Chapter 6 - Games of Death

In a faint hazy blur of brightness, where edges softened into fuzzy glow and young faces melted like wax under sunlight, Mauve and Millow sat close in the endless grass plain beside a gnarled tree, its leaves whispering overhead through the dreamlike haze. Simple white shirts clung to their small frames, white shorts streaked with earth, the air thick with sun-warmed sweetness and crushed stems. 

"Millow, why is everyone leaving us behind? What's going to happen to us now?" Mauve leaned forward, tousled hair a shadow over blurred dark eyes, one small hand gesturing toward the hazy horizon. 

"Hmmm..." Millow tilted his head, plucking a blade of grass and twirling it between dirt-streaked fingers, his white shirt shifting against the tree bark. "...I wonder why too." 

Mauve sighed, picking at a seam on her white shorts, fabric rough under tiny nails. "I bet we'll stay here forever until we just die. Even if they're an idiot, they were right, the future is not good for us." 

"Really?" Millow glanced sideways through the bright fuzz, his fingers pausing. "Then why do we still live?" 

"I don't know." Mauve's shoulders slumped, tree's dappled shade cooling her blurred features. 

"We don't matter." Millow traced a slow pattern in the dirt with a stick, voice soft as the plain's murmur. "Everything does not matter. Not even our future." 

"You think?" Mauve leaned closer, lips a faint curve in the haze. 

"Yeah." Millow chuckled then, a light ripple bubbling out as he clapped both hands over his mouth, shoulders shaking under the glowing blur. 

"Something's funny?" Mauve's brows knit faintly, mirroring his mirth with a tilt of her small frame. 

"Hmm." He rocked back on his heels, stick dropping into the grass. "Everything's funny." 

"Why?" Mauve pressed, hands waving through the fuzzy light, sleeves whispering. "What do you mean?" 

"It's the meaning itself, Mauve." Millow grinned wide in the bright haze, poking her arm gently with one finger. 

"I don't get it." Mauve shook her head, confusion softening her blurred outline. 

"Well..." Millow hopped up suddenly, brushing grass from his white shorts with quick pats, eyes brightening on the tree's low branches. "...oh wait I want to climb again!" 

The flashback ended. Mauve is now standing at the gaols with the other outworlders beside her. 

"I still don't get it, Millow." Mauve said as she looks at a stone with an engraving. 

The stone's engraving says "March towards the future." 

The narrow stone path stretched before them like a broken spine but with recognizable square tiles of stones and small lines of gaps, each weathered tile barely wide enough for a single footfall. On either side, the acid pits bubbled and hissed—not the clean green of spring grass, but the sickly, luminous dark green of corruption itself, like the diseased ichor that leaked from demon wounds. The vapors rising from those churning depths stung Mauve's eyes and throat, carrying with it the acrid promise of dissolution. 

"At least the rats won't follow us here if we managed to get across." The thought settled in her mind with grim satisfaction as she glanced back at the tunnel entrance they'd just emerged from. 

The mutated creatures—things that had once been ordinary vermin before the demonic corruption twisted them into human-sized horrors with too many teeth that didn't fit properly in their distended jaws—milled at the threshold. 

Their collective chittering rose to a fevered pitch, a sound like grinding glass that made her jaw ache. But they didn't advance. Even in their corrupted state, some instinct recognized the acid for what it was: death. 

But she knew back then she'd made the right choice. When the fork in the gaol's passages had presented itself—one path wide and inviting despite the distant screaming that echoed from its depths, the other cramped and treacherous with that same terrible screaming growing louder—she'd chosen difficulty over comfort. Not out of bravery, but calculation. 

Narrow means the rats can't swarm us. Screaming means something else is dealing with whatever's down here. And acid... 

Her eyes traced the bubbling pools again. 

Acid means the rats die if they're stupid enough to follow. 

The weight of the other outworlders' gazes pressed against her back. Four of them that she had met had chosen to follow her when she'd turned toward the narrow path without hesitation, their faces painted with that unique mixture of terror and desperate hope that seemed universal among the summoned. They thought her confident. They thought the knight's sword she carried—scavenged from a dead Terraldian soldier moments ago that Mauve never told the story of, its blade still crusted with the dried blood of whatever had killed him—meant she knew what she was doing. 

They're wrong. 

But Mauve understood something fundamental about survival in this nightmare world: looking like you had a plan was often more valuable than actually having one. These outworlders like her had followed her because in that split-second decision at the fork, she hadn't hesitated. She'd walked forward like she knew the way, and that illusion of certainty was a lifeline they desperately needed to grasp. 

Now that lifeline had led them here, to this gauntlet of stone and acid where one wrong step would mean a death too horrible to contemplate. 

The screaming grew louder. Closer. 

Mauve tightened her grip on the sword's leather-wrapped hilt and observed the stone held. Solid. Ancient. Each tile bore the marks of countless feet that had passed this way before—how many had made it across? How many had their bones dissolved in the acid below, leaving nothing but bubbles and silence? 

"Don't think about that. Think about the next step. Only the next step." she says to herself. 

She didn't look back to see if they obeyed. Looking back meant seeing their fear, and seeing their fear meant acknowledging her own. Instead, she focused on the path ahead, on the rhythm of survival that had kept her breathing since the Emergence. 

The acid hissed. The screaming echoed. The tiles held. 

Behind her, the mutated rats chittered their frustration and hunger, they are getting closer. The trails of the gaols would've been easier if there were no demonic forces that came at play, but Mauve knew, nothing in life is easy, even at a new world. 

The chittering swelled—a rising tide of hunger and fury that filled the stone corridor like a living thing. Behind Mauve, the debate erupted in fractured bursts, voices layered over one another in the particular chaos that came when fear met indecision. 

"March towards that? That's like a trap that if we took the wrong step, we'll fall and die!" The boy's voice cracked on the last word, his arm thrust toward the tiles as though pointing could make the danger more real, could make them see what he saw. 

The older man's response came too quickly, the kind of desperate reasoning born from needing an answer—any answer. "Perhaps we can be fast enough that if we step one wrong tile we can just pull our leg and step onto one another?" 

"If that is true then no one would've died here, but look! Those skeletons prove otherwise." The young woman's tone carried the flat certainty of someone who'd already calculated the odds and found them wanting. Her gesture toward the acid pits was economical, dismissive—*see? think.* 

"Uhm guys? I think the rats are on their way here!" The youngest girl's panic was naked, unfiltered, the words tumbling out in a rush that made them blur together. 

Mauve's jaw tightened. The debate was wasting time they didn't have, burning through seconds that could mean the difference between a controlled crossing and a panicked stampede. She could hear it now—not just the chittering, but the *sound beneath it*. The scrape of claws on stone. The wet huff of corrupted breathing. The rhythmic *pat-pat-pat* of bodies moving with terrible purpose through the darkness. 

Torch-light flickered against the tunnel wall behind them, and the shadows came first—elongated, distorted shapes that moved with the jerky wrongness of things that shouldn't exist. Too many legs. Bodies that bulged in places where bone and muscle had grown without plan or mercy. 

The calculation was instant, automatic: *They've committed. They're coming. The debate is over.* 

"Go! I'll fend them off!" The command ripped from her throat, sharp enough to cut through the paralysis. She was already moving, stepping *toward* the entrance instead of away, the sword rising in her hands with the kind of decisive motion that left no room for argument or second-guessing. 

The others would move or they wouldn't. She'd given them the order; what they did with it was their choice now. 

The first rat exploded from the darkness like something birthed from nightmare—a pale, bloated mass of matted fur and exposed muscle where the corruption had eaten through skin. Its eyes were too numerous, black beads scattered across its skull in a pattern that suggested faces trying to form and failing. The stench hit her a half-second before the body did: rot and ammonia and something sweet-sick that coated the back of her throat. 

*Block high. It's going for the throat.* 

The sword came up just as the creature's maw opened, revealing teeth that had grown in layers, some pointing inward, some jutting at angles that would make feeding impossible. Fangs met steel with a *clang* that vibrated up through the crossguard and into her palms, the impact solid enough to rattle her teeth. The rat's momentum carried forward—it was *heavy*, far heavier than it should be—and Mauve's boots scraped backward across stone as she absorbed the force. 

Her arms burned. The muscles in her shoulders screamed as she held the blade between herself and those gnashing teeth, watching them work against the steel, watching the black tongue writhe behind them. The creature's breath was hot and wet against her face. 

*Push. Now.* 

She redirected the force, shoving forward and *twisting* the blade at the same time, using the rat's own weight against it. The creature stumbled sideways, its too-many legs scrambling for purchase, and for one precious second it was off-balance. 

"Fuck! No!" 

The scream of the woman came from behind her—raw, visceral, the kind of sound that came when hope died. Footsteps. Splashing. The hiss of acid meeting flesh. 

Mauve's focus fractured for an instant—*they're on the tiles, someone fell, how many—* 

Movement. Peripheral. Low and fast. 

