Madelaine frowned at her royal knights, Boney 1 and Boney 2, who carried torches on either side of her. It was nice to have her own little entourage, as befit her station, but it had been a decision out of royal necessity, rather than royal will. The meatwall had lost an arm, and if something could bite off that dude's arm when he had gone all giant, she wanted something between her and the thing doing the biting.

Distinction: Soul Binding

Spells may be made permanent at a cost of a permanent reduction in your maximum mana for the full mana cost of that spell; mana spell cost reductions do not apply. You may Reclaim Soul Bound spells in order to recover your maximum mana; if this results in a maximum mana beyond your inherent limitations, this bonus will decrease by 1 per day.

Distinction: Siphon Soul

If your attack kills an opponent, you may spend mana equivalent to the ascensions of the target creature to attempt to store its power, gaining a temporary bonus to your maximum mana up to its number of ascensions. This bonus decreases by 1 per day

Two small things, equal to half the customization points she'd gotten while they'd been stuck in this cursed cavern. At least it had plenty of skeletons; she was on her third Boney 1, now, and her second Boney 2, and as weird and strange as it felt channeling the energy to make skeletons walk again, soul binding the spells felt like somebody trying to pull her intestines up through her ribs; it was intensely uncomfortable and disconcerting.

Maybe more disconcerting than the experience of learning the spell in the first place. That had felt … wrong. It still felt wrong. The spell didn't feel like words, it felt like a chunk of incomprehensible math stuck in her head; “casting” it was even worse, her thoughts replaced with rambling crunchy static.

It beat having your royal arm bit off, though. So she'd kept doing it. And Boney 1 and Boney 2 would stick around until something broke them and she had to Reclaim them; they were both cast with more mana than they had been at first time, and they were harder to break. It just made the static slightly louder in her head.

That not-sound was the only thing she'd heard since that … no. Her eyes watered, and Madelaine blinked the tears away. It was odd; it shouldn't be something that made her sad. She couldn't think about … but she could think about her mother. There wasn't a hole in her mind, there; there wasn't anything to forget.

It shouldn't bother her at all, should it? Shouldn't it? Why didn't she … and there, of course, was the hole. That which couldn't be grasped.

Madelaine shook her head, and turned her attention deliberately back to the cavern around them. Attention here. The spiders weren't a threat – mostly. One of the little blue messages had called them horseweb spiders, a name that had stuck with her, because she had seen the size of the webs in here before they had set everything on fire, and it was an appropriate name. But they weren't horses, and the spiders kind of deflated if you stabbed them just right, which she'd been practicing at.

But there had been the gigapede, the giant ugly bug that had bitten Thomas' arm off when the meatwall had tried to grab its pincers closed. She'd been impressed that he'd thought of it, at least up until it didn't work. Then there had been the little cavern full of ugly white worms that were bigger than she was; that had been the end of Boney 1.1 and Boney 2.1, and quite the surprise that had been. Thomas had helped her out, but then Lady Anne had to help him out. Madelaine shook her head again. The silence made it hard to concentrate. Focus on the present.

They picked their way around the edge of the lake cavern, checking the smaller caverns; she thought maybe they were looking for other people, but so far nobody they'd found had been alive. There had been a group that looked like they'd been alive for a little while, at least; the skeletons looked like … no, stay in the present.

She moved her hand to her rapier, and started looking around the lake cavern for any threats. Looking for something was at least slightly more engaging than trying to watch everybody else. She blinked, staring at the … uh. Large white beetle. Why were all the bugs so big here? She turned to get someone's attention, but Lady Anne was already watching it scuttle past. They kept walking.

The next opening in the wall ended a few feet in, with nothing but some white discoloration on the ground, that looked kind of like bird droppings. Lady Anne pointed at some rocks overhead, and Admiral Norris and Princess Arias nodded, but they didn't look alarmed, and their group continued on to the next cavern. Meatwall just looked confused. Madelaine was also confused, but it would be improper to show it, so she looked with everyone else, and nodded, and kept walking with her royal escort.

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They walked, and walked, and walked some more. It was tedious, tiring, and boring, and Madelaine was giving serious thought to getting her escort to carry her on one of those royal stretchers she had seen on … that she had seen. It's not like skeletons got tired, after all. Could you make a … skeleton-mill, powered by skeletons? The bones would probably eventually erode, or grind down, or whatever, just from touching each other as they moved.

The recesses were mostly empty, or just had spiders in them. They found two that kept going, and looked like they might go deeper – Lady Anne and Princess Arias had pointed at the ground, which had gravel instead of solid rock, and it was all moldy and slimy – and Princess Arias marked the wall with a piece of chalk; they'd be coming back to those, Madelaine guessed? It was hard to know what was going on.

