I focused my webtouch senses into the stairway, which led upward and deeper into the cavern wall. Higher, toward the surface. Away from the flocks of poison, mind-altering spitbats. Just felt like a normal stairway, so I started climbing--but I soon found my path blocked by rubble.

A barrier of collapsed stone filled the narrow space. I was about to settle in to wait for my mana to tick up when I remembered that the gold bead had refreshed that, too. So I sent an exploratory smoke-arm through the rubble and focused on what my vaporous fingers detected through my webtouched senses. The rubble ended ended five or six feet from me, then opened into a large space.

I stretched my Arachrys-gifted perception farther than ever, to check for threats. I hadn’t seen a glimmer of light in days. I didn’t even know if my eyes were open or closed, because vision didn’t matter to me anymore. I’d depended entirely on blind sensations: not quite vibrations, not quite sonar. More like an uncanny awareness of my immediate surroundings.

Or, at least, of parts of my immediate surroundings. My websense covered directions and situations in which my vision failed, but there were still blank spots, and the sort of granularity that only my vision could handle.

Except now that I focused on my webby senses, I realized that at some point they’d sharpened tremendously. I could measure the roughness of a broken brick in the rubble behind my smokey hand. I could count the fraying leaves of the clump of vegetation snarled on the ground. I could pinpoint depth and texture and size. I still couldn’t detect anything at a long distance, or across the space in front of the rubble--nothing like my vision, that stretched to the horizon--but closer than that? In a twenty or foot sphere? The world snapped into focus.

The details overwhelmed me, and I snapped back into my body in the stairwell.

SUPPORT: Arachrys Blooded upgraded to Spheresense, Twinmind, Protection.

“Whoa,” I said. “That’s great. I mean ... except I can’t remember what it used to be?”

SUPPORT: Spheresense provides greatly-improved perceptual fidelity and sensitivity. In a sphere, as even you might have guessed, centered on your sensory apparatus at the time. At higher levels, spheresense will ignore physical obstacles.

I snorted a laugh. “I’m gonna see through walls? Goddamn X-ray vision! Except, uh, for the ‘vision’ part. X-ray senses.”

SUPPORT: Additionally, your resistance to mental and psychological damage, given your twinned mind, is now tantamount to immunity. The ability to shift stress and assaults from one mind to another, even briefly, is a shockingly effective defense.

“Yeah, that’s the only thing that kept me sane this long.”

Princess said.

she chimed.

I said.

I snorted.

she said.

She giggled.

Hoo boy.

SUPPORT: Your blood is sufficiently hybridized with Arachrys hemolymph that the vast majority of venoms and poisons will not strongly effect you.

“Because it’s partly effecting Princess? How long until she comes down?”

she said.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

“Sweet dreams.”

she said, and dozed off.

I took a second to get past being called a ‘two-legged lobe,’ and then directed a question to Status: “So was this the Gift of the Deep? The improvement of my Arachrys bond? Was the Deep like ... in my own body? My own mind and blood?”

SUPPORT: And finally, you will learn to dream together with increasing frequency and effectiveness. Except perhaps not ‘finally,’ because bond between yourself and Princess is apparently unprecedented.

Apparently? What the hell does that mean, ‘apparently?’ Don’t you know everything, oh wise and mighty voice-in-my-head?

There was no answer.

Okay, then. I took a second to center myself, then wafted through the rubble and emerged higher on the stairway. Three steps above me, the stairs ended in what my new, sharper senses told me felt like an underground park. There were actual trees, which I hadn’t run across before down here. I’d seen loads of mushroom-looking things, including some tree-sized formations, but no trees. These had trunks and branches, leaves and twigs, but they felt kind of stiff and cold. Maybe like the leafless, charred trees in the tombyard? Except they felt different. They didn’t feel like wood. They felt like stone, or even harder.

Huh.

I crept to the top of the stairway, inspecting my surroundings but also reveling in the sheer expansiveness of my new perception. Despite focusing mostly on the trees and the garden, part of my spheresense tracked the walls to my side and the floor underfoot. As I walked forward, I remained aware of the the ceiling and even the rubble behind me.

It really was like Daredevil, except with a much smaller radius than hearing. Or like Spiderman, except without a special attention to danger. Well, so it wasn’t that much like either of them. It was more like Arachysman. Bitten by a radioactive princess ...

