Chapter 5 - The Unbarring
Footsteps echoed down the spiral stone staircase—fast, heavy, and panicked.
A guard carrying a sputtering torch and a ring of heavy iron keys appeared around the corner of the corridor, his face pale with superstitious terror as he stared at the ringing bells above the crypt archway.
“What is this? What’s happening?!” the guard stammered, his hands shaking so badly he dropped two keys before managing to jam the third into the lock of Elara’s cell.
It wasn't a guard sent to bring her food or prepare her for the scaffold. It was a guard sent by someone high up in the palace who had heard the bells and realized the nightmare had begun.
“Open the door,” Elara said, her voice dropping into an icy, commanding tone that made the man flinch.
“I—I have orders to keep you secured until—’'
“Open the bloody door or you’ll be the first one they tear apart when that wall comes down!” Elara roared, slamming her boot against the inside of the iron bars.
The guard cursed, twisted the key with a desperate jerk, and the iron door swung inward with a shriek of ungreased hinges.
Before the man could draw his sword, Elara lunged forward like a striking viper. She hooked her arm around his neck, wrenched the heavy iron ring of keys from his belt, and slammed the back of his head against the stone wall. He dropped to the floor unconscious, his torch rolling across the flagstones and hissing out in a puddle of water.
Elara didn't waste a second. She grabbed his dropped sword—a standard-issue steel broadsword with a heavy crossguard—and stepped out into the hallway.
The air in the lower corridor was thick with the dust of centuries and the sickening, sweet smell of rotting almonds and ancient embalming oils.
From the wall of the Old Crypt, three separate stone slabs had shifted outward, creating dark, jagged openings like broken teeth in a skull.
A figure crawled out from the central vault.
It was dressed in the rotting, moth-eaten remnants of a sixteenth-century royal doublet encrusted with tarnished silver thread. Its skin was dry and yellowed like old parchment, but its eyes—sunken deep within their sockets—burned with a cold, terrifying intelligence. It turned its head slowly, its neck vertebrae clicking like dry twigs, and looked directly at Elara.
It didn't attack her. It didn't snarl like a beast.
It simply raised a skeletal hand, pointed toward the spiral staircase leading up to the royal apartments, and let out a dry, rasping breath that sounded like wind blowing through autumn bones.
“Cassian…” a voice rasped from a dozen throats within the dark catacombs. “Blood calls… for blood.”
Elara gripped the broadsword tighter, her knuckles aching. She looked from the terrifying army of the resurrected dead assembling in the corridor up toward the distant golden light of the palace above.
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King Cassian was currently sleeping in his velvet bed, dreaming of taxes and power, completely unaware that his ancestors had come to collect the debt.
“Come on then,” Elara whispered, turning toward the stairs. “Let’s go wake the king.”
