What was this feeling?

  This… dread?

  It hit Kar like a Focused blast. Not an ordinary fear, the sharp panic of something lunging out unexpectedly. No, this was heavier, older. Something half-remembered Kar couldn’t place, a lost memory now recalled as a desperate, pleading warning. It pressed in around him, a pressure on his skin, which, after slight resistance, sank deeper still. Into his very bones.

  Kar was left with a cold certainty, that he was standing on the edge of something that never should have been opened.

  Those black figures shuffled towards them.

  He couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Even as more and more Shadowcryst slowly revealed themselves.

  They came on slow, like sleepers dragged from hibernation. Long limbs unfolded, and heads angled in Kar and Lore’s direction as they advanced. Some lurched forward on two legs, others more. They were joined by those with no appendages that squirmed or crept toward the light. The grinding cacophony of crystal scraping on stone echoing ominously.

  How many?

  At first, Kar had thought them few, but as the first of their number approached the threshold, the deep darkness beyond kept giving, until there was an innumerable swarm, pressing forward at a glacial pace.

  Kar had to shut it back. He stumbled forward, legs protesting his appeals to move.

  The broken off void-cryst he had left behind in the archway ripped open his left hand, as he tore and pulled at it desperately. Slick blood ran in rivulets down his forearm to the elbow.

  “Move aside!” Lore shouted.

  Kar stumbled away, heart pounding. His eyes flickered to the Shadowcryst. They were close now, their leading numbers moving with more voracity as they became fully bathed by light near the threshold.

  Lore surged past, swinging her new hammer. The head of the Focus-Forged weapon slammed into the void-cryst at hip level with a crack that echoed off the array of semicircle steps behind them. Shards of void-cryst ricocheted, one fragment slicing a stinging line across Kar’s left cheek.

  She swung again, harder. Then again. The last chunks of void-cryst broke off and clattered to the stone ground. Kar rushed forward, pulling and brushing away whatever splinters remained until it looked as it had before it had been defiled.

  Nothing changed.

  There was no shift in the air, no tightening of the breach. The Causeway remained connected. Open. And the first of the Shadowcryst stepped across the threshold onto this side.

  Kar’s stomach turned. How had it been activated? How did any of this work? He was trapped in the middle, and three steps behind in every measure. But no excuse, could excuse, what had just been done by his hand.

  “Back up,” Kar said, blinking furiously. He couldn’t turn back time, couldn’t undo this nightmare he’d unleashed. He had to fix it.

  What did he have to work with? What were they up against? He had the Focal ring on his left hand. Melisdra had left it with him all this time, strangely. But what did that matter?

  To prove his doubts, Kar lifted his left palm and Focused a blast toward the nearest Shadowcryst. It dissipated in the air before striking the creature, like mist blown apart by an unseen gale.

  Just as Kar had expected. It was the same thing that happened to any Focusing that got near his void-cryst arm. Which meant Focusing would be useless as a weapon against these things.

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  That left him with one clear choice.

  Melisdra had told him, no Absorption. But she was the least of his concerns right now. Kar leapt toward the Shadowcryst. It barely reacted, only twitching toward him at the last moment. Too slow to stop Kar.

  He grabbed hold of the creature with his left hand, and pulled. The experience wasn’t what he expected. Not like drawing on a shard, or one of the cryst-soldiers or cryst-beasts.

  The Energía Kar was trying to take from the Shadowcryst wasn’t normal. It was that other kind—what regular Energía turned into after Kar had Absorbed, then Converted it.

  The Shadowcryst resisted him, and suddenly, Kar felt it pulling on his Energía. It was a battle of wills, and Kar was losing. He threw himself backward—breaking the connection—and scrambled away from the monstrosity in despair. If he couldn’t take its Energía, then he had no resource to Shadow Forge with.

  Lore leapt past him, her hammer a blur. She struck the creature with a savage flurry, each blow cracking its crystal veneer. Chips exploded off its torso and shoulders, and the outer shell splintered. Beneath it, something darker writhed—shadow condensed into muscle-like ropes, twitching in agitation.

