Damien squeezed his eyes shut. “Amma, please tell me that just sometimes happens on the western coast of the realm.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Fuck.” He stood straight and looked about, hands still tight on her hips as the earth began to rumble once more. “At the very least, it’s a distraction.” Then his face contorted like he might be sick.
“Damien, what’s wrong?”
He shook his head, grabbing up her hand, and eased the door to the dining hall open amidst the quake that was shaking the building once again. Men were streaming out into the courtyard, no one taking notice of either of them. A pillar in the room had cracked through, and a table was knocked over in the scuffle. Damien tugged her arm, and the two slipped in amongst the others to escape the failing building.
The courtyard was darkening under heavy clouds that had rolled in though the sky had been clear that morning. Before them, the contingency of men spread out, and the gates at the far wall were open wide, but the two came to an abrupt halt. That—that wasn’t supposed to be there, and it seemed everybody knew it.
In the center of the courtyard, there was…nothing. The ground had seemingly opened up, but not to the earth below, filled with roots and rocks and dirt. No, the courtyard’s center had become a massive pit of the inkiest blackness Amma had ever seen, darker than any shadow Damien had ever conjured.
Suddenly slick with sweat, Damien’s hand squeezed Amma’s as they were jostled from behind by more men fleeing the hall, but he didn’t move, struck still. She tugged him away from the door and toward one side of the courtyard, knowing Gilead and Roman would be soon to come out. Damien’s eyes never left the pit, but his legs began working again. Every face Amma could make out in the shadows was painted with terror, and she felt the dread that was emanating off the newly formed void too, but Damien’s features twisted into disgust.
The two gave the pit a wide berth, but others were running to it despite their fear, weapons drawn. The ground still shook, shouts and the breaking of stone filling the air. One of the mages left a cluster of others and fell to his knees at the pit’s edge, a place she couldn’t imagine wanting to be, and he stared hard into the nothingness below. The rocky lip under his hands looked to crumble as he leaned forward, and Amma picked up speed.
There was a small structure along the side wall of the keep, and Amma led them toward it, open doors on both ends so that they could run through and end up closer to the keep’s exit. Amma dodged around the men, Damien trailing after her, but just as she made it to the building, the stones of its front gave way. With a terrible crash, it crumbled right before them, blocking their escape around the pit. Amma halted, skidding back away from the falling rubble and knocking into Damien.
His eyes had been locked on the void as he let Amma drag him across the courtyard. Pallid and sweating, he suddenly doubled over, grabbing his stomach. “This is wrong,” he coughed out when she tried to make him straighten. “The noxscura. The rot. How is it here too?”
Amma’s heart couldn’t pound any harder, but his words made her veins go cold. “What is it?”
“It was in the wildwood too,” he said, standing again, breaths heavy and face contorted with pain. “It took hours to banish it and the power of the witches, but there isn’t time for that now. This is stronger, and it’s…it’s hungry.”
At that, a tangle of black smoke coalesced over the pit. It rose up, distorting the air about it, sinewy and slithering, and then struck out. Its haziness solidified and wrapped around a body laying injured beside the fallen rubble. The man was jerked upward, crying out as his limbs went rigid, and in one, swift move was dragged downward into the darkness. There was a sickeningly wet crunch, blood spurt upward and then rained back down into the void.
“Oh, gods,” Amma whimpered, falling over herself to pull Damien back and put as much distance between them and the pit as she could. They were cut off from the exit by the destroyed building, the only way out along the void’s far side which meant going backward to where Roman and Gilead were coming out of the main hall. But the marquis and the mage didn’t notice either Amma or Damien, as drawn to the horror of the chaotic pit as everyone else.
Queasy and addled, Amma tried to take a calming breath, but even the briny air had gone sour, tainted with a gruesome aura. Another body was yanked into the nothing with a black tendril, smoke one moment, solid the next. Another scream, another crunch, another rain of blood. Beside her, Damien bent down onto one knee and placed a hand on the ground.
“What are you doing?” She tried to pull him back up. “We need to go.”
“This can’t be allowed.” Damien’s voice was hollow, brow heavy as he glared at the thing before them.
Amma dug her fingers into his tunic’s shoulder, holding onto him so he wouldn’t go toward it, as crazy as that would have been. Of the men still scrambling, one actually did stagger toward the pit and then thrust himself right in, no tendril needed. Amma’s horrified scream caught in her throat, grip on Damien tightening. She could feel it then, the way it thrummed matching her heartbeat, and she knew.
Everything would cease to exist if It got its way. Better than she knew almost anything else at that moment, Amma understood that every person, every creature, every tree, her, Damien, all of them, would be gone. Only then would It be happy. And then E’nloc would destroy Itself.
“What in the Abyss do we do?”
Damien turned up to her. “You have to go. Get as far from here as possible.”
Her grip on him tightened as he stood. “And leave you?”
“I have to try and stop it.”
“How do you think you’re going to do that?”
He gazed out on the void again, that nauseated look taking him once more as his eyes went glassy. “I don’t know how, not from the outside, but I think I know what it wants…”
Another tendril struck out from the pit, this time snatching a mage who fled past it, pulling him in with a horrified scream until he was swallowed by the dark. Damien’s face didn’t change as he watched, simply staring, stoic, resigned.
“Not from the outside?” Amma glared at him hard.
“But from the inside.”
“Don’t beridiculous.” Amma shocked herself with her own bite, giving him a shake. “You’re leaving this place, now, with me. Do you understand?”
