Surprisingly, I didn’t pass out this time. Almost wish I did though, the pain was excruciating. The focus stone exploded in a blinding flash, burning like red hot iron in my hand.

A rugged scream tore from my throat, as much for the sizzling stone as for my mounting headache. Richia let off her own terrifying howl and for unending seconds we stood there, screaming in blind pain as the spirits worked their magic.

Then, out of nowhere, everything stopped. The burning, the light, her screams, everything stopped from one second to the next as the spirit stone turn to dust between my fingers. Still, I kept screaming for another good fifteen seconds, as it was only sensible; my life being on the line an all.

Eventually my yelling died down into a ‘huh…?’

I peeked around. First thing I notice, I wasn’t monster girl’s chow, which, you know, is always verry much appreciated.

The second thing I noticed was Richia’s limp head dangling before me. Was she dead…?

No, it was faint but she was still breathing. What was more, though it was difficult to say under the red candlelight and with her covered in blood, it appeared her grayed skin had gone back to normal.

Yes, I wasn’t imagining it; even the hand peeking over the altar had reverted its bestial claws back to human fingers. Had the contract been successful?

I look around eagerly, only to frown whence my eyes met with a pile of dust. The spirit stone had disintegrated completely. That was highly abnormal; from what I’ve learned, during a spirit contract the spirit integrated with the stone to create an artificial body for itself. None of the valuable material should be lost in the process.

Then why had the stone turned to dust? Where was my mystical creature? Where was the impossible beast fleshed out from a living element that was supposed to be my lifelong companion and power source? Where was the candy puppy I have always dreamed off?!

I sighed in mild disappointment. Truly, it was no wonder it had failed. Even if the whole set up for the spirit contracting ritual was commonly known among magus; for some mysterious reason only a select few academy magus knew how to pull it off correctly.

Judging by their conspicuous lack of contracted spirits, none of these cultists were magus, let alone members of the academy. To tell nothing on the highly irregular set-up for this particular contracting ritual. In fact, the scary part was that this ritual had actually done something… and something damn terrifying at that…

Thinking back on it, it should be a relief not to have your soul bound to an evil spirit, never mind how amusing the idea of a secretly evil candy pup was. Though admittedly, I was just guessing upon the nature of this so called ‘evil spirits’ based on the desperate screams of a cultists and the insane behavior of a handful of people whose sanity was suspect to beginwith.

In other words, I had no idea of what had actually happened here. I was calling these things ‘evil spirits’ but in true I had not a clue of what they were. Were it not for the sinister tendrils of darkness or the supernatural physical power displayed by these so called possessed cultist, I would have choked all of this up to a wild episode of mass hysteria.

Sadly, I had seen way too much to deny the horrible truth. Now I knew that out there was something else than the benign spirits employed by magus. Something darker and hungrier. And that something almost had me.

I shivered at the drying blood on Richia’s mouth. It was a small comfort that, whatever those things were, they obey some of the same laws as spirits did. Even if the contract had ultimately failed, it had apparently compelled the evil spirit out of Chin-face’s body.

What had happened with the thing afterwards was anyone’s guess. I was half tempted to take a peek with true sight to make sure there weren’t any dark tendrils lurking about, but I was well and truly spent; any more spirit craft was sure to kill me.

I closed my eyes, resting my pounding head against the altar.

What a mess. How was I supposed to explain any of this to Jake? Scratch that, how was I going to lie to Jake about this…? What’s that, conscience? It’s bad to lie to your family? Well, tough luck! Come back when you know how to explain all this to Jake without him freaking out and leveling the whole city in the process!

In all seriousness I was afraid for my brother. He didn’t have precisely nerves of steel, and all this was way above his paygrade. Going directly to him with this mess was doom to spell disaster. But again, for all I knew Jake was aware of everything. Maybe I was kidnapped right Infront of him. I mean, the last I remembered was going with him to the castle for that job interview… uhg! All went foggy pass that point, and the dam headache didn’t help.

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I took my head between my trembling hands.

´Weird, ´ I thought, ´my hand doesn’t hurt…´

When I peeked at it my hand was perfectly fine. ´No scorching marks? Did I imagined being burn…? ´

In the end I shrugged it off; the small mercy was more than welcomed, and I wasn’t about to see this gift horse in the mouth.

I looked into the clean palm of my hand until it stopped trembling. I knew I needed to escape from there as soon as possible. If the cultists that managed to escape earlier returned with reinforcements, I would be screwed. If the city guardsmen that were surely looking for Chin-face found us bloodied in a room full of cultist’s corpses, I would be verry much screwed. And if nobody ever found us and I was force to spend the rest of my existence trapped here with big head over there, I would be royally screwed.

