“Hey!” I shout up to the fire mage as I hurry over to the wall. A quick Inspect takes me to the right spot. It’s three feet off the ground, but my void can reach it. The predator perks up as it catches scent of my plan. “Down here!”

Raz glances around for a moment before finding me. He frowns. “You are that same homunculus, aren’t you? The one I wanted to dissect.”

Christ, why is that everyone’s first instinct? “Enemy of my enemy, right?” I say. We don’t have time to hash out the details. Just please don’t kill me.

Raz grins down at me in a way that is the opposite of reassuring. “If you let me out of here, you will not regret it.”

I already am. “Try not to blow up the good guys.”

In response, Raz raises a hand over that melted spider sentry of his, funneling more red light into its shell. I consider getting Echo to explain what he’s doing, but there’s no time.

Okay, I say, and the predator eagerly obliges. I connect with the mana circuit at the same time the predator connects with me.

The mana slams into me—us—as we break the mana line. Just for a second. We don’t need any longer than that. Just long enough for Raz to escape. But it’s hard to concentrate on our surroundings when so much energy is electrifying our magic. It jolts through our soul before the void siphons it away, trying to avoid another build up.

Was that long enough? Can we stop? We can still see, but we can’t make any sense of our surroundings, not while everything is getting scrambled by the foreign magic. Either way, we can’t take this much longer. We hope that was enough time.

No, not yet. We still have room in our essence to absorb more magic. Such limitless power. Why not—

Stop! That’s enough. We’re done.

We yank the void away from the wall, our mind fuzzy and overcharged as we hear the buzz of the barrier next to us snap back on. Shaking the aftereffects of the magic away, we start to peel the reluctant predator from our mind, looking about for Raz.

We don’t have to look far.

“Hey! Spider!”

What was once a broken, spider-shaped, knowledge-sucking torture helmet has now become a miniature sun. At least, that’s the only way we can think to describe it. The fire mage is holding a blindingly bright ball of spite that makes the very air around it shimmer. We recoil as waves of heat wash over us.

To Raz’s merit, he has Yedzaquib’s undivided attention. Even Zyneth, backed against the wall from Yedzaquib’s relentless pursuit, is staring wide-eyed at Raz’s weapon instead of running.

“You wanted to learn what arcana I know?” Raz calls, raising the glowing sun. “Well here’s a demonstration.”

“Oh, shit,” Zyneth says.

Raz throws the fireball at Yedzaquib.

Despite its deathly appearance, the attack moves almost comically slow, no different from someone under-handing a softball. It arcs toward the arachnoid, who steps nimbly out of the way, drawing new lines of magic while he moves. A dozen spider sentries spit threads, all intersecting near the center of the room and jumping to life with purple light, intending to catch the fireball.

We don’t know what Yedzaquib had planned to do after that. Maybe turn it around and throw it back on the mage. What he likely didn’t plan on was for the fire to evaporate the threads before they even made contact, continuing its trajectory unimpeded to land on the ground in the middle of the room.

Our void reacts before we even register the explosion.

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Darkness wraps around us mere moments before we slam into the wall, the void cushioning the blow. Even so, a faint, garbled voice blips through our mind.

[...Bludgeoning damage…]

The void unwraps itself from around us, but the world continues to shake. Loud crunching and screeching noises are tearing through the room, which is full of dust and strange red light. Is it coming from Raz’s attack? No, the miniature sun is gone but the light—

The light is coming up through the floor. Even as we watch, an enormous chunk of floor cracks and falls away. There’s shouting. A blur of white as Yedzaquib launches himself at Raz, who flashes as fire jumps to his hand. Zyneth—where’s Zyneth?

We spot him hugging the wall, nimbly leaping between stable patches of floor as he skirts around a crevasse. Good. He’s unharmed.

