Damien wished he'd been one of the unconscious ones. He felt every cell in his body cry out in pain when they collided with the far end of the vent they'd broken through the wall into. Krissa's body had once again taken the brunt of the impact and finally, the three larger sentients broke apart from one another as they fell through the wall in slow motion, then began a downward arc. His eyes widened in panic as he sent one final trail of electrical current through the cave, striking Alexa in the chest as his remaining view of the firey, destroyed cavern went away. Yet, no matter how he searched, the second presence he'd always felt never came back.

Grief struck once again, palpably as their fall sped up. He didn't even register that a certain weight was missing from his shoulder until he realized the one presence he could feel was unconscious. Panic set back in and though he tried to use both, only his left hand flailed around in the air until it caught some fabric. He clenched his hand and pulled it inward before regripping the small figure carefully but tightly while holding it near his stomach.

Kastra appeared unconscious. Looking around, Damien's mind raced through recent events while occasionally vaguely wondering how far they'd gone; the wind hadn't ceased whipping by their ears despite the vast distance covered once yet. The others had long since disappeared upward from his mana sense and his headache was making using any other type of sight impossible. A brief probe of their pact showed that he was still missing something.

So Damien fell, awake for all the pain he was in, huddled together and protecting Kastra. A few minutes went by as his mind wandered, checking their pact every minute. He was thrown closer to the walls at one point from an errant updraft and he tensed, but something repelled him from it, and he continued his fall uninterrupted. He'd tried to make a pocket of air, or anything that would help slow down his fall before he hit the ground, but he'd long since run out of mana from healing the stab wound Krissa had given him. Trying to overstress his veins now just caused him even more pain than he was already in, not even touching on the impossibility of focusing on drawing that energy out while his head throbbed as it did.

He was lucky to even be awake. If that was luck, he wondered, checking the pact again.

A few smaller rocks entered his mana sense from up above him, moving faster than he was by a slim margin. He idly wondered where they'd come from, as every piece from the cavern wall had long since disappeared beneath them. Regardless of his musings, the rocks continued to pick up speed and eventually slid past him, a few bumping off of his body before continuing downward at an increasingly rapid pace. More continued passing by, entering his sense quicker and quicker, until they reached a speed that began to pose a threat to him. His left arm protecting Kastra while his right was slung over the back of his neck, the small rocks began slicing into his skin and bouncing off the walls around them, creating an irritatingly loud racket as they all fell-

"What..." he mumbled out, surprised to hear the rocks and himself.

The wind had been making it hard to even think, yet now it was barely there, reducing in volume the further they fell.

"Slowing down..." he eventually pieced together, uncurling himself and glancing up and down.

An endless darkness was all Damien saw above him, but below a small, warm, blue light was slowly fading into existence. It was growing larger at an... acceptably steady rate, until he finally broke out of the tunnel he was falling through into a vast underground cavern.

He was floating near the ceiling, against his will, and looking down at a huge pond that shimmered blue in some places while teal in others. The entire bed of the pond held what gave it the glow in the form of thousands upon thousands of mana stones, some as small as any pebble while others reached the size of the coaches he'd just been traveling in. The dim glow each gave off refracted off the water above it and lit up every corner of the wide cavern, too dim to make out any details but still bright enough to allow Damien to see the walls all around him.

Turning his head to examine said walls, he realized he was much closer to the one on his left than the cavern's center. Glancing to his right, he saw an island in the center of the large body of water with a thin causeway that gave it access to a tunnel leading out of the cavern on the far wall. All in all, he'd estimate that the vast underground area resembled the size of a large sports stadium.

"Well this is-" he muttered, stopping abruptly when he felt something large enter his reactivated mana sense, moving fast.

He recognized what it was a half-second later and willed himself out of the way, tried to blow his body to the side with the paltry amount of mana he'd recovered, but it was no use. His body wouldn't budge as his grip on Kastra tightened once more. The large figure came hurtling downward, almost directly on course with-

The body struck the lip of the tunnel he'd exited out from and violently jerked away from it and where Damien was floating. Large chunks of stone broke off and peppered his skin with a stinging sensation, loosening his death grip on the small body in his clutches. The broken and bloodied wings still nearly clipped him but ultimately didn't. He could have sworn he'd seen a manic grin plastered on the corpse's face as it flew by.

He never did get her name.

The body fell two hundred feet down until it hit the water with a loud crash. The broken pieces of the wall that had fallen with her hit the pond moments later and then the cavern was still once again, echoing the last influence she would make on this planet until all that was left were ripples on the surface of the water. It had taken less than a minute for the lake to calm and the sound to cease, but that was the least of Damien's worries.

