Month 1, Day 4, Late Morning
The torch was the last thing anyone wanted.
Basha went down the line handing out jobs the way she always did, fast, no room to argue. Rafi took point. Ben got the rear. Squad 1 filled the middle with Antoine out front, like he'd set the whole thing up himself. Then she got to me, pulled a bundle of cloth and pitch off her pack, and shoved it into my chest.
"You carry it."
That was it. She moved on.
I looked down at the thing in my hands. A stick with oil-soaked rags wrapped around one end. Somebody behind me snorted. I didn't see who, and my face went hot anyway.
Right. Out of everyone here, the dwarf with the hammer, Nikita who could probably kill a guy with his hands, Antoine and his stupid shoulders, they gave the torch to the kid who looked like a strong wind would fold him in half. The one job that didn't matter. Hold the light so the people doing the real work could see what they were doing.
"Don't drop it," Viktor said, walking past. He grinned at his own joke. Nobody laughed. Nobody told him to shut up either.
Nikita stopped next to me. Looked at the torch, then at me, and shrugged.
"Good. I hate carrying stuff."
I couldn't tell if he meant it. With Nikita you mostly couldn't. But the knot in my chest loosened half a turn, and I'd take it.
Ben struck a flint against the rags until they caught. The flame went up small and orange, then steadied. He held a hand near it, watching the way it leaned.
"Mm." He nodded at nothing. "Pulls up."
That was all I got out of him. He never said more than he had to.
Basha looked at the mouth of the ruin one more time. The stone around it was still black and dead in that clean half circle, like something had reached up out of the ground and squeezed the life out of it. The cold breathed out of the dark in slow pulls. In. Out.
"Down," she said. "Slow. Stay tight." Her eyes went across us and stopped on Antoine for half a second. "I say back, we go back. No argument."
Somebody muttered something I didn't catch.
"Nobody plays hero."
Then she stepped inside, and the rest of us went after her.
The stairs went down way further than they should have.
I held the torch up and out, the way you'd hold something you didn't want near your face, and the light only got so far. A couple steps ahead. The walls close enough to touch on both sides. Past that, nothing. The dark just ate it.
The air kept changing the lower we went. Colder. Wetter. That smell again, old stone and something underneath it, sweet and kind of rotten, like flowers left in a vase too long. Stronger with every step.
Nobody talked. That was the worst part. Eight, nine people on a staircase and the only sound was feet. Careful feet. Mine. Everyone walking like they were trying not to wake something up.
Then I caught the echo.
Our footsteps came back wrong. On a normal staircase the sound bounces tight, off the walls right next to you. Here it came back late. Too late. Like the steps were dropping into a room way bigger than the one we were in, somewhere under us, and taking their time getting back.
I wasn't the only one. Ben stopped. Put his palm flat on the wall and went still, head tipped, the way he did over fresh tracks. Five seconds. Ten.
"...Hollow," he said.
"What?" Rafi, from up front. He'd stopped too, I could hear it.
"Under us. Air. Lot of it."
"How much is a lot?"
Ben just shrugged, which from Ben meant more than enough to worry about.
Antoine made a sound behind me. Not quite a laugh. "And? We keep moving."
Basha didn't answer him. She just started walking again, and we went with her, and I lifted the torch a little higher even though it didn't do anything.
The stairs let out into a hall.
I felt it open before I saw it. The air loosened, the tight walls dropped away on both sides, and for a second the torchlight just spilled out into black and caught nothing. Then the walls came back, far apart now, and I saw what was on them.
Carvings. Floor to ceiling, both sides, going as far down as the light reached.
They weren't like the ones from before.
The first ruin, the one Daisuke and I poked our heads into, the murals there had been clean. You could look at them and get them. There'd been writing under those, and somehow we could read it, the same way I could understand the elves and dwarves on the field, the meaning just landing in my head whether I wanted it or not.
This was different. This writing did nothing. I looked right at it and it stayed lines. Marks cut into the stone, careful, on purpose, and shut tight, like a door with no handle. Whatever did the translating in my head had nothing for it.
Mirae stopped in front of the closest panel.
She'd kept her distance from me the whole way down, like always, a few steps back, never right next to me. But the carvings did something to her. She forgot about the distance. Walked right up, close enough her nose nearly touched the wall, and her fingers came up and hung over the cut lines without touching.
"This isn't..." She stopped. Tilted her head. "It's older. Way older than the other one. The edges are all..." Her thumb hovered near a groove. "Soft. Worn down."
"Can you read it?" I asked. Came out quieter than I wanted.
"No." Fast, sure. Then slower. "No, it's... it's not even the same writing. That thing in your head, the translating thing, it doesn't do anything here. It's just lines to me."
She didn't move. Kept staring.
"This one keeps coming back though." She pointed without looking away. "All over the wall. Same mark. Again and again." Quieter. "They really wanted you to remember that one."
I looked where she was pointing.
Most of the carving was a crowd. Figures, hundreds of them, too worn down to tell what they were, all turned the same way, all kneeling. And the thing they were kneeling to, cut bigger than everything else, set into the stone above them.
An eye.
One eye. Open. Round. Cut deep enough that the torchlight pooled in it and made it look wet.