The second rat came in from the left, and Mauve shifted her weight, blade already moving to intercept. But the one she'd pushed—the first one—didn't press its attack. Instead, its head swiveled with that awful, boneless flexibility, black eyes fixing on the easier prey behind her, and then it was *running*, scuttling past her flank with a speed that her combat-focused stance couldn't adjust for in time. 

*No—* 

"Shit! Go!" 

A voice was heard from a man her as she engaged the second rat, the blade coming down in a diagonal slash that caught it across the shoulder. Bone split with a wet *crack*. The creature shrieked—a sound like metal scraping glass—but it didn't stop, just twisted, jaws snapping toward her leg. 

She pulled back, pivoting, and drove the pommel down into its skull. Once. Twice. The third strike finally made it recoil. 

Behind her: more screaming. Splashing. The acrid burn of acid vapors intensifying. 

Mauve spun halfway, trying to see—*how many made it across, how many fell, are they moving—* 

But the rat she'd struck was already recovering, and the first one—the one that had gotten past her—was somewhere in that chaos of sound behind her, screaming and killing, and she couldn't protect them and fight at the same time. 

*Choose. You can't do both.* 

The second rat lunged again. Mauve met it with a two-handed thrust, driving the blade forward with all the strength in her core. The point caught it just below the ribs, punching through corrupted flesh and whatever malformed organs lay beneath. The resistance was wrong—too soft in places, too hard in others—but the blade went *through*, and she felt the scrape of steel against spine. 

The rat's shriek escalated into something beyond sound, a vibration that hurt in her bones. It thrashed, jerking on the sword, trying to pull away and only driving the blade deeper. Black ichor spurted from the wound, hot and viscous, spattering across her hands and forearms. 

She twisted the blade. Shoved. Used her boot against its flank to kick it *off* the steel as it finally went limp. 

The sound of another rat—*behind her, from the tunnel, how many are there—* 

Mauve tried to turn, tried to look back and assess the damage, tried to see if anyone was still alive on those tiles or if the screaming had stopped meaning survival and started meaning death. 

But there was no time. 

The third rat was already coming, and the shrieking of the one she'd killed was still echoing off the walls, mixing with the human screams and the hiss of acid and the chittering that kept rising, rising, *rising* from the dark. 

She reset her stance—blade low, knees bent—and stared into the tunnel mouth. 

*How many more?* 

The third rat emerged from the tunnel's mouth like a piece of the darkness itself made flesh—larger than the others, its bulk nearly filling the corridor's width. The corruption had been crueler to this one: its spine jutted through the skin in irregular ridges, forming a serrated crest that ran from skull to haunches, and one of its front legs had split into two at the shoulder, creating a grotesque double-limb that moved with disjointed coordination. The eyes—so many eyes—caught the torch-light and threw it back in glints of yellow and red. 

It didn't rush. It *stalked*, each step deliberate, claws scraping stone in a rhythm that felt almost thoughtful, almost patient. 

Mauve's breath came hard and fast through her nose, her lungs burning from the acid vapors and exertion. The sword felt heavier now, the muscles in her forearms beginning that telltale tremor that came before failure. Black ichor coated the blade and her hands, making the grip slick, and she could feel it seeping through the leather wrapping, warm and viscous against her palms. 

*Big. Too big. Have to make the first strike count.* 

The rat feinted left—a twitch of that double-limb—and Mauve's body responded before her mind caught up, blade swinging to intercept. But the creature pulled back, its maw opening in what might have been a grin if such expressions belonged on rat-faces, revealing a throat lined with concentric rings of teeth like a lamprey. 

*It's testing me. Learning.* 

The realization sent ice down her spine. The others had been driven by hunger and corruption—mindless, aggressive. This one was *thinking*. 

It lunged. 

Not at her center mass, but low, going for her legs with that horrible double-limb leading. Mauve jumped back, but the corridor was narrow and her heel caught the edge of a loose stone. Her balance wavered for a critical half-second, and the rat surged forward, using her stumble to close the distance. 

She brought the sword down in a desperate overhead chop—no finesse, just gravity and panic—and the blade bit into the creature's shoulder where the split limb joined the body. Bone crunched. The rat screamed and *twisted*, wrenching itself sideways with such force that it nearly tore the sword from her hands. 

Mauve held on, throwing her weight into a downward pull, using the embedded blade as an anchor. The rat thrashed, its good forelimb raking across her shin—she felt the claws catch fabric, then skin, three parallel lines of fire that made her vision white out for an instant. 

*Don't let go. Don't. Let. Go.* 

She wrenched the blade free in a spray of black blood and immediately thrust forward, aiming for the center mass. The point skidded off a rib, deflected by the angle and the creature's manic writhing. It snapped at her face—close enough that she felt the heat of its breath, smelled the rot—and she had to jerk her head back so violently her neck cracked. 

*The neck. Throats don't have bones to deflect.* 

The rat reared up, trying to use its bulk to bear her down, and that lifted its head just enough. Mauve adjusted her grip, reversing the blade in one sharp motion, and drove upward with everything she had left. The point punched through the soft tissue beneath the jaw, through the roof of the mouth, and up into whatever passed for a brain in this corrupted mass. 

The shriek cut off mid-note, transforming into a wet gurgle. The creature's legs buckled, its weight sagging onto the blade, nearly pulling her down with it. Hot blood—redder than the ichor, more *wrong* somehow—poured over her hands and wrists, shockingly warm. 

She kicked it off the blade, her boot squelching into its ruined throat, and the body hit the ground with a meaty thud that sent tremors through the stone. 

No time to breathe. No time to think. 

The scrape of claws behind her— 

*The first one. The one that got past.* 

Instinct screamed and Mauve *threw* herself sideways, tucking into a roll that sent spikes of pain through her bleeding shin. She felt the displacement of air as something massive passed through the space where her spine had been a heartbeat before. Her shoulder hit stone, the impact jarring the sword in her grip, and she used the momentum to come up in a crouch, blade already rising. 

The first rat—smaller than the third, but faster, meaner, its muzzle now dark with what might have been human blood—skidded as it tried to redirect its failed lunge. Its claws scrabbled for purchase on the slick stone, and for one perfect instant its flank was exposed, all the soft vulnerable space between ribs and hip. 

Mauve didn't think. Didn't aim. Just *moved*. 

The blade went in horizontally, a killing thrust between the ribs that punched through to the vital organs beyond. The rat's momentum did the rest, dragging itself along the steel until the crossguard stopped its forward motion. It spasmed once—a full-body convulsion that nearly tore the sword away—and then went limp, dead weight sliding off the blade to collapse in a heap. 

Two down. 

Her lungs burned. Her leg screamed. The sword felt like it weighed twice what it had minutes ago. 

And then she heard it: the fourth one. Emerging from the tunnel entrance with the same deliberate, stalking gait as the third. 

Mauve's back hit the wall. She hadn't meant to retreat, but her legs had made the choice without consulting her mind, seeking the solidity of stone, the security of having nothing behind her. 

The fourth rat was leaner than the third, built for speed, its body elongated and serpentine where the corruption had stretched bone and muscle into new configurations. It moved with a fluid, horrible grace, head low, eyes fixed on her with an intelligence that made her stomach twist. 

It knew she was tired. Knew she was hurt. Knew she was *cornered*. 

The corridor was too narrow to dodge left or right. The acid pits were at her back, just beyond this small alcove of stone. Forward was the rat. Behind was death by dissolution. 

*No room. No time. No choice.* 

The rat coiled—she could see the muscles bunching beneath the patchy fur, see the exact moment it committed to the lunge. 

Something broke open inside her chest—not panic, not fear, but a raw, incandescent *refusal*. She had not survived of this nightmare world, had not clawed her way through starvation and exploitation and the casual cruelty of a realm that wanted her dead, had not made the hard choice at this labyrinth and walked into this hell-pit of screaming and acid, just to die here, now, cornered like prey. 

"AAAHHHHH!" 

The scream tore from her throat—primal, wordless, a sound that carried every ounce of defiance she had left. She didn't retreat. Didn't brace. *Charged*. 

The rat lunged and Mauve met it in mid-air, sword held in both hands like a spear, her entire body behind the thrust. The point caught it in the open mouth—down the throat, through the soft palette, into the brain cavity beyond. The impact slammed her backward, her boots skidding on stone slick with blood and ichor, her shoulders hitting the wall with bruising force. 

But she held. Held the blade. Held her ground. Held the *line*. 

The rat thrashed, impaled, its body writing in its death throes. Claws raked her arms, tore through her sleeves, left burning furrows across her biceps and forearms. Its weight was crushing, pushing down on the blade, pushing her harder into the wall. 

*Push back. PUSH.* 

Mauve screamed again—throat raw, voice breaking—and *shoved* with everything she had. Legs driving, core locked, arms trembling with the effort. The rat's body lifted, inch by impossible inch, and then she twisted the blade violently to the side and *threw* the corpse, using its own weight and momentum to hurl it away from her. 