A hulking mass of darkness in the lake moved once all was still. As it advanced under the water, the glow of mana stones disappeared while others appeared behind it, the only indication something was there in the first place. It moved without a sound and went straight for where the Hellial's corpse had hit the water. When it arrived, it once again went still and a new portion of the lake went dark. Glancing around the pond again, Damien wondered if every dark spot he could see throughout the area was... whatever that thing was.

Idly, the water made him remember to check the pact again.

Another figure entered his sense a few seconds after everything else had already unfolded and Damien noticed it as Krissa, slowly descending as he was. He felt anger flare in his chest as her body settled next to his a few feet away, but couldn't move more than an inch in any direction. Whatever was causing him to float had complete control of him, so all he could do was glare or yell. He chose to glare in lieu of what he'd seen down below earlier.

She didn't glare back, still unconscious. He'd taken the direct hit from the Hellial, but she'd been the one crushed between their combined weights and the wall. He wouldn't be surprised if she'd died from that; Dresmyrs did not have a body that was much more enhanced than Humans.

He turned his attention back to the cavern, ignoring her for now. He didn't understand why she'd attacked him or what she was even doing here, nor did he much care. She'd always been an aggressor in school but had never outright tried for his life, yet less than an hour ago when the fight had been at its apex, when he was moments from ending things and focusing on Alexa, this woman had tried to kill him. None of their previous interactions would have warranted this level of aggression. And none of their previous interactions would give him pause when it came to killing her. It was as simple as every other Hellial he'd just ended. She attacked him, so he'd kill her to make sure it didn't happen again. He was done playing nice, done coddling others because they were just misunderstood. If it had been Kastra that had received her sword, it might have been disastrous. She didn't deserve the opportunity to try again.

They remained floating near each other for almost an hour, unable to move. Rai had been silent ever since Damien had re-taken command of his body. That was another situation that gave Damien pause currently. He didn't know what the God was thinking, or if he was even sharing a body with him at the moment, but Damien was done with the being as well. If not for him, Damien might have died without a doubt, but Alexa may still be alive. If he had stopped playing with the Hellials...

But he hadn't. And he let her die. Damien felt his anger resurfacing as his left fist began to clench, before releasing immediately when he felt the pact feeding back discomfort and pain. He looked down at Kastra with his eye and saw she was waking up. Scanning her with the paltry amounts of mana he'd gotten back, he sighed in relief when it showed she didn't have any serious injuries. Any superficial ones he'd healed when she was out and the only reason she'd gone unconscious was likely due to colliding with a piece of the wall.

In the hour or so she had been out, he'd stabilized his own body as well and patched up most of his broken chest, but his right arm and hand were still useless. He hadn't gotten enough mana back to handle that task yet. His ring was thoroughly melted. The insides were almost indistinguishable from each other and it would take weeks of manipulation to get it back into a working state. If he even could without Marci and Alexa's...

"Stop thinking about her," Kastra whispered from his chest, curling into a ball slowly. "It hurts me when you think about her."

Damien nodded, pushing down the hot feeling in his throat that threatened to take over as he idly checked the pact yet again. This wasn't the time to cry. He focused on Kastra instead, going over her condition again and again. Her mind seemed stable, unlike it had been when they'd been fighting earlier. She wasn't grieving but was far from happy. She seemed indifferent. Cold. Aloof... Similar to how she'd been back when he'd first met her.

"Where are we?" she asked.

"No idea. We fell for over ten minutes... We're miles away from the surface, that's for sure," Damien responded.

Kastra nodded and pushed at his hand lightly, causing him to open it as she flew up above his head to look around. It seemed that whatever magic was holding him and Krissa in place wasn't affecting her. Looking down with his eye and remembering the dark shape in the water, he was glad he'd held onto her during the fall. He couldn't tell which shape it was anymore, or even if it mattered.

"What is she doing here?" Kastra asked, staring at the Dresmyr and breaking him out of his thoughts.

Damien turned his head to look at her and opened his mouth to respond when the spell holding him up began moving him towards the island. Krissa began moving as well, while Kastra had to fly to keep up.

"I don't know. I don't know why we are stuck here either. I'm surrounded by some kind of barrier. I can't move much, and it's interrupting any type of external manipulation I try to do. It's like Lemshire, but worse."

