The two had feasted and enjoyed themselves for nearly two hours. Cella, who was terribly torn up by the scorpions and ants, fashioned a makeshift suit patched by bits of chitin and fungal growths. Her ragged clothes she had begun the journey in had become soiled in both blood and guts. Some her own, the rest from many dead bugs.

Ren felt a breeze that stirred no air. Like a smell touching his nose, the false breeze pulled at his mind. He felt his head turn up as a dog sniffing at food above. He felt a primal sense, that with great urgency, told him to find the source of it. He tried to pull his mind away from it as Cella turned to him.

“How do I look?” She showed off her creation held together by both stiff and flexible fibers she had grown, patches of scorpion chitin covering vital areas across her body.

"Well, I can’t say it was ingenuitive.” Ren hid a small smile and crept across his face.

“I know it isn’t the most fashionable, but I do come from the rotten depths of the planet where no light shines.” A smile crept onto her face as well.

“That’s fair I guess…” Ren turned his eyes from her and looked into the darkness beyond. “Since I’ve regained myself, I’ve been feeling something strange.” He quickly turned serious.

“What? Is something wrong? Besides the part about being trapped in an unending maze of insects and other things that want to kill you.” Her smile slowly died as she looked at him.

“It’s that, when I fought the crawlers, my power, the one that corrupts the things I use it on, it didn’t work right on them. That shouldn’t be possible, nothing should resist that power. I mean, in theory, nothing should. I really don’t understand this world sometimes though, so I could be wrong. Also, I feel something, like it’s a part of me, missing… Like I’ve been missing something and I have to go find it. I don’t just mean how I can’t remember my old life, but how I feel like part of me is close, yet I can’t see this part that feels like it fell off. I can almost smell it in the air, I can feel it like a cold shiver.”

“I don’t understand, I’m still pretty confused about who and what you are. We can talk about that some more later, but do you feel where this ‘piece’ of you is?” She looked him in his eyes, seemingly unbothered looking into the lightless pits there.

“Maybe, I think I can follow it.” Ren stood and gave her a hand. He led her to one of her blocked pathways and pointed. “I can feel it, I think. Maybe it’s this way.”

Her green light came as she infused her mana into the fungal growths blocking the passage. He led her further into the cavern as nearly two miles passed under them.

They arrived at a long vertical cut in the wall where they could squeeze through. Ren went first and slowly pushed himself ten feet into the wall when he broke loose of it and came into an opening.

The area was small, the remains of several carcasses laid picked clean of any meat. A small nest of eggs protruded from a pile of odd flesh that was heaped in a pile.

A large and hollowed-out ribcage served as the nest’s shelter. The flesh around the eggs was a gray-black, to Ren, it had a small vibrant purple hue. The color reminded him of the energy that he wielded.

Another crack in the earth, though this time on the ground, parted stone several feet from the nest. His eyes were slowly drawn to the hole there. A slowly spine-chilling tingle ran down him. A buzzing sensation came alight in his chest as if his heart was humming a tune. The song his heart sang was a tune that drove him mad, a song that sent him into the core of ecstasy.

Before he realized it, he had lowered himself into the crevice as Cella was speaking. He only caught a part of what she had been saying.

“-ink it is safe?” She looked at him concerned.

“What… It's safe. I can feel it, Cella, I can feel it calling to me…” Ren let himself begin dissenting into the tightness of the crack leading straight into unknown depths.

Cella began to speak again, yet Ren could not hear her as his mind was consumed by the thrumming heart in his chest that mirrored the vibrant flow coming from below him. His mind became obsessed with only the idea of reaching the depths. In an unconscious state, like that of a dream he felt the majesty and warmth flooding into him. His body continued downwards disregarding jagged rocks and sharp stones cutting into him. He was oblivious as he descended.

–

Cella called to him as he faded from his consciousness.

“Ren! What’s going on? I don’t really think it’s safe…” She watched as a vibrant light swam in his black eyes.

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He spoke without expression, letting his body sink into the depths. A smile played on his face as he sank, and it was the last thing she saw.

She sat in the darkness alone. If the parents of these eggs came, she knew she wouldn’t stand a chance by herself. He wouldn’t leave me knowing that right? He wouldn’t leave me to be alone again in the dark?

The memories flooded her. A dam had been holding the memories in her mind, at one, it broke. Their bodies, covered in blood, children dying before their parents. All of the men and women she had known in her life were killed and devoured by the little corrupted gray creatures. Blood and viscera littered the ground as she watched from a small crack. She was alone, watching everyone else die.

