Exmortus III: Tombs in Chorus

Book Three: Tombs in Chorus

By Todd Maternowski

Copyright 2014 Todd Maternowski

Smashwords Edition

Additional rants, raves, and other time-wasting pursuits are available on the official website:

https://wild-ink.net/

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

ISBN-13:

9781310985850

What others are saying about EXMORTUS:

There are real night terrors in this world and they must be stopped at any cost... the action moves at a fast pace and for this reason Exmortus is an easy read, with the reader experiencing Ash’s journey with him and getting that sense of danger and urgency that reflects in his mission.

-Elloise Hopkins

It’s a fresh angle on the traveling story ... the dialogue felt genuine, the characters seemed real.

-Zen Cherry

The author's fantasy world is a harsh, brutal place where mistakes lead to death and trust is a commodity that's price may prove to be too high... The world is full of history and monuments that are interesting and bring to mind the vast scale and epic nature of Tolkien's works... If you like your fantasy brutal, then this is the book for you.

-Eric Swett

This is the perfect book for anyone who likes a good adventure story.

-A Bookish Affair

The characters are well developed, they grow on you, they make you laugh and add a solid amount of depth to an already deeply engaging story... This novel is hard to put down once the story kicks into high gear and never really lets up at any point.

-John Casanova

Dark fantasy literature with a sense of humor, which is not something you see all that often.

-Keith Riskey

A compelling and well written novel from a promising new author... For a debut novel, the growth process from start to finish is significant and given the end result, I can't wait to read the next book in the series.

-Matthieu Hausig

This is a great book for young readers, both male and female or anyone who loves a good book with believable characters.

-Night Owl Reviews

For Drake Xavier

Prologue

Starlight tormented him, threatening the thin wisps of life. He alone understood the danger those distant stellar explosions represented, those bright, too-obvious reminders of sudden and inevitable annihilation. Alone among his kind, he pondered the milky skies and realized that his tiny and insignificant world was enveloped by trillions of dire omens, warnings that the small amount of power his kind enjoyed would someday come to a quick and purposeless end.

At first it depressed him —none of his kind, even his own Creator, took his idea seriously, blind and bored as they were to the vast reaches of soulless space around them— and his Creator assured him that the distances were too great, the advantages gained too infinitesimal. Hints were dropped that such a thing may have happened already —perhaps more than once— in the very distant past, a past his kind happily forgot.

Rather than engage in the constant warring and copulating that distracted the others, he decided to wait out the Doom and accept oblivion before it inevitably arrived. He found a mortal youth of exceptional beauty and violently manifested within it, casting the mortal's own soul into a nearby stone. With this new form acting as a self-imposed prison, he journeyed to the bottom of the deepest ocean he could find, and waited.

The vast, blind beasts that fought like gods miles beneath the surface did not bother or entertain him —he saw right away how stupidly similar they were to his kind— and after several million years they ceased to exist. He watched with growing curiosity how these gargantuan leviathans established themselves as deities in their own narrow domain, fighting viciously over worthless spans of water even while completely ignoring the inhospitable wastes just a few miles above and below them. He felt a sortof gleeful condescension when these undersea behemoths were gradually defeated, not by more powerful versions of themselves, but by smaller, faster, quicker, more lithe creatures —beings that adapted to their changing surroundings, that could work together in groups to take down the individual: souls that did not agree to be trapped in an invisible hierarchy of their own imagination.

One by one the colossal emperors of the ocean floor were deposed, overcome, destroyed by creatures that should have posed no threat whatsoever. And, within another few million years, even these creatures, once so quick to adapt, were themselves murdered, their corpses devoured by newer, even quicker beings. He watched this process in rapt silence, a new idea growing slowly in his mind.

Finally, the Doom —or what he had assumed was the Doom— arrived on a nearby landmass. The stellar invasion that had tormented him since birth filled him with a childlike excitement he had never before experienced. But there were problems. The stellar divinities were, as his Creator had warned him, weak and impotent from the vast expanses traversed, unimpressive shells of themselves. They acted out their invasion with puny, mortal soldiers, their movements clumsy and poorly-coordinated, their aims hazy. Despite their wasteful incompetence, they still overcame the haughty beings that had ruled that particular landmass for eons, driving them nearly to the edge of his ocean. His own kind were nowhere to be found in this conflict, preferring to delegate to inferiors.