It hit the ground in a boneless sprawl, twitched twice, and went still. 

Mauve collapsed back against the wall, chest heaving, the sword point-down on the stone, both hands wrapped around the grip to keep herself upright. Blood—hers, theirs, impossible to tell anymore—dripped from her elbows and chin. The cut on her shin pulsed with each heartbeat. Her arms were a map of shallow claw-marks, none deep enough to be lethal but all screaming their presence. 

The tunnel entrance was quiet now. No more chittering. No more shadows. 

Just the hiss of acid. The distant screaming—fainter now, or maybe her ears were ringing too loud to hear it properly. 

And her own ragged breathing, each inhale tasting of copper and rot. 

The silence lasted three breaths. 

Then, from deep within the tunnel's throat, came the sound—a rising cacophony that made the previous attack seem like a scouting party. *Pat-pat-pat-pat-pat*, not the rhythm of four or five bodies, but dozens, a stampede of corrupted flesh and bone cascading through the darkness like a flood given teeth and hunger. 

Louder. So much louder. 

Mauve's head snapped toward the entrance, every muscle in her battered body screaming protest as she forced herself upright. The sword came up—heavier now, or perhaps her arms had simply given everything they had and found the reserve empty—and she settled into a stance that was more memory than strength. 

*Too many. I can't fight that many.* 

The thought was clinical, detached, the kind of assessment that came when emotion had been burned away by necessity. She couldn't hold this position. The math was simple: even if each rat took only ten seconds to kill, she'd be overwhelmed in minutes. Stamina had limits. Bodies had breaking points. 

The corridor offered no other exits. Behind her, the trial. 

Her gaze cut sideways to the stone tablet embedded in the wall near the tile path's entrance—the one she'd barely registered in the chaos of rats and screaming. Even now, coated in grime and shadow, the engraving was visible, carved deep enough to hold meaning across centuries: 

"March towards the future." 

Something hot and bitter rose in her throat. Mauve's lips pressed into a thin line, her jaw working as she stared at those words—at the *audacity* of them, at the grotesque optimism they implied in a place where bones dissolved in acid and people died screaming. 

She spat. 

The glob of saliva and blood hit the tablet dead-center, sliding down the carved letters in a slow, contemptuous trail. 

*Future. More like death. Right. Millow was right.* 

Her attention shifted to the path itself—the narrow causeway of tiles stretching over bubbling darkness. The screaming had stopped. She registered that now, in the pause between heartbeats. The four outworlders who'd gone ahead—the boy, the old man, the young woman, the panicked girl—their voices had cut off sometime during her fight. She didn't know when. Hadn't had the luxury of tracking it. 

Mauve scanned the tiles, looking for silhouettes, for movement, for *anything*. 

Nothing. 

Just stone, and acid, and— 

There. 

Her eyes caught on something pale against the dark green luminescence. Bones. New bones, still slick, some with fragments of cloth clinging to them where the acid hadn't yet finished its work. Three distinct clusters that she could see from this angle. Maybe four. The tiles near them looked darker, stained. 

*They fell. All of them? Or most?* 

The fights had felt like minutes, but time moved strangely when adrenaline took over. It could have been longer. Or death could have simply been that efficient—a wrong step, a slip, gravity and chemistry doing the rest in seconds. 

Her stomach twisted, but the sensation was distant, observed rather than felt. 

The chittering swelled. Closer. Maybe thirty seconds out. 

*No time.* 

The clinical part of her mind—the part that had kept her alive by making the hard calculations others couldn't stomach—noted with perfect clarity that she'd expected this. Had *known*, on some level, that those four would serve as test subjects. Their panic, their rushed steps across the tiles, would have shown her which stones held and which didn't. She would have watched, learned the pattern, crossed with calculated precision while their bodies dissolved below. 

It would have been efficient. Practical. 

The rat corpses around her—three massive bodies leaking ichor—offered another option. She could have used *them* instead, thrown the bodies onto tiles to test them. But the timing was wrong now. The horde was too close. Hauling corrupted rat carcasses into position would take too long, leave her back exposed. 

*Should've thought of it sooner. Should've—* 

No. The urgency of defending herself had been real. The rats had been *there*, immediate, trying to kill her. Strategy had to bow to survival when teeth were at your throat. 

She had no choice now. 

But an idea crystallized, sharp and sudden. 

The sword. The blade could reach. Could test. 

Mauve moved to the edge of the tile path, her bleeding shin protesting each step. She extended the sword, holding it one-handed, point aimed at the nearest tile—the first one, directly in front of the threshold. She pressed down. 

The tile held. Solid. No shift. 

She pulled back, adjusted, targeted the second tile in the sequence, slightly to the left. Pressed down again, harder this time, adding her weight to the pressure. 

The stone gave a fraction of an inch—a subtle sink that would have been imperceptible underfoot until it was too late—and Mauve yanked the sword back. 

*Death tile. Don't step there.* 

The sound from the tunnel was deafening now, a roiling wave of screeches and claws that made the air itself seem to vibrate. 

"I cannot be here now, shit, why is everyone so stupid." 

The words came out flat, barely above a mutter, spoken to no one and nothing. Her gaze flicked once more to the bones dissolving in the acid, to the dark stains on the tiles that marked where people—*names she'd never learned, faces she'd barely registered*—had stood moments ago, hoping she knew the way. 

Part of her wanted to care. Wanted to feel the weight of their deaths, to mourn the lives they'd had before the Emergence—families, jobs, mundane concerns that now seemed impossibly distant and precious. Wanted to be the kind of person who paused, who honored their sacrifice with something more than tactical assessment. 

But that part was small. Distant. Drowned out by the iron certainty that had carried her this far: 

*Survive. Find Millow. Everything else is secondary.* 

If she'd had more time—if the rats had given her minutes instead of seconds—maybe she could have saved them. Could have used the sword-testing method, called them back, led them across with precision. 

Or maybe she'd have tried and died defending them from the horde anyway, and all five would be bones now instead of four. 

The math didn't change: dwelling on it was a luxury she couldn't afford. 

The first shadows appeared at the tunnel mouth—low, fast, too many to count. 

Mauve tested another tile with the sword point. Held. Tested the next. Held. The one after that—*sink*. 

*There. Two death tiles in the first five. Pattern might continue.* 

The horde spilled into the corridor like a living carpet of teeth and corruption. 

Mauve stepped onto the first tile, sword extended, already testing the path ahead as the chittering rose to a fever pitch behind her. 

The trial had begun. 

The blade descended, point-first, onto the sixth tile. Mauve's weight stayed back, balanced on the fifth, her body coiled with the tension of someone who knew that commitment meant death if she'd miscalculated. The steel met stone with a dull *tock*. 

Solid. No give. 

She shifted her weight forward onto it, feeling the tile's integrity through the soles of her boots, through the vibration that traveled up her legs. The stone held without tremor or shift. Good. 

*Next.* 

The chittering crescendoed into something beyond sound—a physical force that pressed against her eardrums, made her teeth ache. Mauve didn't turn. Couldn't afford the second it would take to look back. Her peripheral vision caught movement, a roiling mass of bodies pouring through the tunnel entrance like water breaking through a dam, and that was all the information she needed. 

*They're coming. Keep moving.* 

The sword extended to the seventh tile—offset right, following what might be a pattern or might be random death. She pressed. The tile sank with a grating whisper of stone on stone, dropping perhaps half an inch before catching on whatever mechanism lay beneath. 

*Death.* 

She pulled back, adjusted, tested the tile to the left instead. Solid. She stepped onto the sixth tile fully, freeing her back foot to move forward to the seventh—the safe one—while the blade was already seeking the eighth. 

Behind her, the first rat hit the tile path. 

She heard it in the change of sound—claws transitioning from rough corridor stone to the smoother surface of the ancient tiles. Heard the weight of it landing, the frantic scrabble of momentum that couldn't be stopped even if the creature had wanted to stop. 

A splash. A shriek that cut off with wet finality. 

*Wrong tile. At least one.* 

The acid hissed and bubbled with fresh meat. 

More followed. The horde didn't learn, didn't slow, just poured forward with mindless hunger. Some made it onto tiles that held. Others didn't. The air filled with the sound of dissolution—flesh and bone meeting acid with a sizzle that undercut the shrieks like a constant, awful baseline. 

Mauve tested the eighth tile. Held. Stepped forward. Tested the ninth. *Sink.* Adjusted left. Held. Stepped. 

The safe path was irregular—no clear pattern she could predict more than one tile ahead. Second from the right, then left, then center, then right again. Random, or designed by someone whose logic had died with them centuries ago. It didn't matter. Each tile was a binary question: life or death. She asked the question with steel, got her answer, and moved. 

A blur of motion in her peripheral vision—low, fast, coming from the left. 

*On the tiles. One made it close.* 

Instinct screamed. Mauve pivoted on her forward foot, the sword coming up and around in a horizontal slash that used the testing motion's momentum. The blade caught the rat mid-lunge, connecting with its skull in a strike that was more luck than skill. Bone cracked. The creature's trajectory deflected sideways, its body tumbling past her shoulder and over the edge. 