Kastra nodded and her eyebrows knit together as she focused on him. He could feel her mana probing at whatever had hold of him as he hung in the air like a cat grabbed by the skin of its neck, slowly moving towards land.

"She stabbed you," Kastra idly mentioned.

Damien nodded.

"That she did... She's probably part of the reason they attacked. If it were a normal raid, I wouldn't think much of it, but they purposely targetted-"

He felt anger flow through the pact, but Kastra only gave the slightest of nods externally when he abruptly stopped.

A minute went by in silence before Damien checked the pact, then tilted his eye toward her as a sigh escaped his lips. His shoulders slumped forward, eyebrows dropping as his stomach and chest began tingling with a crippling, nausea-inducing pain.

"It didn't work," he whispered.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

"Stop."

"It didn't. I... She never came back," he continued. "I checked. I tried- focused on her when we were falling, and-"

Kastra just glared at him.

"I'm so sorry," he choked, unable to stop the words.

"She is lost. It is unfortunate. We have a price to collect for it. Now is not the time to dwell."

Damien was more than a bit taken aback by her cold answer, but nodded. She was hurting a little through the pact, he could tell, but it was... on the level of losing a cousin. Or a grandparent you weren't particularly close to. Muted.

He opened his mouth to say something, but changed his mind and remained still. They were closing in on the island finally, so it was time to find out what their fate was here. Maybe none of this would matter because they'd be killed by whatever was controlling him anyway. There was certainly enough mana in the air to make it a possibility.

Still, they arrived at the piece of land without being harmed and Damien found himself able to use his mana once again. Looking around, nothing stood out except a few circular areas where dust and grime were absent. There was one much larger than the others centered on the piece of land, but other than that, nothing else was in their vicinity.

Both he and Krissa had landed outside each of the circular areas, and Damien wasn't inclined to enter one. They hadn't been killed yet and he wasn't inclined to push his luck.

"Any ideas?" he asked Kastra, who'd assumed his size and was silently watching from beside him.

"Don't step in them, and don't move towards the path leading out. The creatures that reside in this underground pond have assembled there."

"Can you tell what they are?" he asked.

"No. But I can tell they aren't inert."

Damien nodded as he continued checking the area. There were two smaller mana dense circles, and the larger one set in the center. When he moved toward the pathway leading out, he found a final enchantment set on the ground. It was much smaller than the others but also appeared immensely more intricate.

"We could-" Damien started, before trailing off.

His mind that had been so focused on finding a path, a way out, stopped. He slowly moved toward the ground and sat with a grunt, all motivation to do anything non-existent. His left eye socket was throbbing and his right hand was a mess. His internals were still bruised and caused him immeasurable pain when he moved, not to mention the phantom pains his body was wracked with. Something missing from who he was as a person. A piece of his, of their souls. Nothing he did could change that.

But as defeated as he felt, the cold anger throbbing into him from the other side of his two-way pact caused him to eventually look up to where Kastra was floating away from him. Her eyes trained on something.

Turning slightly, he focused on what that was and felt his own emotions drown out as Kastra's began to take hold. Slowly, he rose from the ground.

'Boy, stop now. She's no Hellial, she has a right to live,' the God in his head said.

"Nothing I do will bring her back, but that doesn't mean this thing get's to try and take more from me," he whispered.

Damien ignored the second mind inside of him as he moved towards the unconscious girl. She had tried to kill him; that alone was reason enough. Kastra didn't try to stop him, but merely floated along behind, and when he reached her, he grabbed the unconscious woman by the hair and dragged her toward the smaller runes. She woke up from the pain and started moving a bit, trying to push his hands off, but he ignored her, throwing the body on top of said runes by the causeway and waiting for the result.

Nothing happened.

'Stop this, Mortal! You're treading down-'

Rai yelled at him, Krissa cried out in pain. He scanned her body and found that nearly every one of her ribs was either cracked or broken, and her arms were likewise damaged. He didn't even need to restrain her, by the looks of it.

Damien moved forward and once again grabbed the girl, pulling her to each of the other three runes in the area, yet still nothing happened when he tossed her form onto each one.

At some point in between, Kastra began to once again shrink, though she stayed floating away from him for the time being.

"-it's your fault they!-"

She started to scream at him. He wanted to laugh. And cry. Mostly, he wanted to curl into a ball and sleep. Instead, he just sighed.

"Special conditions for activating," Kastra murmured as the other two beings yelled at Damien in his mind and in the flesh.

He shrugged.

"Looks like it. Any ideas?" he asked.

Kastra shook her head and gestured at the screaming Dresmyr.

