Teclos turned around.
And immediately wished he had not.
The room beyond the iron door was not a dungeon.
It was a butcher's shop with human parts.
For a moment, his mind refused to understand what his eyes were seeing. The stone walls stretched far and wide beneath the castle, as wide as the whole castle seemed. Lanterns burned in neat rows on both sides and on the ceiling, spaced approximately one meter apart. Their light shone over the iron contraptions, chains, hooks, cages, tables, and things Teclos did not even know how to name.
The smell hit him like a cloud of rot and disease.
Blood was everywhere, accompanied by burned flesh and sweat.
Fear and agony were carved into the faces of people lying on the contraptions or inside the cages. But none of them were alive. What he saw were just corpses.
Teclos's stomach clenched violently. He tried to hold it back, tried to force himself to breathe through his mouth, but the next inhale only made it worse.