He watched his kind's passionless disinterest in these inconclusive early battles and after much thought, he decided to act. He emerged from the sea, still in his mortal prison, and offered to lead the newcomers to glory. The stellar newcomers did not understand him and attacked him at first, thinking he was another threat. Their weapons stung him in ways he didn't expect, but he persevered, gaining their trust in small steps, through premeditated acts of healing and kindness.

More slowly than he would have liked, the newcomers eventually came to him. They did not understand him, nor he they, but they allowed him to be near, to heal their kind when they were injured, and to make small animalistic suggestions when he could. But this phase never fully developed, as a new band of mortals arrived from the surface of his former ocean, an army of powerful individuals made insanely stronger by their organization, creativity, and intelligence. The stellar armies started suffering terrible losses, and despite his best efforts they were gradually pushed back across mountains, deserts and marshes. Whenever his people dealt a death-blow to their enemies, two new reinforcements arrived to replace each one that was lost, while each casualty on his side was irreplaceable, a soldier destroyed forever.

Worse still, these hosts of enemy recruits had the Taint. He sensed it immediately, a sick familiar feeling hidden in the steaming vapors of these mortals' spilled blood. It took him no time at all to know the source —his own Creator. He did not know what the Taint did, or what advantages it gave these puny mortals, but he suspected it had quite a lot to do with why his armies were losing ground. The betrayal infuriated him, causing him to lose control and wade into the thickest clusters of enemies he could find, laying waste to friend and foe alike until the soil was soaked for miles around in body fluids stinking of Taint.

Despite his rages, the enemy pressed on with increasing numbers, and in the blink of a few thousand years he had no choice but to openly concede defeat. Rounding up what few survivors he could find, they made a final stand against his Creator's corrupted minions. The stellar forces lost, and were nearly annihilated. Forced back into the dark mountain where they had first arrived, his people were sealed in by his Creator's slaves under millions of tons of sanctified rock, creating a dank and lightless prison that made him yearn for the days he spent at the bottom of the ocean. He realized his mistake now —he had too quickly attached himself to an obvious failure, having neither the experience nor the aptitude to lead living beings into war. The other gods were no doubt laughing at him, particularly his Creator, who had come from across the sea to this landmass for the sole purpose of adding His holy essence to the dark stone prison. He felt betrayed and angry, all the more so at himself for not waiting longer, waiting for a stronger, more focused, more intelligently aggressive harbinger of the Doom. His rages were beyond his control now, exacted on the twisted, tortured forms of those pathetic beings he had once healed and led. Trapped forever with the few wretches fortunate enough to hide from him, he had nothing to do but wait.

So he waited.

In time, his rages subsided. He turned them inwards, collected them as his kind did, accumulating vast stores of power he did not have previously. His people became feral, each new generation of offspring losing what little grip on sanity they had left. They hid their young from him, starved to death, sucking fungi off of moist rocks in underground lakes to survive, fighting each other to the death on sight. Some of the younger ones attacked him, not with the potent weapons they had long forgotten how to operate, but with claws and teeth and raw fury. It brought him great sadness to destroy these poor copies of the impotent originals.

His despair increased with each passing year until he felt It stir. He did not know what It was or how he could feel It, but for a span of a breath he felt It move, in It's own prison —one even deeper inside the earth than his own. The mountain rocked to its very foundations for a few minutes, the tunnels and chambers blowing with stale, cold air that issued through vents leading from the very center of the earth. Without knowing why, he knew that those exact same mortals that had cheated and defeated him, that had driven him into this prison with the straggling remains of his people —these mortals had been annihilated by a power so alien, so ancient that it must have arrived when his Creator was still young. There was a force out there, buried in an inaccessible vault, that even the gods feared.

This filled him with hope.

He cast aside his homicidal ways and began to take an active role in the development of the degenerate offspring. Having long lost their own language, he created a new one for them, one which they could use despite their physical deformities. Once a base of communication was established, he began to teach them, mentoring them in the arts long lost by their ancestors. His people were still feral and wild, but with time their children surpassed them in learning and organization, and their children's children improved and advanced far beyond even that level.

Still, there was so much remaining, so much knowledge left to impart into their limited minds when he heard the explosion. Far off across the mountain, in a vast chamber near the western ridge, he detected a crack in his prison's walls. His first impulse was to shriek in joy —had It overcome the elders of his kind? Had the entity they feared triumphed, and come to release him?