A rock launched out of his hand, striking the girl in the temple with the force of a bowling ball. She fell to the ground unconscious yet again, the God in his mind sighing loudly. Damien ignored, then ultimately found he could mute the extra voice when it tried to begin speaking to him about what happened and what to do next.

He felt his mind try and probe the pact once again but stopped himself, choosing to sit on the ground instead. Kastra finally moved near him and stood on his shoulder, but he found himself wishing she'd stayed away for a bit longer. The emotion caught him by surprise as much as it did her, making him regret for a moment he'd not learned how to mask his feelings as they had. Luckily, it seemed Kastra hadn't cared as she instead chose to sit down closer, relieving and aggravating him at the same time.

They sat motionless like that for a few minutes, Rai having long since gone silent in the back of his mind. Damien had sat facing the center runic structure and studied it, but it gave him nothing. No mana leaked out of the intricate runic carvings, none of the runes were like anything he'd ever seen before, and there wasn't a single protruding stone in the vicinity to give him even a hint of what they did.

Based on Kastra's silence, he assumed she had no clue either. He was... less than inclined to break their silence as well. She had shown extreme sorrow then a forced indifference towards Lexi's... well, he didn't want to intrude and question her thoughts or feelings on the matter.

As an hour passed though, he realized he was going to have to be the one to break the silence. It was clear there would be no exiting this cave via the causeway and their lives were linked. There would be no heroic moment of sacrificing himself to try and run down it, nor would there be one where he threw her off himself and dove on a rune in an attempt to set it off and be the only one to accept the consequences.

If he died, she died.

Slowly, Damien stood, causing the inert Kastra to jump slightly as she glanced his way. For the past hour she'd been immobile, staring into space, perhaps literally.

"I'm going to stand on it," he spoke out, indicating the center rune before them.

When she didn't respond, he sighed and tried again.

"I would like to try standing on it. Nothing else I can think of gets us out of here alive, and from the mana I felt above, I doubt leaving from where we came in is an option."

"It's not, for you at least," she responded, "and before you ask, if I leave, my lack of presence would be noted and defensive measures would activate. So no, I can't leave alone or you die," she stated, jerking her head toward the edge of their circular island to explain further. "The entire area is coated in a barrier. It would inhibit you alone trying to leave in any direction except directly over the bridge over there. And in the event you left in that direction, the runes below would activate and send all the monsters below into a frenzy. Even if flown over, it will activate."

Damien's eyes widened as he looked at her. Here, he'd assumed she'd been in shock, thoughts spiraling or at least stalled out. Instead, she'd been trying to determine a way for them to escape. Meanwhile, the only plan or thing he'd come up with was, 'I step on rune, go boom, problem solved.'

Her stating in a roundabout way that she wouldn't be able to go check on Lexi without him dying, thus causing her death, also took him by surprise. The person who created this entire area was so determined to force whoever ended up here to step on those runes that they trapped them in a prison that, while it couldn't hold a Fae, was well crafted enough to detect an existence transcending understanding.

The thought sent shivers down his spine.

"Then-"

"Yes, it would seem the only way we leave this area together is by finding out what that does," she sighed, glaring at him slightly. "But I should be the one to-"

"No," Damien interrupted.

"I'm the only one with years of experience in runic magic out of us. If it has destructive intent, I'm at least confident I'd be able to redirect it," Kastra replied indifferently.

Damien nodded, but stuck by his answer.

"That's true, but look around. It's a decrepit, underground facility that even you can't escape undetected. If you really tried, you could have left the academy undetected, but here you're stuck? It's clear that whoever, or whatever, made this area wants those trapped to... step on his runes? Play his game. If it was just about killing the person, he'd have the monsters in the lake take care of any intruder immediately, but they didn't. Which means that those do something other than death and destruction. Which means that I'm not going to let you risk your mind or soul by being the one to activate them," Damien stated.

Kastra stared at him impassively, though he felt a flicker of pain go through her as he finished up. Shaking her head slightly however, she spoke again.

"Fae or mortal, anything that affects the soul would affect either of us. Your next iteration could bring irreparable damage with it."

"Damage I wouldn't know about or remember. But it would affect you once revived."

"Meaning that out of either of us, I would be better equipped to handle whatever-"

"It could even affect the entirety of your hive depending on what it does as well," he stated, cutting her off.

She shook her head, exasperated as she flew off his shoulder, in front of his face as she once again resumed normal size.

