I LAY BROKEN. Pain engulfed me, crushing my spirit, my breath. I could see only by the light of my own blood, a fading glow splashed on the stones that lay jumbled around me. Black sand cascaded in little threads around me, slowly burying me alive.

My arm was shattered. That much I knew without seeing it. It lay smashed between one stone and another, and the flesh screamed with endless fury at my foolish betrayal. Words flitted around my mind, but failed to cohere into anything but a heaving wail. I tried to pull it free, but even my legs were slow to respond. I was nearly encased in stone.

I fought for every breath. The weight of all the fallen stones and sand lay atop me, and only by the barest grace had I evaded being extinguished entirely. A small pocket of air lay in the jagged gaps between my tomb, and into that darkness, fear leaked faster than even the sand.

Unable to move, with even my anguish dying on my lips, I admit I begged for death. Defeat here would mean awakening elsewhere. Back across the river, perhaps, but anywhere was better than here.

But death had abandoned me. Left me, in its casual disinterest, to a fate worse than even the void beyond life. And for the first time since I’d first awakened by the pit, I felt that inward creeping of that hollowness: the siren call of despair rising up, tempting me with oblivion.

To die, and die once and for all, and know not pain nor peace, but nothing at all. To Fade.

I might have accepted it then, locked as I was under the weight of the world, and helplessly watching the last of my radiance spatter onto the dark stone.

I heard Param’s words in the back of my mind. A lifetime ago she had told me to focus. To use the power of the radiance to seal the wounds. I had lost a great deal of blood, fighting the bird-demon, and then the worm-faced deacon. More, having fallen into the depraved depths. How long I’d been unconscious I could not guess; how much more blood wasted on the lifeless ground I knew not.

But if death would not release me, then I must find a way to survive.

Ranna claims her prize. The words, the last words I heard on that bloody beach, pounded like the pulse in my ears. I was cold, and growing colder, as I leaked more blood. As cold as that cruel ocean surf.

I closed my eyes. In the darkness, it hardly made a difference. And I focused, driving my consciousness down into my flesh. Seeking warmth where I felt only ashen cold. I found it pooling at my center, and flushed it out. At first, it was like pins and needles, like flesh awakening in a hornet’s buzz. But slowly it faded as the power worked over the worst of my wounds. Even as I did it, I felt the cold approaching faster and faster yet, yawning open like a wolf’s maw. The world seemed to spin around me, until I hissed and released my hold on the radiance.

I lay gasping, but not bleeding. That, at least, was a triumph.

My last thought before fading into the deeper blackness was that my eyes were open…but I could see nothing. Nothing at all. Oblivion.

#

FAR ABOVE, RED light painted a broad crescent on the ragged lip of the hole. That was the first thing I was aware of. My breath came freely, if painfully. Life, or whatever it was that animated my sorry flesh, returned with a chorus of aches and teeth-grinding flares. Every nerve seemed to light up, clamoring for attention.

“Open your mouth.” Param’s voice. In her black robes, she was little more than a cobra reared above me. She hiked back a sleeve and held her amber skinned arm above my head. I looked at it in confusion. Her other hand found my mouth and pried it open gracelessly. She kept her fingers there, hooked on my lower teeth, and peered into my eyes.

“You stand at the brink of death.”

I realized I was no longer buried under all that stone in a single flash. Questions surfaced from the darkness of my dazed consciousness, but her fingers kept my mouth pried open until she was sure I would not move. Then, in one quick, clean sweep, she drew the blade of her silver knife down her arm, working backward from the wrist. It was a small cut, perhaps half an inch, but radiance began to leak immediately.

It dribbled down into my mouth, warm and bright. It had the copper taste of blood, but not the salt. Though revolted, I did not turn my head. I swallowed the mouthful of blood she gave me. I absorbed the warmth of it, but it did little to diminish the pain.

Param bandaged her cut deftly, and sat back on her haunches. She looked utterly defeated.

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She looked as bad as I felt. I ran a quick inventory, discovering my right arm was broken, or at least fractured, below the elbow. I was covered with cuts and bruises, which was only surprising in how painful they were as a single awful chorus. With some trepidation, I looked to the Cindermark on my chest, and discovered the light was very low. Little more than an ember. No wonder I felt cold and weak. Yet, I was alive. There was that.

Staring around, trying to adjust my eyes to the dark, I discovered that we were at the bottom of what seemed to be a dome buried under the earth. The walls extended out around us, widening off into the shadows my eyes could not pierce. The whole place had the dry, stale smell of a tomb long closed. Of memories shut away and forgotten. A strange assortment of jars and pots stood around tall black pillars that supported the curved ceiling, though what they were for, I could not say.