It hit the acid with a splash that sent droplets arcing upward. One landed on her forearm—a point of searing agony that made her vision white out for an instant. She hissed through her teeth, didn't stop moving. 

*Tenth tile. Test. Sink. Death. Adjust. Test. Held.* 

Step forward. Eleventh tile under her front foot. Sword extending to test the twelfth. 

Another rat—this one from the right, its approach telegraphed by the frantic clicking of claws on stone. It was on a tile two positions back from her, already coiling to jump. 

Mauve's calculation was instant: she couldn't turn fully without risking her balance on the narrow tile. Couldn't swing with full force. Had to make it count with position and timing alone. 

The rat leaped. 

She dropped into a crouch—knee bending, center of gravity lowering—and thrust the sword *backward* in a reverse grip, angling the blade upward. The rat's momentum did the work. It impaled itself on the point, the steel punching through its chest cavity and erupting from its back in a spray of black ichor. 

The weight hit the blade like a hammer, nearly wrenching it from her grip. Mauve's arms screamed, her shoulders taking the full impact of the creature's mass. She twisted, using the motion to redirect the body's fall, and let gravity pull the corpse off the blade and into the acid below. 

No time to breathe. The sword came back up, extended forward. Twelfth tile. Test. 

*Held.* 

Step. 

The horde was thinning itself—she could hear it in the decreasing volume of shrieks, in the way the splashes came in clusters rather than a continuous cascade. They were stupid, driven by hunger and corruption but not capable of learning from the deaths of their swarm-mates. They just kept coming, kept dying, kept feeding the acid. 

But some were lucky. Probability didn't care about intelligence. Random chance meant that a few would stumble onto the safe path by pure accident, following the exact sequence that kept them alive even as they had no idea why. 

*Three more on the tiles. Maybe four.* 

Thirteenth tile. Test. *Sink.* Adjust. Test. *Sink.* Adjust again. Test. *Held.* 

"Come on, come on—" 

The words came out as a snarl, frustration bleeding through the clinical focus. The safe tile was far right—nearly at the edge of the path, giving her almost no room to maneuver. She stepped onto it anyway, her right boot hanging half off the stone, heel over acid. 

A rat lunged from directly ahead—one that had gotten lucky, that had followed her exact path through sheer coincidence and was now close enough to reach her with a single leap. 

No room to dodge right. Left meant stepping onto an untested tile. Back meant collision with whatever was behind her. 

*Forward. Through it.* 

Mauve screamed—wordless, raw—and thrust straight into the lunge. The blade caught the rat in the throat, punching through and out the back of its neck. She used its body as a shield, letting its momentum carry it onto the sword while she held firm, and then *shoved*, pushing the corpse backward even as she stepped forward onto the fourteenth tile. 

Untested. She'd had no choice. 

Her foot came down. The tile held. 

*Lucky. That was just lucky.* 

The rat corpse tumbled backward, colliding with another creature behind it. Both went over the edge in a tangle of limbs. The acid claimed them with a hiss. 

Mauve's breath came in ragged gasps now, each inhale burning in her lungs. Her arms were lead weights. The cut on her shin had reopened, fresh blood soaking through her pant leg. The acid burn on her forearm pulsed with each heartbeat. 

*How far? How many more tiles?* 

She couldn't see the end of the path—the torch-light didn't reach that far, and the acid's glow only illuminated the immediate stones. Could be ten more tiles. Could be fifty. 

Didn't matter. The only direction was forward. 

Fifteenth tile. Test. *Held.* Step. 

Sixteenth. Test. *Sink.* Adjust. Test. *Held.* Step. 

A rat came from the left—mid-sized, faster than the others. It leaped from three tiles back, a distance that should have been impossible. Mauve brought the sword up in a desperate parry, catching it across the side rather than the face. The impact knocked her sideways. Her left boot slipped off the tile's edge. 

*No—* 

She threw her weight right, arms windmilling, the sword's momentum helping pull her back. Her boot came down on the tile's corner—barely an inch of stone—and held. Held. Held. 

The rat tumbled past her, its claws raking across her calf as it fell. The pain was distant, catalogued and filed away for later. 

She was still on the tile. Still alive. 

*Keep. Moving.* 

Seventeenth tile. Test. 

Behind her, the sounds of the horde were fading—fewer splashes, fewer shrieks. They'd exhausted themselves against the acid and the wrong tiles, culled their own numbers through blind aggression. 

But ahead, in the darkness beyond the torch-light's reach, she could hear something else. 

The screaming. 

The same screaming that had drawn her to this path in the first place, still echoing from somewhere deeper in the gaol. Louder now. Closer. 

*One problem at a time.* 

The sword descended to test the eighteenth tile, her jaw set, her eyes fixed forward with the singular, unyielding focus that had carried her through hell and would carry her through this, too. 

She would cross this path. 

She would survive. 

And she would find Millow. 

Everything else—the dead behind her, the screaming ahead, the exhaustion gnawing at her bones—was secondary. 

The tile held. 

The sword descended toward the twenty-third tile—or was it twenty-fourth? She'd lost count somewhere between the rat that had grazed her ribs and the one she'd bisected mid-leap. The point touched stone. 

*Sink.* 

Mauve's jaw tightened. She adjusted left. Tested again. 

*Sink.* 

Center tile. The sword pressed down. 

*Sink.* 

Something cold settled in her gut—not panic, not yet, but the precursor to it. A whisper of wrongness that her body recognized before her mind could articulate it. 

Right tile. Test. 

*Sink.* 

She pulled back, reset her stance on the current tile—solid beneath her boots, holding her weight without complaint—and forced herself to think past the fatigue and pain. 

*All of them. Every tile ahead is sinking.* 

Her gaze swept the path forward, squinting into the gloom beyond her position. The tiles continued for perhaps another dozen feet, each one identical in the dim acid-glow, and beyond them— 

There. 

Solid ground. The cavern floor, rough and dark, marking the end of the trial. The exit. 

Twelve feet. Maybe fifteen. 

The chittering rose behind her—a fresh wave, or what remained of the horde regrouping. She didn't turn to count them. The sound alone told her enough: more than she could fight on a single tile with no room to maneuver. 

*All the remaining tiles are traps. The path doesn't continue. It ends here.* 

The design was elegant in its cruelty. Anyone who'd made it this far—who'd tested their way through the earlier tiles with caution and precision—would reach this point and find their method useless. Testing became impossible when every option was death. The only way forward was to abandon caution entirely. 

*Jump. They want you to jump.* 

Fifteen feet across open air, over bubbling acid, from a standing position on a narrow tile that offered no room for a running start. Landing on uneven cavern stone in the dark, with exhausted legs and an injured body. 

Impossible. 

The word crystalized in her mind with perfect clarity: *impossible.* 

Mauve felt it then—the doubt, creeping in through the cracks in her resolve. The voice that whispered she was too tired, too hurt, too *human* to make a leap that would challenge someone fresh and whole. That she'd slip on the takeoff, or miss the distance, or land wrong and tumble backward into the acid. That she'd survived rats and tiles only to die here, on a jump she had no business attempting. 

Her hand trembled on the sword grip. 

*You can't do this. You're going to fall. You're going to—* 

She slapped herself. 

The crack of palm against cheek was sharp, sudden, cutting through the spiral of doubt like a blade through cloth. Her face stung. Her eyes watered from the impact. The voice went silent. 

*Shut up. I didn't survive this long by listening to can't.* 

The chittering swelled—close now, the first rats reaching the tile path behind her, their claws clicking against stone. 

*Make impossible possible. That's the whole fucking point of being here, isn't it?* 

Mauve adjusted her grip on the sword, holding it tight against her side rather than extended—needed the weight centered, needed both arms for balance. She planted her feet as wide as the narrow tile allowed, bent her knees, felt the coil of muscle in her thighs despite their exhaustion. 

*Don't think about the distance. Don't think about the acid. Think about the landing. Only the landing.* 

One breath. Deep, pulling air into the bottom of her lungs, tasting acid and copper and the particular staleness of ancient stone. 

Two breaths. Feeling her heartbeat, the rhythm of blood pumping through a body that had given everything and was being asked for more. 

Three breaths. 

She jumped. 

The world reduced to motion and prayer. Her legs drove, pushing off the tile with everything left in the muscle and sinew. The tile shifted beneath her—unstable now under the explosive force—but she was already airborne, already committed. The cavern ceiling blurred overhead. The acid's glow filled her peripheral vision, too close, too bright. 

Time stretched. 

Her body arced through empty space, fifteen feet of nothing between her and solid ground, every inch of it a test of trajectory and momentum. The sword's weight pulled at her side, threatening to twist her mid-flight. She didn't fight it—used it, letting the rotation bring her feet forward, angling for the landing. 

The cavern floor rushed up. 

