Elira stepped closer to the cell again, the thread of ice reforming at her fingertip. This time there was no pause. The cryomancer pressed the fine point into the lock with delicate precision, the faint scrape of freezing metal barely audible in the dark. Frost crept into the mechanism, filled the tiny internal gaps, then shifted under her control.
A soft click followed. The cell door loosened. No alarm. No burst of mana. Just the quiet release of old iron under patient hands.
Viola’s gaze remained on Rufas the whole time.
Questions could wait. Shock could wait.
The fact that he was here, chained beside Gustav’s people like another inconvenient secret waiting to die, could wait too.
For now, all that mattered was the mission. And suddenly, that mission had become much bigger than it had been a minute ago. Elira moved quickly after that.
The first lock gave way, then the second, then the third. Her control over cold was precise enough that she barely had to force anything. Thin needles of ice slipped into the old mechanisms, expanded at exactly the right point, and broke the locks from within with muted clicks and soft cracks of frozen metal.
One by one, the cell doors opened. And yet the prisoners didn’t move. Not even with the distant chaos still pounding through the castle above.
The impacts outside had only grown worse. Every few seconds, the dungeon shuddered from another explosion or collapse somewhere overhead. Dust drifted from the ceiling. Iron bars rattled faintly. Somewhere far off, stone groaned as if the castle itself was slowly realizing it had been built in the wrong era to deal with Ludger.
Still, the prisoners barely reacted.
Some hung limply from the walls. Others slumped in place even after the doors were unlocked. No panicked movements. No desperate questions. No attempt to crawl, beg, or flee.
That was wrong. Luna stepped closer, her expression flat, but her nose wrinkled slightly. She could smell it now. Blood.
Not fresh enough to belong to a recent battlefield alone. Older than that. Layered into their clothes, their skin, the dried wounds on wrists, ribs, shoulders, backs. The sharp copper scent mixed with sweat, stale stone, filth, and something uglier beneath all of it.
Interrogation. Beatings. Systematic pain. Luna’s gaze darkened by a fraction.
They had probably been broken down already. Tortured until they would confess to anything required. Then dragged onto the execution platform tomorrow and made to repeat it in public before losing their heads.
A common tactic. Simple. Effective. Cruel enough to discourage sympathy. Make the condemned say they were traitors with their own mouths, and half the crowd would stop asking questions.
Viola moved deeper into the row of cells, jaw tight behind her armor. Then she stopped again.
“In here,” she said, voice low.
Elira and Luna turned. The next cell held children.
Not teenagers trying to act brave. Not young adults caught in the sweep. Actual children. Smaller frames chained to the wall in the same way as the others, wrists bound by humming restraints far too large and heavy for bodies that young. None of them looked older than ten.
For a moment, the dungeon seemed even colder. Viola’s eyes hardened. There was no shock left in her at this point. Only a flat, ugly anger settling deeper into her chest.
She stepped to the bars and reached for one of the chains. The moment her armored hand made contact, she felt it. A pull.
Subtle for an instant, then sharp enough to be obvious. Mana began draining through the point of contact, slipping out of her like water through a crack. Not just suppressed. Taken.
Viola jerked her hand back slightly.
“They drain mana.”
Elira stepped forward at once. “Move.”
Her voice had lost almost all of its earlier softness. She raised one crossbow, formed a condensed ice bolt around the loaded shot, and fired directly at the chain link near one child’s wrist.
The bolt struck.
Frost exploded across the metal before the chain could draw more than a minimal amount of energy from the impact. Elira immediately followed with a second and third shot, layering cold over the suppressive runework so fast the draining mechanism never had time to fully respond.
Cracks spread over the frozen links. Then the chain shattered. The sound was small, but in that dungeon it felt sharp enough to cut through the darkness. Elira moved to the next one without pause.
Again. And again.
Each chain froze solid before its enchantment could drink too much of the mana fed into the attack. Under that much concentrated cold, the metal lost integrity, turned brittle, and broke apart into glittering shards and dead iron fragments.
Viola joined her immediately, pulling the broken restraints away from the children as fast as possible while Luna checked the others. Within moments, several sets of chains had been destroyed.
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Still, the children did not wake properly.
One stirred weakly. Another gave a faint sound that might have been a breath trying to turn into a cry. But none of them rose. None of them spoke. Their bodies were too drained, too damaged, too empty.
Viola’s expression turned grim.
She looked across the cells again. At the adults. At Rufas. At the children. At the hanging bodies and torn clothes and dried blood and hollow stillness.
Then she understood. No one here could be interrogated like this. Not now. Not under these conditions.
Even if some of them woke in the next few minutes, whatever answers came out would be broken, incoherent, or shaped by pain and fear. Anyone tortured this thoroughly might confess to crimes they had never even heard of, just because their body had learned that speaking was better than being cut open again.
Viola clenched her jaw.
“All of them are useless for questioning like this,” she said.
