A single swipe of the manacle turned blade was enough to open Elyria's cell, and then Thorne's.

  Elyria stepped out first, rolling her shoulder, squeezing and releasing the fingers of her remaining hand as though reacquainting herself with the simple fact of movement.

  Tunde kept his eyes deliberately away from the stump where her other arm should have been, fixing his attention instead on Thorne, who had gone very still in the moment his chains came free.

  The stillness did not last.

  Loud footsteps rang through the corridor beyond, heavy and purposeful, the sound of something large coming quickly.

  Thorne moved before Tunde had processed the noise, one moment standing beside them and the next simply elsewhere, a blur that resolved itself into a figure with his fist already buried through the stone wall.

  There was a wet, wrenching sound.

  When Thorne withdrew his hand, something pulpy and dark came with it, trailing viscous strands before he let it drop. It hit the ground with a sound that turned Tunde's stomach.

  The wailing stopped.

  The silence that followed felt almost loud.

  "They're coming," Thorne said, without particular urgency.

  "A wailguard," Elyria said, looking at what remained of the thing on the floor with open distaste.

  "Nasty creatures."

  Tunde stood between them, unsure of his place in whatever was about to happen. Thorne answered the question before he could ask it.

  "New kid, stay back. Initiates incoming, by the sound of it."

  Elyria was already looking around the corridor with the focused expression of someone taking inventory.

  "I'm not much use to you in close quarters right now," she said, frustration clipping her words.

  "They stripped me of my metals when they brought me in."

  "No need," Thorne replied.

  "Nothing I can't handle."

  The first of them appeared at the far end of the corridor, large shapes filling the passage from wall to wall, crude weapons catching the dim light.

  They moved fast, faster than their size suggested they should be capable of, their forms blurring at the edges of Tunde's vision. He opened his mouth.

  Thorne was already moving.

  His fist connected with the first savage's skull, and the head ceased to exist as a coherent shape.

  The cudgel the man had been carrying tumbled free, and Thorne caught it in the same motion, spinning it to intercept the second, who had been charging with a red glow emanating from its weapon, that same unstable energy Tunde had seen before.

  Thorne sidestepped with the ease of someone performing a familiar routine, brought the cudgel around, and removed the second savage's upper body from the rest of it with a single compressed strike.

  Three remained.

  It took him less time to deal with them than it had taken Tunde to count them. Three seconds, perhaps less, and the corridor walls wore a fresh coating of red.

  Thorne stood among what remained, and then something happened that made Tunde take a step back without deciding to.

  The gore, the blood, and shattered matter scattered across the walls and floor began to move. It flowed inward, drawn toward Thorne as though answering a call, absorbed into his frame as the presence he carried swelled outward, pressing against the edges of the narrow space.

  "Undead," Elyria said, the word coming out half-choked.

  Thorne turned to look at her. The expression on his face was not pleasant.

  "I am not one of those abominations," he said.

  She raised her one hand, palm out.

  "You won't find any judgment from me. Not here, not now."

  Tunde glanced between them, then at the space where the bodies had been.

  "Undead?" he asked quietly.

  Elyria kept her eyes on Thorne for a moment longer before answering.

  "A path some Ethra users follow. They trade the Ethra of life for a twisted mirror of it, sacrificing what makes them living for something that refuses to die. There are many variants, and none of them are looked upon kindly. Most powers in Adamath consider it a perversion of Ethra itself, something that should not exist."

  "How does it work?" Tunde asked.

  "I have no idea," she admitted.

  "And if you have any intention of living a long and unremarkable life, I would suggest keeping your distance from any affinity that has been censored."

  She stopped speaking, her gaze dropping to something on the ground ahead of them, and Tunde followed it to a length of metal rod lying discarded against the bone-covered wall.

  They moved.

  The tunnel wound downward before rising again, and the bones grew more numerous as they went deeper, packed into the walls and floor with the particular dedication of people who had built their entire world out of the dead.

  Tunde jogged at a pace he hoped didn't look as uncertain as it felt, watching as Elyria scooped up the metal rod without breaking stride.

  By the time she had taken a dozen more steps, the rod was no longer a rod. It had reshaped itself in her hand into something skeletal and deliberate, a hand made of interlocking metal with five fingers ending in long, serrated claws.