A moment later this pleasant feeling dissipated: Its presence was nowhere near him, even now. He approached the breach, wondering if one of his people, perhaps one of the brighter students, had discovered a way to escape. There was a metallic encasement of ancient weapons located in that precise chamber, after all... but when he arrived, he was greeted with an unexpected sight. Two of his kind were there, but their presence was almost undetectable, their ability to communicate nearly nonexistent. They were attended to by two mortals, one of which had a deranged, twisted nature that was partially mortal, but partially something else. New and alien, it felt deliciously threatening.

The other had just a trace —the faintest of traces— of the Taint.

He did not know what this meant. Expecting rage, he felt nothing but sheer, exuberant joy. Could the Tainted have rebelled against his Creator? Was the elder, primal It in command of the mortal world —or better yet— had It wiped out those who had laughed at him, those of his own kind who had never listened to him and his idea?

He saw the opening in his prison behind the strangers, and decided to thank the two who had freed him. Extending his arms in embrace, the threatening mortal attacked. Using one of the old weapons, it sent an irritating blast of energy directly at his form, which recoiled. He did not wish to destroy those who had freed him, but he could not understand their motives, either. He did not know how long the breach would hold, and hesitated slightly in deciding whether to take on this unpredictable foe.

At that moment the Tainted mortal struck the threat in the head with a warm weapon and disappeared into the metallic encasement with the pair of unresponsive gods. He laughed at the absurdity of the situation: the threat fell easily, the encasement was swarmed by his people, many of whom emerged with the weapons of their forefathers. He looked around at the walls of the chamber and saw an army —was there really this many of his people left? Had they bred, survived and thrived to this extent under his guidance?

He knew their numbers, now, were greater than they had ever been. Greater than when they had alit on this landmass. They were hungrier, more intelligent, more subservient to him. They spoke a language of his devising, rather than the old one he never understood. Thousands had already taken the initiative, without waiting for his command, yet doing precisely what he would have wanted them to do. They armed themselves with their ancestor's weaponry and streamed out through the breach, out onto the landmass that was now their right.

Laughing and dancing, he led his people out into the clean, clear air. For the first time in eons, he felt the presence of his Creator, and wondered aloud what had transpired in his absence to make it so feeble, so weak. So sickly.

Chapter One – The Vessel

The heavy door slammed shut, severing the creature's pincers in half. In the darkness Ash heard the lost appendage scrabbling along the metallic floor, trying to reconnect to the shrieking thing outside.

Ash stepped away from the bloodcurdling screech of the fiend and backed into a rack of steely devices. He stumbled on tired legs and fell. One of the babies' heads smacked into the cold steel floor. Ash quickly got to his knees and grabbed both infants, still hanging from his shoulders in their makeshift harness, and squeezed them tightly to his chest.

Ash held his breath for a moment, his shoulders tensed, before the injured girl began to wail. The other followed suit, and immediately a high-pitched reptilian baying from the other side of the door joined them in chorus. The fiend pounded on the wall with its remaining appendages, the banshee shrieking for revenge.

The only sources of light Ash saw were the forearm-sized square tiles near the door, back-lit by a soft pale green glow. He knew it was only a matter of seconds before the beast discovered their function —he himself had only found it weeks before in the catacombs of the Dustmen thanks to a frantic combination of luck and fear. Once that door opened, the thing that had chased him this far would tear their soft flesh to ribbons.

He glanced around for a place to hide, for another door or passageway that would provide a few more seconds of life. Just as he spotted a smaller glowing tile, he heard the sickening hiss of the main door opening.

Ash bolted for the small lit tile. He pressed it in, hoping the beast would delay for a single moment when it found its severed pincers. The tile flickered but no door opened. The thing slithered along the metal floor toward him with inhuman speed. Ash released his hold on the infants, grabbed his staff with both hands and swung low in the darkness behind him.

The edge of his stick nicked something thin and in motion, causing it to loudly slide a foot or more to the left. Ash violently stopped his follow-through and shifted all his weight into a full-on upper-cut to the space the creature had just vacated. His muscles tensed, his lungs filled to capacity with the stale air of the vessel... and his staff passed harmlessly through empty air.

