Chapter 4: The Palace Above the Abyss

Elora's POV

The blizzard howled against the doors we'd left behind.

I clutched the hatchling and limped after Silas. He moved with an effortless glide, each step barely skimming the snow, while every stride I took sent a splintering pain up from my knee to the top of my skull. My boots had long since soaked through with icy water, and each footfall left a blood-tinged mud print in the snow outside the tribunal hall.

He didn't bother with a carriage.

He stopped at the center of the plaza and tapped his staff once against the ground. The snow evaporated on contact, revealing an intricate magical array in cold blue light.

"Step in," he said, without turning.

I walked into the glow. A violent weightlessness seized me and flung me upward, my stomach lurching hard enough that I nearly retched—but there was nothing in me to bring up, only bile. When the sensation released me, harsh light drove straight into my eyes.

The wind was gone. So was the smell—that particular stench of coal dust and sewage that clung to every corner of the lower city. In its place moved a current of warm air, clean and faintly amber-scented, as though the atmosphere itself had been purified.

This was Arcanum. The empire's highest seat of learning.

We stood inside an enormous circular hall built for arrivals. The floor was laid in solid white onyx, polished to a mirror finish. Overhead, golden magical lanterns drifted in slow orbits—miniature suns that warmed the space to something resembling early spring.

And I was a creature with no business in any spring.

My ruined cloak was still dripping, each drop spreading into a foul stain on the white onyx. The hatchling shuddered against my chest as the warmth hit it, and the wound along its side bled fresh through my shirt in a wide dark stain.

About a dozen people filled the hall, most of them around my age, dressed in soft velvet robes with gold family crests pinned at their collars. They had been talking. Now they weren't. Every one of them stared at me with hands raised to cover their noses, brows drawn tight with undisguised contempt—the look you give something rotting in a gutter.

I didn't look away. I kept my spine straight and my grip on the hatchling firm, and I let them take in every detail: the blood on my face, the bruising, the filth. In the black market, the moment you show fear is the moment you become someone's next meal.

Silas paid none of it any attention. He walked directly to a raised platform along the far wall, where a man in grey administrative robes scrambled to his feet.

"Grand Magister, sir!" The man bowed, then cut a look in my direction, his eye twitching. "This—why has a beggar been brought inside?"

"King's writ." Silas dropped a rolled parchment on the desk, his voice carrying no warmth at all. "Register her. Apprentice classification, but keep her out of the inner courtyard. She's a research subject. A dangerous one."

The administrator's eyes dropped to the imperial seal, and the color left his face.

"As you command. And her accommodations—"

"Your problem."

Silas turned. For the first time since the tribunal, his eyes found me—pale and cold as lake ice, holding the detached assessment of someone cataloguing a specimen. The look lasted two seconds.

"Don't die too quickly, girl. The academy's mortuary doesn't accept bodies without research value."

Then he left. His silver-white robes disappeared around the far corridor, and his footsteps faded, and that was the entirety of what he offered before walking away from the thing he'd just deposited here like equipment he had no current use for.

Low laughter rippled through the hall behind me.

The administrator descended from his platform holding an identification card between two fingers, a cloth pressed over his nose with the other hand. He made a short shooing gesture in my direction, the kind you use on flies.

"A commoner. Carrying a half-dead magical creature." Another wave of the hand. "Stop contaminating the floor and follow me."

I followed without a word.

We left the warmth and light behind. The corridors grew narrower, then darker, then colder. The magical lanterns thinned out and disappeared. Polished marble gave way to rough black stone that wept moisture along its seams, and the amber-scented warmth was replaced by a damp, bone-deep chill and the heavy smell of mold.

The hierarchy of this place was built into the stone itself. The nobility lived in sunlit towers above. People like me—lower-city commoners, inquisition-marked research subjects—were stored underground, out of sight.

We descended a winding staircase for a long time. At the bottom, in a dim corridor, the administrator stopped and dropped a rusted iron key on the floor between us.

"Greystone. Bottom level. Last door on the left." He pressed the cloth tighter over his nose. "If that dying animal makes a sound that reaches the tower floors, you won't live long enough to find out who complained."

He left at something close to a jog.

The corridor settled into a dead silence.

I picked up the key, walked to the last door on the left, and turned it hard. The door swung open with a long, rotting groan. A wave of cold air hit me, carrying dust and the smell of something small and long dead. The room was barely a room—small, stone-walled, no heating array. The walls were black with mold along the lower edges. A narrow window near the ceiling admitted a thin blade of cold air through its warped frame. Two plank beds occupied most of the floor; one had no bedding at all, just bare boards.

I stepped inside and kicked the door shut.

Every reserve I'd been running on gave out the moment the latch caught.

I carried the hatchling to the nearest bed and set it down carefully. It was frighteningly cold, its chest barely moving. I stripped off my soaked cloak and laid it over its body.

Then I slid down the side of the bed frame until I was sitting on the stone floor, back against the wooden leg.

The darkness was nearly total. The only sound was wind threading through the window gap.

My ribs ached. My wrist was still bleeding. Deep in my chest lingered the fading ghost of dragonfire, a phantom warmth that hadn't fully decided whether to heal me or hollow me out. I was cold everywhere else, and hungry in the way that had moved past pain into something duller and constant, a blade that had been turning in my stomach so long I'd stopped counting the rotations.

The place was barely an improvement over One-eyed Grok's cellar.

But I sat in the dark and drew in a long, slow breath of cold, mold-tainted air.

I had survived. The Grand Inquisitor's pyre was far enough behind me now that I could no longer feel its heat.

As long as I still had breath, as long as whatever burned through my veins hadn't finished burning—the nobles in their towers, the mages who had looked at me like something scraped off a boot—every one of them would eventually answer for it.