Run, run, run! All my energy, all my effort is devoted to fleeing. My legs are numb, my shoulders burning from the weight of my mace. I press onward, yet however fast I want to move, there’s dwarves in front of me I cannot pass. I took the rearguard, and if I throw that position away, who will trust me? Yet if I don’t, Fjalar will be able to trap me here for the darkness to devour.
I’ve only once felt this terrified—the time I fled downward from the terrible heat of the dragon. This is the opposite: I’m fleeing coldness, and upward, yet the danger is the same. Worse, for now I have a foe ahead of me as well as behind.
It’s gaining on us, foot by foot. At this rate it’ll subsume me—maybe we should stop, turn and attack it, weaken it some more. Yes, I think that’s our only option.
“Halt!” I scream. “We need to form a defense! It’s going to catch us! We need to stop, attack and weaken it!”
No one stops; they won’t listen to me. Who wants to stop with escape just in reach?
“Halt!” I repeat. “Either we fight it here or we fight it on the platform, with it coming up from below!”
No one is interested in hearing my logic. They just continue to run. The injured dwarves have exhausted themselves, and are slowing significantly, limping, their legs on the verge of giving out.
“Halt!” I scream again.
Should I halt with no support, give the darkness a blow with my mace at the zenith of its brightness? No, that’s mad: I’m not strong enough to damage it by myself. That means I’m going to have to accelerate past the injured—which some dwarves have already done. The two in front of me were uninjured, and now they’ve pushed past the slowest dwarf.
I glance back and the darkness is almost upon me. I spin around and lash out at a line of void grasping for me—my mace smashes through, disintegrating it, but this does not slow the darkness’s advance. I stumble onward, away from it.
“Halt!” I yell again, desperate to get someone to fight with me, but they just won’t. Maybe they’re right about themselves—they are cowards! The odds are not impossible, we beat it back before and hurt it enough to make it think twice about coming after us so eagerly.
“Halt!” I shout to the injured dwarves in front of me. “It’s going to catch us anyway, do you want to face it or have it take you while your back is turned?”
“But we’re nearly there!” one shouts as he glances back. “We’re nearly there!”
“We aren’t!” I scream in frustration. “You remember how long our walk down here was! We haven’t even reached the halfway point!”
“That’s not true,” he wails. “That’s not true!”
“It is true! Stand and fight!”
He turns and stops, giving me hope he’s going to fight, but no others follow his example. I stand next to him regardless, hoping to give the darkness one good blow before I restart my sprint, and he disappoints me. He tosses his mace to the stone in despair and prostrates himself before the advancing void.
“Spare me!” he cries. “We never meant to disturb you! Spare me!”
“Fool!” I yell at him, and strike at the darkness.
It recoils for only an instant then comes at me full on. I turn and sprint, fast as I can, leaving the injured dwarf to his cold fate. The next injured—one who was at the very middle of the group, as far as I can recall, meaning that everyone is pushing past everyone else now—moves to the side to get out of my way. He’s slowing and his breathing is ragged. I cannot see his eyes, my hearing is not good enough to make them out through his visor, but I can tell he’s given up.
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I have no choice but to pass him. He doesn’t even bother to scream out when the darkness reaches him.
There’s a fair stretch before the next dwarf now. Shit! I need to catch up, so I force myself to accelerate, but my legs won’t go as fast as my mind commands; they’re in agony, pain shoots up them with every stride. My arms feel as if they are on the verge of dislocating from my shoulders. My hearing has gone strange from the fatigue also, compounding the effect of the damage to my runic ears; the corridor is bending and twisting.
I pass the next dwarf. This is no longer a retreat but a race to see who will survive, and Fjalar, with his head start and blood-healed body, is sure to win.
I pass another injured dwarf, then another. I feel guilty for it. It’s their fault, I tell myself. If they’d listened to me back there, formed a wall to beat the darkness away, then they wouldn’t have to die. In the moments after Belthur arrived, they listened to Nthazes, so why won’t they listen to me now?
What have I done to break their trust? Nothing—they’re just fools, unwilling to listen to someone who isn’t one of their own.
Even so, I still feel guilty. The darkness is at my heels now, chilling my back through my armor, which means that each dwarf I pass is another death.
Eventually, all the injured dwarves are gone and between me and the next dwarf is a vast stretch of tunnel. The gap closes by inches—we’re running at nearly the same speed. I’m at the very limits of my endurance now. If I survive this, I don’t think I’ll be walking for a good while. My very bones are beginning to hurt.
Scars on the wall flash past me. Runethane Yurok said those showed the furthest point the last expedition went, and I think that was at about the halfway point of our journey to the city.
Only halfway then! The coldness on my back is growing colder. It spurs me on, pushing my endurance past what I thought possible. Like how in the forge I only feel the rhythm of my hammer and all else vanishes, now I only feel the rhythm of my run and the only thing in existence is the space ahead of me and death behind.
I reach the next dwarf, and pass him. He doesn’t give up or fall behind, instead accelerating from fear at the chill just behind us. Like a wave it pushes us on to the next dwarf, who also speeds up.
The one after trips. I sprawl over him, roll. One of the flanges of my mace digs into my hip, making me yell in pain—then I choke on worse pain in my throat, because breathing in the death-dry air here has ruined it. There’s no time to recover; barely breathing I push myself to my feet and keep on running toward the next dwarf.
Finally, I see it: there’s an end to the tunnel, and a thin line, appearing as a thread from this far away, must be the cable of the lift mechanism. Instead of feeling hope, a sinking feeling takes hold of me. If Fjalar gets to it first, he'll have plenty of time to ascend before I reach the platform.
I’ll just have to hope beyond hope that Nthazes or the other dwarves will stop him.
We continue to run. I glance back, and every time I do so I see that a dwarf has vanished. Our group’s number remains constant then, as we continue to catch up with others. There’s about a dozen of us in this shifting group—probably this is a full half of the fort’s population.
The cable grows in thickness. We’re nearly here now. I can’t see if anyone’s on the lift yet, though.
Just a hundred feet to go now. My thinking ceases—all I’m doing now is feeling the pain in my legs and the rhythm of my boots.
“Hurry up!” someone shouts, his voice hoarse. “Hurry up!”
Then some more voices come, indistinct. It seems like an argument. Fear shoots through me—there’s only one thing they could be arguing about, and that’s whether or not to start the ascent before we get here. Adrenaline shoots into my thigh muscles, attempting to propel them and make them work faster, yet the meat of my body is too tattered to obey.
One of our group, in a burst of speed, shoves past me. I stumble into the wall and fall to my knees. I struggle to stand; more dwarves pass me—they don’t even look at me. Maybe they don’t even notice me.
The chill of the darkness forces me to my feet. I stumble on. Only thirty feet to go now. The dwarves are throwing themselves onto the platform, yelling:
“Up, up! Take it up!”
“Wait!” shouts Nthazes. He’s positioned himself in front of the controls. “We’re not all on!”
“Take it up!” Fjalar shouts.
“I said wait! Are you trying to kill him?”
“I’m trying to save us! Get out of the way!”
He attempts to wrestle Nthazes away, but my friend stands firm. Fjalar yells in frustration, takes a step back, and swings his armored fist into Nthazes’ head. My friend collapses sideways, stunned. Fjalar slams his hand on the button.
No! The platform begins to rise. Ten feet to go now and it’s nearly out of reach; I toss my mace backwards and grab hold of the edge. My fingers thread through the holes of the hexagonal steel mesh.
The platform lifts me off the stone. The darkness roils up after me like impossibly cold and silent steam. I lose feeling in my toes, then my feet.