It turned.

  Two pale lights found Aris across the floor, steady and patient and entirely without hurry, and the floating plates of its form drifted to orient toward him with the slow certainty of something that had never once needed to rush.

  For three full seconds Aris stood exactly where he was, satchel over his shoulder, harvesting cloth still in his left hand, and looked at a Floor Thirteen creature looking back at him.

  Then he ran.

  Not away.

  Toward the girl.

  He was aware, distantly, of the noise he was making all the careful quiet of his approach, years of practiced silence, completely gone, his boots on the stone floor as loud as a declaration. He was aware of the Hollow Guard behind him, not running because it didn't run, just moving with that slow drifting inevitability. He was aware that he had a dagger on his belt that was lucky in the superstitious sense and useless in the practical one.

  He reached her in seconds that felt architectural.

  She was alive.

  He didn't understand how she was alive. The wall behind her was marked at a height that told him exactly how hard she'd hit it, and the floor around her was telling its own story, and she was alive anyway breathing in short, shallow pulls, one hand pressed back against the wound in her side that the makeshift cloth had stopped covering. Her armor was beyond assessment now. There were pieces of it nearby that had separated on impact. Whatever had kept her protected coming down seven floors of dungeon alone had finally given everything it had to give.

  Her eyes were open.

  They found his face with an effort that was visible, like focusing through water, and for a moment she just looked at him this stranger who had yelled at her in the dark, who was now crouching over her with a flower-harvesting satchel and an expression he could feel on his own face and didn't want to imagine.

  Behind him, the deep bell-resonance of the Hollow Guard's movement pulsed through the floor again.

  Closer.

  Aris looked at her. Then he looked up at the creature drifting toward them across the crystal-lit dark, its axe hanging loose, its pale eyes fixed, its patience absolute and enormous.

  Then he looked back at her.

  "Can you move?"

  Her mouth opened. What came out wasn't words exactly more the shape of an attempt.

  "Okay," he said, mostly to himself. "Okay."

  He pulled the satchel off his shoulder, shoved it against the wall, grabbed her arm across his shoulders with both hands, and stood up.

  She was heavier than she looked.

  That was his first coherent thought after the second the first being something wordless and urgent that his legs had already acted on. The armor that remained on her added weight that didn't distribute evenly, and she wasn't helping, couldn't help, her feet dragging more than pushing, her consciousness coming and going in a way he could feel through the arm he had wrapped around her back. Her head dropped against his shoulder. He adjusted his grip, got his arm further under her, and walked as fast as the combination of her weight and the uneven stone floor allowed.

  Which was not fast.

  He kept his eyes forward. The passage back to the stairwell was two hundred meters, maybe more he'd never measured it going this direction with this particular problem. The crystal light was enough to see the path. It was not enough to see details. He picked his footing one step at a time and didn't look back.

  That was the worst part. Not looking back.

  The Hollow Guard didn't make footstep sounds. He knew this he'd known it from the moment it had come through the northern passage without anything his ears could track, just that deep resonance through the stone that wasn't exactly a sound at all. Which meant that right now, behind him, there was either a Floor Thirteen creature drifting closer at its steady inevitable pace, or there was nothing, and he had no way to distinguish between those two possibilities without turning around.

  He didn't turn around.

  His breathing was doing something unmanageable. He could hear it too fast, too shallow, loud enough in the passage's silence to bother him. He clamped down on it, forced a longer exhale, got two seconds of control, lost it again. The girl's weight shifted and he stumbled half a step and caught them both against the wall and pushed off and kept moving.

  He wanted to call out. The distant sounds of other Wanderers had been coming from the western passage there were people somewhere on this floor, not far enough that they couldn't hear him if he yelled. He opened his mouth.

  Closed it.

  If there were other creatures nearby and there were always other creatures nearby, that was what a dungeon was sound was an invitation. The white rabbits alone. If there was anything else displaced from its usual floor the way the Hollow Guard had been displaced, anything hunting in the dark margins between the crystal columns that he hadn't spotted on his way in

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  He didn't yell.

  He walked faster.

  The girl made a sound against his shoulder not words, just a sound, low and involuntary. Pain, or the effort of staying conscious, or both. He adjusted his grip again. His left arm was burning from the shoulder down. The stone floor was doing something unhelpful to his ankles.

  One hundred meters, he estimated. Maybe ninety. The passage bends left and then it's straight to the stairwell and then it's just five floors of route I know by memory and

  Something in the quality of the dark behind him changed.

  He couldn't have explained how he knew. He just knew, the way animals know something in the peripheral awareness of a body that had spent six years learning the sounds and non-sounds of this floor. The dark behind him had weight in it now. Presence.

  He turned his head.

  The Hollow Guard was not at its original distance.

  It was not drifting.

  It was moving with a purpose that its initial approach hadn't suggested was possible not running exactly, but accelerating, its floating plates drawing tighter together, the gaps between them narrowing, its pale eyes fixed on him with an intensity that made the word patient suddenly seem like it had never applied. The axe was up. The resonance through the floor was continuous now, rhythmic, getting louder.