A stinging razor sliced through the boot on his left calf. Ash jumped on instinct, then felt a blast of steaming hot breath directly below him. With a final surge of adrenaline he brought his staff and his weight down on the creature underneath him. His staff smashed through a thick eggshell membrane with a sickening crunch that made his forearms and spine tingle. His feet landed hard on a thin, strong, cylindrical extremity of the beast, then harmlessly slipped off.

The creature thrashed around in the darkness, slapping its limbs against Ash's staff as he held it at arm's length and retreated back toward the large open door. The fiend's pincers scraped against the hard metallic walls, sending gouged-out clusters of stinging shrapnel in all directions. Hot droplets of blood from the infants mixed with the fluid already flowing from the gashes in his arms.

He pounded the glowing tile and the door opened with a hiss, alerting the wounded beast to his exact location. It ceased its mindless thrashing and lunged at him. Ash deftly stepped back from the door and swung his staff as the beast sped past, shoving its momentum forward. Then he slammed his palm on the glowing tile. The thing's hideous squeals led Ash to think that the door might have taken off more than half a pincer as it closed this time.

Adrenaline coursed through every vein in his body, flushing out his fear, his confusion, his doubt. Ash stepped back toward the smaller door and slipped in a slick puddle of the beast's ooze. He caught himself with his free left hand as it plunged a half-inch deep into the hot slime. The fluid seared his palm like molten-hot metal. Ash staggered to his feet, half the skin of his palm sizzling like freshly-cooked bacon. The creature howled a series of sharp, staccato gakgakgakakakak barks behind him, the demonic sounds covering the hiss of the opening door.

Ash bolted for the smaller door as the twisted fiend exploded into a whirlwind of blades, cutting through his clothes and the skin of his back with a frenzy of serrated pincers. Ash hit the small tile and swung wildly behind him, hitting a moving limb but doing no damage. The light flickered again as an insectoid appendage slit the nail off his index finger. The door did not budge. Ash slammed it with his scorched fist as a tentacle whipped across his backside. A noxious cloud of steaming breath hit Ash squarely in the face as he put his back to the small door.

The babies stopped crying and the door opened. Ash fell backwards with an awkward thump. Still laying prone he grabbed his staff with both hands and brought it down on the glowing tile with all his remaining strength. The tile exploded, sending bright green and blue sparks in all directions just as the door slammed shut. The creature instinctively drew back at the hiss and Ash was alone with the infants in the darkness, their blood seeping into his own gaping wounds, the drumming of their hearts drowning out the irregular mechanical buzzing noises coming from the smoking door.

The buzzing stopped as a collection of other noises, a series of shrill clacks and gakgakaks, melded with the muted screams of the beast. A sudden drowsiness overtook him, his vision and hearing moving in sluggish, ponderous waves. His muscles fought him, his eyes opening and closing like the heavy swinging gates of an untended church. A vision of the door wide open showed him bright green rolling hills under the clear morning air—then the door slammed shut and he was outside in the cavern, peering back at the smooth steel side of the vessel.

A quick tap of his foot and the images dissolved. Moments of lucid clarity slipped through the cracks and fissures of his blood-loss and exhaustion. The next few minutes ebbed and flowed with his terrors, hallucinations and paralysis. Questions with no clear answers fought tooth and nail, clambering over each other, and in their frenzied war began destroying whatever small sliver of mental stability he had left.

How many more are out there?

Where can I get food for the babies?

Did I kill Ludwig?

Why did I run from the Son of Torain?

Why did he make me feel so... so physically ill?

The noises outside resolved into the distant, drawn-out moans of faraway leviathans in the deep reaches of the ocean. A minute later the chamber was filled with light.

Ash kicked the door lightly but the illusion did not disappear. He and the babies were bleeding over the immaculately spare, smooth silver floor of a small rectangular room, perhaps four feet deep and twice that in width. Above him was the door he had just come through, small wisps of smoke issuing from its upper edges as well as the glowing tile that he had smashed with the staff. He laid his head down on the floor to look behind him and saw a strangely-ornate doorway to an even smaller room.

Ash's eyes focused on a circular dark spot at the far end of the smaller room. He gasped.

A window!