Mauve hit hard—feet first, but the angle was wrong, too much forward momentum. Her ankles screamed on impact. She pitched forward, unable to stop, and did the only thing she could: turned the fall into a roll. 

Stone scraped against her shoulder, her hip, her injured shin—each point of contact a new flower of agony. The sword stayed clutched in her hand through pure will, the blade scraping sparks as it dragged across rock. She rolled once, twice, the world spinning in a nauseating blur of stone and darkness, and finally came to a stop on her side, curled around the sword like it was the only solid thing in the universe. 

Pain. Everywhere. A symphony of it, each injury adding its voice to the chorus. 

But she was *across*. On solid ground. Alive. 

*Move. They're still coming.* 

The thought cut through the pain-haze with iron urgency. Mauve forced her eyes open—when had she closed them?—and saw the tile path behind her, now occupied by rats. Three of them had reached the final tiles where she'd stood. More were coming, a stream of corrupted bodies following the scent of prey. 

She had seconds. 

Mauve pushed herself upright, every muscle screaming protest. The sword came up in a two-handed grip, point toward the gap between the tiles and the cavern floor—the choke point they'd have to cross. 

*Can't jump like I did. They'll try anyway. Use it.* 

The first rat didn't hesitate, didn't test. It simply leaped, driven by hunger and the instinct that had kept it alive through the tile path. The distance was too far. Its body arced through the air, claws scrambling at nothing, and fell short by three feet. 

The acid claimed it with a hiss. 

The second rat tried the same. Fell short. Dissolved. 

The third, smaller and faster, managed to get closer—its front claws actually scraped the cavern edge before gravity pulled it down. Its shriek cut off mid-note. 

But the fourth—larger, heavier, using the same explosive leap Mauve had managed—*made it*. 

Its claws hit the edge and caught. The creature hauled itself up with terrifying speed, maw already opening for the killing lunge. 

Mauve met it with the sword, a downward strike that carried her full weight. The blade split its skull from crown to jaw, cleaving through bone and brain. She wrenched the sword free and kicked the corpse backward, sending it tumbling into the acid below. 

Another rat leaped. This one had more momentum, landed with all four feet on solid ground, already pivoting toward her. 

She didn't give it time to set itself. Stepped forward and thrust—quick, precise, aiming for the center mass. The blade punched through ribs. The rat thrashed, trying to bite even as it died. Mauve twisted the sword and pulled it free in the same motion, letting the body collapse. 

Two more came together, coordinating by accident or instinct. They landed in a tangle of limbs, one atop the other. 

Mauve's strike was a horizontal slash that caught them both—not killing blows, but enough to send them off-balance. She followed with a kick to the first one's flank, using her boot to shove it sideways. It tumbled over the edge, taking the second one with it in a mess of claws and squeals. 

The acid hissed. Hissed again. 

More rats on the tiles, but they were hesitating now—some animal awareness finally penetrating the corruption, showing them that the jump was death for most of them. They milled about on the far tiles, chittering in frustration. 

One more tried. Leaped with full commitment. 

Fell short. 

Then another, smaller, more desperate. It almost made it—front claws scraping the edge—but Mauve was already moving. She brought the sword down on its paws, severing claws and bone. The rat shrieked and fell, its weight no longer sufficient to pull itself up. 

The acid welcomed it. 

The remaining rats—she could see perhaps six or seven still on the tiles, more clustered at the earlier parts of the path—weren't jumping anymore. Just pacing, chittering, watching her with those too-many eyes. 

Mauve stood at the edge, sword held ready, chest heaving, every part of her body a catalog of damage and exhaustion. 

*Come on. Try it. Jump.* 

None did. 

The standoff held for ten seconds. Twenty. The rats' chittering began to fade, shifting from aggressive to uncertain. One by one, they started to turn away, retreating back down the tile path toward the corridor, giving up on prey that had proven too costly to reach. 

The last rat lingered the longest—one of the larger ones, its eyes fixed on her with an intelligence that made her skin crawl. Then it too turned, limping on a damaged hind leg, and disappeared into the shadows. 

Silence. 

Just the hiss of acid. The drip of water somewhere in the distant dark. Her own ragged breathing. 

Mauve lowered the sword slowly, the blade's point coming to rest on the stone. Her arms trembled, no longer able to hold the weight properly. Her legs threatened to buckle. 

She'd made it. 

The trial—this part of it, at least—was done. 

*None of them left.* 

The thought arrived with a strange emptiness. No triumph. No relief. Just the flat acknowledgment of fact: she'd defended the position, used the choke point to her advantage, and eliminated every rat that had made it across. The ones that remained were retreating, no longer a threat. 

She'd won. For now. 

Mauve allowed herself one breath of relative safety. Then another. Her gaze drifted to the darkness ahead—the direction the trial continued, deeper into the gaol. 

Somewhere in that darkness, the screaming still echoed. 

And somewhere beyond that, if she could just survive long enough, Millow was waiting. 

*Not done yet through this hell.* 

The sword came back up, braced against the ground to help her stay upright. 

*But closer.* 

A trial at a time. 

Always forward. No matter the cost. 

Mauve walked. 

Each step was a negotiation between will and flesh—her body cataloguing its injuries with clinical precision even as her mind moved past them. The shin would need wrapping. The acid burn would scar. The claw marks across her arms were shallow enough to ignore. Inventory complete. Damage assessed. Still functional. 

The gaol corridor stretched ahead, empty and quiet save for the distant drip of water and the echo of her own footsteps. The sword remained in her hand, tip dragging occasionally against stone when her grip weakened, but she didn't sheathe it. Couldn't. There was no sheath, and more practically, the next threat could be around any corner. Efficiency demanded readiness. 

Her mind turned back to the trial—not the visceral memory of rats and acid, but the *structure* of it. 

*March towards the future.* 

The engraving had been deliberate. Trials weren't random sadism; they were tests with underlying logic, designed to filter for specific qualities. Thi world operated on that principle: weaknesses exposed and either overcome or proved fatal. 

So what had that trial actually tested? 

*Decisiveness under pressure. Resource allocation. The willingness to sacrifice for forward momentum.* 

The tiles hadn't been about luck. They'd been about commitment—each step a small death or a small victory, binary choices executed in rapid succession with incomplete information. The rats had been the time constraint, the pressure that prevented overthinking. And the final jump... 

Her lips twitched in something that wasn't quite a smile. 

*Make impossible possible. Reject the premise that "can't" is an answer.* 

It fit. The whole design fit a philosophy: that the future belonged to those who moved toward it without hesitation, who tested the ground but didn't freeze when all tests failed, who *jumped* when jumping was the only option left. 

She'd passed. The four who'd gone ahead hadn't. 

The thought should have carried more weight—four lives ended, four people who'd followed her because she'd projected confidence—but it arrived as data, or an unbiased truth, filed away with the same detachment as her injury assessment. They'd failed the test. She hadn't. The trial continued. 

*Is that cold? Probably. Effective? Definitely.* 

Her mind shifted to the broader pattern, the pieces of information she'd been accumulating since the Emergence, scattered fragments that were beginning to coalesce into something approaching understanding. 

Cursions. Soul-weapons. Every Outworlder supposedly had one—a supposed manifestation of their essence, their experiences, their *self* made tangible. But she hadn't summoned hers. Didn't know how. The sword she carried was stolen, practical, mundane. A tool, not an extension of her being. 

*So how do you acquire what's supposedly already yours?* 

The question had been gnawing at her since she'd first heard the term. The Terraldians who'd mentioned it—always with that mixture of awe and disdain reserved for Outworlders—never explained the mechanism. It was assumed knowledge, something the summoned should *just know*. 

But she didn't. And neither did most of the Outworlders she'd encountered in her first desperate day, the ones who'd died to starvation or monsters or the casual cruelty of a world that viewed them as invasive pests. 

The corridor opened into a wider chamber, empty except for more of the same ancient stone and the omnipresent sense of weight—centuries of suffering compressed into architecture. Mauve paused, listening. No screaming here. No sounds of combat or death. Just silence. 

Her thoughts drifted unbidden to Earth. To the life before. 

*This isn't even the worst I've faced.* 

The realization arrived without drama, a simple comparison between contexts. The rats had been terrifying, yes. The acid, the tiles, the exhaustion—all real threats to her continued existence. But the *fear* they'd generated was manageable, containable. Physical threats had clear solutions: fight better, move faster, think sharper. 

Earth had offered different horrors. Subtler ones. The kind that couldn't be killed with a sword. 

The slow suffocation of a corporate hierarchy designed to crush ambition under bureaucratic weight. The petty tyrannies of mediocre men in positions of power, leveraging authority to mask incompetence. The endless, grinding frustration of watching opportunities slip away because she'd been born the wrong gender, the wrong class, lacking the right connections—because the game was rigged and everyone pretended it wasn't. 

The casual cruelty of a system that demanded you smile while it bled you, that called your exhaustion "lack of resilience" and your anger "unprofessionalism." 

