Dailus
Dailus woke up with a headache that clawed at the back of his eyes.
He was lying on his back against a stone floor, and he could feel cold metal on his wrists and ankles, which were spread out and stretched with no slack in the chain. He could only move his head, barely, and he did his best to look around.
The room he was in was cool and dark, which told him that he must be underground. The ceiling above him was circular and wide, and the only light in the room came from a half dozen red candles arranged around him in a circle. He didn’t take it to be a good sign, but not much these days actually was.
It had been an exhausting ride from Théas—there had been plenty of urgency when Lady Elana had shouted orders at her guards in a guttural, foreign tongue—and Dailus was relieved when they had finally stopped. He’d had enough of being tossed around on horseback to last him a lifetime. But, as soon as they crossed into the Wastes, his escorts had seen fit to render him unconscious. He really wished that people would stop doing that.
He had never been this far south before, and the lack of moisture in the air was starting to get to him. He decided to bear with it and hoped he adjusted to it quickly. Although, after being sold as a slave in that humiliating auction the other day, he wasn’t sure how long he would be staying in one spot—or how long he would be alive, for that matter.
Just as his mind started to wander, he heard footsteps behind him. They approached him and stopped, just beyond his vision.
“Lady Elana has done well,” rasped a voice in an accent, slow and strong. “You will make a fine Vessel.”
Dailus didn’t know what a Vessel was, but he didn’t like the sound of it.
“What does that mean?” he asked, and the footsteps began again. In front of him walked a man dressed in a dark blue robe with a white border.
“It means you have been chosen,” the man said. Although, when Dailus got a better look at him, he would not have called him a man: he looked more like a skeleton, as the skin from his neck on up was missing, and his unblinking eyes stared hauntingly on.
Dailus swallowed the sick that crept up his throat.
“Chosen?” he choked. “For what?”
“You will see,” came the ominous answer. “But for now, be silent. The Vessel must be cleansed before the Holder of the Dead may enter.”
“Cleansed? What . . . ,” Dailus began to ask. Then he saw the gleam of a knife that the man had pulled from his robe. He couldn’t make out many details, but he saw the iron carving of a howling wolf gracing the handle.
“Silence,” the man said as he knelt down. He held out the tip of the knife to one of the candles and watched as the flame licked at the edge of the blade. “May Ahmaan Ka find this body suitable.”
“No,” pleaded Dailus limply, but he knew it was useless.
The man’s unblinking eyes shifted to Dailus as he brought the blade to the top of his forehead. “We are all equal in the sight of the Holder.”
Dailus felt the blade glide across his skin; it was incredibly sharp, and nearly painless. The only indication he had that it had bit into his flesh was the warm oozing of blood that he felt on his face.
He looked up, trembling at the skinless, skeletal face before him. The horrific realization came forth slower than the blood: that face would soon be his, too.
A scream escaped his lips when he felt his own skin peel back, and he swore he saw the lidless man smile.