The Rising Grounds

Nobody climbs out of the Slaughter Grounds whole.

The voice telling Lucian Chevalier to abandon his people sounds exactly like his own. He and five wounded survivors are crossing a crystal wilderness, following a scholar's trembling needle toward the last way out. Then they find the camp. Bedrolls still laid out. A kettle over cold ash. Four armed people gone without a sound, and the thing that took them has a name.

The survivors call him the Collector, a condemned noble who drains Ether through touch. Chasing is beneath him. He waits. When he slips inside Lucian's head, he doesn't threaten. He reasons.

The whispers make one offer. Leave the wounded. Cross the ridge alone. Lucian learned on the border where to put the knife so the cut looks like mercy, and the Collector knows exactly where that wound sits. Daylight won't end it. The world above has a name for what climbs out of the dark, and nobody says it kindly.

Can Lucian carry all six of them into the light without becoming the thing that hunts them? Or will the Grounds get what they always wanted, one more man who chose to live? Grab The Rising Grounds and decide for yourself where mercy ends.