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Mag handed Lyriat his robe with a sigh and went through the change, Pet’s paws hitting the ground a second later. A shake and scratch, and he hunkered down so his Illustrious Horned Majesty could hop up.

It’s the height of indignity, Pet. I can’t believe you agreed to this.

—It’s the height of courtesy, lad. You should know better⁠—

He’s got two bleeding legs, he can run just fine.

—Aye, and we’ve got four. We’re faster and the disguise is better⁠—

Mag couldn’t argue that, though he wanted to. A single racing wolf looked far less suspicious than a wolf and a person in Thodelebor. No one in their right mind would travel through here unshifted anymore. It was just his irritation with the all-knowing king, his own hurt, making him lash out.

They sped across the distance in no time, through smoke and mud and rot as usual, finally reaching one of the last villages before the Ghostbor Chasm border—what was left of it, at least. Lyriat dismounted at the edge, not even looking at Mag when he handed his robe over.

“Have you ever noticed,” he murmured, “how quiet it is when we come?”

Mag thought back to their other visits. “I suppose so, aye. I would think that’s a good thing.”

Lyriat paused at a pile of debris, staring and staring at it in that way he sometimes did when having an idea. “I think it’s something. Good? No.”

“What then?”

“I think every time we’re dropped off, it’s near the other cave, and there’s never any monsters, or battles, or anything there either. The tunnels we found that led to the surface were the same—nothing at all roaming outside the entrances. Now, Thaddeus told us to meet him here, where he thinks he found something, and it’s the same.” He tilted his head, ear to the air. “See? Utterly still. What if they’re all like that?”

“The entrances, you mean?” At Lyriat’s nod, Mag turned it over and considered the implications. “You think it might be a way to spot more of them. Find the empty spaces, and you’ll find a cave.”

“It’s certainly worth a try.”

“Psst!” Their heads snapped up at the sound and followed it to Thad’s waving silhouette across what was once a village square. “Over here.”

They found him in the wreckage of a sitting room, right next to a hole in the ground.

“Under a house?” Magnus hissed, horrified by the idea of some unsuspecting family falling prey to whatever came out of it.

“Aye,” Thad answered, solemn. “Makes you wonder how many more there are like it.”

It really did, and Mag fucking hated it.

Lyriat tossed one of his glowing stones down into the hole. “Once more into the depths, my friends.”

Magnus shivered against his rising hackles and turned his senses to the shadowy world around them. The caverns they’d passed through in this system weren’t like the other one, some of the walls shorn not with time, but sheer fucking force. Recently, too, if the scent of wet clay and fresh tilled earth was anything to go by.

He felt the disappointment radiating off of Lyriat in waves, all of them realizing some time ago that this wasn’t a place they’d find any leads on Nyri and Bal. There were no signs of life within the maze, nothing left behind. Shite, there hadn’t even been a single offshoot to explore or choice in direction to make—just a series of wide open spaces scooped out of the single passage.

Until now.

—Maggie—

Aye, Pet. I see it.

Magnus reached out and snatched Lyriat up by his cloak hood, yanking him back before he was swallowed whole by an endless abyss. “We’re trying to go up, aye?”

He pointed at the camouflaged drop. Anyone whose eyes were aimed ahead instead of down would be in for a nasty surprise, the trap made to look like the ground kept going straight on to the forked tunnels ahead. Between them, though, was a gap about six feet wide, the glow from Lyriat’s stone being devoured by its pitch depths.

Regular darkness, it seemed, as opposed to the chasms’ writhing shadows. Thank the Sisters.

“Shite,” Lyriat breathed. “I didn’t even notice it.”

“I would say that’s probably the point.”