the problem. I couldn’t remember who had been imprisoned here. But this thing—this imposter—definitely had.

  “The price for each question is set in stone.”

  Of course. It had to be the baby. Out of all the twisted things imprisoned in this forsaken place, it just had to be the baby.

  I leaned toward the cell, squinting at the walls. And there it was—etched into the stone, barely visible under layers of grime—was a ledger of sorts. Payment, neatly tallied: obscure knowledge traded for cryptic answers. Scrawled in shaky letters was the current exchange rate.

  “One unknown word for one question,” I read aloud, my voice echoing faintly through the corridor. “Fair enough…”

  Now came the hard part: finding a word obscure enough to stump a being that mimicked innocence but had the intellectual appetite of a god-eating archivist.

  “Octothorpe?” I offered casually.

  “Boring,” the baby replied, his voice smooth and unimpressed—far too articulate for a toddler's brain. “Try harder.”

  I rolled my eyes. Of course, he knew that one. The gods forbid anything easy.

  “Hirquiticke?” I tried next, a smug smile creeping across my face. Surely that would—

  “Are you trying to describe yourself now?” the baby said without missing a beat.

  I clenched my jaw. Great. The baby also had a snarky vocabulary.

  “Fine, smartass.” I leaned closer to the barrier. “Peristeronic.”

  There was a pause. For the first time, silence. A spark of triumph lit in my chest.

  “…That’s a new one,” the baby finally admitted. “Ask your question.”

  “Who was in this cell?” I asked quickly, before he could reconsider. The question was out of my mouth like a bullet.

  “The Devourer,” came the answer, flat and immediate. “Now, what does the word mean?”

  But I was already drifting away, thoughts spinning like loose paper in a storm. The Devourer. That name tugged at something primal inside me. I couldn’t remember much, just scraps—glimpses of writhing flesh, the stench of decay, and something… highly flammable.

  Still, I responded automatically. “Of or relating to pigeons.”

  “Hm. Interesting. I’m going to need to sleep on that,” the baby said. As the illusion faded, the twisted intellect that wore the face of an infant melted away into a simple, curled-up child. Snoring loudly, arms wrapped around stubby knees. Harmless.

  At least until he woke up again.

  “Damn babies and their constant napping,” I muttered, brushing dust from my cloak.

  The Devourer… wasn’t she that revolting worm-thing?

  I didn’t have time to dig deeper into the memory. The air rippled, and then the floor swayed beneath me like a ship on black water. The world spun. My hand darted out, trying to catch the nearest wall for balance—but I never made it.

  Everything went black.

  * * *

  Light.

  Sound.

  The faint, muffled clatter of hooves and wheels creaked into focus. The soft murmur of voices from outside a carriage.

  “…Is Lucinda in there?” a familiar voice called out, distant through the carriage wall. Muffled, but unmistakable.

  My eyes snapped open.

  “Luna?” I whispered, scrambling upright in a rush.

  Without a second thought, I shoved the carriage door open so hard it nearly came off its hinges. The next moment, I flung myself forward—straight into Luna’s arms. Her scent, her warmth—it grounded me like nothing else could.

  “Luna! I missed you so much!” I practically shouted, squeezing her tightly.

  Behind me, Tom blinked in stunned silence, clearly not expecting me to hurl myself out of sleep and into a hug.