Your steps pad against the dusty stone floor and your maille twinkles off the chamber's walls.

A burning, a wetness from your side, vision coning, a sickness overcomes you. Dropping to your knees near a pillar you rip the helm from your head and vomit.

Your hair soaks the stone pillar as it rests against it.

Far off from another room, comes a scream, a vicious yowl, wild and pained and cruel.

Using the pillar you stand, trembling legs like a doe, you begin to clamber up the stairs nearest you.

Reaching the top you enter a doorway, a thick, musty, air hangs around rotting bookshelves, the room is deep, with an open center, stairs winding down along the walkways; it's hard to breath. You make your way towards an open door, dirt sprinkling you from the upset shelves.

Closer now, through the door, you peer down a long moonlit hallway, windows towering from end to end. You pause a moment, dust floats in the tall blue light, tired wood creaks and settles endlessly.

Suddenly a light flickers off the wall at the other end of the hall.

You remove yourself from the doorway, narrowly missing some sagging boards in the floor, to behind a bookshelf. As you crouch and listen to your breath, A low, gluttonous, growl comes from beyond the depths of the room unlike anything you've heard.

What other nightmares may this place hold? Footsteps brush down the hallway in a confused pattern, wrought iron clanging deeply, the orange light growing. Your eyes water and sting from the musk of the room. You focus on stifling your breath and watch the doorway.

A creature shambles into view, bent and hunched and wicked. With head low, it looks 'round top its crude helm, lantern forthput expectantly.

Light screams through the books and shelving, you tuck yourself away. Heavy steps, ragged breathing, its head sweeps from here to there patrolling, listening.

As it walks, you slowly pull a book out from the shelf, you feel its weight for a moment before tossing it over the bannister into the pit of the room.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Smack.

An excited shudder comes from your right as the creature turns and heads towards the stairs to your left.

As it passes, your hand tightens on your sword hilt, the lantern's light fully exposes you, but to its rear so that it cannot see you. Still as the grave you sit with eyes fixed, soon it's down the first stairs and heading toward the second case, nearly out of your sight. You take the opportunity to start back 'round the bookcase toward the open hallway door.

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

You mistep - the warped boards.

A terrible creak and moan come before sending your right leg straight through the floor. The scramble causes a shelf nearby to collapse, spilling heavy tomes to the floor.

You look back to where you last saw the light, but it's gone. Blackness.

You're pushing against the floor trying to release yourself, wriggling, squirming, sweating, seemingly all in vein. Having taken the moment to rest, you seem to hear something, and squinting into the darkness reveals that swaying iron helm topping the stairs.

It takes greedy steps towards you in the darkness. gleaming what's left of a jagged sword.

You're going to die.

Stuck in a fucking floorboard-you're going to die.

Like a fucking idiot.

Pulling your leg is futile, as death encroaches, panic takes your heart. You slam your elbows and body into the rotting boards tirelessly, all the while that hoarse, rattling breath draws nearer.

Your weight gives in as you're hurled through the opposite side in a plume of rotten dust and planks, onto a table, breaking it to bits. More heavy tomes follow from the floor above.

Rolling out from the confusion you attempt to wipe clear your eyes, but it seems no use, they blur and show little. You piece out what you can in the dark through heavy blinks and orient yourself, drawing your sword from its scabbard.

You look back up the hole you fell through, but the creature isn't there; From then you train your eyes on the staircase, the only possible entry.

A long time passes with nothing but the shadows and settling of wood.

You begin to glance around the room, but it's difficult to make anything out amongst the tall dark bookcases... until you do. Now it knows you know.

The creature paces toward you eagerly, your eyes fixate on the vile blade in its grip.

It steps within three meters of you before you raise your own sword just above your shoulders, so that the point steeps and faces its chest.

It stops, half-circling you thrice before a cling of metal startles you and your sword's tip is thrown off mark, you're able to retrain it quickly however, before another play is made.

The two of you circle one another for a time, feinting and testing the other's reactions.

It persists in grabbing at you with it's unarmed hand, you threaten and it retracts, but never does it cease trying. This time though, the hand gets closer than in others. You make a small upward cut from below, deeply slicing it from palm to thumb. Below you, maille sounds along with a splitting pain in your groin, your legs want to buckle. The beast retracts its armed hand to deliver another blow to your face. You turn your head so that the jagged edge scrapes across the side of your helm, and into your coif.

You make another upward slice, toward the abdomen, but your arm is blocked by the creature's injured hand so that the blow is only partial.

Another stab for your groin, you turn at the hips so that it hits the armor of your leg.

Your free hand pummels what is latched to your arm so that it loosens its hold, when a blow into the soft of your waist causes you to retreat.

Separated now, most of your cuts are blocked by the tattered maille rags that cloak the creature.

It tests you again, flinching and parrying, before grabbing right at the blade of your sword. You meet its grip halfway up the blade, and force it through a gap in maille so that the creature is pierced badly. In return it strikes hard into your underarm drawing a sharp reaction that sends you for distance from it.

The wound you delivered is leaking, you can hear it spilling onto the floor and through the floorboards. The creature's silhouette, nearly still now, illuminated by the moon, a pumping stream from its body.

The head grows heavy, it takes a step but confuses its feet and falls utterly to the floor. With no more than a few terrible, flooded breaths its life ceases.

You feel yourself become sick again, a familiar heat rising in you. You drop to all fours and let your helm fall away from your head.