He blinked then, gaze shifting over the whole keep as if he’d just woken from some dream.
She snatched his jaw and turned his head to meet her gaze. “Tell me you understand, Damien.”
His throat bobbed with a swallow, eyes finding hers. “I…I understand.”
“Good.” She squeezed his hand and took off, and he let himself be pulled along, passing behind Roman who stood there slack jawed, staring at the pit. She led Damien around a heap of rubble that had once been a makeshift armory, fire smoldering from the stones, and hugged the other side wall even as it shook and cracked. The main gate of the courtyard was open wide ahead of them, the last of the soldiers fleeing through it.
Damien picked up speed then, running along beside her, intent finally set on the way out, and together they sprinted for the doors, paces away. Soon they would be free, the pit behind them, the walls of the old keep falling into it, swallowed up and gone.
Then there was a pull at Amma’s arm, and she was ripped right off her feet. Falling onto her back, the wind knocked out of her, arm extended over her head, she locked her grip on Damien’s hand, refusing to let go. Amma rolled onto her stomach to see he had fallen flat, scrambling to get up just as she was, still holding on. Behind him, the pit appeared both far off but too close. A tendril had crawled out of it, solid and black and stretched long across the courtyard to wrap itself around Damien’s ankle.
Amma swung her other arm overhead to grab his wrist, knowing what was coming a second before the two were ripped toward the pit unrelentingly. She screamed, digging fingers into his slick skin, teeth grit, eyes squeezed shut. She would sooner pitch herself into the nothingness than let go, but they weren’t stopping, and so Amma released Damien with one hand and buried it into the earth as they were dragged along. She felt for the arcana that she knew had to be there, even in this treeless place. Eyes shut, Amma reached out with her mind, with her heart, and then she felt it, the tiniest spark hiding in a sea of darkness, and she placed all of her will behind it.
Shoots sprung from the wet earth all around them. Just thin roots, weak on their own, the vines climbed over their bodies, but together there were hundreds, maybe thousands, and while some snapped, others tightened down against the earth and held on with everything they had, slowing their ruthless advance toward the pit.
Damien too had a free hand, and he reached up to rip his dagger from its sheath. He dragged the blade down his outstretched arm, blood welling up through his sleeve and wetting the blade. Chthonic words fell out of his mouth and blackness rose up around them both, encasing them in a dark cloud, and finally the two fell still.
Inside the cloudy haze, the rest of the world was blocked out. Then the roots holding them in place began to turn from their wet whiteness to grey, thinning, drying, and crumpling into ash. They died at a rapid pace as the ground beneath them became soggier, but Amma was able to scramble up onto her knees, crawling to Damien. His eyelids were fluttering down, but she screamed his name as she wrapped her arms around his bloody one, feeling the heat off of his cut as she pulled him upward. The cloud about them dissipated.
“It wants me,” he told her, voice ragged as he stumbled up to his feet. “Something’s driving It. It’s calling for a…a vessel.”
“Well, you can’t—” Amma’s eyes went wide, ripping Damien back down to the ground with her. A black tendril struck out where they had just stood. It shot out with such a force that it slammed into the wall beside the open gates. Rubble was knocked across the exit, and the tendril went wild, flopping over the earth as it pulled itself back into the pit.
Amma shot back to her feet. Across the void, there was Roman still, backed up into the main hall that had collapsed in on itself, still staring in disbelief, but there was another figure too, this one not cowering and afraid. Gilead stood just at the edge of the pit, blackness swirling around his feet and hands out as if he were somehow in control, though Amma knew, whatever It was, couldn’t be controlled.
“There.” She pointed, one arm still tight around Damien.
He stood and found Gilead, eyes sharpening on the man, and then took his dagger to his skin once more. His hand was shaking as he did it, but he didn’t falter, running a palm through the sticky crimson and throwing the droplets across the darkness. The blades formed themselves, flickered as they crossed the pit, and then hit Gilead squarely in the chest.
The mage stumbled back with a wet cry, the arcana around his feet crackling, and the ground rumbled again. More tendrils snapped out from the pit, but they were erratic and wild, flickering from shadow to solid, slamming into the earth and sinking back into the darkness without ensnaring anything.
Amma and Damien turned back for the exit gates, one of the doors broken off and blocking the way out, the other side filled with crumbled stone. Amma searched for the best way through, but Damien just tugged her back. “I’ll clear a path.” He called up arcana, the air crackling, and Amma only thought to stop him a moment too late. With something to focus on, a single tendril shot itself toward the two.
Amma shrieked, tackling him out of the way and just over the arm of pure arcana. They slammed into a pile of rubble, and Amma watched as Damien’s eyes went glassy again, the spell fizzling out.
“Overdoing it a bit,” he coughed out, holding up the bloody dagger. “Fucking hole’s sucking the life out of me.”
Amma growled, eyeing the tendril flopping about as it blindly searched for him again. She would stab it if she didn’t think that would only help it track them. “What do I do? There has to be another way to get us out of here.”
Damien shifted beneath her, sticking a hand into his satchel and pulling out a scroll of parchment. “This is a terrible idea,” he told her, “but it’s the only one I’ve got.”
She took the scroll with shaking fingers and unraveled it. “Despised Damien Maleficus Bloodthorne, son of, Zagadoth the blah, blah, blah, you are callously summoned to Yvlcon,” she read aloud. “Then there’s just a bunch of squiggly symbols. How does this help?”
“It’s enchanted,” Damien groaned, “but it may take us somewhere worse.”
Amma looked up at the pit of never-ending darkness that was almost certainly growing in size, the bloodied mage who was crawling to his feet and calling up arcana, the blackened tendrils that were clambering for a vessel to inhabit or eat or worse, and no way to escape any of it save for straight up the crumbling walls of a decrepit keep. “Nope, there’s nowhere worse than this. Let’s do it.”
“Dip it in my blood and read the rest of the words aloud.”
She was already covered in his blood, smearing the parchment in it. “This is Chthonic—I can’t read it.”
“Yes, you can.” His hand was squeezing her arm weakly, and she felt a tingle of arcana run through her. “You recognized the language, didn’t you? Chthonic’s phonetic anyway.”
She took a breath and let the words come, the ground below them rumbling harder, the tendrils in the pit flopping about, senses sharpening, but the magic seemed to be sparking everywhere. She read as best she could, a language she didn’t know, symbols she couldn’t place, but it came out all the same, and then there was a freezing wind at her back.
Turning, there stood a doorway, nearly as black as the pit itself, but a frame of silver, reflective and moving as if made of liquid metal, ran along the outside. Damien struggled to sit up, and she hurried to help him, but he slid down again, legs weak, body going lax.
Amma tugged at him again, muscles aching. “Damn it, Damien, why are you so heavy?”