  She flexed it experimentally, and the sound it made was a dry, scraping thing.

  "Much better," she said, with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had gotten their shoe back on.

  "Your Ethra is metal?" Tunde asked, watching the construct settle onto the end of her arm like something that had always belonged there.

  She glanced at him sidelong.

  "That's an oversimplification, but yes."

  Then she was past him, leaping forward in long, fluid bounds to draw level with Thorne, and the two of them tore into the next cluster of savages with the coordinated brutality of people who had, in the short span of their captivity, developed an intuitive understanding of how the other moved. Tunde hung back and watched.

  He looked down at the blade in his hand, then at his chest, feeling the thing that had settled there since he woke.

  They said he had unlocked his Ethra heart.

  That some power now lived in him and answered to him, or would, eventually. What he had at the moment was a vision filled with color he had not asked for, a blade he did not entirely control, and the ability to see his companions shining like lanterns in the dark.

  Elyria's blue glow was steady and calm, pulsing with a rhythm that reminded him of deep water. Thorne's red and green coiled around him in restless wisps, never entirely still, suggesting something always in motion beneath the surface.

  Neither of them could see what he saw when he looked at them; he was reasonably certain of that. He kept it to himself.

  A light affinity. He turned the phrase over as he began jogging again. What use was light to a man who had never been anything but a body to be put to work?

  He was still turning it over when Thorne appeared directly in front of him, materializing out of nothing with the casual thoroughness of someone who had simply decided to be somewhere else and then was.

  Tunde's heart lurched. Thorne looked at him, looked at the blade, and shook his head in the manner of a man assessing a situation and finding it unsatisfactory.

  "This won't do," he said, and took hold of Tunde's arm.

  The world smeared.

  When it resolved itself again, they were somewhere further along the tunnel, the dizziness hitting Tunde in a wave that made the walls tilt.

  He blinked hard, forcing his vision to settle, and found himself face to face with a savage charging toward them from the direction of a pale rectangle of light that could only be the tunnel's exit.

  Behind the savage, more shapes moved in the outer brightness. He could hear the sounds of the others, Elyria's claws ringing against something, the wet sounds of Thorne's earlier work still fresh in his memory.

  Elyria appeared from the side and drove her foot into the savage's chest with controlled force, sending it tumbling backward into the darkness behind it, bowling into the shapes there. She turned toward Thorne with an expression that was several things at once.

  "That one was on the verge of breaking through to Disciple," she said.

  "He hasn't even reached Initiate. You want to put him against that?"

  Thorne shrugged with one shoulder.

  "He needs to understand what he's walked into."

  Elyria opened her mouth.

  Tunde stepped forward.

  "I'll do it," he said.

  The words came out quietly, with a steadiness that surprised him more than anyone.

  Elyria turned to him as though he had just said something in a language she did not speak.

  "Are you stupid? Did he rattle something loose when he dragged you here?"

  "I'll do it," he said again.

  The repetition had the quality of something he was telling himself as much as them, a mantra laid down against the fear that was very much present and choosing not to be listened to. His mother's face came and went.

  His father's. His sister's, in the moment before he had been separated from her in the dark, her hand slipping from his.

  He was tired of being the one who survived things he had no business surviving while the people he cared about did not.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  If this killed him, at least it would be on his own terms.

  As if something in him had heard the decision and agreed with it, the manacle shifted. Not the short, utilitarian blade it had produced before, but something longer, a proper weapon, the metal taking on a dark silver sheen that pulsed once and then held steady.

  Thorne looked at it, then at Tunde. He put one hand on his shoulder and pushed him forward.

  "Watch its swings," he said simply.

  "They feed on living Ethra," Elyria said quickly, the protest collapsing into practicality in the way of someone who understood that certain arguments were already over.

  "It bolsters their vitality and endurance past what's natural. Aim for the head if you can reach it. One clean strike. And for the love of the regents, actually use that blade."

  The savage came before she finished the sentence.

  It came roaring, incensed in the way of something that had watched its companions fall and had decided that fury was the appropriate response to loss.

  Its mace was bone, the same dense, reinforced material as the cell bars, and it swung with both hands and the full weight of its considerable frame behind it. Tunde raised the blade on instinct.

  The mace came through it.

  Not through it in the way of cutting, but through it in the way of ignoring it entirely, the bone mass simply not caring about the silver edge that grazed it.

