The Brayhound still lived.
But barely recognizable. Its body was mangled — ribs jutting like broken timbers under torn hide, one hind leg twisted unnaturally, and strips of flesh hanging loose as if the creature had slammed against every jagged inch of the chasm wall. Its jaw sagged crookedly, half shattered, and one eye was simply gone. The remaining eye burned with a trembling, unbearable hatred.
Kael felt his stomach lurch at the sight. The thing should've been dead. Nothing that wrecked should even breathe.
"How… is it even moving…?" he whispered, though the answer formed in his mind before the old man could speak. Was it revenge? A final animal obsession, fixated on him? It felt absurdly plausible. Logical, even.
The creature answered not with thought, but with a wet, choking snarl as it hurled itself upward.
Its impact struck the metal lattice like a hammer, rattling it from end to end.
"Move!" the old man shouted, and their sprint began.
Kael dashed forward across the groaning beams, the metal vibrating beneath his boots. Ahead of him, the boy moved with uncanny balance, barely seeming to touch the structure. The old man was ahead, surprisingly quick for someone his age. Last trailed the guard—slower, weighed down by armor and an increasingly colorful vocabulary of curses as he struggled to keep up.
Another slam shook the framework from below, harder than the last. Kael staggered as the beam dipped sharply and rebounded.
The guard reached him just in time, grabbing Kael's shoulder to stop himself from toppling. "Don't you dare fall!" the man roared, though fear cracked the edges of his voice.
Kael didn't answer. His eyes were fixed on the grotesque shape rising again — its body dragging up the metal skeleton with the stubborn will of a corpse refusing burial. Each movement left bits of flesh behind.
Then the brayhound leapt — despite its broken body — and struck the beams beneath them with full, desperate force. The entire framework screamed. Metal warped. Bolts snapped like brittle twigs. The beam supporting Kael and the guard lurched downward with a sound that felt like the beginning of collapse.
"No—!"
The structure buckled. Kael tried to catch himself, but the metal simply vanished beneath him. He and the guard dropped together, the man's grip locking around Kael's arm.
For a brief, sickening moment, Kael felt himself being dragged downward by pure dead weight. The man's armor pulled them both like a stone tied to a rope. Kael's feet scraped frantically against open air.
The chasm widened beneath them, hungry.
The guard screamed.
But Kael didn't.
Instinct swallowed thought. His shackled arm snapped upward, the chain rattling violently as he flung it toward a horizontal beam above. The chain lashed through the air — caught — clanged — wrapped — until it tightened.
His body jerked mid-fall, pain spiking up his arm like fire. His wrist tore against the metal cuff. Below him, the guard still clung desperately, dragging him down, but their grip was slippery with sweat and panic.
"No—no—!"
The guard's fingers slid free.
And he fell.
Kael barely saw him vanish into the abyss — only felt the sudden release of weight and the absence of pull — before darkness swallowed the armored figure whole.
And then the Brayhound, still crawling, still full of impossible malice, tumbled after him too, its final snarl echoing upward like a curse.
Kael didn't reach the bottom.
Not yet.
The chain snapped taut around the beam he'd caught.
A brutal jolt ripped through him, the kind that felt like bone shattering. The shackle cinched mercilessly, nearly wrenching his arm from its socket. Kael screamed as his body swung sideways, dangling in the center of the yawning void. The world blurred — black stone above, deeper black below — everything spinning as he tried to suck in breath after breath.
The chain held. Somehow.
He dangled there, feet kicking uselessly, one hand locked around the links as if gripping them could keep the world from dropping him.
His wrist throbbed with a pain that bordered on blinding. His shoulder felt wrong, stretched too far, too violently. Each breath came sharp and uneven, like knives scraping his lungs. But he didn't dare look down.
Above him, the metal framework groaned under shifting weight, bits of debris pattering against his shoulders and dropping past him into the dark. Every little sound echoed strangely, swallowed too soon, as though the chasm devoured noise as hungrily as it would devour him.
Kael tried to pull himself upward, but the effort sent another spike of pain through his already brutalized arm. His vision pulsed in and out, the edges darkening. Sweat prickled across his skin despite the cold air. He clenched his teeth and tried again, pulling just enough to stop himself from spinning.
'Not like this... not like this...'
Kael forced himself to focus, to cling to the pain as an anchor to reality. The cold bit into his fingers. These small sensations grounded him, kept him awake, kept him from sinking into the darkness that beckoned below.
Then — something changed.
A faint vibration, soft enough that he thought he imagined it, hummed somewhere above. The air shifted. His skin prickled. A familiar pressure — heavy yet gentle — pressed at the edges of his awareness like a presence leaning close.
A dark shimmer appeared.
Slowly, weightlessly, a small obsidian orb drifted downward. It moved like ink suspended in water, swirling lazily through the air until it hovered before his chest.
Kael's breath caught. His eyes widened. Even through the agony, a thread of recognition unfurled inside him.
The orb pulsed once, softly.
Then it flowed toward him, sinking into his chest like smoke slipping through skin.
Cold flooded his ribs first. Then warmth. Then finally... nothing.
Just darkness blooming behind his eyes.