Darkness.
It greeted me before my eyes even opened. Damp, cold, endless. The air was thick, too thick, as if the stone walls themselves exhaled decay. I blinked slowly, my vision blurry and my body aching from… everything. My side throbbed with a dull, infected heat,where they had bitten me. Where they tried to silence me.
I wasn’t dead. That much was clear.
But I was no longer in the Rogue Kingdom.
The ceiling above me was jagged and broken in places, as though time had gnawed on it. Rusted chains hung from old beams, swinging slightly from a breeze that shouldn’t have existed. My wrists burned,raw from bindings now gone, but the memory of them still etched into skin. My legs were weak, barely able to support me as I sat up and took in my surroundings.
A prison.
Not just any cell. A