  The force behind the swing transferred entirely into Tunde and threw him sideways into the wall. He felt something give in his arms, a sharp, structural protest that was definitely a crack, and white pain flooded his vision.

  "Dodge and strike!" Thorne's voice came from somewhere behind him.

  He rolled.

  The mace came down where his skull had been, close enough that he felt the air move. He got his knees under him, scrambling upright, and that was when his sight changed.

  It was not painful, just a deepening, like something shifting into a higher focus. The savage's form filled itself with red lines, running beneath the skin and through the body like a map drawn in light, and certain areas burned brighter than others.

  He did not know how he knew that those points were weak. He simply knew it the way he had always known where to dig, where the hidden things were buried, with a certainty that bypassed conscious thought entirely.

  The savage raised its foot.

  He saw the kneecap glow.

  He rolled, and he swung, and the blade took the leg cleanly at the joint. The savage's roar became something else, something raw and lost, and it went down toward him in its collapse, and he brought the blade up sideways without thinking and the neck ceased to connect the head to the rest of it.

  Blood came down on him in a curtain. He lay on his back beneath the weight of the body and breathed through his mouth and did not think about any of it, just breathed, until the weight was lifted away and Thorne and Elyria were looking down at him.

  "Well," Thorne said, with the particular tone of someone whose expectations had been adjusted.

  "That's one way to do it."

  Tunde pushed himself upright, blinking blood from his eyes, and watched as the blade pulsed. Small motes of red light were lifting from the body of the savage and drifting toward the blade, absorbed into the metal with a sound like an intake of breath. The glow that followed was brief but warm.

  Thorne was no longer smiling.

  He looked at the blade with an expression that had moved past assessment into something more careful.

  "An Ethra absorbing weapon," he said slowly.

  "One that changes shape and size on its own, and can cut through the rock-hardened skin of a savage running blood and bone Ethra." He looked at Elyria.

  She was already looking back at him with the same expression.

  "Keep that hidden," she said to Tunde, without preamble.

  "The moment the wrong person sees it, you become the most interesting problem they have. People have killed for considerably less."

  "Assuming we survive long enough for that to be relevant," Thorne said.

  He was looking at the distance with a slight narrowing of the eyes that suggested he was already thinking past this moment.

  "We still have to deal with whoever controls this place."

  Tunde got to his feet and stood there for a moment, breathing, taking stock. He looked down at the blade.

  It pulsed once and then began to shorten, contracting back toward its origin, and as it did, something new happened.

  The manacle reformed around his wrist, but the blade did not disappear entirely. It remained, connected now to the cuff by a thin chain of the same dark metal, hanging from his hand with a patient readiness.

  He flexed his fingers around the grip and found that it fit.

  Elyria had already moved on, working out the geography of the situation.

  "This territory is under the domain of the Talahan Empire," she said, looking around at the structures visible beyond the tunnel mouth.

  "So how did a settlement of flesh-eating savages grow large enough to have a gate and a fighting force without anyone in the Empire noticing?"

  "The Wastelands," Thorne said simply.

  "The Empire doesn't spare resources to patrol dead ground. Out here, you get bandits, beast tides rolling in every few seasons toward whatever towns are close enough to be worth raiding, and settlements that appear and collapse so fast no one bothers to note their passing. A group like this could grow in that kind of blind spot."

  Tunde had been squinting past the tunnel mouth, letting his sight run as far as it would carry.

  "There are more outside," he said.

  "More than twenty. I can see the outlines."

  Thorne looked at him.

  "You can see that far?"

  "Red shapes. Human shaped." He paused.

  "Moving toward us."

  "Your light affinity seems more versatile than I initially gave it credit for," Elyria said, though something in her tone suggested she was cataloguing this for later.

  "I've never heard of it manifesting as a detection ability."

  Thorne did not remark on it.

  Instead, his right palm split open along a line Tunde had not seen before, and from beneath the skin came something dark and dense that poured outward, reshaping itself rapidly into a blade with an edge that looked like it had been made to end arguments permanently.

  Elyria looked at it with barely contained revulsion.

  "That is genuinely unpleasant."

  Thorne did not acknowledge her.

  "Here is what we are going to do," he said, with the efficiency of someone who had planned battles before and did not enjoy repeating himself.

