“No, no,” I whispered, fighting the insidious warmth seeping into my muscles, my skin.

But it was no use.

Numbness swept through my body, deadening my eyelids. There was no pain when the nothingness came for me this time. I simply fell asleep, knowing I would wake to a nightmare.

Chapter 6

Twinkling lights blanketed the ceiling of the crypt when I opened my eyes. My lips parted as I dragged in deep gulps of…fresh, clean air. That wasn’t the ceiling or lights I saw. They were stars. I was outside, no longer in the crypt.

“Dammit,” a man to my right swore. “She’s awake.”

My body immediately reacted to the sound of the voice. I reared up—

Pressure pressed down all over my body, followed by a sharp, stinging wave. My jaw clamped shut against the cry of pain as my head lifted off a flat, hard surface. Ivory bones entwined with thick, dark roots lay across me from my chest to my knees.

“It’s okay. She’s not getting free.”

My gaze swept in the direction of the voice. Commander Jansen stood to my left, a silver wolven mask hiding his face. He angled his body toward mine. Beyond him, I saw the crumbling remains of a stone wall bathed in moonlight, and then nothing but darkness beyond. “Where am I?” I rasped.

His head tilted to the side, his eyes nothing but shadows inside the thin slits of the mask. “You’re in what remains of the city of Irelone. This,” he answered as he swept his arms out widely, “is what is left of the once-great Castle Bauer.”

Irelone? That sounded vaguely familiar. It took a couple of moments for my mind to clear enough for the old maps with their faded ink, created before the War of Two Kings, to form. Irelone… Yes, I knew that name. It had been a port city to the north and east of where Carsodonia was now. The city had fallen before Pompay during the war. Good gods, that meant…

I was in the Wastelands.

My heart thundered in my chest. How long had I been asleep? Hours or days? I didn’t know where the Crypt of the Forgotten Ones had been in the Skotos Mountains. For all I knew, the crypts could’ve existed in the foothills of the mountains, a half a day’s ride north of the outer reaches of the Wastelands.

Throat dry, I lifted just my head to look around. Dozens of the so-called Protectors stood in the center of what could’ve been the castle’s Great Hall at one time and around the edges of the decaying structure, all hidden behind gleaming bronze masks. It was the kind of sight conjured from the depths of the darkest nightmares. Was Alastir among them?

In the darkness beyond the ruins, a single torch flared to life. “They’re here,” a masked man announced. “The Ascended.”

Air halted in my throat as several more torches caught fire, casting an orange glow over heaps of fallen stone and earth that had refused to house new life in the hundreds of years that had passed. Shadows formed, and I heard the sounds of hooves and wheels on packed earth.