  A horrible, grinding screech tore from the creature, vibrating through the floor and up Kar’s spine. The others behind it answered, their screaming cries resonating in a nightmarish chorus that made Kar’s teeth and skull ache.

  Lore screamed her own, answering battle cry, and brought the hammer down on the thing’s head. The crystal casing shattered, and its eyeless face broke into fragments.

  Still, it didn’t die.

  The Shadowcryst lurched toward Lore, sensing her Energía, Kar realized. It struck out with one of its limbs. The tip sharpened mid-swing, crystal flowing into a needle point that stabbed into Lore’s side.

  Her shout cut-off, and she stiffened, eyes wide. Then her body convulsed as the creature’s arm pulsed with a dim, sickly light. It was feeding on her.

  “No!” He screamed, throwing himself onto the Shadowcryst. Kar’s void-cryst arm rose and fell like a club. He hammered at the creature’s limb, at the joint, anything he thought would force it to release her.

  A crack split the air, and the feeding arm snapped off. The creature recoiled, making that same grinding screech it had made earlier, and staggered back.

  Lore collapsed.

  Kar was there to catch her before her head could hit the ground. The weight of her sudden and heavy, her face already so pale. Blood seeped through the cloth of her torn, green dress and smeared across Kar’s void-cryst arm. It thrilled at the sensation, and Kar’s head swirled with equal parts disgust and fear.

  He scooped her and her hammer up and ran, bounding up the curved array of steps around the Causeways, three at a time. Lore’s body bounced against his chest as he clutched her tightly to him.

  He reached the street above and laid her down roughly, hands shaking, allowing the hammer to clatter to the cobblestones. He was terrified of what he would find. The wound in her side was deep, too deep.

  Kar Focused, wrenching every last thread of Energía he could muster. He pressed his ringed finger to Lore’s side and Imbued it into her. Warmth flooded outward, and her body began stitching and knitting itself back together.

  The process stuttered to a halt, incomplete. He had nothing left of himself to give.

  Kar’s reserves had always been pitiful. He’d found ways to compensate, but right now, that didn’t matter. He desperately needed Energía, Lore needed it.

  Someone stepped up beside Kar. A local man, come to investigate the terrible disturbance. “Oh Source…” The stranger gasped, upon seeing the open Causeway and the Shadowcryst slowly disgorging from it. “Are you alright, son?” The man asked, a deeply concerned expression on his face.

  Time froze as a dark, desperate idea occurred to Kar. He could see no other way.

  Cursing himself, Kar stretched out his right hand toward the man’s leg. He did as the Shadowcryst had done, and took the man’s Energía as his own.

  The man was no Adept, Kar could sense. But he had something else, intertwined throughout every fiber of his body. Was this the life-force Erio and Tharn had discussed with Morrow? What his void-cryst arm had pulled from Kar to reform itself after Melisdra severed it from him? It felt like just another flavor of Energía.

  The man cried out, then fell to his knees, shaking. His vitality flooded into Kar as he Absorbed it, but it wasn’t something he could make use of, not yet. He Converted that life force, turning it into—what he now thought of as—Dark Energía. He tried to Imbue it into Lore, to finish healing her. It didn’t work. He was working through all of this on the spot, leaning fully on intuition. He couldn’t use this Dark form of Energía to create normal Focusings.

  It was all Kar had, though.

  In desperation, he poured it into Lore’s wound another way, trying to emulate the Imbuement process—via Shadow Forging. Dark threads and filaments crawled across Lore’s exposed abdomen, sealing the wound shut. Kar noticed, then, the lighter splotches of crystal still present along her side—evidence of his earlier efforts to heal her, that first time they’d entered the Vault together and fought those cryst-soldiers. It seemed so long ago now…

  Kar released his hold on the older man he’d accosted. The man collapsed fully to the ground, gasping and shuddering.

  Beside him, Lore inhaled sharply, and her eyes snapped open.