The next hole in the wall had some spiders in it; they weren't too challenging, she killed three of them herself. And then the next one Arias had to lower a rope from, and Thomas had to stay behind, because he couldn't climb the rope one-handed; he'd tried the day before without success. Madelaine climbed up, but she left him one of her royal guards, in case he got into trouble.

This tunnel required her to crawl on her hands and knees a bit, so the man wouldn't have liked it at all, anyways. She could imagine him whining about the tight enclosed space, and how it was hard to breathe, and how the air heated up and it felt like she wasn't getting enough and the tunnel kept going and she couldn't see very far because Arias was crawling ahead of her and she couldn't back up because Anne was behind her and she was very glad when it widened back up. She could imagine it, but she was of stiffer stuff. But also it didn't befit her royal status to have to crawl in that manner and she'd send her royal guards with the others next time.

The air smelled funny and she felt dizzy, when she got into the wider open space of the cavern, and their torches started going out. Norris did some magic and she felt better, though, and then they could relight their torches. Then they kept walking; Norris had to do the magic at least once more that she saw, and she thought she felt a breeze stirring the second time, but the air was warm and it was hard to tell for sure.

This tunnel led upwards for a ways; she got to stab a couple more spiders who had tried to make a web across the tunnel, but then the tunnel turned nearly vertically upward in the next, unexpectedly bright room, where the air was all weird again, and Norris had to do his magic again. There was light filtering down through the hole, a little fist-sized chunk of red light, which they hurried towards; but it was just a tiny hole going up, and she, at least, couldn't figure out how to angle herself to see up it.

As they stood around, she felt the air moving past them, and started to get dizzy again; Norris shook his head and started hurrying them from this section, back the way they had come. He did the spell once more, and then she was crawling back through the horrid tiny space which was entirely too dusty, and they climbed back down the rope to resume their walk.

She thought about the bad air in the cave, though. Why was the air bad if there was a hole going outside? Maybe it didn't lead outside. But then, why was the air moving? And why didn't it blow past them while they were squeezing through the narrow tunnel? There must have been another hole in the room they didn't find.

The next side tunnel, which led them over more of the tiny pebbles led up a small incline into another large cave, and she got excited, because stalagmites rose up from the ground, and looking up, stalactites covered the ceiling; it was all wet, and glistened in their torchlight, and it was really pretty. But she didn't see the big snakes until they had almost reached her.

Madelaine leapt back, stabbing wildly, and missing. With her next thrust, her rapier leapt from her hand, but of course it bounced off a stalagmite, spun in the air, and landed point-first in head of the first snake. Which didn't stop moving, so she yelped – she couldn't hear it, but she could feel it in her throat, which felt really weird – and grabbed her rapier. The snake turned at her, and she was forced to relinquish her sword and jump away again before it tried to bite.

Her royal guards moved in, then, and started kicking at the two snakes. She paused, safely out of the reach of their terrifying fangs, to look at them properly; they were each as long as she was tall, and as wide around as her wrist, and a funny diamond checkerboard pattern of alternating blues and reds. They were pretty!

But also there was a weird sensation in her chest, which made her panic for a moment, looking for bites. But no, she felt it in her feet, and she felt it in her arms and head, and then she realized the giant snakes had rattles they were shaking fiercely in time with the weird sensation. She stared at them. It was … creepy, now that she knew what it was. How loud was that?

Thomas calmly walked in front of her, stomping on the two snakes repeatedly even as they bit at Boney 1 and Boney 2, and finally at his bare feet. He bled a little bit, but he looked more annoyed than hurt; he was in his giant body form. At least he'd finally gotten over being naked; he had been super weird about it. She'd asked Lady Anne about it, after she'd seen that Princess Arias didn't care, and if the princess didn't care than neither would she; Anne hadn't really explained it, just said something about men being shy, which didn't sound right at all to Madelaine but she couldn't argue the point at all.

The snakes died, and she got another customization point. She wasn't getting anything for the spiders anymore, which she guessed was because she just stabbed them and they died now, whereas the snake had almost bitten her. She'd gotten a lot from the faceless …

Madelaine looked around, and found her sword on the ground, next to the squashed snake. She then proceeded to look for everybody else, and only proceeded to start cleaning her sword when she made sure everybody was done; she'd started cleaning her sword while Anne and Arias had still been fighting in one cave, and even though nobody had seemed to notice, she still felt sheepish about it.

They continued on, cave by cave, moving in their little pool of light in the vast darkness of the cave. Until, almost within the minute that Madelaine first thought that their group might turn back to sleep for the night, they found a cave that was different, because somebody had made a little wall of piled rocks. And there was light behind the rocks. People!