(Adelaide)
By the time they reached her chamber door, Adelaide felt like she could finally breathe again.
Her lungs still trembled from the place they’d just passed—the black-mouthed tunnel slanting down into the human-soul dungeon. Even now, several halls away, she could feel the echo of it clinging to her ribs like frost. As if the cold had memorised her bones.
She hadn’t just heard those souls.
She’d felt them.
Like a thousand fingertips pressing from the inside of her chest.
Their agony had wrapped around her heart with cold, skeletal fingers, squeezing as if begging her to listen—begging her to free them, or to witness them, or simply to not turn away. The sound hadn’t been sound at all, but a vibration in her bones. A pressure behind her sternum. A collective ache pressed int
