Warning: This chapter might be triggering for it's contains implaid torture, abuse, and rape to minors.
The air in the prison wing was thick with mildew and old blood, a stench so dense it seemed to sink into their skin, coating their lungs with every shallow breath.
Each step squelched on damp stone slick with mold, and the dim torchlight flickered over flaking walls that looked more like wounds than architecture.
Every cell they passed seemed to watch them with dead, hollow eyes, iron bars twisted like broken ribs. The silence was not peaceful, but suffocating, as though even the echoes of past screams refused to disturb this graveyard of human dignity.
At the far end of the corridor, one door stood out. Heavy. Steel-banded. Its blackened hinges swollen with rust, the frame warped and stained by years of filth and neglect.
Eamond's detection glyph burned against his ribs, pulsing like a living heartbeat, dragging him toward it with a force he could not resist.
