From deep in the passage came a dry rustle of crawling; the air quivered like a drumskin, and a muddy wind, like flood-stirred silt, drifted straight from ahead.
Panic pricked like thorns. “Don’t be afraid!” Hedi racked her brain like a mill at midnight. “The roaches are still far; I can—”
Before she finished, Selina hoisted Hedi and sprinted, swift as a deer. The light spell jittered with Hedi’s jolts, hopping like sparks and crosshatching the knife-hewn walls.
Hedi’s face went ashen, storm-cloud gray. Her belly thumped Selina’s shoulder, and her organs felt squeezed like fruit in a press, each jolt a solid punch.
“Let me finish first.”
“I won’t let you use Sacred Magic.”
“No, we still have magic scrolls!”
Selina didn’t slow. Her breathing and Hedi’s muffled whimpers beat like twin drums, echoing in the darkness sliced thin and long.
The roaches’ rustle tightened its intervals, rattling the dark like a shaken veil, then shifted to a hiss, like air through teeth and caterpillars writhing.
Nausea rose like a tide. Hedi clapped a hand to her mouth as the blunt ache in her gut stole every sense, until weightlessness yanked like a nightmare’s drop.
But the dark had capped the circuit between eye and mind, a lid on a lantern. She couldn’t know Selina fell and she herself flew.
Thud!
Hedi slammed to the ground like a sack of stone.
The passage burst before her like scattered pearls; time froze like ice, and the hard floor warped her body into a broken shape.
Killing pain knifed through her, sharp as winter. Some bone had cracked or chipped, or her brain might have sprayed like a split gourd.
Then clarity struck like cold water. She was alive, and with it came pain that howled, the chill floor on her skin, and a lizard-tail mind thrashing.
“Are you okay?”
Hedi lay there, sure she’d black out, yet a stubborn spark kept her in this world of roaches and night.
“Say something—don’t scare me!”
“I’m fine.”
“Sorry. I ran too fast.”
Hedi fished a magic scroll from her pocket, and a sheath of flame rose, hugging her outline like a second skin.
The roaches halted at once, a black tide breaking. Their antennae trembled like grass in wind as they waited with patient hunger.
“They won’t come closer.”
“That proves pain snaps back to the source,” Hedi said, gripping Selina’s hand as she stood. “We’ve only one scroll left—get to the Dark Realm’s core.”
“I’ll carry you.”
“No. Don’t throw me on your shoulder; it hurts like a spike.”
Selina’s apology was a whisper, light as ash. “I wanted to run faster.”
“Next time let me finish!”
“O—okay!”
Hand in hand, Hedi dragged speed from weary legs and rushed for the Dark Realm’s core like a flame chasing oil.
The roaches split like a sea, yielding a path, waiting for the flame’s death to sweep in and parcel them into meat.
Walls rose on both sides like sheer cliffs, pocked with countless holes; roaches slid in and out like needles, their numbers dizzying.
Hedi moved with care, as if walking a tightrope. The end stayed hidden, and the link to the earth’s heart lay unknown.
Her soles slid on nameless wet, a film like snail-trail; the ground lost its feel, and each step pulled her nerves taut as bowstrings.
Crawling walls, whispering rustles, sticky damp, darkness thick as ink, throbbing pain, a thirst for rest—each tightened around her mind like an iron hoop.
Reason crept toward its edge like frost at dawn.
How much longer?
What time is it?
What does the sky look like outside?
What if the scroll dies before the core?
Hedi shook her head like a bell to scatter the gnats of worry. She longed to check the time, but her legs ate all attention.
“Professor,” Selina said, fear gnawing like mice, “how much longer?”
“Soon.”
Yet the passage kept unspooling like endless silk. It felt like circles, but a straight road can’t be a snake eating its own tail.
It was only an invisible horizon, breeding wild shadows in the mind, the way fog breeds ghosts.
Hedi slapped her cheeks, two crisp claps, and gathered focus like a fist, turning dread into daydreams of after.
She imagined a newspaper opening like wings, the ink-smell rushing her face like fresh rain.
How strange.
She rarely read the paper; fame and obituaries passed her like silent wind, not from stubbornness, just indifference.
Yet in this eternal dark, she craved those small breezes, those trivial leaves spinning by.
“Professor, there’s a door ahead—I see a door!”
“Finally!”
Hedi let her taut focus slacken like a loosened knot, and her foot slipped like on algae; she nearly fell, grabbing Selina’s arm to steady.
She mustered the last of her focus like coals fanned to life and edged step by step toward the door.
The rustle in the passage vanished all at once, thread cut clean, with no warning and no tail.
Silence.
The sudden quiet in the black corridor felt more ominous than any ugly noise, a wolf with its breath held.
If roaches make sound, you can stand against them; silence is different, a mist that wraps the ears yet stays empty.
“So weird,” Selina said, words breaking stillness like pebbles on water. “Are we really going in?”
“The Investigator’s notes prove there’s a core deeper in.”
“But… it’s so quiet.”
“We’re close to whatever controls the roaches, and it’s a single door away from us.”
“Professor…”
“Can the crystal work here, or must we shut the Dark Realm down?”
“It works at a weak point.”
“Try it.”
Hedi stood before the door and listened like a hunter in snow. Only the crystal’s click-click turning echoed, unnatural in the narrow dark.
To ease the pressure, she swallowed air like a dry seed, yet she couldn’t hear her own swallow, as if sound had fled.
While they waited, the flame barrier began to shrink like a dying lantern; Hedi yanked the second scroll and fed the fire.
This burn ran faster, a wick racing, reason unknown; maybe the core’s pull gnawed the mana stored in the scroll.
After all, the Dark Realm holds no mana; scroll-cast spells dull here like blades in sand.
“The crystal might get us out of the Dark Realm!”
“Might? Doesn’t sound solid.” Hedi rubbed her eyes like smudged glass. “We’re out of scrolls. All or nothing.”
