Elia's blood didn't just pool.
It didn't just stain.
It sank—through the crack in the stone, into the crystal's jagged edges, into the dungeon's core.
Into him.
A hot, living thread, weaving through his dead heart.
And he screamed.
Not with sound—no voice, no body, no mouth to shape it.
The scream tore through the black veins of the dungeon, a silent howl in the stone, raw and wrong, like a beast clawing free from a grave.
Pain came first, not the familiar sting of blades or broken traps, but something deeper, older.
Memory crashed over him, a flood of jagged shards.
A king's throat splitting under his knife, blood steaming in torchlight.
A dagger sliding between ribs beneath a cathedral's altar, the priest's gasp a hymn.
A child screaming in a general's arms, both burning as he watched, their cries blending with his laughter.
Names flickered—his own, long lost, and those of his targets, etched in hate.
A god's voice, once calling him ally, now a curse.
Poison, bitter on his tongue, as an empire turned on him.
He remembered death.
Not his own.
Everyone else's.
"You're awake," a voice whispered, not real, but his own, a ghost of the killer he'd been.
"You remember now."
The core pulsed, red flaring to black, then red again, a heartbeat stuttering to life.
In the chamber behind, a slime respawned, its form glitching—two blobs for a split second, then one, quivering, unsteady.
The dungeon felt it.
Its hunger, its tension, its potential.
He didn't know if he was seeing it or willing it, but he pushed, a flicker of intent, and the slime turned, slowly... toward the hallway.
Torv's laugh echoed nearby, sharp and careless, as he rummaged through loot, oblivious.
The others' voices—Myra's whine, Gorr's grunt, Lila's silence—drifted like smoke.
They thought the dungeon was theirs, a joke to bleed dry.
He wasn't ready to kill.
Not yet.
His power was a spark, fragile, untested.
But for the first time in four hundred years, a thought cut through the haze.
How do I kill them?
Not can I.
Not should I.
Only how.
The dungeon breathed, its walls trembling with a pulse of its own.
He was no longer a prisoner, no longer a thing to be mocked.
He was awake, and the stone was his skin, the slime his claws, the core his beating heart.