Our attention is drawn away as a sharp crack punctuates a showering of dust and rocks near the staircase. A pile of glass there catches the light that spills through another widening gap in the floor. Our body! It’s still out of our range, too far away to control, but if we do nothing, it will slip through the crack in the floor and shatter irreparably below. No, we worked too hard for it. We can’t start from square one now.

The void launches us across the room like a meteor. Our core is so small, it’s trivially easy to pick it up and carry it along with our leap. We bound over a gap in the floor, more of the room falling away even as we pass. And what we see below drives fear into our soul.

We hadn’t been paying much attention to the layout before, but we should have expected it: Beneath us is a vast abyss, the downward spiral of relics sinking so deep we can’t even see the bottom. Floating in the middle of all that, supplying this entire structure with its magic, is the arcana crystal. Pebbles are pinging off of it with small pulses of red light.

We land on the platform and feel our glass fall back within our control once more. We’re instructing the body to pick itself up even as we wrap our void around it, filling the gaps and strengthening the joints. No time to put our core back within its pouch—we use our void to hold it above the neck to keep an eye on our surroundings.

With the sum of our void magic bracing the body, it’s taking a mental load off needing to control every piece of glass at once. In fact, it’s never been easier to move. Never so fluid. We can feel it; between the combination of shadow and glass, this body is powerful, more than the sum of its parts. We wonder why we’d ever tried to keep all that excess void bottled up.

No. No, this is just temporary. Stay focused.

With our more direct path, we beat Zyneth back to the stairwell, although he’s now almost back to us, only a few jumps away from our ledge. Raz and Yedzaquib are still fighting on the other side of the room. One of Raz’s legs is caught in a magic snare, and he’s using bouts of flame in an attempt to keep the arachnoid from closing in, but it’s clear he won’t be a distraction for much longer. We need to get out of here fast.

And then the rest of the floor falls away.

It doesn’t happen in slow motion. It’s all over in a matter of seconds. But we register it all anyway, almost instantaneously, in a series of rapid-fire realizations.

The floor drops. Zyneth throws an arm out and snags a jagged stone in the wall. Yedzaquib falls through the gap, dozens of spider sentinels firing lines in an attempt to catch him. Fire bursts to life beneath Raz, blowing him back up and out of the abyss. Beneath us, the first giant slab of stone crashes into the arcana crystal, and it explodes in a shrapnel of red slivers. Everywhere, the fields turn off, all at once.

As the concussion from the blast hits us, zinging across our glass, Zyneth’s hold slips.

“No!”

We lunge forward, but we’re not close enough, not fast enough. Our glass fingers swipe through open air—but the void shoots beyond, black talons seizing his arm and digging into his skin. He cries out but grabs hold. The void goes taut.

We stumble to the edge of the hole. One more step and we’ll be dragged over, but the rest of our void spears behind us, stabbing into the stone and anchoring us in place. The weight slams us down onto our knees, and we feel glass break. We pull on the void with all our might, half hanging out over the chasm ourself, as Zyneth looks up at us with teeth gritted in pain and fear. He tries to grab the void with his free hand to pull himself up, but his fingers pull through the material like taffy. The void stretches as Zyneth sinks down and away from us.

Void Whip!

Energy crackles through the void, strengthening the material and redoubling our hold on Zyneth. But even reinforced, there’s far too little of it to hold him. Our void stretches, then begins to tear.

No, no, no! We can’t let him fall. We have to save him. But our void is spread too thin. We aren’t strong enough.

But we could be.

The inventory.

The idea flashes through our mind. A part of us reaches for it, and we stop it. We know what it’s really after, we know it’s been waiting for an excuse to free itself.

He’ll die if we do nothing.

We can’t. We can’t be the cause of more death. Whose death we mean—the felis and dracid, Zyneth, someone unlucky enough to cross our path in the future—it’s all jumbled in our mind.

The dissonance is splitting us in two. But we have to keep it together, we have to make a decision, if we don’t do something now, Zyneth will—

The void rips apart. Zyneth begins to fall.

We stop thinking and just react.

[...ng void from inven…]