The voice shouldn’t have known my name.
Yet it did.
“Celina?” it rasped again, hoarse, broken, but unmistakably familiar.
I turned, heartbeat thundering as I moved through the shadows of the prison chamber. Cold air coiled around me, thick with the stench of mildew and blood. I crept along the rows of iron-barred cells, torchlight flickering over skeletal limbs, bruised faces, empty eyes.
Then I saw him.
Sunken cheeks, a grizzled beard, hair gone almost white, but the eyes, those eyes had once watched over me from behind armour forged in Emberlight’s ancient forges.
“Cael?” I breathed.
He gripped the bars with shaking hands. “You’re alive. They said… they said you died in the fire.”
I dropped to my knees before the cell. “They said the same about you.”
His face twisted in somethin