*At least here the enemies have teeth I can see.* 

There was a freedom in that, perverse as it was. The rules of Terraldia were harsh but *honest*. Monsters wanted to eat you. Demons wanted to corrupt you. The acid would dissolve you. No pretense. No gaslighting. Just clear cause and effect. 

And more importantly: here, she could *act*. Could take the variables presented—rats, tiles, acid, other people—and arrange them into solutions. Could use her mind not to navigate political labyrinths designed by idiots, but to survive genuine threats through genuine strategy. 

*Everything is a resource. Everyone is a tool. Every situation has leverage points.* 

It was how she'd always operated, the fundamental framework that made sense of chaos. On Earth, that approach had been punished, constrained, forced into acceptable channels that dulled its edge. Here, it was *necessary*. The four Outworlders who'd followed her onto the tiles—she could have mourned them, could have dwelt on their lost potential. 

She hadn't engineered their deaths. But she'd *used* them, in the way that any competent strategist used available assets. 

*Is that monstrous? Maybe. Does it keep me alive? Absolutely.* 

The thought should have disturbed her. She waited for the guilt, the moral recoil that good people were supposed to feel when they treated human lives as game pieces. 

It didn't come. 

What came instead was a colder realization, one that made her steps slow as she processed it: 

*The only thing I'm actually afraid of... is finding Millow.* 

The admission crystallized with uncomfortable clarity. Rats, demons, acid, trials—these were all problems with solutions. Variables to manipulate. Obstacles to overcome through superior strategy and will. 

But Millow was different. Millow was the one variable she couldn't afford to lose, the one piece on the board that mattered beyond its tactical value. And that meant Millow was the one thing that could *break* her—not through death or pain, but through failure. 

*What if I find him and he's already gone? What if I'm too late? What if I reach him and still can't keep him safe?* 

Those were the scenarios that made her chest tighten, that introduced uncertainty into the otherwise clean logic of survival. Because there was no backup plan for Millow. No alternative strategy. No acceptable loss ratio. 

It was inefficient. Irrational. A weakness that any competent opponent could exploit. 

And Mauve knew, with absolute certainty, that she'd defend that weakness anyway. Would burn every other resource, sacrifice every other advantage, break every rule of strategic thinking to protect it. 

*That's the real trial, isn't it? Not the tiles. Not the rats. It's whether I can maintain control when the one thing I can't afford to lose is at stake.* 

The corridor ahead split into three paths. More choices. More tests. 

Mauve adjusted her grip on the stolen sword and chose the middle path without hesitation, her mind already moving to the next problem, the next calculation. 

Behind her, the bones of the four who'd failed dissolved in acid, forgotten. 

Ahead, somewhere in the dark, Millow waited. 

And Mauve walked forward, driven by the same unyielding logic that had carried her through rats and tiles and three weeks of hell: 

*Identify the objective. Assess the resources. Execute the plan. Adapt when it fails. Never stop moving forward.* 

Everything else—guilt, fear, doubt, the trembling exhaustion in her limbs—was secondary data, logged and filed away for later processing. 

The trial continued. 

And she would pass. 

Because failure wasn't an option she was willing to accept. 

On the place, not near but not too far, the stairway spiraled downward like the throat of some vast stone beast, each step worn smooth by centuries of condemned feet. Torchlight flickered against wet stone walls, casting shadows that writhed and twisted with each movement of the procession. The air grew thicker with every descending tier—first cool and damp, then progressively warmer, carrying with it the particular stench of human misery: unwashed bodies, rot, and the acrid bite of fear-sweat that had seeped into the very mortar. 

Prince Eryth moved with the fluid, economical grace of someone utterly comfortable in his own body. Each step was placed with unconscious precision, his weight distributed perfectly, his hand resting on the pommel of his sword not from tension but from habit—the way a craftsman's fingers naturally found their tools. His royal attire, deep crimson and black, seemed designed more for function than ceremony despite its obvious quality: reinforced at the joints, unencumbered by excessive decoration, the kind of clothing that wouldn't hinder movement if violence suddenly demanded it. 

Behind him, Aegean walked with his wrists bound, the rope connecting them a physical manifestation of controlled threat. His posture was straight despite the restraints, his movements measured and deliberate in a way that suggested he was cataloguing every detail of their descent—counting steps, noting guard positions, mapping exit routes with the same methodical precision one might bring to solving a complex equation. His expression remained utterly neutral, a mask of stone that revealed nothing of the calculations occurring behind those dark eyes. 

The guards flanked them in practiced formation, their armor creating a rhythmic clink-clink-clink that echoed off the stone walls. Professional. Alert. But there was a tension in their shoulders, a tightness in the way they gripped their spears that spoke to the same awareness Eryth felt in his gut: something was wrong here, in the air itself, a wrongness that preceded any visible evidence. 

"We are already too late for saving them." 

Aegean's voice cut through the descending silence with the flat certainty of stated fact, not prediction. No inflection. No emotion. Just data presented for consideration. 

Eryth's jaw tightened, a muscle jumping beneath the skin. His hand flexed once on the sword pommel before he forced it to stillness. When he spoke, the words came out edged with barely controlled irritation—the kind that came from being told something he already suspected but refused to acknowledge. 

"How do you know?" 

The question was sharp, challenging, carrying an undercurrent of prove it or shut up that needed no elaboration. 

"I just do." 

Two words. Delivered with the same maddening neutrality, as though the certainty of his knowledge was self-evident and required no justification. It was the kind of answer that made Eryth's teeth grind together, the smug unassailability of someone who operated on internal logic no one else was privy to. 

Eryth turned his head just enough to fix Aegean with a glare that had made lesser men flinch—a look that combined princely authority with the promise of very immediate, very physical consequences. It was the look of someone used to being obeyed, to having his questions answered fully and immediately, not dismissed with cryptic non-explanations. 

Aegean met the glare with the same empty expression, unaffected, as though the prince's displeasure was simply another variable to be noted and filed away. His eyes moved past Eryth then, scanning the dungeon cells that lined the walls—dark cavities filled with human shapes that pressed against bars or huddled in corners, faces too filthy and hollow to distinguish individual features. Prisoners who'd been rotting here long before today's crisis, who would continue rotting long after. 

His gaze returned to the prince, still empty of everything except that maddening, analytical distance. 

"Why would I be brought to the gaols again?" 

The question was posed with genuine curiosity, the kind of intellectual puzzlement someone might express when encountering an inefficient system. Not fear. Not resentment. Just the simple need to understand the pattern, to identify the logic governing his current situation. 

Eryth's response was immediate, clipped, each word bitten off with cold precision: 

"I know my sister." 

Three words that contained entire volumes of sibling dynamics—the resigned acknowledgment of inevitable chaos, the weary acceptance that Pomelia's schemes always required participants, willing or otherwise. There was something almost tired in the way he said it, beneath the spite. The exhaustion of someone who'd learned long ago that arguing with a force of nature was pointless; you could only brace for impact and try to maintain your footing. 

The stairway finally opened into a vast chamber—the antechamber to the gaols proper. The ceiling arched high above, lost in shadow despite the numerous torches that lined the walls. The massive gates ahead dominated the space, ancient iron reinforced with bands of some darker metal that seemed to drink in the light rather than reflect it. Runes covered every surface, glowing faintly with a sickly green luminescence that pulsed in slow, rhythmic patterns like a diseased heartbeat. 

The gates were open. 

And standing before them, silhouetted against the darkness beyond, was Princess Pomelia. 

She turned as they approached, and even in the dim light her presence was immediately distinct from her brother's. Where Eryth moved with physical confidence, Pomelia radiated an entirely different kind of certainty—the manic energy of someone whose mind was always three steps ahead of the current conversation, already exploring tangents and possibilities that wouldn't become relevant for another five minutes. Her clothing was practical in a different way than Eryth's: covered in pockets and small pouches, ink stains on her sleeves, the organized chaos of someone who treated their body as a mobile laboratory. 

Her smile was bright, sharp, the kind that preceded either brilliance or disaster with equal probability. 

"Sister?" Eryth's voice carried genuine surprise beneath the practiced neutrality, his stride not breaking as he covered the remaining distance. 

"Oh here you are, Eryth! And the celebrity is here, I guess." 

Her eyes shifted to Aegean, and in that moment something flickered across her expression—rapid assessment, cataloguing, the same look a naturalist might give a particularly interesting specimen. The guards around them immediately dropped to one knee, fists to chest, heads bowed in the formal obeisance due royal blood. The thump of armored knees hitting stone echoed through the chamber. 

Pomelia waved a hand dismissively at the display, already turning back to the gates, her attention fragmenting across multiple points of interest simultaneously. 

"What are you doing here?" Eryth asked, his tone shifting to something more familiar, more brotherly—exasperation mixed with concern. "Shouldn't you be in the Thaumaturge by now?" 

The Thaumaturge. The royal academy's highest research tower, where the kingdom's most brilliant and most dangerous minds conducted work that was carefully not discussed in polite company. Pomelia's natural habitat. 

"Oh well, I have to see the action for myself, but it turns out we're already too late." 