Ash spun to his feet and dashed into the smaller room with a strength he had not possessed a moment before. Treading lightly —whether by design or due to shoddy workmanship, the entirety of the small room seemed haphazardly connected to the floor and ceilings of the larger room, almost as if it was ready to fall off the entire vessel at a moment's notice— he cautiously stepped up to the tiny, face-sized window and peered out. At first he could not make out anything, as the cavern outside was far too dark, the light behind him far too bright. But after a few moments to allow his eyes to adjust, Ash started to see a sort of movement, a flowing, streaming motion that reminded him of a river of heavy black current. The illusion was arresting, and sleep began to wrest control of his senses once more.

Then a piece of the river stopped and turned. Ash did not understand what he was looking at. Or what was looking back at him.

BANG!

The beast was inches from his face, pressing its horrifying mandibles onto the thick glass-like material that separated them. Glistening mucus erupted from the creature's mouth and made visibility next to impossible. Ash recoiled in disgust. The thing scraped the area around the window with its claws —its muffled scratching echoing faintly through the walls and putting Ash's nerves on edge. He took another step back into the larger chamber, and the creature, called by some unseen master, leapt back into the swarm. Ash felt a cold shudder ripple through his hands and neck.

The babies were asleep and breathing heavily, but their cuts had stopped bleeding. Ash's hands trembled as he studied their cloud-soft skin, comparing it to the gnarled, charred remains of his left palm.

Why me?

I wasn't trained for this.

Ash smoothed the soft, dark hair of one of the girls, staring at her chest for the barely perceptible rise and fall of breath. Small cuts criss-crossed her tiny arms, her neck, her chipmunk-like cheeks. His eyes began to well.

No. Not for this.

Nodding off, Ash checked his own body for cuts. There were several across his forearms, two stinging in his left ear, and a deep gash across one of his calves. Some were still bleeding, but any healing supplies he had were still on the horses outside, horses he knew were dead, devoured by these giant, starving insects down to the bone.

He laid the girls down across his shoulders, then slumped to the ground in deep, dreamless sleep.

When Ash awoke his blood was brown and dry, his wounds itchy and sore. The light was still as bright as before and the babies still asleep, but he knew they would be hungry soon. Ash hated to hear them cry, especially when he knew he could do nothing to soothe them. He had no food, no milk, and no water.

Laying the girls out on the floor in their harness, he stood up to stretch his muscles. Gently running the fingers of his good hand over the walls, he puzzled at their smooth, almost frictionless construction. He chuckled to himself.

Smoother than a baby's bottom.

One of the infants began to stir. Ash's knees popped as he squatted down to pick them up, then cracked as he stood back up. He rocked them gently in his arms.

"Shhh shhh shhh. You're alright now. The monsters are on the other side of the door. They'll get us, they'll ...get us bad. But right now, at this very moment in time... your short, brutally short lifespans...shhh shhh shhh... we're just... we're just three against the world."

He stepped into the smaller room. It was barely a closet, perhaps four foot square, with two long protrusions on either side of the window that looked like cots. Outside the darkness was still —the flowing torrent of monsters had disappeared. Ash began to daydream, picturing what was happening outside, seeing the Dark Mother covered in a horde of murderous fiends.

It took us two weeks to get here from Sutro. Two weeks, with a guide and two sturdy horses.

Ash's long index finger lightly pressed down on a small circular tile on the doorway.

Sutro will be annihilated within the mon—

With a slight hiss a wall of thick metal slid between Ash and the larger room. He was cut off from the light, feeling the steel beneath his feet grow warm as the tiny room began to vibrate. A heavy thud reverberated through the metallic walls, followed by another.

Ash panicked. He screamed.

NO!!

The infants lay on the floor, just on the other side of the thick glass. He jammed his fist on the pulsating tile once, twice, a hundred times. Other tiles began to glow with a soft green light. Ash jabbed at them all again and again, his vision blurred from the violent shaking. His face was covered in tears as he slammed his finger on a small red circular tile.

Suddenly the room shuddered wildly, and the vibrations increased. Ash fell to the floor and watched the girls, now wide awake and eyeing him through the window with curious little faces. Ash wanted to scoop them both up in his arms and cry, and cry, and cry.

He closed his eyes just as the room exploded.

Chapter Two – Separation

Ash opened his eyes to a dazzling array of colors. The back of his head felt caved in from the blow of an enormous maul, his spine and neck aching and as hard as stone. He groaned as his head fell backward onto one of the cot-like protrusions. It had a firm, yet yielding, almost squishy feel to it. He brushed the dried blood from one of his eyes with his burnt left hand, too late realizing his mistake. His cry of agony fell dead on the muffled walls of his prison.

