The Silver Sparrow

Common Enemy

There were more than a thousand skulls in the Prayer Room of a Thousand Skulls. If he had to guess, it would be closer to three thousand. No one truly knew how many remains Eli the Conqueror had brought to the crypt he'd commissioned during the last two decades of his life. The chamber had never been completely excavated and some skulls had been placed on top of another for lack of room. The crypt—the only name Lasura would call the place by—had been dug right underneath the Red Hall of Marakai. More than three thousand skulls had been buried right under his throne.

No, not buried. Arranged was the more appropriate word, thought Lasura as he looked at the wall behind the black sarcophagus. Hundreds of human skulls lined up, filling every inch of the wall from one end to the other and from floor to ceiling, all facing forward. All four walls of the chamber had been decorated the exact same way, with more skulls lining the arch of the entrance.

Decorated also wasn't the appropriate word. It wasn't meant to be a work of art. All these skulls had simply been gathered, collected like books on the shelves, kept, and displayed with efficiency in mind to accommodate as many as possible. These were men, soldiers who had died fighting with him on and off the battlefield to bring peace to the peninsula. Eli had always written in his journal that his throne had been built on the lives of thousands. No one would have thought he'd meant it literally until they could see this place.

He was said to have prayed here often; it was why he'd chosen to call it the Prayer Room. Eli the Conqueror was a religious man, a firm believer of Marakai the Sky Father as with most of his subjects. Those of the faith practiced sky burials, where bodies were placed outside, in the open, for birds and other prey to pick them clean. The remaining bones were then collected and kept in the family's home. For those who'd died fighting alongside Eli, the Prayer Room was where they kept the skulls to honor the dead.

They'd laid him to rest here when he died, in the sarcophagus placed at the center of the chamber for people to come and pay their respects. The rectangular stone sarcophagus had inscriptions of his life's stories, worn-out almost entirely now by how many hands had touched it when people came to pray. After the rebellion following his death, this part of the Black Desert had been deserted, its secret entrance lost for almost eight hundred years only to be discovered and occupied by the Rishis a mere century ago. They never found the mummified body of Eli, but the room had been where they found his journal, and the skulls had been enough to make the crypt a legend.

You would have loved to see this, wouldn't you, father? Thought Lasura. This was who you want to be, to succeed, wasn't it? The man who united the peninsula, who brought peace to these lands. You were prepared to sacrifice this many lives, to fight this many battles...

But you couldn't sacrifice one.

He stepped up to the raised platform where the sarcophagus had been laid. The clack of his boots echoed softly against the countless, dust-covered skulls. It came back toward him in whispers from all directions, like the sound of a thousand soldiers marching somewhere in the distance, caught by the wind and brought to his ears as it wandered ahead. The room was completely dark, save for the light made by the one torch he'd lit by the entrance when he came in. The flame danced to the gentle draft coming through the ventilation shafts, cast thousands of shadows left and right of the protruding skulls, giving the impression that all three thousand of them were moving, looking at him.

Or judging me.

He wondered if this had been what Eli wanted when he came here to pray. To be judged by the dead and maybe, hopefully, made peace with them for what he'd done—or hadn't done.

Could you have, Lasura wondered, made peace with either of them if there had ever been an opportunity?

A silly thought, that, and one too late in any case. In his anger, he'd decided to walk away from it all, and now he'd lost them both, on the same day. Many days before, actually. By the time the news had come from Rasharwi, it was all in the past, done, finished, over before anyone could have done anything to reverse it. Not me. Not from here anyway.