The words tasted bitter. Because that had been the whole reason for the mission. Luna did not deny it.
Her eyes scanned the prisoners once more, calm but colder than before. “Not useless,” she said. “Just not in this state.”
Elira looked between them, then at the prisoners again. “Then what do we do?”
Above them, another violent impact crashed through the castle, so hard the dungeon ceiling rained dust in a gray curtain.
Somewhere outside, Ludger was still dragging the capital’s attention onto himself with enough force to shake the bones of the earth.
And down here, the plan had just started falling apart. Luna moved first.
While Viola and Elira kept checking the other cells, she stepped toward Rufas without wasting another second. Her knives flashed once in the dim light, quick and controlled, and the humming chains binding his wrists and ankles were cut apart before they could fully resist. The suppressive metal fell away in pieces, clinking softly against the dungeon floor.
Rufas slumped forward immediately.
Luna caught him before he could hit the ground too hard and lowered him against the wall instead. Up close, the damage was even easier to read. Bruising. Split skin. Swelling around the ribs. Dried blood around the mouth. The usual signs of torture were all there.
But there was something else too. Luna leaned slightly closer. Drugs.
She could smell it on his breath, on his skin, mixed into the sweat and blood. Bitter. Chemical. Heavy enough that even now, after however long he’d been left down here, it still clung to him.
Maybe they had poisoned him to weaken him. Maybe they had dosed him to loosen his tongue. Maybe both. That sounded like the kind of efficiency people in power loved to call practicality. Luna grabbed Rufas lightly by the collar and gave him a small shake.
“Rufas.”
No real response.
She shook him again, harder this time.
“Wake up.”
His eyelids twitched. His breathing hitched. A faint groan escaped him as his head shifted weakly to one side. Luna did not soften.
“Rufas. What are you doing here?”
For a moment, his eyes opened only halfway. Empty. Unfocused. He looked at her without really seeing her, pupils slow and clouded, his mind still dragging itself through whatever poison and pain they had left inside him.
Viola watched from a few steps away, tense and silent.
Rufas’s lips moved.
At first, Luna thought he hadn’t heard her properly.
Then the words became clear.
“I didn’t betray the Empire.”
His voice was raw and broken, more air than sound.
“I didn’t betray the Empire…”
He kept repeating it like a reflex. Like something beaten into him until it was the last thing still standing in his head. Luna’s gaze hardened. That alone told her enough about what kind of treatment he had received. But not enough about why he was here. She crouched slightly lower so he could focus on her face, or at least on the outline of it.
“Why are you here?”
Rufas mumbled again, drifting.
“I didn’t betray the Empire…”
Luna’s tone sharpened.
“Why are you here, Rufas?”
He flinched faintly at that, his thoughts dragging together with visible effort. For a second, it seemed like he would slide away again into incoherent muttering. Then something caught. Maybe the question. Maybe the instinct to defend himself one last time.
His throat worked.
“I…” He swallowed painfully. “I told him…”
Luna waited.
Rufas’s eyes shifted weakly, as if he were seeing something far away instead of the dungeon wall in front of him.
“I told the Regent…” He breathed in shallowly. “...that wiping out Gustav’s entire family was too much.”
His voice cracked.
“He could have… spared the children.”
Silence followed. Not because nobody understood him. Because everybody did. Luna went still.
In that instant, the whole shape of it snapped into place with such ugly clarity that she almost felt disappointed in herself for needing the explanation at all. Of course that was enough.
Rufas had not betrayed the Empire. He had not sold secrets, plotted rebellion, or switched sides. He had done something far simpler and apparently far more offensive. He had questioned the Regent’s decision.
Not publicly, probably. Not dramatically. Maybe not even harshly. Just enough to suggest restraint. Just enough to imply there might be a line. That perhaps exterminating every last branch of Gustav’s bloodline, including children, was excessive.
And for that, he had ended up here.
Drugged. Tortured. Chained in a dungeon with the very family he had tried to partially save. The Regent wasn’t playing. He didn’t like being questioned. Not even by his own people. Not even by useful nobles.
Especially not by useful nobles, Luna realized. Those were the dangerous ones. The ones who thought loyalty earned them the right to speak honestly. The ones who forgot power did not value sincerity unless it was kneeling.
Rufas’s head drooped again.
“I didn’t betray the Empire,” he whispered one more time, weaker than before.
Luna believed him. That was the problem. Viola’s hands had slowly curled into fists by her sides. Elira, standing a little behind them, looked at Rufas with a different expression now. The earlier surprise had vanished. What remained was something colder.
Luna exhaled once through her nose and rose back to her feet. Her knives still smelled like blood. Above them, another crash thundered through the castle hard enough to shake dust free from every crack in the dungeon.
Ludger was still holding the night together through violence.
And down here, Luna had just learned something even worse than hidden trafficking routes or sealed labyrinth conspiracies.
The Regent’s system was rotting so badly that mercy itself had become suspicious.