“There’s something wrong here,” said Reiner.

“There’s plenty wrong here,” said the man with the hart headdress. He was the leader. The others nodded in agreement, their totem headdresses hiding their faces.

It had seemed a clever notion to team up with them. The Brethren, they called themselves, a handful of locals that acted as guardians of this ancient place. Reiner would be delving into these Halls with or without them; the former had seemed the more prudent choice.

They’d found him taking shelter in the entrance of one of the tombs that littered the vale. They’d made their ask, as folk always do. One of their number had succumbed to insanity and cooped herself up in the Halls, doing gods-know-what. Brethren did not shed Brethren blood, so they’d asked him to do it.

“Can you make it painless?” the girl with the falcon headdress had asked.

He’d promised he’d try.

Taking a life was never pleasant, but he’d had to draw his sabers often enough to know that sometimes, the end did justify the means. There was a chance that these Halls held the Annals of the Lodge, thought to be lost to time. Fawkes, the woman who had taken him off the streets and taught him all he knew, had devoted her life to searching for the Annals. If there was a chance to get his hands on them, he’d gladly put down a hundred deranged Brethren–not just one.

Fawkes.

She’d look down on this whole endeavor, were she with him. That’s why he hadn’t waited for her and struck out on his own. They were equals now, not master and apprentice, but her tongue was still as sharp and her mood as rotten as always.

The Halls had proven to be much more than what he’d hoped. He’d expected a half-ruined sepulcher. He’d found a complex of underground halls and enchanted vaults massive enough to rival the fabled fortresses of the elves. There were treasures stored down there, dangerous ones. If the Annals proved to be among them, it would be worth Fawkes’s ire.

That was the long and short of how he’d found himself in front of a set of double doors deep underground, accompanied by a half-dozen of shamanistic locals.

“Can you hear the whispering?” mumbled one of them. She was no more than sixteen, seventeen maybe, and her headdress was shaped like a raccoon.

“Silence,” Brother Hart hushed her.

Reiner could hear it too, now. Others had warned him of it, asked him to look into it, even. He’d dismissed it as superstitious nonsense. He’d been wrong. Fawkes would have clocked him for that.

“Keep your wits about you,” the man warned. “Evil nests behind these doors.”

He pushed the double doors open, and Reiner’s senses were immediately overwhelmed by a peculiar smell of rot and decay–one he’d smelled a time too many.

“Low-dwellers.”

“Yes, the Misbegotten.”

Reiner shot a glare at Brother Hart.

“You never said our mark practiced fleshwarping.”

“She did not,” the man grunted, brooding.

“Well, someone does.”

He had hardly finished his sentence when he was proven right. A band of low-dwellers came out snarling from the dark, flesh-hungry fiends created with heathen magic.

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The Brethren braced themselves and shouted warnings. Reiner drew his sabers and met the closest low-dweller with a flash of deadly steel. A clawed limb flew in the dank air, severed. Dark blood stained the stone floor. The fiend screamed in fury and agony, but it was brutally cut short as Reiner struck again, taking its head at the shoulders.

Someone shouted a warning. The Brethren behind him leveled their spears just in time for the storm of fangs and claws and hunger that were the low-dwellers.

Reiner whirled and slashed left and right, trying to keep the snarling fiends at arm’s length. One of them dove at his feet, clawed fingers looking to grab him by the ankles and trip him.

“Shit,” said Reiner. He threw himself to the side, slipped and hit the stone floor, and rolled away thrashing, expecting one of the low-dwellers to bite his face off at any moment.

He scrambled to his feet, panting, raising his sabers just in time to meet swiping claws. He parried and dodged to the side at the last second, pivoted, and stabbed the fiend in the eye, driving his blade through its primitive brain.

He pivoted again and put the now-dead thing between him and the rest of the hissing fiends, stealing a moment to catch his breath.

He hadn’t been injured, but he’d been cut off from the Brethren. They were only a few dozen feet away, holding their own against the low-dwellers. Between them and himself, however, there were enough of the fiends to tear him limb from limb in a quick second. The dim light from the Brethren’s torches barely reached him. He might as well be on his own.

“Shit,” he muttered again. He’d been in some tight spots before. He’d fast-talked his way out of some of them, cut his way out of the rest, and lived to tell the tale. He’d somehow make it out of this one, too, but it got him thinking about his life. Maybe Fawkes was right. Perhaps it was time to start erring on the side of caution. Maybe-

A low-dweller barrelled past his makeshift corpse shield, a damn big one, and his moment of respite was over. He drew his saber free of the dead low-dweller, raising the other to block the swiping claws of his new opponent. More followed behind the big fiend, eager to strip his flesh from his bones.

Reiner had seen enough. He might as well use his ace in the hole now, before the situation devolved into something even worse. He reached into his sleeve and pulled a few clay pellets the size of his thumbnail. He leaped backward to put some distance between him and the fiends, then threw the pellets to the floor with all his might.

The result was spectacular; each one of the enchantments held by the pellets went off at once, exploding with a blinding light and a deafening bang. All the low-dwellers flinched and took a step back, their sharpened senses overwhelmed.

He channeled as much essence as he could spare into a Wayfarer technique, shielding his eyes from the blast with a gloved hand. The Antestep, he called it, as it let him side-step out of the world and into the Antehalls–a liminal realm existing in parallel.

He only had enough for a single step, but it would be more than enough. One step, in and out, was usually sufficient to take him dozens of feet away and out of harm’s way.

The world dissolved and shimmered, like the reflection in a clean pool when the wind brushes the surface. The dark and the fiends and the stench became faint, ghostly afterimages, replaced by the dimly lit infinite corridors of the Antehalls.

Time stretched and stretched, a single heartbeat becoming a small eternity. Distant bells rang in Reiner’s ears, and the smell of ozone and camphor filled his nostrils. He basked in the solitude, the sense of stillness and timelessness, and-

Something was wrong.

Someone was there.

Someone was watching.

A dark form, tall and slender, its face hidden behind a visor of pure ice-blue crystal. A single eye burned behind it, red like freshly shed blood. It was fixed on him, radiating sinister curiosity.

Whatever that was, it wasn’t supposed to be there. Nothing was.

Acting on pure primal instinct, Reiner cut short his jaunt through the Antehalls and stepped back into the world. He stumbled in the dark, missing his initial destination by who-knew-how-many feet.

Where was he? He couldn’t see anything in the pitch-black darkness.

In some vault, probably, or in a side passage. He counted his lucky stars that he hadn’t ended up lodged in a stone wall.

Now, where were-

Ancient steel pierced his back and crushed his ribcage, big as a plow and sharp as a razor. Giant arms lifted him from the ground, raising him to the ceiling like an insect pinned to a needle.

As life left his body, his thoughts went to his teacher. He’d been a fool not to wait for her; He’d been a fool to come in here alone.

He didn’t mind that he was dying. His had been the choice; his should be the consequence. It was time to pay the piper. It was only fair.

He only wished she wouldn’t come to look for him.

He should have wished for something else.

He should have known better.

Then the silence took him, and that was that.