Irene lay there, broken and silent, swallowed by the cold embrace of stone.
The cell was small—far too small for someone once hailed as the Empire's Prime. Its walls bled dampness, the kind that crawled into her bones and made her knees ache. Her skin, once warm with the heat of battle, was now marbled with grime and dried blood, streaked in a pattern almost ritualistic. She blinked slowly, barely, and even that motion felt like a betrayal of strength she no longer possessed.
Her eyes remained open—not out of vigilance, but because closing them felt like surrender.
'It already happened,' she thought.
Her failure.
Her capture.
Her disgrace.
The light above flickered, weak and pitiful, casting long shadows across the uneven stone floor. Every shift of the flame seemed to mock her, like the laughing mouths of ghosts.