  Twenty meters.

  Fifteen.

  Run, his body decided, without consulting him.

  He ran.

  Three seconds of it three seconds of real speed with her weight across his shoulders, his boots hitting the stone hard, the satchel gone, left behind somewhere, three seconds of actually covering ground and then his right foot found the edge of a raised stone in the dark and the decision was made for him.

  They went down together.

  The impact stripped his grip and she rolled free and he hit the floor on his hands and one knee and felt it in every direction simultaneously. For a moment he just existed on the ground, processing. Then he got his hands under him and pushed up and grabbed for her and she was there close, on her back, the white ruin of her hair spread on the stone floor, her eyes open and finding the ceiling.

  "Come on," he said, getting his arm under her shoulders. "Come on, up"

  He got her halfway.

  The shadow came first.

  It fell over both of them from behind a cold, total shadow that the crystal light couldn't reach around and with it came the resonance, so close now that it wasn't in the floor anymore, it was in the air, in his chest, in his back teeth. The temperature dropped two degrees in a second. Aris felt the hair on his arms respond.

  He turned around.

  The pale eyes looked down at him from a height that made crouching feel correct, made standing feel like a statement. The Hollow Guard had stopped. It wasn't drifting anymore. It simply was present and enormous and without urgency, the way large things are without urgency when there's nowhere for the small things to go.

  The axe rose.

  Slow. Deliberate. The iron head catching the faint blue light and holding it strangely, like the metal had never quite decided to be metal. The Hollow Guard didn't rush this part. Aris understood, in a way that bypassed thought entirely, that it had never needed to rush this part.

  He couldn't move.

  He was aware of this the way he'd been aware of it before aware of his body and the instructions he was sending it and the complete failure of those instructions to produce results. His hands were on the floor. His knee was on the floor. He was looking up at a Floor Thirteen creature with an axe overhead and he could not make any part of himself do anything about it.

  Somewhere in the training he didn't have, there was probably a correct response to this moment. He didn't have it.

  The eternity lasted approximately four seconds.

  Then something touched his sleeve.

  Fingers. Weak, sweating, gripping the canvas of his jacket with an effort that communicated exactly how much that effort cost. He looked down.

  She had turned her head toward him. Her pale eyes grey, he could see now, grey like the underside of clouds were on his face, and they were clear in a way that her consciousness hadn't been since he'd grabbed her off the floor. Like she'd surfaced for this specific purpose and had limited time before she went back under.

  Her voice, when it came, was almost nothing. Thread-thin. The voice of someone running on the last reserves of something that had no reserves left.

  "Just leave me."

  Three words. A complete sentence. The most reasonable thing anyone had said in the last four minutes.

  Aris looked at her.

  Then he looked up at the Hollow Guard.

  Then he looked back at her.

  Something moved through him that wasn't bravery he knew what bravery felt like in stories, the warm swelling of it, the music underneath. This wasn't that. This was quieter and colder and more like a door closing than a door opening. The door that led to the version of this moment where he stood up and ran. Closing. Already closed.

  He thought of Edric at the altar this morning. The Architect's hand reaching downward into the earth. The thing Edric had never needed to say out loud because he'd said it in every action Aris had watched him take for as long as he could remember

  The Architect doesn't distinguish.

  He stood up.

  Not smoothly. His knee protested and his left arm was still burning and he didn't entirely trust his right ankle, but he stood fully, completely upright and put himself between her and the axe overhead.

  "I follow the will of God," he said.

  His voice came out afraid. He didn't try to fix that. It was afraid because he was afraid, and pretending otherwise seemed like the wrong note to strike in front of a creature that was going to kill him regardless of how he sounded.

  But he didn't move.

  Behind him he heard her a sound that wasn't quite surprise, wasn't quite confusion, but was something that lived between the two. Like she'd already written the next part of this story and he'd just said a line that wasn't in it.

  "I'm not leaving you."

  He raised his right hand.

  It wasn't a practiced motion. He didn't have practiced motions he had six years of careful, gentle, precise work in a church clinic, drawing poison from old Wanderers' joints and corruption from infected wounds, coaxing rather than forcing, absence rather than attack. He had that and a lucky dagger and the mathematics of a moment that had run out of alternatives.

  His palm faced the Hollow Guard.

  The creature looked at it. The pale eyes tracked from his face to his hand and back, without expression, without adjustment, with the patience of something that had measured the situation completely and found nothing to reconsider.

  Then his Eidolon Void, woke up.

  Aris felt it before he saw it a pressure that was the opposite of pressure, an absence that had weight, rising from somewhere that wasn't quite his chest and wasn't quite behind him and was both simultaneously. The air around his raised hand changed. Not visibly. Not with light or sound. It just became less less present, less warm, less willing to be there, as if the space around his palm had decided it had somewhere better to be and was quietly leaving.

  The Hollow Guard's axe hesitated.

  One second. The iron head suspended at the apex of its arc, the creature's pale eyes fixed on Aris's hand, something in its ancient and non-human processing encountering something it was taking a moment to categorize.

  Aris didn't know what he was doing.

  He did it anyway.