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The shaman’s words died in its throat as the grey-robed figure’s attention shifted away from it entirely. Those unsettling eyes—too knowing for soone who looked barely eighteen—found Rhys instead. The sudden focus felt like standing in the path of an avalanche, the weight of that gaze pressing against him with almost physical force.
"His life is yours," the figure said, nodding toward the creature pinned beneath his blade. His voice carried the sa conversational tone he might use to discuss the weather. "Your friend Jorik is dead. Petra is traumatized. Your spear is broken."
Rhys’s hand instinctively clenched at his side, finding only empty air where his father’s spear should have been. He saw the broken shaft in the debris. Three generations of Blackwood legacy, he thought, the words like ash in his mind. Gone.
"Your story, as written, ends here in failure and death."
Rhys flinched, his back pressing hard against the tunnel wall as if he’d been struck. Each word landed with brutal accuracy, finding the cracks in his pride and widening them.
Blood seeped through his torn shirt from claw marks that would probably never heal properly—assuming he even lived long enough to worry about scars. The tunnel seed to close in around him, the darkness at its edges threatening to swallow him whole.
"The ’protagonists’ would have found your valiant corpse and used it as fuel for their own heroic journey." The figure’s head tilted slightly, studying Rhys like a specin under glass. "Poor brave Rhys Blackwood, who died protecting his friends. Such a noble sacrifice. Leo von Valerius would have wept appropriately, learned so valuable lesson about the cost of heroism, and grown stronger for it."
What does Leo have to do with this? The thought flickered through Rhys’s mind, but it felt distant compared to the growing hollow ache in his chest. Everything the stranger said rang true. Rhys could see it playing out exactly as described—his broken body carried from these tunnels, his death serving as motivation for soone else’s story. His village would receive a formal letter of condolence, perhaps a small stipend. Then he would be forgotten.
Soone more important would take center stage.
"I am offering you a different ending."
"The shaman beneath the blade managed a desperate wheeze, a half-ford protest. The figure’s focus remained locked on Rhys, those strange eyes reflecting the dying torchlight in ways that made them seem older than the mountains themselves. There was sothing inhuman in that gaze, sothing that had seen beyond the veil of what ordinary people understood.
"I can give you the ans to save your sister."
Rhys’s breath caught. Elara’s face swam in his vision—pale skin made translucent by illness, dark circles under eyes that still sparkled when she smiled. The dicine he’d sent ho would last maybe two weeks. After that... after that, his family would have to choose between food and treatnt. An impossible choice with only one outco.
"I can give you vengeance."
Images flashed through Rhys’s mind. Vance Thorne’s smirking face as he knocked Rhys into the mud during training. The Morgenthorne family crest on flags that flew over lands his people had bled to defend. Noble houses that sent commoners to die in holes like this while their sons played at being heroes in safer tunnels, their failures excused, their diocrity celebrated.
"I can give you the strength to never be this helpless again."
The figure stepped closer, his movents silent despite the loose stone underfoot. The shaman remained frozen beneath his blade, its burning eyes darting between them like a trapped animal. But the creature might as well have been furniture for all the attention its captor paid it now.
"All I ask for in return..." The figure paused, letting the words hang in the stale air between them. "Is everything."
Rhys’s throat felt dry as old parchnt, coated with tunnel dust and the tallic taste of his own blood. "Everything?"
"Your loyalty. Your service. Your willingness to beco sothing more than what fate intended." The figure’s voice never wavered from that maddening calm. "The world sees you as expendable, Rhys Blackwood. A convenient sacrifice to make their golden children shine brighter. I see you as raw material."
Raw material. The phrase should have been insulting. Instead, it sparked sothing in Rhys’s chest—a flicker of possibility he’d never dared acknowledge. Soone saw potential where others saw only a commoner’s son with a broken spear and a dying sister.
"Who are you?" Rhys managed to ask, his voice barely above a whisper in the cavernous space.
The figure’s lips curved in what might have been a smile. "Soone who understands that the world’s current arrangent is... insufficient. Soone who believes that worth should be earned rather than inherited. Soone who thinks it’s ti for a few changes."
The shaman chose that mont to speak, its voice a desperate rasp. "Young master, I can offer you true power. The deep places hold secrets that predate your kind by millennia. I can teach you to command the very stones, to—"
The figure turned back to the creature almost casually. "As for you," he said, his tone suggesting mild annoyance at the interruption.
The blade moved.
A single, economical cut opened the shaman’s throat like a second mouth. Black blood poured onto the tunnel floor, mixing with the dust and debris of their battle, forming dark pools that reflected the torchlight in sickening ripples.
The creature’s eyes went wide, then dim, then empty. Three centuries of accumulated power and knowledge snuffed out like a candle in wind.
Rhys stared at the corpse, his mind struggling to process what he’d just witnessed. The shaman had been ancient, powerful enough to break minds with a gesture. It had survived the rise and fall of kingdoms, outlasted entire civilizations, feasted on countless travelers.
And this grey-robed student had killed it like swatting a fly.
The figure tossed the bloody dagger aside. It clattered against the tunnel wall, just another piece of refuse in a space that had beco a tomb. He turned back to Rhys as if nothing significant had happened, as if ending a life that had spanned centuries was rely an afterthought.
"Well, Rhys Blackwood?" Those too-knowing eyes fixed on him again, patient as stone. "Do we have a deal?"
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