  "I go out first. I draw their attention and their damage. We have not encountered a dedicated bone Ethra user among them yet, and I expect there is at least one among this group. Elyria, you follow and deal with whatever I leave standing. Leave a few for our new addition."

  Tunde's mouth moved before he thought about it.

  "What stage are you two?"

  Thorne looked at him the way one looks at someone who has just put their hand in a fire to see what would happen.

  "Asking a stranger their stage of cultivation is either a declaration of intent to fight them or a very efficient way to get yourself killed in most parts of this world. Don't do it again."

  "I'm sorry," Tunde said immediately.

  Elyria offered it without being asked.

  "I'm a Disciple. Second lowest stage." She glanced at Thorne.

  "His, I have not been able to confirm, but the lower end of my estimates is still significantly higher than mine."

  Tunde looked at Thorne with a reassessment that settled somewhere between respect and healthy caution.

  Thorne cracked his neck once, and then he was outside.

  The impact of his initial strike hit them as a pressure wave, the kind of force that traveled through the ground and up through the soles of Tunde's feet. Elyria let out a low sound of involuntary awe.

  "Definitely above Disciple," she said, and then she was moving.

  She glanced back at him once.

  "Stay behind me. No unnecessary movements, nothing ambitious or clever, just dodge and cut until we can get you to Initiate level at minimum. Keep up."

  She was gone in a series of long, vaulting strides, the metal claws at the end of her arm catching the daylight as she cleared the tunnel mouth.

  Tunde followed.

  The sunlight hit him like a physical thing. He had not seen open sky in, he realized he did not know how long.

  He had time to register the scope of the valley they had emerged into, a deep basin below the main ground level, walls of bone-studded rock rising on every side, structures built from the same material dotting the floor in a dense, organic sprawl, and then his sight prickled, and he let it.

  It was immediately too much.

  The Ethra in the surrounding air hit the manacle, and the manacle responded eagerly, drinking it in, and the rush of it came back through his wrist and up through his chest like a current too strong to stand in.

  His knees gave.

  He went down hard, one hand braced on the ground, and the world tilted dangerously as his senses overcrowded themselves trying to process the sudden abundance of input.

  Then, as abruptly as it had come, it subsided.

  The manacle settled, having taken what it needed, and the colors around him resolved themselves into something he could look at without his eyes watering. He rose.

  Elyria was already engaged with three savages simultaneously, these ones clearly better trained than the ones in the tunnel.

  They moved with a coordinated precision, keeping her from committing to any single direction, and the bone blades they wielded were serrated along both edges, designed to tear rather than cut cleanly.

  She held her own regardless, her metal claws finding the gaps in their guard and leaving long, deep cuts that closed slowly. Too slowly for normal bodies. She had not been wrong about their vitality.

  His approach went unnoticed.

  He was not large, not visually threatening, and the savages' attention was entirely fixed on the more obvious danger in front of them.

  He came in from behind the first, measured the point his sight had marked on the back of the skull, and drove the blade through it.

  He brought the blade down the length of the body as he went past, not cleanly, not skillfully, but with enough force that the outcome was not in question.

  He swallowed hard against the taste of blood in the air and kept moving.

  The other two registered him at the same moment, their attention splitting for the fraction of a second it took Elyria to close the distance.

  The second's throat opened under her claws. The third took a spike through the top of its skull before it finished turning. She looked at Tunde over the bodies, nodded once, and moved on.

  He found Thorne in the middle of what had been twenty-something savages and was now a great deal less.

  The bodies around him were in various states of resolution, breaking down and flowing toward him in the way that still made something primal in Tunde want to back away.

  Thorne was breathing harder than he had been, eyes closed, one grey finger raised.

  Elyria stopped. Her hand found Tunde's shoulder and kept him back.

  "Thorne?" she said carefully.

  The moment stretched.

  Then Thorne opened his eyes, and the black gaze with its red pinprick center stared back at them both with the flat, patient intensity of a predator who has just reminded itself what it is.

  A pause. A swallow. The red pinpricks dimmed slightly.

  "Sorry," he said.

  "Needed a moment."

  Elyria's grip on Tunde's shoulder did not relax immediately.

  "Are you functional?"

  "I am now," Thorne said, and reached down to lift one of the bone blades from the pile of dead.

