Sleep is not a refuge. It's a battlefield.
I'm back on the island, but the beach is gone. Instead, I stand in the center of the Crypt of Heroes. The sarcophagi are open, and the skeletal remains of the heroes lie exposed, their empty eye sockets fixed on me. The walls that should be there, locking us into the caves, are gone, exposing me to the open air of the island again.
The humanoid Gloom Dweller, the one with the violet hair and silver eyes, is there. He stands beside the central table, but he's not looking at the scrolls. He's looking at the glyph in my hand.
"You see," he says, his voice a smooth, silken murmur that makes my skin crawl. "It's a language. Not of words, but of... resonance. You felt it, didn't you? The despair? The hunger?"
I try to speak, but my throat is frozen. I can only stare at him.
"You think you're special," he continues, circling me slowly. "The tainted blood who can touch the Gloom. But you're not the first."
Those silver eyes stare at me for a long moment, but my throat refuses to obey.
He turns from me, and begins to walk a small circle around the dias and myself.
"How quickly things change. The Order reduced to rats hiding in the dark they thought they could destroy. Rather amusing, isn't it? You and your kind."
He gestures to the skeletal exorcists around us.
"Humans."
He says it with the same disgust I've heard all my life. He sees all of us the way The Order sees me. He sees all of us as inferior.
The realization doesn't comfort me.
"Still," he says, and those bright silver eyes meet mine. "You are the only one of your kind who is even a little bit interesting. So perhaps you are special after all."
He holds out a hand, and I see it is covered in a glove of pure, solidified Gloom.
"Come with me. Learn what you truly are."
The Gloom on his hands launches toward me, like a spiderweb, like a maw about to devour me.
I can't move.
I can't control it.
I can't feel it.
I-
One thought flashes through my mind. Burns like fire in the dark.
I will not die.
I lurch to the side, peeling myself off of the ground with all the pain and effort of tearing myself in half.
And crash into the floor next to my bed with a pained sound. The cold stone smacks into my shoulder and sends a spike of pain through my entire body. The thin blanket is tangled around my legs. My heart is hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.
A light clicks on. Not the soft blue glow of the wards, but the harsh, bright white of an Exorcist Candle. Flynn leans over the side of the top bunk, his hair a mess, his face a mask of concern.
"Stick? You okay?"
"I'm... fine," I gasp, my throat raw. I push myself into a sitting position, my body aching as if I've actually been in a fight.
"You don't look fine," Amelia says from the foot of the other cot. She's sitting up, her arms wrapped around her knees, her face pale in the candlelight. "You were thrashing around like you were fighting off a spidergloom."
"I'm fine," I repeat, my voice a little stronger this time. I'm not fine. My mind is reeling. The dream... it felt so real. The Dweller's words, the offer...
"...You're not the only one who had a nightmare." Amelia offers a smile that feels uncharacteristically raw. "I had one too, went i went to sleep earlier. If you want to talk about it..." Her words trail off and she shrugs. She knows I won't talk about it. But she's offering anyway.
There's...
Some comfort in it, I suppose. Even if I don't want to talk about. Or think about. That dream.
I sigh and lean back against the bed, staring up at the ceiling.
A nightmare.
In retrospect it makes complete sense. Of course I would have a nightmare after everything that's happened. A dream where the humanoid taunts me? That's the sort of thing that's inevitable at this point.
I groan.
All the soreness I've built up over the past few days is magnified from my foolish combat roll out of bed. My body aches and my mind is...fuzzy.
At least Amelia didn't try to press the issue.
Flynn, who has been watching me with a thoughtful expression, finally speaks up. "Well, since we're all awake now," he says, swinging his legs over the side of the bunk and dropping to the floor with a thud that makes the room shake, "how about we find something to eat down here?" He grins. "I'm starved."
"You're always starved," I grumble, but I'm secretly relieved. The idea of trying to go back to sleep after a dream like that is more terrifying than facing a horde of Spiderglooms.
Amelia sighs, but a small smile touches her lips. "He's got a point. I don't think any of us are going back to sleep anytime soon. Let's go see what the dead heroes left for breakfast."
We make our way out of the room and into the hallway. The path we've come from ends in the main chamber - nothing but the exit and coffins lie that way. The path we're on dead ends near this room - the very reason I picked it.
But there are other branches presumably and, if Thomson is right that this has everything we need to survive, one of those paths has to lead to food.
Flynn forges ahead, a golden-haired battering ram against the gloom, Amelia and I trailing behind him. We explore the network of corridors, a labyrinth of ancient stone and oppressive silence. Most of the rooms we find are more barracks, identical to the one we claimed, all frozen in a dusty, two-hundred-year-old stasis.
There are other rooms I don't recognize at all, and a large library.
Amelia gasps. "Heavens."
It's a space I'd expect to find in a palace, not in a hidden crypt. Towering shelves, carved from the same dark, rich wood as the doors, stretch up into the gloom, packed tight with leather-bound tomes. The air smells of old paper, dried ink, and a faint, sharp tang of preservation magic. Scrolls are neatly tucked into carved cubbyholes, and glass-fronted cabinets display what look like star charts and alchemical diagrams.
Amelia is practically vibrating with excitement. Her eyes, usually so guarded and serious, are wide with a pure, unadulterated joy. "This... this is the lost archive," she whispers, her hand hovering over a leather-bound volume titled On the Nature of Resonant Souls. "These are the original texts. The ones they said were destroyed in the Great Fire of 887."
Flynn, on the other hand, looks less than impressed. He peeks at a scroll filled with dense, spidery handwriting. "Great. More homework. So, which one of these has the part about where they keep the food?"
Amelia shoots him a withering glare that would have curdled milk. "Flynn, this is the accumulated knowledge of a thousand years of exorcists! This is our history, our culture! It's invaluable!"
"It's indigestible is what it is," Flynn retorts, patting his stomach. "My brain needs calories before it can even think about processing... whatever that is." He points a thumb at a particularly complex diagram that seems to depict a human soul being unraveled like a ball of yarn.
I find myself siding with Flynn, though I'd rather be dragged through a patch of Feral Dwellers by my ankles than read through this place even with a full stomach.
Maybe that's my mistake, though. Somewhere in here might just be the answer to why I, a Tainted Blood, can control Gloom like a Gloom Dweller. Avoiding it, giving into the urge to run from all of this could just be dooming not only myself but everyone who I...
Before I can finish that particular spiral, my stomach very loudly votes to override it.