Yay me. Peachy prospects everywhere.

First things first. I shook myself, stilling my nerves, then crawled away from the altar, giving the sleeping Chin-face plenty space, you know, to keep on the safe side. I stood, taking a deep breath and immediately dry heaving to the side. Let’s just say a dozen plus mutilated corpses don’t smell pretty.

Now covering my nose with the neck of my shirt I bent to pick up a near by black candle. I had no idea what those were made of, yet the lot of them were still lit, even the ones scattered around the floor. I was half tempted to take them all with me, but they were too bulky to carry them in my pockets. That’s when I notice my satchel was nowhere to be seen. Nor my shoes for that matter…

Was I wearing pajamas? But I sleep naked! No! No time for that! Focus!

On my tipitops I did my best to evade the gooy bits – not verry successfully mind you, and when I reached the thick wooden doors, I heave them to not avail. I’ve seen one of the guards struggling hard against them to escape before being eaten, but I had to confirm for myself if the door was closed.

After a little experimentation I concluded that, yeah, the door was closed, and that over there was probably half of that guy’s torso. With a curse under my breath, I retraced my steps, on my way discovering how slippery intestines could be on bare footed people… I don’t want to talk about it…

When I finally extricated myself from that mess, I decided that a few minutes shivering in fetal position at a corner would do me good. I may have even cried a little.

I was in between hugging myself and cleaning some snot with my mostly clean sleeve, when I noticed my candle’s flame tilting to the side. That was odd. The fire pointed directly to the door behind me, as if…

“As if the air is flowing from somewhere else!”

I took my candle and started gingerly prodding around the wall with it. In no time I found the origin of the wind current. It came from the mouth of a stone demon carved on the wall.

I bit my lip. Was it just a ventilation? I needed it to be more, so hoping it to be more this time I prodded the demonic figure. I pushed the eyes like buttons, threw from its teeth and even elbowed it on its prodigious reproductive apparatus – just to be thorough. Only whence I exhausted all other options I resign myself to put my hand into the devil’s mouth.

The inside was cold and slippery. I winced as my arm disappeared up to my elbowed inside the creepy thing. I fumbled about for a second or two until my fingers found a musty rope, tight against the stone.

I look around, weighing the rest of my non existing options, then flinched as I pulled the cord. With my nerves as they were I half expected the stone devil to come alive and sever my arm with its stone fangs, so no sooner I heard the click and the squeaking of rusted gears I took out the offending arm as if it burned. Even when nothing happened, I opened and closed my hand a couple times to reassure myself it was still there.

To the side of me a section on the wall pushed forward, leaving a slim passage big enough for one person to step sideways.

“Lucky hand. Gotta start using my left more…” I muttered as I peeked inside.

A dark tunnel extended to deps my candlelight couldn’t reach. I swallowed dry at the huge spiderwebs willowing in the air like the vails of tragic brides. Cave spiders were no joke; their paralytic poison was the main cause of death among miners, not to mention how huge they could get.

I shivered, looked at the room full of dead cultists, then shivered again.

“Spiders it is.”

I roamed around my scattered buddies until I found a dagger figuring that, with my luck so far, I would need something to defend myself inside there. I took the blade’s tip between my fingertips and shook it until the severed hand let go of it. I shivered again, gagged once more for good measure and only then made my way inside the dark passage, armed with my blade and candle… but before I could cross in there, I stopped.

Chin-face snoozed on the altar, her undignified, blood-soaked butt pointing skywards…

I tapped my head against the wall.

By all rights I should let her here. She had been nothing but horrible and because of her I was being harassed by all kind of weirdos. Furthermore, I wanted my involvement with whatever this was to end here; there was no way this was my doing – right? Besides, nothing good could come for involving myself with the crazy bitch. Not to mention the verry real possibility of she going berserk again and eating my ass off.

I tapped my head against the wall once more.

On the other hand, I didn’t remember the conditions in which I had been kidnaped; It was plenty possible that the both of us disappeared together. If I suddenly came back without her there was every chance that the city guard would come knocking at my door… and, who knew? Maybe if I save her here, she would quit giving me a difficult time. Perhaps I would even get a cash reword for my heroics…

I headbutted the wall.

No, the sad true was that all of those were just excuses. I had already decided to drag her unconscious ass out of there, just because, crazy bitch or not, I wasn’t about to abandon her to the cultist’s mercy if there was a chance for them to come back.

“Oh, this is gonna be fun.”