I paused a few steps into the garden and unleashed my senses. At first I thought the trees were petrified, but a moment later I realized they were metal. Metal sculptures of trees, surrounded by razor-edged leaves and piercing twigs, in an underground garden with paths and benches. I detected now-empty ponds, and hedges of frilly fungus that Intuit told me not to taste, even with my poison resistance.

My sharper senses picked out hammered-metal roots and patches of lichen while brushing against the relatively low ceiling, which was embossed with fractal patterns of branches and twigs. Oh! And one of the lumps on the ceiling was a poison snail. So at least I had a plan for lunch. Still, I decided to focus on most important thing first: I needed find a stairway heading higher. So I followed the exterior stone wall--carved with trellises--around the edge of the garden.

Except instead of finding a stairway, I found a wraith.

Or, well, the wraith found me.

A mass of dried vegetation erupted from the floor a few feet from my left boot, and my senses showed me the perfectly-circular hole beneath. A shape--a blurry, amorphous, eel-like shape--exploded at me, and if I hadn’t been aware of a complete circle around myself, it would have tagged me.

Instead, I leaped to my right, then dove sideways, and a freezing wind buffeted me--but the wraith didn’t make contact. A tendril missed my three inches. I kept rolling and scrambling away from the wraith pit, deeper into the garden. Metal branches carved me like scalpels, but I didn’t slow.

At least not until I discovered another wraith pit ahead of me.

Then I grabbed a cold metal branch and hurled myself in the other direction. The first wraith was moving slowly through the metal trees, maybe pursuing me and maybe not. The second one, on the other hand, burst at me and kept following. Moving fast for a wraith. I found myself automatically throwing a hatchet, but of course a solid weapon couldn’t touch the ghostly creature.

The hatchet just spun through the patch of writhing whiteness and vanished into a bush made of wires and thorns.

I zigzagged through the garden, hyperaware of the spear-like branches, checking for even more fucking wraith pits. A snail almost jabbed me but I juked away even though the poison wouldn’t bother me anymore. I spotted two more wraith pits as I fled, switching from path to path, desperate to find an exit.

And after what felt like ten minutes, I found one: a hexagonal break in the trellis-decorated wall opened into a space that felt like a corridor. Thank the goddamn tides.

I swerved and sprinted, then skidded through the hexagonal doorway.

I found myself in a hexagonal hallway with a carpet of dust, and didn’t stop running. Wraiths terrified me. I couldn’t even touch them--at least not longer than a few seconds, in smoke form--while they could literally break me.

So I fled blindly--stupidly--along the hallway for maybe thirty feet before I slid to a stop in front of the dead end. A rock wall of empty shelves that pretty emphatically implied this wasn’t a hallway but some kind of long storage closet. There was no exit.

“Shit!” I said.

Princess corrected.

“Not now,” I snapped.

She fell silent again, either sleeping or sulking, and I scanned the walls with my senses, checking for a drain, a grate, any possible way out. I didn’t spot anything. Shit. Okay. Okay, maybe if I turned to smoke I could squeeze past the pursing wraith, and get back into the garden?

Except I couldn’t. They were so much stronger in their spectral form than I was in my smokey form. Still, I didn’t know what else to try. So I faced the entrance, focused and ready and terrified, and waited for a ghastly chill to touch the farthest reaches of my senses.

I whispered to Princess in my mind, a minute later.

She didn’t answer.

I whispered, after another two minutes.

She still didn’t answer.

I exhaled and waited another ten minutes before retracing my steps ever so slowly toward the garden. I passed another snail, but kept my distance. No time for a snack. I stopped ten feet from the hexagonal entryway, and didn’t sense a wraith. Then five feet. Then finally I reached the doorway and let my senses flow outward.

I felt a chill to my left and ‘saw’ a shimmer in the air about twenty feet away. Okay. It wasn’t deadly close, just terrifyingly close. So I needed to haul ass past it to the stairs and return to Spitbat City. That was better than getting my spine cracked by wraiths.

Only one tiny problem: I had no idea where the stairs were. I’d lost track of them during my mad scramble across the garden. Still, I knew they opened in the wall somewhere. So I’d burst from this hallway, turn right, away from the wraith, and keep running until I found the way out.

A simple plan for a simple man.

I took a breath. Then another.

Then I burst from the hallway, turned right, and started running.