It was a funny thing, fear.

Every time Rusty thought he'd hit his limit, he found that no, it was possible to cram a little MORE adrenaline and panic into his twelve-year-old frame.

And for the moment, at least, that raw, chemical mix was enough to mostly forget the pain in his bad arm, and scramble through the muddy crevice at double time. There was no light, but that was okay, because he sure as heck didn't want to see what was after him. He scraped his face and knees against the rock ceiling above him, scraped them so badly he was pretty sure he was bleeding, but all that was secondary to the driving need to FLEE the thing slithering and scrambling behind him.

Then, with a gasp and a shudder and a blessed feeling of pressure easing, he was out from under the wall, out into an open space. He reached his good arm up, couldn't feel anything above him, so he hauled himself out, noted absently that his bandage had ripped off his arm at some point, stood upright, and hauled his muddy, sogged underwear up over his hips again as he turned and tried to look for the best place to hide.

As it turned out, it was another good news/bad news situation.

The bad news was that he could barely see anything. It smelled more open, if that made any sense. The cool draught was flowing all around him, in a way that suggested that the room he'd gotten to was vast and open.

The good news, was that there was the tiniest bit of silvery light, a speck at the edge of his vision. The way out? Maybe. It looked like it was up off the floor.

Then a scrape behind him drew his attention.

The thing was trying to come under the wall.

And the squishing and scratching noises sounded an awful lot like something big trying to dig out enough space to pull itself through to get to him.

Rusty swallowed as bile rose up in his throat. And he found himself tired. Adrenaline took it out of you, and he'd been running hot on a belly full of weird oatmeal and nothing more. He was thirsty, his arm was torn up, and he'd just wiped himself out squirming through that gap.

But if he stopped, he was dead. He knew that with certainty. He was country-raised, and he knew that no predator that size put that much effort into a hunt unless it expected a seriously good payoff at the end of it. And it HAD to be a predator. The wizard had told him there wouldn't be any guards, but the stairs were open to the surface. This thing had probably moved in and used it as a lair.

So Rusty turned toward the pinprick of light in the distance, and put one foot in front of the other. He didn't think he had the energy to run all the way there.

And that saved him.

The first... few hundred feet, maybe? Yeah, that went fine.

Then the ground sloped down all of a sudden, and he tried to stop, and the mud turned out to be way too slick for quick stops. Rusty's feet went out from under him, and his ass planted hard on the floor. At least it was squishy.

It took a frantic few moments of flailing as he slid down the slope, before he got his right hand dug in enough to stop himself... and when he stared down the way the slope went, he could make out two things.

The first, was a dim purple light filtering up from below.

And the second was the massive crevasse that it illuminated. He couldn't see all the way down into it, but it was pretty deep, and had big purple crystal chunks growing on the sides.

Was one of those the rune he needed? They glowed, they were growing in patterns, yeah. But he was pretty sure that if he tried to get to one, he'd fall to his death.

So instead he hauled himself back over the lip of the slope, panting, using his good arm as much as he could, until he could stand upright again.

He followed the lip of the crevasse, the place he could just see, thanks to the faint light, until he was around it. It didn't fill the entirety of the room, but it was pretty wide.

At a thought, he stopped and listened. The thing was still digging behind him. Rusty sobbed a little, dry sobs, then hurried up. He tried to watch for more crevasses as he went, but as soon as he put the purple light behind him, he was back to being mostly blind.

Mostly.

That silver dot in the distance was bigger, now. And he alternated glancing down to the floor and staring back up at it as he went. It worked, mostly.

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It worked well enough to let him see what he was going for. A silvery symbol, illuminating something like a stone table. It hung in the air above a hollow spot in the table, like an ornament hanging from a Christmas tree. But there was nothing for it to hang from. It was freestanding, glimmering there in the darkness, all angles and curves.

It took a second for Rusty to realize what it reminded him of. It was mostly curves, two large ones that wrapped around, and contained other lines and shapes within. But the overall shape of it resembled a diagram he'd once seen in an encyclopedia.

It looked like a brain, with icicle-like protrusions hanging from it.

Rusty's throat felt dry, as he remembered Terathon's words. He had to break off part of it, and jam it into his flesh. Wasn't that what the wizard had said? He thought it was.

His left arm throbbed as he thought that, and as he reached the raised dais that the table was on, he hesitated. He'd already had something shot through him today, and oh wow, it had hurt. Was there a way to do this without stabbing himself again? What if he swallowed it, or put it up his butt?

