At the centre of a massive cavern that was shrouded in blackness, a strange scene was taking place.

  “Are you ready?”

  Jason stared into the eyeless sockets of the chained woman’s face, conscious of the deathly silence that diluted the air, of the still surface of the bloody lake that surrounded the great stone platform where he’d found her. He seemed more perturbed by her pitiful state than she did, the chains that ran through her pale, emaciated skin setting his heart aflutter with nerve-wracking discomfort. The silvery chains kept her suspended two metres above the ground, hoisted between a pair of strange stone pillars that were covered in carvings of unknown characters.

  Disgusted and somewhat disgruntled, Jason responded to the aged voice by biting his finger and smearing the bleeding cut against a glob of dark blood that the woman had spat out a short while ago. Apparently this was the first step to the so-called Blood Oath, a dubious agreement that would supposedly bind him and the woman in an irrevocable contract. The price of failing to keep his end of the bargain would be his life, a stipulation that was the same for her. Despite the fact that she was his only hope of ever escaping this nightmarish place, he had waited until she’d completely detailed her terms before agreeing to the proposal.

  According to the near-mummified woman, if she managed to help him escape this place, he would have fifteen years to acquire the so-called key that would set her free from her hellish imprisonment. On the other hand, if she failed to help him leave this bloody cavern within a year’s time then her life would be forfeit.

  I can always keep looking for a way out after this. If I can get out of here on my own, then she wouldn’t have helped me at all and I won’t have to worry about fulfilling my end of the deal. The woman would die in that event, of course, but that wasn’t his problem. If anything, death would be a sweet release from the torment of her current situation.

  A few seconds after their blood had thoroughly mixed, the woman made a guttural sound that one might hear from a drowning animal and then a small bubble of iridescent substance left her mouth, the same sort of rainbow-yet-translucent energy that the powerful and intimidating Aelia had used during the last moments of her life.

  “This will…take a moment.” The woman’s body heaved like a fish that’d been out of water for far too long.

  The bubble of iridescent energy slowly descended onto the dark surface of the bloody pool, making contact with a light plop. The energy burst apart and seeped into the blood, which began to glow with a golden radiance that overshadowed the illumination of the spirit stone that Jason held in his left hand.

  Very soon, the energy receded and left a blinding oval of shivering light floating between them, which then split into two halves. One shot toward Jason, the other toward the woman, disappearing into their chests in the same instant.

  A strong tingle shot through Jason’s body, more painful than shocking, as if he’d stuck a fork into an electrical socket right after climbing out of a pool. The pain only lasted a minute, and then he felt fine.

  “Okay,” he said. “So, how do I get out?”

  The woman didn’t respond. Her head dipped downward and her limbs went limp, as she sagged into the chains that bound her. She had reverted to the same state that she’d been in when he had first laid eyes on her.

  “Hey, are you okay?”

  At least twenty minutes passed before she began to stir, first a finger, then a hand, until finally her head tilted upward to consider Jason’s worried expression with apathy.

  “That took…a considerable…amount of energy.”

  “Will you be okay?”

  Another minute drifted by. “The binding arrayment has been completed, though I may have to rest for a time.”

  “Hold on, you’re supposed to help me get out—”

  The woman’s withered body began to spasm, several minutes passing before she finally reverted to a limp state. Even so, her head remained tilted upward.

  “Bodies…five bodies… Find them…grey robes, left arms—” She coughed violently. “Their left arms, a pentagon, in black ink… Bring them here, and wait…for me to awaken.”

  “Wait! How long will that take? Hey!”

  It was no use, for she had already lost consciousness. If he didn’t know better, he would have thought that she’d died.

  Great, what am I supposed to do now?

  He stood around for a time, like a lost child in a strange place. Eventually, he stormed off across one of the many narrow bridges that latched onto the circular platform where he’d found the woman. Holding onto the taut railings of twined rope, he began crossing another great stretch of the dark cavern and set about looking for the corpses that the woman had specified. As the hours began to claw by, Jason was seized by a sense of helplessness. He’d spotted countless bodies floating aimlessly amidst the bloody lake and had no way to determine whether or not they were the ones that he was supposed to be looking for. The more he saw during his explorations, the more he prayed to God that he would manage to find his own way out of this place.

***

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Five days had passed in the darkness of the ghastly cavern, and by now Jason was convinced that he’d found and traversed every rope bridge that resided within the region. The shortest ones stretched on for at least five kilometres, and the longer ones were nearly twice that length.

  Jason was thoroughly convinced that the strange network of rope bridges wouldn’t lead him out of this place. If there was an exit, then it would be somewhere out in the darkness, hidden in the sea of gore.

  He eventually returned to the central platform where the lifeless woman lay shackled within her bed of chains. He tried getting her attention, clapping loudly and even yelling at her. He was way too scared to care about being rude.

  The minutes dragged on and she didn’t show any signs of waking. It was then that Jason recalled her last words and his stomach began to turn. Somewhere out in the cavern were five specific corpses that she needed him to retrieve, each with a tattoo of a black pentagon on their left arms. According to the woman, these were somehow necessary to aid in his escape.