My stomach did something cold and slow. I'd seen that before. Not in a carving. In the sky, the night everything went to hell, the little white dot opening up inside the black and looking down at me like it had been waiting the whole time.
I didn't say it. Didn't want to put it out loud and make it real.
"Aleks." Nikita, behind me. Low. "Light."
"What?"
"You drifted. Bring it back."
I'd walked toward the carving without noticing, dragging the only light in the room with me and leaving half the group standing in the dark. I stepped back, quick.
That's when the dark moved.
It came off the wall on my left.
I didn't even read it as a thing at first, just a chunk of the black peeling off and dropping low and fast. Then it hit the torchlight and I wished it hadn't. Long. Wrong. Way too many joints, all of them bending where joints shouldn't bend, a body stretched thin and burnt-looking, no eyes, no face, just a head that swung toward the warmth like it could smell us.
Somebody yelled. Steel came out. Antoine moved fast, faster than I figured he could, blade catching the thing across where a shoulder should've been. It split open. Dark stuff came out, thick, almost poured.
Then it closed back up.
The cut sealed. The dark filled it in. The thing didn't even slow down.
"It's not dying." Rafi's voice cracked on it. "It's not going down, it's not, hit it again, hit it again."
A second one peeled off the wall on the right. Viktor swung, missed, swung again, and it went past him like he wasn't there.
It was coming at me.
I don't know why me. Maybe the light. Maybe because I was the smallest. Maybe it looked at all of us and just picked the weakest thing in the room. It came low and fast across the floor and there was no time to think, no time to run, nothing in my hands but a stick.
So I did the only thing my body knew how to do.
I threw my arms up over my face.
And the torch came up with them.
The fire went straight into it.
The noise it made wasn't a scream. A scream comes out of a throat. This came from everywhere at once, high and flat and so wrong it went through my skull and out the other side. The thing folded backward, away from the fire, scrambling, all those broken joints going at once, and then it was gone, back into the dark at the edge of the room where the light didn't reach.
The second one stopped.
It had Viktor half cornered and it just stopped, head turned toward me, toward the torch. Then it backed off too. Not hurt. Just gone. Both of them swallowed up by the black, and the hall went dead quiet again except for everyone breathing too hard.
I stood there with my arms still half up. Torch shaking in my hand. I lowered it slow, like it might change its mind.
Nobody moved.
They were all looking at me. Antoine. Basha. The dwarf. Rafi with his mouth open. The kid with the torch. The one job that didn't matter.
"It ran." Jonas. He'd been so quiet the whole way down I'd half forgotten he was there, and now his voice came out thin and kind of amazed. "From the fire. It actually ran from the fire."
Nobody said anything for a second. Let it sit there. Then Ben spat his grass blade out and said it flat, like he was telling me it might rain.
"Light." He nodded at the dark. "They don't like the light."
After that the arguing started.
Quiet, because we were all still listening to the dark, but it was arguing. Half of Squad 1 wanted to go back up. We'd found the way in, we'd seen what was down here, that was plenty, report to Lydia and come back with twenty people and torches. The dwarf was already turned toward the stairs.
Antoine wasn't.
"Back to what?" He didn't look up from wiping his blade. "We go up now, we've got nothing. A hole, and a story about running from it."
"People could die down there," Rafi said.
"People die up there." He said it flat, like it bored him. "Same as always."
Nikita hadn't said anything. He was watching the far end of the hall, where the floor kept going past where the light gave out. There was a draft coming from down there. I could feel it now too. Cool air, moving. Coming up from somewhere open.
"There's a way down." He said it to Basha, not Antoine. "Air's moving. Something's open under us."
Basha looked at the stairs behind us. Then the dark ahead. Breathed out through her nose.
"A bit further." Her jaw worked. "We find where that air's coming from. Dead end, we turn around. No argument." Her eyes found me. "Light up front. Aleks, with me."
So much for the job that didn't matter.
The way out of the hall got narrow fast.
The walls came in until two people couldn't walk side by side. The ceiling dropped till the tall ones, Antoine, the elf woman, had to duck their heads. The air went thick down there, heavy and wet, and that sweet rotten smell pressed in from every side until it sat at the back of my throat and wouldn't leave.
I went up front with Basha, holding the light out ahead of us both. The torch had burned down some, flame smaller now, and I kept thinking about what happened if it went out. If it just died in this narrow stone throat with those things sitting in the dark, waiting for the one thing that scared them to disappear.
Don't think about that. Walk.
The draft got stronger the further in we went, and that was the weird part. The passage was squeezing in tighter and tighter, so the air should've gone still and dead. Instead it kept moving against my face, steady, cool, coming up from somewhere ahead. Like the narrow bit was a neck, and past it the whole thing opened up into something with room to breathe.
Then the walls dropped away.
I felt it before the torch showed me anything. Same as the hall, except bigger. Way bigger. The tight stone vanished on both sides at once and the heavy air turned cold and open, and the little flame threw its light forward and up and out, and hit nothing. No wall. No ceiling. Just black, and that feeling of distance behind it, like a room too big to find the edges of.
My mouth went dry.
I lifted the torch as high as my arm would go. The light climbed a few meters into the dark and quit, beaten, swallowed whole.
Whatever was out there in front of us was big. Big enough the dark had depth to it, like the light was only showing me the very edge of something huge.