Rusty looked at the icicle bits, and decided no. No, that was definitely not going up his butt. And with his luck, they'd probably choke him if he tried swallowing them. And the wizard had told him not to put anything in his head, so... yeah. Okay.

He stood below it, staring. Break off a piece, and jam it into himself. Okay.

Rusty lifted his hand, put it down.

This is what I came here to do. Come on!

He tried to reach out to it, drew his hand back. This close to it, the light burned with something that wasn't heat. It was like being too close to an electric fence, when the air was just right, and you could feel the energy of it humming and thrumming, letting you know what would happen if you touched it.

I came here to do this, Rusty told himself. Terathon's fighting for me right now! He believed in me. This could maybe let me save him!

He swallowed, hard, and reached out to the rune... and hesitated.

He might have lost his nerve, at that point. He might have failed altogether, and gone looking for another way out.

That might have been what he did, except for one thing.

That was the moment he realized that he couldn't hear any digging sounds any more.

The creature was through the gap.

It was in the room with him!

Rusty learned a valuable lesson, that day. Rusty learned how to use his fear to make himself do things that he was afraid of doing.

Mind you, this didn't necessarily make what he was doing a good idea...

Rusty reached out to the rune, and snapped off an icicle-like spear of it, and instantly there was a WHUMP, and a wave of force that pushed him back from the table. Silver dust exploded into the air, and the glowing silvery light started to fade almost instantly.

And to his horror, the piece he was holding started to fade, too. Not as fast as the rest of the now-scattered pieces of the rune, but quickly.

Rusty did not have long to figure out where he was going to put the thing.

He looked down at himself, looked down at his scrawny, muddy, scraped body, and saw the wound in his arm, torn open again from his crawl and exertions. It was just below his elbow, and seeping blood all down his forearm.

Well, I've got a hole in that anyway, Rusty decided, and before the fear came back, he jammed the pointy bit he'd torn off straight into the arrow wound.

And oh GOD that hurt!

He was on his back, screaming and flailing and beating his arm against the muddy stone, as it sizzled, and flickering, strobing silver light ran up him and sparked. If a sailor had been watching him do this, they might have compared it to watching saint elmo's fire flicker on and off during a storm, or ball lightning sparking and hopping across a deck. It was flashy, and spectacular, and Rusty saw exactly none of it because he felt like he'd just pissed on an electric fence and kept on pissing, locked in place, unable to stop the stream.

Finally, the pain ebbed. And as he kept his eyes closed and sobbed in the now-total darkness, he saw something, in his peripheral vision.

The predator? He twisted, tried to look at it. Too late he realized he was leaning on his bad arm, but... it didn't hurt as much, now. He felt the wound, felt a massive scab where it had been. The flesh felt whole. There was still pain, but it was muted.

Another flash in his peripheral vision, this time from both directions at once. Silvery flashes in the darkness.

Rusty blinked, and the flashes started to assemble into shapes. Symbols.

He opened his eyes again and they went away, scattered back into flashes in his periphery.

You're being hunted, the back of his brain reminded him. Figure this out quick, Rusty.

Rusty took a deep breath, and closed his eyes.

The peripheral lights surged across the blackness of his closed eyelids, drew themselves into the symbol of the rune. And then they shifted and flowed into new symbols, that flashed past, one by one, like a ticker tape. They made no sense.

They shifted and repeated, and they made no sense again, but some of them triggered memories when they came up. Smells of baking bread, the feel of riding a horse for the first time, the way satin felt against his fingertips... Disparate and unconnected memories, as the ticker tape of symbols went by, his eyes flicking back and forth under his lids as if he were dreaming, trying to read the unreadable.

And somewhere around the fifth time they repeated, Rusty started to understand what the symbols meant. He didn't read them, not exactly, but he understood them now, even if what they were saying didn't entirely make sense.

As near as he could tell, they meant this:

Rune: Memory has been integrated into your chakra network.

Total usage: 3/39

Then came a glowing diagram of his body, only it was all lines. And on one arm, a silvery orb pulsed with his heartbeat, flaring and receding.

Then new symbols appeared.

First Rune attuned. Chakra system awakened. Rune usage unlocked. Assensing unlocked. Consumption unlocked. Companion manifested.

UNDERSTAND.