There was no way we were getting back up to the surface. And worse, I feared what might meet us should we manage it.

“Thank you,” I said weakly.

I caught a glint of her eyes. The rest of her face was lost in shadow. “Think nothing of it.”

I shoved myself up on my elbows. “What was that thing?”

“One of the lesser lords of the flesheaters. The Deacon of Talons, he calls himself. The others flock to him like a king.”

I shook my head, remembering his pale, writhing face. “Is there no end to the monsters?”

“This is Hell,” Param said, turning her face from me. “Hell has no end.”

Suddenly, I clutched at myself, searching for the tunic that held my silver tear. She watched me as I slapped frantically, then stood on shaking limbs. “Where did you pull me from?”

She didn’t point, but she did glance. I followed her gaze to the heap of rocks that lay in the middle of the dome. I knew the rocks might be loose, and that I risked much clambering up them, but at that moment, I didn’t care. I had neither the silver tear, nor Bloodfang. In that perilous land, I was as good as naked.

I found the hole she’d pulled me from. My chest tightened at the sight, and sweat stood out cold on my brow. I got halfway down before I had to back up again, steadying myself with one hand against the stone. Nausea and dizziness rose all at once, and I nearly pitched back down the stone. At the last second, I caught myself, and mastered the fear. Breathing forcefully through my nose, I jammed my head and shoulders back into the hole.

The light of my Cindermark cast a barren glow. Just enough to catch a dull gleam from deeper in, like mercury glimpsed through clouds. I clawed forward through gravel and sand and felt the edge of the silver tear quaver under my touch. I had to shove myself in, eliciting an unwilling whimper, to fully grasp it.

I wasted no more time retreating from the hole. Never again, I thought as I leaned my back against the rocks. Bury me under an open sky.

The silver tear seemed intact. Its surface was coated with dust that clung to it. I gave a weak prayer for small mercies.

“My sword,” I called down hopefully to Param. “Have you seen Bloodfang?”

“It is there,” she said, drawing a finger to the foot of the stone heap. In the meager crimson gloom coming from above, I picked out the greatsword’s hilt. It lay where it had fallen.

I scrambled across the rocks, more carefully not, to snatch it up. Even as I bent down to snatch it up, though, Param pounced on me. She moved as quiet as a panther in her blacks and caught me totally unawares. She slammed her foot down on my left hand, pinning it to the hilt. I cried out and toppled over.

“Where did you get that blade?” she demanded, veil up to cover her eyes. I was sensing that the veil going up meant anger or violence.

“The Baron of Elarm,” I said.

She ground her heel into my fingers, smashing them against the hilt. My other arm, the bones aching badly, was useless to defend me. “What pact did you seal with him?”

“Pact?” She wasn’t making sense. “I didn’t make a pact with him! Get off me!”

But she did not relent. More force still, until it felt like my bones would shatter. “Speak the truth, devil! I fed you blood! You owe me the truth!”

“I killed him!” I roared. “Is that what you want to hear? And I took the sword as my prize!” The pressure eased somewhat. “He’s dead. The chapel on the other side of the river is empty now.”

“How?”

“Let off my hand, woman!” I snarled. Her eyes shone with malice, and she leaned on me again, drawing a shriek out. “Gah! I got a noose around his neck. It was tied to headstones. I tipped them into the river, and they dragged him down, too.”

She searched my eyes. I wonder what she was. Whatever it was, Param let off the pressure and backed up a step. “If you lie, you will pay with your life. Do you know what that sword is?”

I snatched up Bloodfang, too angry to care about the pain in my hand. The hilt felt good in my hand, solid and comforting.

“I don’t care what it is,” I said, “but I’ll show you what it can do, if you ever pull something like that again!”

Param settled to the ground before me, folding her legs under her, coiling up. She watched me from behind her veil, and after a long moment, let it down. “You know little, Cinderborn, but you presume much. That blade is wrought of ur-iron.”

I shook my head. That meant nothing to me.

“It is a cage, as the deacon said. I heard him, taunting the soul within the sword.”

I looked down at the blade. In the weak light, the orange that stained the surface was nearly as black as the rest of the blade. The dog’s head pommel seemed to snarl in the shadows. “A wolf caged in iron,” I quoted. “What did that mean?”

“Feed it a little blood,” Param said, “and find out.”