Goddess Of The Underworld. Chapter 86

**Haiden**

I’ve smelled death before. Fresh. Rotted. Burned. Torn apart in battle. I’ve seen what war does to bodies, to minds. But this? This is different. This is layered.

It’s not the scent of rot that makes my skin crawl. It’s the absence of life in a place that should be sacred. The cold that clings to the air even though the sun beats down overhead. The way the birds stopped singing two clearings ago. Levi and I follow the pull of magic through the overgrown brush. It’s stronger here, denser, like molasses dragging through my veins. The whispers are louder now too, but they’re jumbled, overlapping like a hundred souls all trying to speak at once. Then we find it. A shallow dip in the earth. No stones. No markers. Just a circle of dead grass and a ring of blackened trees.

Levi drops to his knees before I can say anything. His hands are already glowing, threading through soil like it’s a living thing. I stay standing. I don’t want to kneel here. Not yet. Not until I know what I’m kneeling to.

Levi exhales hard, his brow furrowed. “There’s… so many.”

“How many?”

He swallows. “Too many.”

I nod once and kneel beside him, pressing my palm to the earth. My magic reaches deep. Deeper than it should. It finds bone. Fabric. Cold metal cuffs. Chains. Children. Shackled in death. I clench my jaw. My throat burns, but I force myself to stay still. To listen. One voice breaks through the rest.

“We were the door,” she says. A girl. Soft and sad. “We were the key, but she was the lock.”

She. Envy. I jerk back, blinking hard.

“Did you hear that?” I ask Levi.

He nods slowly. “They were part of the spell. This was… a convergence site. A sacrifice. And they used it more than once.”

That’s when I see it, carved into the base of a tree at the edge of the clearing. An ancient rune. I rise and move toward it, brushing moss away to reveal the full symbol. I’ve only seen it once before. What Envy showed us in her memories, beneath the packhouse. On the stone floor of the chamber where they nearly turned Envy into something monstrous. I trace the lines, feeling the static rise under my fingers.

“Marcus didn’t just experiment,” I say, voice low. “He perfected something here. This was a testing ground.”

“For what?” Levi asks.

“For gods,” I answer. “Or something meant to imitate them.”

The breeze shifts. A low hum rolls through the air, like the earth itself remembers. And then I know, this place is still active. The spell here never died. It’s dormant. Slumbering. But it feels us.

Levi turns to me. “We need to mark this site. Get Elira’s scholars here. Maybe even Felix.”

I shake my head. “Not yet.”

“Haiden...”

“I want to know what they were doing first. I want to see it. I want to understand it.”

He hesitates. “You want to understand Marcus?”

“No,” I whisper, staring into the heart of the grave, where a faint shimmer still dances across the soil like breath.

“I want to understand how to destroy him.”

**Noah**

I’ve never seen her like this. Focused. Quiet. Cold in a way that has nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with purpose. Envy stands by the open map spread across the war table, her fingers tracing the familiar grooves of Tolaris’ territory. Every angle accounted for. Every tunnel entrance marked in blood-red ink. She’s not pacing. Not fidgeting. She’s a storm just before it breaks. And me? I can’t stop watching her.

“Third ventilation shaft on the northern side. That’s our best shot,” she murmurs, more to herself than me. “It bypasses the ceremonial chambers and leads straight into the lower hall. Felix said it was used to bring in bodies when Marcus didn’t want to be seen. They buried it under the old well.”

A flash of fury tightens her jaw. I almost reach for her, almost but I stop myself. Not now.

“I’ll go first,” I say instead.

Her eyes snap to mine. “No.”

“Yes,” I reply firmly. “You’re the key. If something goes wrong, they want you alive. I’m just the distraction.”

Her glare could burn down kingdoms. “You’re not just anything, Noah.”

The words settle in my chest like armor. Even now, even with all this weight pressing on us, she still fights for me.

She steps back and breathes out slowly. “Fine. But we go together. And if you get caught doing something stupidly heroic, I’ll kill you myself.”

A smirk curls at my lips. “Noted.”

We pack light. Enchanted blades. Smoke runes. A vial of Obsidian Dust that burns through cloaking spells for twenty seconds at a time. Twenty seconds. No more.

“You nervous?” I ask as we crouch near the tree line, the ruins of Tolaris’ outer wall now in sight.

“No,” she answers honestly. “I’m ready.”

I believe her. This is more than revenge for her. It’s reclamation. Of the children. Of herself. Of whatever future they tried to steal from her.

“Do you remember the way it felt the last time we were here?” she asks as we move, silent through the woods.

“Yeah,” I say. “Like the place was breathing.”

“It still is,” she whispers. “But this time, we’re not just walking into the dark.”

“No?”

She glances back at me, a wicked light in her eyes.

“This time, we bring the fire.”

I grin. That’s my girl.

We reach the well just before sunrise. The earth is damp with dew, but beneath the moss-covered stones is the faint shimmer of an old illusion ward. She draws a rune with the tip of her blade, breaking it clean. It flickers out. The metal grate beneath the vines glints in the half-light. I pry it open while she murmurs a prayer to silence the hinges. Below, the shaft yawns into blackness. Cold air breathes up from it like the mouth of a beast.

“You sure?” I ask one last time.

She doesn’t hesitate.

“Let’s finish what they started,” she says.

And together, we drop into the dark.