When they reached Estalis after days of grueling travel, she was dragged from the cart like refuse cast aside. Her garments were torn, her body smeared with dust, yet no one spared her a glance of pity. To the soldiers, she was not a woman of flesh and blood but a burden, a captive to be disposed of. She had hoped that Turik would help her, but he lay unconscious, his breathing shallow—his silence signaled her doom.
They hauled her through the gates of the fortress, past walls slick with damp moss, into a place where the stench of iron and rot clung to the air. The dungeon swallowed her whole, its darkness broken only by the guttering flame of a torch. A jailer thrust her into a cell no larger than a cattle pen, the door slamming shut with a finality that echoed like a sentence. She was cast down not as a noblewoman nor even as a prisoner of worth, but as one condemned to vanish beneath stone.