She gestured into the darkness beyond the gates with a theatrical flourish that somehow managed to be both casual and precise. Her fingers traced the air in patterns that might have been unconscious or might have been some kind of mental notation, mapping invisible connections. 

They moved forward, boots crossing the threshold, and the reality of "too late" revealed itself in visceral detail. 

The entrance corridor—what should have been a space filled with nervous Outworlders and disciplined guards preparing for the trials—was instead a charnel house. Bodies lay scattered across the stone floor in postures that told stories of sudden, savage violence. Guards in the kingdom's colors, their armor rent open like paper, chests and abdomens torn apart with enough force to expose the cavity beneath. Entrails painted the walls in dark streaks. Blood pooled in the uneven floor, still wet enough to reflect torchlight. 

And among the human dead: rats. Dozens of them, their corpses bloated and wrong, flesh stretched over frames that had grown beyond natural proportion. Some had split open, revealing internal structures that resembled nothing from the natural world—extra organs pulsing with residual dark energy, bones that branched and merged in impossible configurations. 

The smell hit like a physical blow—copper and shit and rot, underlaid with something sweeter and more nauseating. Chemical wrongness. The particular stench of corruption magic's aftermath. 

Eryth's hand moved to his sword, fingers wrapping around the hilt with practiced ease. His body shifted subtly into a more grounded stance, weight distributed for quick movement in any direction. His eyes scanned the carnage with the rapid, systematic assessment of someone trained for combat: threat evaluation, exit routes, ambient sound analysis. The playful energy that had characterized his earlier movements hardened into something more predatory, more focused. 

"So the demon intrusion was true. They all ran inside?" 

His voice had changed too—flatter, clearer, the verbal equivalent of drawing a blade. All business now. 

"Yes, it's only a matter of time before they are all dead." 

Pomelia's pronouncement carried no particular emotion, just the same matter-of-fact delivery Aegean had used earlier. A conclusion reached through logical analysis, stated for the record. 

Eryth turned to look at her, one eyebrow raised, his expression caught between disbelief and dark amusement. 

"And what? We'll go there and like... save them?" 

The sarcasm was thick enough to cut, delivered with the particular inflection of someone pointing out an obvious absurdity. His free hand gestured vaguely at the corpse-strewn corridor as evidence of the futility of such an endeavor. 

Pomelia's response came immediate and sharp, her tone shifting to something harder, more cutting: 

"You think we should just send other people to do the job? This is a work of a demon. We cannot afford to lose more lives here." 

The implication hung heavy: we are the ones equipped for this. Anyone else is just more corpses. 

Eryth's laugh was short, bitter, carrying an edge that could draw blood. 

"Coming from you who experiments on people's lives for your study?" 

The accusation landed with the weight of old arguments, familiar territory. Pomelia's expression didn't shift—if anything, her smile sharpened, taking on a quality that suggested she'd heard this particular criticism enough times to be utterly immune to its sting. 

"Just shut up and come with me." 

Her tone was almost affectionate despite the words, the way one might address a particularly dramatic but ultimately harmless sibling. She was already moving, stepping over a dead guard's outstretched arm with practiced ease, her gaze fixed on the darkness ahead. 

"We already know the trials here, it'll just be easy. What's difficult is dealing with the atrocities inside and killing that demon—if we'll be able to catch it." 

There was a brightness in her voice now, an almost gleeful anticipation that sat uncomfortably against the backdrop of carnage. For Pomelia, this was a puzzle, a problem to be solved, and the bodies were just data points in a larger pattern. 

Eryth followed, his earlier reluctance evaporating in the face of forward momentum. When he spoke again, there was a matching energy in his voice—not glee exactly, but the kind of eager readiness that came before a good fight. 

"Fine, fine. I just hope that demon's strong enough to make our fight thrilling." 

Pomelia's chuckle was bright and sharp, bouncing off the stone walls. Aegean, still bound, still emotionless, watched this exchange with the flat regard of someone observing alien life forms engage in incomprehensible rituals. 

"You banter like this but lives are at danger." 

His scoff was barely audible, but it carried perfectly in the sudden silence that followed. Both siblings turned to look at him—Eryth with narrowed eyes, Pomelia with renewed interest. 

The guards reformed around them as they moved deeper, boots squelching in blood, armor creating a discordant rhythm against the heavy silence of the gaols. The corridor branched ahead, splitting into multiple paths that disappeared into darkness, each one marked with ancient symbols whose meanings had been lost to all but the most dedicated scholars. 

This was the fork. The choice point. 

Pomelia stopped, her head tilting as she scanned each path with rapid eye movements, her mind clearly running through calculations invisible to everyone else. When she spoke, her voice carried absolute authority, the certainty of someone who'd already mapped every probability and chosen the optimal distribution of resources. 

"You four—go there. And the others, go there. We three will go here." 

Her finger pointed to each path in turn, the middle one last—the narrowest, the one where distant screaming still echoed faintly. The guards moved immediately, splitting into designated groups without question. This was the kind of command that didn't invite discussion. 

"Save the Outworlders from those abominations." 

The order was almost an afterthought, delivered over her shoulder as she was already stepping toward the middle path. Eryth followed, his hand still on his sword. Aegean moved with them, bound wrists held before him, his pace matching theirs exactly despite the restraints. 

They passed the stone tablet embedded in the wall, its surface worn smooth by centuries but the engraving still deep enough to catch torch-light: 

MARCH TOWARDS THE FUTURE 

None of them commented on it. Eryth's eyes flicked to it briefly, filed it away, moved on. Pomelia's gaze lingered for perhaps half a second longer, her lips moving silently as though testing the words, before her attention fragmented again to the path ahead. Aegean read it with the same empty expression he'd worn since they'd descended, giving no indication whether the message resonated or registered at all. 

The corridor opened into the trial chamber, and the evidence of battle became impossible to ignore. 

More rats. Dead rats, their bodies scattered across the stone in patterns that spoke to methodical execution rather than panicked defense. Clean cuts. Precise strikes. Throats opened. Skulls split. Each kill had been efficient, wasting no motion, no energy beyond what was necessary to end the threat. 

Pomelia moved toward the nearest corpse, dropping into a crouch with the kind of graceless efficiency that suggested aesthetic consideration was entirely secondary to function. Her hands moved over the rat's body without hesitation, fingers probing the wounds, examining the exposed internal structures. The stench intensified this close—corruption magic left a particular residue, a sweetness that coated the back of the throat—but she seemed utterly unbothered, her focus absolute. 

Eryth remained standing, though his nose wrinkled slightly at the smell. His eyes continued their scanning pattern, never settling, constantly reassessing the space for threats or useful information. The bodies didn't interest him the way they did his sister; they were simply environmental features, obstacles that had been neutralized. 

"These rats again." 

Pomelia's voice was muffled slightly by her proximity to the corpse, but her tone carried unmistakable excitement—the verbal equivalent of a scholar finding an unexpected reference in an ancient text. 

"And I am now seeing that they all had traces of corrupting demonic magic." 

She stood, wiping her hands on her clothes with casual disregard for the blood and ichor now staining the fabric. Her eyes were bright, her expression animated in a way that suggested the pieces of some larger puzzle were beginning to click into place. 

"But how can a demon truly infiltrate our kingdom like this? I can't think of a possibility for that." 

The admission came without embarrassment—just genuine puzzlement, the frustration of encountering a gap in her knowledge. Her hands moved as she spoke, tracing patterns in the air that might have been unconscious visualization of concepts or might have been some kind of gestural thinking aid. 

Eryth stepped over a rat corpse, his boot coming down precisely between the outstretched limbs without looking down—the kind of spatial awareness that was pure instinct, body and environment in perfect unconscious communication. 

"Dark sects and cults have always been a problem, right?" 

The statement was delivered with the tone of someone pointing out the obvious solution, though there was an undertone of question—testing whether this simple explanation held water against his sister's more complex analysis. 

"Yes, but—" 

Pomelia's hands waved dismissively, already three steps ahead, already deconstructing why that answer was insufficient. 

"In order to summon a demon or try to control them—which is of course seemingly impossible for small hidden taboo cults that requires immense dark magic and sacrifices—we'll be able to detect it immediately through an uncontrollable fluctuating demonic energy." 

She spoke rapidly, the words tumbling over each other in her haste to articulate the chain of logic. Her pacing had begun, a restless circular motion that suggested her body needed to move to keep up with her racing thoughts. 

"It's one of you." 

Aegean's voice cut through her explanation like a blade through cloth—quiet, flat, utterly certain. His head was still lowered, gaze fixed somewhere near the middle distance, but the words carried absolute conviction. 

Pomelia stopped mid-stride, turning to face him fully. Eryth's hand tightened on his sword hilt, his body shifting slightly—not quite aggressive, but prepared for it. 

"What?" 

The single word from Pomelia was sharp with interest rather than offense. 

"The one who caused all this was one of you nobles. That should be obvious from your explanation." 

