“Caelia.”
The voice came weak, ragged, but unmistakably real, and Ren scrambled toward it through near-total darkness, hands scraping against jagged stone until her fingers finally found fabric, then flesh.
“Lucan.” She dropped to her knees beside him, hands frantically checking for injury in the dark.
“Are you hurt?”
“Nothing that won’t heal.” He shifted, hissing through his teeth at whatever pain the movement caused.
“You?”
“Bruised. Nothing broken, I think.” She sat back slightly, catching her breath, the collar at her throat pulsing warm again now that they were close enough for the bond to reconnect fully.
“The ground just opened up beneath us.”
“Subterranean cavern. Common enough in this region, according to old survey maps, though I’d hoped we wouldn’t discover one firsthand.” He pushed himself upright slowly, and in the faint gray light filtering down from the distant crack above, Ren could finally make out the shape of their surroundings — a wide cavern, walls slick with damp, stretching away into darkness in every direction.
“Can we climb back up?”
Lucan studied the fall distance above them, jagged rock offering little purchase, the opening itself far too high to reach without proper equipment.
“Not without rope. And even then, the walls look unstable.”
“So we’re trapped.”
“Separated from the main column, certainly.” He turned slowly, scanning what little of the cavern the faint light revealed.
“Whether we’re trapped depends on whether this cavern connects to anything on the surface further along.”
A low, distant sound echoed from somewhere deeper in the dark — not quite a growl, something stranger, more guttural, and Ren felt every instinct she owned go taut with alarm.
“What was that?”
“I don’t know.” Lucan’s hand found his blade, dark magic already curling faint and ready around his fingers.
“Whatever it is, we shouldn’t wait here to find out.”
They moved carefully through the cavern’s uneven terrain, Ren summoning a thin thread of holy light to illuminate their path — dimmer than she would have liked, the corrupted air of the Wastes seeming to smother her power’s natural brightness the deeper they traveled from the surface breach.
“I noticed.” She flexed her fingers, forcing more power into the thread, and felt it resist, sluggish and strained.
“This place is saturated with corruption. It’s fighting my magic just to exist.”
“Is that dangerous? For you specifically?”
“I don’t know yet.” She kept walking, refusing to let the uncertainty slow her pace.
“Ask me again once we’re back in air that doesn’t taste like rotting metal.”
They continued deeper, the cavern narrowing into a winding passage that forced them close together, Lucan’s shoulder brushing hers with every uneven step.
The temperature dropped steadily, and the strange guttural sound came again, closer this time, echoing from multiple directions at once in a way that made Ren’s skin crawl.
“There’s more than one of them,” she said quietly.
“I noticed that too.” Lucan’s grip tightened on his blade.
“Stay close.”
The passage finally opened into a wider chamber, and Ren’s borrowed light — struggling, dim — caught the edges of something that made her breath catch.
Bones.
Dozens of them, scattered across the cavern floor, some clearly animal, others disturbingly humanoid, all of them stripped clean and scored with claw marks.
“This isn’t good,” Lucan murmured.
“No,” Ren agreed, “it isn’t.”
Something moved in the deeper shadows beyond the bone-littered floor, and Lucan’s ash magic flared brighter in response, illuminating just enough to reveal a hulking shape crouched low against the far wall — larger than the beasts from the surface battle, its form more insectile than canine, multiple limbs ending in curved talons that scraped audibly against stone as it shifted its weight.
“Behind me,” Lucan said, voice flat and lethal.
“There are more of them.” Ren’s eyes had adjusted enough now to catch movement in at least two other directions — smaller shapes, but numerous, converging slowly from multiple angles like predators coordinating a hunt.
“We’re surrounded.”
“Then we fight our way through.” Lucan’s blade caught what little light remained, dark and gleaming.
The first creature lunged, and the cavern erupted into brutal, close-quarters violence — claws and blades and Ren’s razor threads carving through the dark in flashes of gold and black.
She fought with everything she had, the corrupted air making her light sluggish and harder to control, every thread costing more effort than it should have.
A talon caught her shoulder, tearing through the leather armor Lucan had commissioned, and she cried out, stumbling back against the cavern wall.
“Caelia!” Lucan was there instantly, cutting down the creature that had struck her with a vicious, decisive blow before turning to catch her against his chest.
“Are you—”
“I’m fine.” She forced herself upright despite the burning pain radiating from her shoulder, blood — gold, unmistakably her own — welling steady through the torn armor.
“Watch out!”
Another creature lunged from the shadows, and this time Lucan met it with something darker than his usual controlled ferocity — ash magic surging violent and unrestrained, tearing the creature apart with brutal efficiency that left the cavern floor slick with black ichor.
When the last of the immediate threats finally lay dead around them, silence settled heavy over the chamber, broken only by their ragged breathing and the distant, unsettling echo of more creatures still moving somewhere in the deeper dark.
“We need to keep moving,” Lucan said, though his voice had roughened, something strained bleeding through the words that hadn’t been there before.
“Lucan?” Ren studied him more closely in the faint light, and felt alarm spike sharp through her chest at what she saw.
His eyes had begun to shift — violet bleeding steadily darker, pupils swallowing color entirely, the same feral red she’d seen before, except deeper now, more consuming.
“I’m fine,” he said, though the words came clipped, strained.
“You’re not fine. Your eyes—”
“The corruption down here.” He pressed a hand to his own chest, breathing hard.
“It’s stronger. Unfiltered by the Citadel’s holy wards. My ash magic is responding to it, feeding on it, and I don’t—” He stopped abruptly, jaw clenching.
“You don’t what?”
“I don’t know if I can control how much it takes.” His eyes lifted to hers, and something raw and frightened flickered beneath the encroaching darkness swallowing the violet entirely.
“Caelia, I need you to understand something. Whatever happens in the next few minutes, whatever I become down here, cut off from every ward that’s kept my corruption in check for five years—”
His voice broke off entirely as his whole body went rigid, black veins crawling visible up his throat, his eyes finally consumed completely by that burning, feral red, and Ren watched in mounting horror as the composed, controlled Grand Inquisitor she’d come to trust began to unravel entirely in the suffocating dark beneath the Shadowed Wastes.