  Despite the moderate temperature, Jason found himself dealing with a permanent shiver. Though widely dispersed, countless thousands of bodies filled the bloody lake like driftwood after a terrible storm. The sheer magnitude of the dead was enough to traumatise even the most stoic individuals, let alone the fact that all of them seemed to have lost their lives mere moments ago. During the past few days, he’d even spotted two corpses that were missing flesh in various spots, as if some rabid animal had fed upon their bodies.

  It bothered Jason that he hadn’t run into any other people after all this time. With each death so evidently recent, shouldn’t he have bumped into somebody on their deathbed by now? Not just that, this cavern was located within a giant mountain range, so how could so many people have wound up in this place, all recently deceased, all wearing different styles of dress? It was as if thousands of people from different cultures had gathered in a single place, not one of them bearing any resemblance to another, none except those three that he’d seen after he’d first scrambled out of the bloody lake and onto that rope bridge.

  Five bodies…find them…

  A strong suspicion filled his gut, making him suspect that he’d already happened upon three of the five that he had been tasked to collect. They were the only three that he’d encountered that had been wearing similar clothing. Not only that, the one who’d been floating face-up had shown an expression of utter astonishment, not pain or anguish like all of the others. That’s it! There’s a good chance that the other two would have the same expressions on their faces. I just have to look for people who have similar expressions and then I’ll have found all five! His plan wasn’t perfect, but it was all he could come up with in his panicked state.

  He retraced his steps and eventually found himself at the approximate spot where he’d initially climbed onto the first rope bridge that he’d seen, just moments after his unsuspecting fall. The bodies were nowhere in sight, but he remembered the vague direction in which they had been floating, and roughly guessed at where they might have drifted.

  Standing on the narrow bridge, Jason stared down at the dark mass of blood beneath him, seized by a silent horror as he thought about what he had to do next. The only way to retrieve those bodies was to enter the lake and swim in the same direction that they had been floating in.

  “There’s got to be another way,” he mumbled. He considered his current appearance, his entire body caked with a dry layer of cracked, flaking blood that made it appear as if he’d covered himself in body paint and neglected to wash it off in the days that followed.

  I don’t want to go back in there!

  Jason stood still for an entire hour, completely put off by the circumstances. When it finally registered with him that he literally had no choice, he bit his lip hard to calm his nerves and then set his jaw with waning determination. Fuck everything, I have to do it. Holding a spirit stone in each hand, he hopped over the bridge’s railing and plunged downward with a bloody splash. After scrambling to the surface and wading in the silence for a few moments, a sickly feeling washed over him and he lost a fight with his stomach. With blood covering his entire face, he vomited out a mouthful of bile. He had no idea how deep this lake was.

  Oh my God…oh my God…

  He swam faster than any competitive swimmer, dry heaving almost the entire time and throwing up the occasional bit of clear liquid. He passed by dozens of bodies in the following hours, all of them soaked crimson and recently deceased. He tried to swim around them whenever possible, but frustration eventually mingled with the terror that numbed his mind, which prompted him to nudge the bodies out of his way whenever they intersected with his path. Gruesome as it was, he eventually made it a point to inspect the left arms of each body that he drew near to, just in case his hunch about the surprised expressions was off the mark.

  Four hours trickled by and he still hadn’t found the bodies that he was looking for. Could he have swum in the wrong direction? He hadn’t seen another bridge since he’d left the pitiful comfort of the one that he’d leapt off of, but judging by the layout of this place he should’ve encountered another one by now, at least based upon the layout that he’d noticed earlier.

  Jason continued onward at an even breaststroke, fast enough to leave a small wake of frothing blood trailing behind him. Every time a hand dipped beneath the water, the brilliant light of the spirit stones would be halved in an odd way, giving life to a strobe-light-type of luminescence due to the speed of his strokes. This only agitated his anxieties.

  An eerie jolt zapped his heart to a standstill every time he sensed a new corpse, filling him with a sense of shameful reluctance. He grew more and more discomforted whenever he had to wade through the warm lake and peel back the sodden sleeves of these lifeless bodies, at which point he would rub their arms to clear off the blood and then inspect them under the light of his stones. In these instances, he only had the palpitating sounds of idle splashes for company.

  He grew more uneasy the farther he swam. Another hour had passed and he still hadn’t seen another bridge. It seemed as if the lake was deeper here, the darkness especially dense. He’d already started absorbing some of the energy from the spirit stones that he held, for all of the walking and swimming that he’d done over the past several days had left his stamina considerably depleted, not to mention that he was starving. To be able to stomach a meal when his surroundings were so twisted and vile would be inhuman, and he had to conserve his meager rations.

  He found them soon enough, the same young adults that he’d first caught sight of back when he had initially arrived here. As far as he could tell, they were about college-aged, maybe a bit older.

  As he’d been when Jason had originally seen him, the young man with short hair still floated on his back, the chiselled lines of his handsome face distorted in that look of utter disbelief that he remembered so well.

  There were also two others, a man and a woman, both of their gazes showcasing the same sort of astonishment as the young man between them. Unlike their companion, their mouths were warped in abject terror. What could they have possibly witnessed before their deaths?

  Jason treated these bodies no different from all the others, shivering in the water as he pulled up their left sleeves and rubbed the blood away just enough to get a look at the black pentagons inked into their inner biceps.