Aegean's delivery remained emotionless, presenting the conclusion as though it were a mathematical proof—step A plus step B necessarily equals step C, and anyone who couldn't see it was simply missing the logical framework. 

Eryth's brow furrowed, the expression flickering across his face too quickly to settle into full suspicion but lingering long enough to show the seed had been planted. Pomelia, conversely, smiled—a genuine expression of delight that transformed her features, making her look suddenly younger, more alive. 

"Hmm. So you even have a brain aside from your cursion. Okay, I'll take note of that. If it's one of—" 

She stopped mid-sentence, the words dying on her lips. Her eyes widened fractionally, pupils dilating as her gaze fixed on nothing, staring through the wall into some internal space where connections were forming, patterns emerging from chaos. 

The silence stretched for three heartbeats. Four. Her expression cycled through a rapid series of micro-changes—realization, comprehension, calculation, and finally a whispered curse that carried more weight than a shout: 

"He's right." 

The words came out slowly, each one placed with care, as though she was testing their validity even as she spoke them. 

"I just remembered that we were working with the essence of corruption magic back then! This is... this is..." 

Her hands came up, fingers threading through her hair, gripping tight enough that her knuckles went white. 

"Shit. Someone found out about what I'm working on and used it to get rid of Outworlders. But why?" 

The frustration in her voice was palpable now, the irritation of encountering a variable that didn't fit the emerging pattern. She resumed her pacing, more agitated now, her previous excitement curdling into something more intense, more focused. 

Eryth, meanwhile, had crouched near a different cluster of rat corpses, his attention fixed on the wounds with the kind of practical curiosity that had nothing to do with magical theory and everything to do with tactical assessment. 

"And why are there dead rats here?" 

His question was simpler, more direct, cutting through the theoretical complexity to address the immediate physical evidence. His finger traced the air above one of the cuts—clean, decisive, the kind of wound that required skill and strength in equal measure. 

"All this time and that's just what you're thinking?" 

Aegean's mockery was delivered with the same flat affect, but there was a barely perceptible shift in his tone—the verbal equivalent of an eye roll, condensed into pure disdain for what he perceived as wasted mental energy on irrelevant details. 

The effect on Eryth was immediate and visceral. He rose from his crouch in one fluid motion, his body already turning, his hand coming up in a fist that promised very immediate violence. His face had shifted into something harder, the playful prince replaced entirely by someone who'd clearly hit people for lesser insults. 

"Stop! I'm thinking." 

Pomelia's voice cracked through the space like a whip, her palm raised in a halting gesture that brooked no argument. She didn't even look at them, her attention still fixed inward, but the command in her tone was absolute. 

Eryth froze mid-motion, his fist still raised, his body vibrating with checked aggression. Several seconds passed before he slowly, deliberately lowered his arm, the movement controlled but clearly requiring effort. 

"She's just thinking now?" 

Aegean's question carried genuine puzzlement beneath the mockery, as though the concept of not constantly thinking was foreign enough to merit comment. 

Eryth's response came through gritted teeth, forced civility barely masking the desire to resume the interrupted punch: 

"No, she's always thinking, and now she's more thinking. She's a Kaleid—you'll never understand her mind or her logic." 

There was something almost protective in the explanation despite its irritation, the grudging acknowledgment of a sibling whose brilliance was as much burden as gift. The term—Kaleid—was delivered with the weight of significance, a label that apparently explained everything about Pomelia's behavior to those who understood its meaning. 

"A Kaleid?" 

Aegean muttered the word, testing it, filing it away into whatever vast internal database he maintained. 

Pomelia continued her pacing, oblivious or uncaring of the near-violence behind her. Her lips moved constantly, fragmentary words escaping in a continuous stream of half-formed thoughts: 

"Well if it's—then it's—" 

Cut off. Restart. 

"But that would mean—no, unless—" 

Cut off. Restart. 

Her hands gestured in the air, drawing invisible diagrams, connecting points only she could see. 

Then she stopped. Turned. Her expression had crystallized into something approaching certainty, that particular brightness that came when disparate pieces suddenly aligned into coherent pattern. 

"I got it." 

The words carried triumph, satisfaction, the verbal equivalent of a puzzle piece clicking into place. 

"There's a connection to Aegean's story, and the dead rats here, and why corruption magic was used. It seems someone might've awakened too. I think I have a hypothesis on the cursions." 

She turned fully to face Aegean, and her smile was sharp enough to cut, bright with the kind of intellectual excitement that preceded either breakthrough or catastrophe. 

"You summon it through powerful will of survival, a great surge of the so-called soul energy logically happens when your emotions fuel up your adrenaline and your lives are at hopeless stake, isn't it?" 

The theory was delivered with the rapid-fire precision of someone who'd already tested it against multiple mental models and found it sound. She waited, watching Aegean's face for confirmation. 

His expression remained empty. No confirmation. No denial. Just that same maddening neutrality. 

"I'm probably right." 

Pomelia accepted his silence as validation, or at least as lack of contradiction, which for her purposes was the same thing. She resumed her pacing, her thoughts already spiraling outward from this central revelation. 

"And that perpetrator might probably still be here to cause more harm, but the question is how? Fuck, this is more complicated than what I had imagined it to be. I have to go back to Thaumaturge for this so I can, uhh..." 

She trailed off, her attention fragmenting across too many simultaneous considerations, each one demanding equal priority. 

Eryth's patience—never his strongest virtue—had clearly reached its limit. His voice cut through her spiral with the blunt force of someone who preferred action to analysis: 

"Can't we just stop fussing about what happened or what shit not? Let's go or all we'll see are dead Outworlders." 

Practical. Direct. Focused entirely on the immediate next step rather than the larger theoretical framework. It was the kind of intervention that had probably saved Pomelia from her own thought spirals countless times before. 

Pomelia's gaze snapped to him, then shifted to Aegean, and something new entered her expression—calculation mixed with mischief, the look of someone about to make a decision that would annoy everyone involved but which made perfect sense to her. 

"Except for him." 

She gestured toward Aegean with a casual flip of her hand. 

"I think you should remove those ropes. He might help us. Don't you want to see what that cursion can do?" 

The suggestion was delivered with the kind of innocent enthusiasm that couldn't quite hide the underlying agenda: I want to see what happens. This will be interesting. 

Eryth's sigh was long, suffering, carrying the weight of a thousand similar conversations that had ended with him doing exactly what Pomelia suggested despite his better judgment. 

"I knew you'd do that. If he goes berserk, this is all your fault." 

The accusation was pre-emptive, establishing blame before the inevitable disaster occurred. 

Pomelia's laugh was bright and utterly unrepentant. 

"Oh please, brother, as if you really care. If he goes berserk, he dies. Stop pressing my buttons." 

The dismissal was casual but carried absolute certainty—the confidence of someone who knew exactly what level of threat they could handle and had already calculated that Aegean, cursion or not, fell within acceptable parameters. 

"You're that arrogant?" 

Aegean's question was posed with genuine curiosity rather than judgment, as though he was trying to determine whether her confidence was justified or delusional. 

"No, we're that powerful." 

Pomelia's correction came with a smile that was all teeth. 

"You have a brain despite having a personality of a cat, so I'll kinda trust you, okay?" 

The backhanded compliment was delivered with the same cheerful energy as everything else, seemingly oblivious to how deeply insulting it might be perceived. 

"You don't know what you're doing." 

Aegean's warning carried no heat, just the flat statement of observed fact. 

"And you don't know us." 

Pomelia's response was immediate, sharp, final. She held his gaze for a moment longer, then turned away, her attention already shifting to the path ahead as Eryth approached Aegean with clear reluctance. 

The prince's hands moved to the ropes with practiced efficiency, his fingers working the knots while his eyes stayed fixed on Aegean's face, watching for any sign of sudden movement or aggression. The bindings fell away, hitting the stone floor with a soft thud. 

Aegean brought his hands forward, rubbing his wrists where the rope had chafed, his expression still utterly neutral. No gratitude. No acknowledgment. Just the simple restoration of mobility, accepted as data. 

Pomelia had moved to the edge of the chamber, staring into the next section of the trial—the acid pits, the scattered bones, the narrow tile path stretching into darkness. Her voice, when it came, carried a different quality now: genuine interest, the kind of focused curiosity that suggested everything prior had been preamble to this, the real puzzle. 

"But I want to know... who's powerful enough to have killed these many rats in this trial. I can't wait to meet them soon." 

Her smile widened as she stared into the dark, her mind already racing ahead, already imagining the variables and possibilities, already treating the unknown survivor as another fascinating piece in the larger pattern. 

Behind her, Eryth's hand found his sword again, settling into the comfortable weight of it. 

Aegean stood between them, unbound now, his dark eyes scanning the acid trial with the same methodical assessment he'd applied to everything else. 

And somewhere ahead, in the darkness beyond the tiles and the acid and the bones of those who'd failed, another trial waited. 

Along with whoever had been strong enough, clever enough, ruthless enough to survive it.