She could have told them about the passage. Her father had known, but he had been dead for years now. When he led them, the people hoped to escape, he told them he knew a way, but he died. He never told anyone but her of the hidden passage right above them. She knew the little ghoulish men would have just hunted them down even if they all fled into the cavern above. Without help, they would die in mass to the insects and other beings that dwelled in the more dangerous biomes in the Underdark.

She told herself this, but it did not end the pain. The floodwall was broken in her mind and she knew her choices had doomed them. She could have at least guided the children with her. Even if it would just attract the horrors of the Underdark to hunt them. Maybe she could have delayed long enough for Ren to find them there. She could have tried to save them. She chose to be alone.

When she got a second chance to live alongside another human, even if it was the damned one who bared the powers of Alkyri, she chose to not die alone. She was weak, she had no red mushroom to engorge her into a killing spree. Alone, she was alone.

See watched the eggs of the insects as the centipedes inside stirred. The eggs were a vibrant and translucent magenta.

She hoped for the crawlers to have all died at Ren’s hand. I cannot die alone here. His madness had sparked the explosion to break away the confinement of painful memories. She sat in a corner of the small room, she wrapped herself in the glowing light of life and grew fungal growths to surround her and cover her as she sat knees to her chest. In the darkness, she wept alone.

–

Ren fell. The stone walls around him were gone and an emptiness was below him. It was not for a second, not two, not three. It was an infinity in his mad mind.

The euphoric state of blindness had led him here. The purple light floated in the voids of his black eyes as an unending darkness was below him. A great nothingness.

Falling, he felt safe. If he was atop a cliff, his mind would have told him his life was about to end. In this unceasing black, his mind saw no ground and was lost.

He no longer even knew he was falling as time passed. Instead, he became entrapped by the idea that he was already dead. His body was gone, and for his sins, he was destroyed. The endless nothingness around him was death, and he was no more.

When the time came that he did see something below him, he didn’t believe it. When the great ocean, boundless miles under the surface, came to meet him in his descent he thought it a delusion.

His body broke as he sank deep into the black water. The damage broke every bone of his body. Not merely cracked, the bones of his feet and legs were turned to splinters. His pelvis reached into his ribcage where the ribs there were shattered and broken in a dozen pieces each. His spine was crushed into a shattered mess. His shoulders, arms, and skull were cracked and in pieces.

His flesh held together the broken pieces of him as shock took him. Delusional with madness, his mind could not fade into unconsciousness. Instead, he felt it. Every piece of him shattered and rendered into a meaningless mess.

Still, his eyes saw. They retained no connection to his brain, and yet he saw. Though his spine was shattered, his nervous system torn, he felt the heatless chill of the water. When he sank, he too felt the pressure building on his body.

It was long minutes before he sank deep enough to stop. He watched as a mass below him slowly came closer. It was a dark carcass made of an unending mass. Rotten, and chewed on, the body was made of the deep purple vibrancy he saw in the flesh above. The flesh that had nourished the crawlers in their centipede forms.

Pieces of the puzzle began to fit together in his mind as a presence washed over him. It was familiar, yet passingly so.

A second black mass came moving through the waters toward him. It was made of hundreds of black tendrils. It had one great orange eye and four others that floated on black stocks reminiscent of the tentacles.

Though no mouth moved, a whispering voice came alive, and a jovial hint touched the voice. “Little one, so very good to see you again. I see you found it! Very good. I wish not to mettle, just to observe. Oh my, well are you not feeling so well? Unfortunate…”

Ren looked at the black mass and heard it laugh. The sound was like screeching chalk and shattered glass.

“Little one, are you hungry? So many are down here. So very, very hungry. This meat doesn’t move anymore, quite foul to the taste, yet quite good for the soul. Now, I have a little price, for a little favor. I see you don’t look up to moving much anymore. Without my presence, you’d be devoured by terrible, terrible things. So, I will give you a little hand, in exchange, I want you to break a little thing for me.”

Ren was unable to answer, and in his mind, he screamed for help. He pulsed out his mana several times, he hoped the aberrant monster would understand.

“Yes, I see. I read your intention little one, your will is quite strong.”

One of the four extra eyes of the creature moved towards Ren and with a pulse of mana, it began to move him.

In a telekinetic grasp, the Abyssal Watcher gently brought him along as it traveled through the water.

Ren felt his vitality begin to fade, he didn’t have much time left. A strand of vibrant purple light was slowly coming into him, but the power was not enough to keep him alive for long. It only prolonged his death.

They stopped as the being gently set his mangled form onto the stone ground. Ren felt the presence of several powerful beings fleeing from the area.