  He held it loosely and looked toward the distance, where a new sound was building.

  A roar. Multiple voices contributing to it. More than twenty had become considerably more than twenty.

  "More coming," he said softly.

  "Can you fight?" Elyria asked again.

  He looked at her with something between patience and warning.

  "I said I'm fine."

  He swung the blade in a short, casual arc, and the first rank of the new wave simply came apart, entrails meeting dust before the sound of the swing had finished.

  The second rank reacted differently, several among them raising their arms as bones began to push up from the earth itself, jagged spires tearing through the ground in overlapping rows, driving toward them.

  Elyria grabbed Tunde and jumped.

  The height she reached made his stomach drop. They landed on a cropping of bone structures above the valley floor, and from up here he could see the shape of the whole settlement laid out below them.

  Everything was bone.

  The structures, the walls, the platforms, the very texture of the place was built from dead things, an entire civilization that had looked at death and decided to make a home in it.

  The platform shifted beneath them. He felt the yellow glow of Ethra moving through the bone before his feet registered the change.

  He moved without thinking, grabbing Elyria and pulling her sideways as a bone spike erupted from the surface directly beneath where she had been standing.

  She landed beside him, breathing hard, and looked at the spike, and then at him, with her silver eyes wide.

  She nodded once. No words, but the meaning was clear enough.

  She did not give the bone user a second opportunity. She went at them with a focused aggression that kept them reacting instead of controlling, her metal claws making the range of their attacks shorter than they needed to be.

  Tunde followed in her wake, letting his sight do what it seemed built to do, identifying the points of vulnerability on the savages she drove toward him and striking at them with economical precision.

  He was not fast enough to engage them properly. He was not strong enough to match them in a direct exchange. But he was quiet, and he was patient, and his sight rarely marked the same spot twice.

  The manacle pulsed steadily, drinking in whatever Ethra the dead released, growing warm against his wrist. He noticed it, filed it away, and kept moving.

  Below, Thorne had become something difficult to look at directly. Not because of what he was doing, though that was considerable, but because of what he was, the density of presence he occupied, the way the air around him seemed to have decided to pay him deference.

  Whoever and whatever Thorne was, the category of person he occupied was several steps removed from anything Tunde had a name for.

  He watched the man cut a path through the remaining savages with methodical thoroughness, and the thought came to him quietly, without drama, that he wanted to learn from this person. Not serve him. Learn from him. He had spent enough of his life in the category of a person who served.

  "Not a slave," he said to himself, beneath the noise of the fighting.

  "An apprentice."

  The difference felt important to name.

  Ahead of them, the valley ended at a gate. Massive, constructed from the same bone material as everything else, but reinforced with rough stone blocks on either side that rose into crude battlements.

  Savages lined the top of the structure, staring down with expressions Tunde read less as bravado and more as the particular alertness of people watching something they were not sure they could stop.

  Thorne came to stand beside them, looking up at the gate with an expression that was entirely unimpressed.

  "The ones we faced outside were the outer guard," he said.

  "What's behind that gate will be a different quality of problem."

  "Which is exactly why the sensible option," Elyria said, with the measured tone of someone making a reasonable argument to unreasonable people,

  "Is to locate the nearest outpost of the Empire or the Cult and let them deal with it. We are free. We could simply leave."

  Thorne looked at her.

  "Do what you want. Take the boy with you if you like. I'm going in regardless." A pause.

  "I have a score to settle with whoever runs this place."

  He said it the way one states a fact about the weather.

  Tunde stepped forward.

  "I'm staying."

  Elyria turned to look at him with an expression that suggested she was genuinely considering whether he had sustained some kind of head injury she had missed.

  "I want to get stronger," he said.

  "This is where I start."

  Thorne looked at him for a long moment, and then something shifted in the flat black gaze, something that was not quite a smile but occupied the same territory.

  "The slave has grown some spine," he said.

  "Good."

  He turned back to the gate, and then he hit it.

  The sound was not the sound of a fist striking bone and stone.

  It was the sound of something that had decided the gate was no longer a relevant feature of the landscape.

  The ground shook. The battlements swayed. The savages above shouted to whatever was inside, and inside, something answered.

  Tunde gripped his blade, felt it settle warm and ready in his hand, and stepped forward through the dust.