The dungeon was cold, damp, and smelled of ancient stone and despair. Torches flickered in iron sconces along the walls, casting wavering shadows across the rough-hewn stone. The air was thick with the weight of centuries of confinement—the silent screams of those who had been forgotten, the echoes of lives that had ended in darkness.
Attia descended the worn stone steps, his footsteps measured, his face carefully neutral. He had not slept. He had barely eaten. The image of his father, broken and defeated, had haunted the edges of his mind since the moment the Fountain of Truth had exposed his deception.
He had not come to gloat.
He had not come to seek revenge.
He had come to see for himself—to look into the eyes of the man who had shaped him, who had broken him, who had tried to dest