"And what, the lives of your future self or those around are less important than my hive? We are better equipped to handle anything that could arise," she argued back, pointing a finger at his forehead. "You're a human, barely what, thirty? You above all people should understand reincarnation and the potential for your mind to follow as well. What if you stayed the same after dying and were altered? Broken? Alone? I'd have my hive at least."

Damien almost took a step back at her prodding, but instead took one forward and pressed his head into her finger and began to try to argue back, but something stopped him.

"We are not entering that, calm down," the voice stated, taking over Damien's body. "I'm not sure why, but I cannot leave you currently. I don't feel the thread that tethers me to my divine form. I will not allow you to enter those runes."

Damien froze internally for a moment before he realized what was happening. Then, he screamed at the idiotic God to shut up as he tried to wrest control of his body back,but found his ability to far too lacking. He watched Kastra's expression switch to one of surprise as she jumped slightly again, before anger began to surface, only to be snuffed out by another mask of indifference once again as the God continued speaking and she moved a few paces back.

"Yeah, I guess the cat's out of the bag. Perhaps I have more control of him than I initially let on. But, I digress. As you have said, you are more than enough to test out this rune, and it will be you that does so. I would sooner burn this body to ashes than allow it to enter that area. I am a God, not a mortal. I will not risk that rune affecting me for your petty sacrificial play."

Damien watched on in horror as Kastra nodded with a thin smile, then proceeded toward the runes as his body remained frozen. Anger, fear, and a bit of desperation tore through his side of the pact, begging in the only channel of communication available to them for her not to do this.

All he received in turn from her was a cold over-the-shoulder nod, followed by reassurance in their pact, with an underlying tone of hurt that was more present than it had been before. That, and the addition of disappointment that he hadn't expected. It gave him pause, until he felt his back get smashed into with a force strong enough to break it, as the saturated mana in the area formed a barrier directly behind them that had expanded rapidly.

The impact rattled his brain and he could feel Rai attempt to react by slowing his trajectory toward the runes, but another barrier simply exploded into existence behind them again and sent them forward even faster, body somersaulting through the air.

Damien felt Rai speed their mind up and send a bolt of lightning into Kastra, launching her off the Island. Her gone, or at least handled momentarily, he sent a follow up towards the runes to slow or stop their shared body, working as they halted a mere foot from the center of the island. The God looked to where he'd blasted Kastra away and was about to say something, when a final barrier exploded into existence in front of them.

Being caught by surprise held no meaning to the speed Rai could speed their brain safely, as Damien took in Kastra's real form shimmering into existence a few feet away. The God was drawing on their remaining mana in its entirety to either stop or just blow their body apart with a ton of chaotic energy, but Damien had felt it coming and clamped down on their mana hard, with a force that only the owner of said mana could. He found it immeasurably easier than trying to wrest control back, but Rai was already ripping some of the mana away from Damien before they had even hit the ground.

"Wha-" Rai started as their body resumed normal time, tumbling back into the center rune, hitting another of Kastra's barriers to keep them trapped inside.

Looking up against his will, Damien saw Kastra's slightly burned body drop to her knees in defeat as the ground beneath Damien flared up in a bright light. Their eyes met for a brief moment before the trapped God ruined the moment, though Damien would have sworn Kastra was looking directly at him, not the God's furious expression on their face.

"You fools!" he shouted, angry beyond measure. "You may have just killed us both! Or a part of me, at least! Do you even-" he started, before looking around and realizing nothing was happening.

With a grin, the man walked up to the barrier, lightning slowly beginning to once again enter their vision and cover their body. Damien's right fist came back, the God entirely ignoring the injuries it was wracked with, and flew like a meteor into the barrier. A red splotch was left behind as the electrically charged fist exploded against the wall of mana, sending cracks all up and down it. The same hand went back, not even really able to make a fist any longer as it crashed forward again, murder on their shared face as Kastra looked on with a slight smile, eyes downcast.

The fist sent a few droplets of blood smashing into the barrier, but didn't get any further. Damien, Kastra, and Rai watched on with curiosity and horror at a black tendril that had lept up out of the rune and wrapped around their wrist.

"No," Rai demanded, electricity discharged having absolutely no effect on the black rope. "Why?" he asked, looking up at Kastra. "We'll die, why? WHY ARE YOU ALL SO IRRATIONAL?!" he bellowed.

Kastra smiled coldly at the God, a couple of tears running down her cheeks as more black tendrils coiled around Damien's arms and legs.

"Better we die then, than allow him to be your plaything," she stated, watching as they were pulled further into the runic pattern until the two were no longer visible.