He clenched his jaw tightly to fight the pain, then slowly opened his eyes to see if the babies were nearby. A faint green light revealed that he was alone.

He thought about standing up, but the strips of pain criss-crossing his back forced him into a cramped crouch. He rubbed his eyes with his good right hand: as they adjusted to the pale green glow, he began to study his surroundings. Peering through the face-sized windows above his head and at the door, he could see that his tiny prison cell was butted up against the slick cavern wall, with the silver vessel about fifty feet away. He saw the window of the room he had escaped from, now sealed over and indistinguishable from the rest of the ship's exterior but for a ring of still-smoking scorch marks. The cavern was too dark to see anything else.

Rocking back and forth for a few minutes allowed him to slowly, painfully extricate himself from the cot behind him, and with great difficulty he stood up. He peered out the window at the vessel once more to see if he could spot any movement. Seeing nothing, he pressed the small green tile that was his prison's only source of light.

The door did not open, but the light on the tile transformed the inside of his prison from pale green to blood red.

He pressed it again, and again, and again, with the same results. The door had not been smashed on this side, but it would not open.

I need to get back in there... I need to—the explosion—they'll be coming. Soon.

He stood up again and peered out of the window, twisting himself awkwardly to try and see the cavern opening from where he was, with no success. All he could spot was an area above the far end of the vessel that was lighter than the rest of the outside.

Remembering how the creature-on-the-wall had leapt at him and tried to punch through the room's small window, Ash momentarily doubted whether this prison could keep the fiends out.

No... I can't sit idly by and wait for death to take us. He's going to have to pick up his skirts and chase us down, the hungry bitch.

Ash took a deep breath and set to work.

It was over an hour, by his reckoning, before Ash figured out how to open the door. Using the staff and some of his body weight as leverage, he was able to wedge the protective plate from the door's opening tile despite the cramped space. It didn't come off, but most of the surprisingly lightweight metal bent just enough that he could see inside at the jumble of thin glass tubes criss-crossing underneath. His first attempt at prodding a tube with his fingers resulted in the most painful shock of his life. After that he wrapped his fingers in his tunic before putting them in dangerous places.

The image of the two infants screaming for him haunted him every harrowing minute, each second of their strained and purple faces sheer torture for him as he had no more milk to give. Fighting against his nerves, his shaking hands, and his complete ignorance of this mysterious pod, he finally solved it —the apparatus was apparently fueled by the thin wisps of smoke curling up from the broken tubes of glass. Once Ash had plugged some with cloth and depressed others, the door opened calmly and quietly.

Ash jumped. Despite working feverishly on the problem, he had not expected it to open. Still shirtless, he grabbed his staff and leapt out onto the black stone.

Come on, you injured freak.

Show yourself.

Now.

Ash's back muscles clenched on impact. He stumbled to the side of the ship he'd just escaped from, looking feverishly for a way back in. Peering through the window's thick glass, he could see that the vessel was still brightly-lit on the inside, though the angle of the window prevented him from seeing the room's floor. He pressed his ear to the hot metal and winced at the pain, but could hear nothing. No crying, no giggling, no shrieks of pain, confusion and loneliness.

It nearly killed him.

GodDAMMIT!!

The last part of the word echoed deep through the cavern walls, a pale facsimile of his own voice alerting every nearby beast to his presence. He slapped his own mouth closed, too late.

He held his breath, trying to listen for any approaching attack. His own heartbeat drowned out all sound, but try as he might he could not stop it from beating. He closed his eyes, covered his ears, and uncovered them, to no effect.

He glanced around. A faint glow from the other side of the vessel told him that the cavern opening was not far off. Despite the injuries to his back and hand, it wouldn't take much of an effort to climb back up the slope, to freedom. To safety.

For a single half-breath, Ash weighed his temptation.

For the next half-breath and the remainder of his life, he wondered whether he was the most vile, self-absorbed scumbag in the universe.

Time to do this the right way, he whispered to the window.

He clutched his staff in his good, right hand, put his back to the vessel and set off around the front.

The signs of the fiends were everywhere. The cave walls were covered in gashes, flurries of scratch marks covering huge swaths of the room,