She stops dead. I grab her arm and yank her forward before the fog can solidify around her again.
“Keep moving,” I snap.
“So we are just... food?”
“That’s one way to look at it. Unless Nyssa wins. If she masters the powers she is denying, she rules. If she fails, we all get eaten.”
Pool looks horrified. Good. Fear motivates where logic fails.
“Then we must find her,” she says, actually picking up the pace.
“No!” I roar as the fog turns to a solid wall of spite. “Dammit, Pool!” I punch the wall, but it doesn’t shift.
“Sorry,” she mutters. “I forgot.”
I rein in my temper. “It’s fine. Who else is here apart from Fire, Air, Lust and Ambivalence?”
“Earth,” she replies, wringing her hands until her knuckles turn white. “And Despair. He was weeping near the entrance when we arrived.”
“Of course he was,” I mutter. Despair is useless in a fight, but Earth has uses. If we survive this.
I grab Pool’s upper arm and physically turn her away from the solid wall of fog she summoned. “Forget them. Forget Nyssa. Look at your feet. One step, then another.”
“But where are we going?”
“Let me concentrate,” I grit out and march in a zig-zag pattern that I will kill Nyssa for making me look like an idiot when I find her.
My shoulders sag. I can’t stop thinking about her. Even when she makes me so fucking angry. She is… everything.
I stop, and Pool stops next to me, staring up at me in hope. She sees me as the leader, and I was supposed to be. Having that taken away is baggage I haven’t unpacked yet. Not that I resent Nyssa. Not at all. But I spent five hundred years working towards one goal.
And now that goal is gone.
It has left me a bit at loose ends.
I close my eyes and then sigh. “Despair, do show your face and stop making me this maudlin creature with no hope.”
A patch of grey separates itself from the rest of the gloom and solidifies into a figure. Despair looks exactly as I remember him: pale, draped in robes that look like they haven’t seen an iron inhalf a millennium, and wearing an expression that suggests he just lost the will to live.
“I wasn’t hiding,” he mumbles, staring at his knees.
“No one accused you of hiding. Your aura is leaking. Pull it in.”
He sighs, a long, rattling sound that makes Pool flinch. “What’s the point? We’re stuck in a grey, foggy maze.”
“The point,” I snap, looming over him until he shrinks back into his oversized robes, “is that I refuse to end my existence in a cloud because you cannot regulate your own mood.”
I grab Despair by the scruff of his neck. He feels cold and damp, like a wet sponge left in a sink. “Walk. And stop projecting. You are making the walls thicker.”
He stumbles forward, dragging his feet. “It’s just so heavy.”
“It is heavy because you are holding onto it. Drop it.”
Pool hurries to my other side, looking between the miserable god and me with wide eyes. “What do we do now?”
“We walk away from what we want. We ignore the Queen. We ignore the trap. We focus on the exit.”
I set a pace that forces Despair to jog or be dragged. He chooses to jog, though he complains with every breath. The fog swirls, dense and grey, feeding off his misery. It tries to solidify into a barrier, sensing the lack of hope, but I push back with cold, hard arrogance. I simply refuse to believe I am trapped.
