They didn’t look back.
Their focus tunnelled forward, fixed on the narrow ledge skirting the lake’s edge, stretching into a darkness that felt endless. Somewhere beyond it, on the far side of the cavern, the path would slope upward, away from the water.
From the creature.
If they were to make it that far, the monster would have to give up.
No one dared carry a torch. They moved blind, each step a prayer. One hand on the cold, slick wall, the other gripping the back of the person ahead. A line of trust and silence. The thunder of the creature crashing the fire followed them like a phantom, a reminder of death each time they hesitated.
Elios led. The weight on him was crushing. A single misstep could doom everyone. Before him, the ledge rose—tight, narrow, cruel in its angle.
There were places where the decayed path crumbled without warning. He caught himself in a flash, then dropped low, digging in like a boulder wedged into the slope, halting the group’s momentum. When jumps came, he went first also—always first. The line once used to reach Azen had been severed; he tied it tight around his waist, passing one end back as a lifeline for others. If he dropped, they could still save him.
Sometimes, somewhere behind, someone slipped. There was the thudding sound of a knee hitting the stones—but no one cried out. Pain could take them later.
The path grew worse the farther they went. The stone turned jagged, the chill deepened. But finally, they saw it. A pale shimmer hinted at light beyond the final rise—weak, distant, but real.
A promise of air. Of escape.
They pushed on with strength they weren't aware of. By the time they neared the end of the path, their aches had sunk into their bones. Every breath came out low and guttural; every step felt like one on thorns.
Still, the barefoot woman kept pace. That surprised Elios more than he liked to admit. Even Orin and Tarth—hardened Seekers both—were faltering. Yet she, though shivering, stayed collected. Elios tried to read her face and failed, only catching the shine of her eyes — mystic, unnerved and beautiful, as if they belonged to the dark.
At one point, she caught him looking. She tilted her head and asked, voice low:
“What is it? Another dead end?”
Elios blinked, shaken from thought. “No,” he said. “Just... Well, the sound behind us. It feels a bit off."
It was true. He couldn’t tell how, but the noise from before had changed for a while. The thrashing impacts sounded less like impacts and became more like rumbling inside a giant stomach. More… repetitive.
“Maybe it’s throwing stuff again,” Tarth murmured behind them. “No one enjoys being burned. Not even mad gods.”
“Oh, who cares?” Orin let out a brittle laugh, the sound cracking in his throat. “Let it screech and crawl. We won. One more push over this slope, and it’s done.”
Then, they heard some other voices.
Above them. Chatting, like miners during a lunch break:
“Hey, quiet. I just heard something… a man’s voice. Who’s down there?” the first one said.
A second voice answered, casual, already drifting away. “You’re hearing things. That place was abandoned ages ago.”
Orin’s face snapped upward. Panic cut through the weariness:
“No—no! Don’t leave!”
He cupped his hands around his mouth, shouting into the stone-throated dark:
“We’re down here! Help us! There’s something you need to hear—something everyone needs to know!”
Nobody answered.
Elios was startled, thinking about an absurd possibility.
He’d felt something unnerving when the voices rose—a flicker of doubt. But the words had hooked his focus, dragged his thoughts elsewhere. Only when Orin screamed for help did he remember the crafty nature of what was chasing them. It could mimic the voices of different men; it obviously could create a fake conversation as well.
But how?
The sound of the crashing was still echoing across the lake. In his thoughts, there should be no way for it to approach here so quickly. Unless…
Sound?
“Stop,” Elios barked at Orin.
Too late. The call had been answered.
Elios whipped his head downward, eyes scanning the inky black far below the ledge—and there, he saw it.
Silent. Vast. Vile.
It had been there waiting.
Coiled beneath them this whole time, while their ears had been busy chasing sounds across the water.
That rhythmic, chattering pulse echoing —he’d thought it originated from where they had departed.
He had assumed. But now he understood — It wanted them to think it had stayed there.
Just as they had tricked it with fire, it had returned the favor with sound. And why wouldn’t it? A creature that could mimic and manipulate sound would find that trick easy. Natural, even.
A trickster beast. It had learned.
Elios had forgotten his own damn words: it was a lurer, not a chaser. But now? It was more than that. It was evolving.
Gods help us.
He roared, throat raw: “Up the slope! Climb! Now!”
Orin didn’t hesitate. He didn’t need to understand—he trusted Elios unconditionally. Tarth followed a heartbeat later, boots scraping stone. Panic surged, but discipline kept them moving.
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The woman’s eyes widened, horror flashing across her face. She looked down, saw what Elios had seen—and in one breath, steadied herself.
Her voice was cold, clear:
“We have to split. If we run the same path, it’ll take all of us in one strike.”
She didn’t say the rest, but the meaning was there. Someone will have to die.
The lake stirred.
It rose. Water leapt — a hill in motion. Under it, a solid wave of darkness pressed upward as if something enormous shifted just beneath the surface. Not a head. Not a body. A mass of terror.
There was no time.
The woman was right, Elios knew it. But the fire in his chest surged against logic. His eyes locked with hers—sharp, unflinching.
“Only two ways up,” he said. “ Take the vine path—I’ll take the slope with my brothers.”
She stared at him for a beat, reading the conviction in his face. Then she nodded once, turned, and climbed.
Four tendrils burst from the lake. Slick, massive things—black as pitch, writhing in the dark like the crooked fingers of some buried god. They moved with grotesque precision, curling over the slope, searching.
Not wild. Not frantic. It did it with such terrifying confidence. Each limb explored a different stretch of stone, never overlapping, never hesitating. They were mapping the ground like they'd done it before. Like they remembered. Within seconds, they had cleared half the slope. And they were right behind them.
Elios’s breath caught. At this speed, they wouldn’t make it.
“Run or fight?” Orin asked, voice pitched too high, breath ragged.
“Both,” Elios snapped—surprising even himself. “We feed it our shit.”
He thrust the echo rod into Tarth’s hands without looking, then drew his falchion in one swift motion.
Steel flashed.
He turned and hacked at the lashings beneath the ramp—ropes, braces, old timber barely holding.
“Destroy the path!” he growled. “One ledge at a time! Cut, then run! Rotate roles as we move!”
The boards shivered. Something huge slid beneath. Elios felt it.
They moved fast—faster than fear.
Orin went first. One clean strike. His blade wasn’t built for this—too narrow, too refined—but his hands knew what they were doing. He compensated with pure technique.
Tarth stepped in to finish the work. His bow was gone, so a hunting knife was all he had. He tried it with both hands anyway, pressing his weight into each cut. His lips moved silently—not prayers Elios recognized, but more like a tally of things he refused to surrender. Not today.
The ramp groaned. Something gave way. A hinge snapped loose with a shriek of iron. Then the slope shifted—a slow collapse. Boards slid, stones tumbled. The path behind them began to eat itself.
It wouldn’t kill the beast — Elios knew that — but maybe it would confuse it. Break its rhythm. Disrupt the patterns it moved by.
And if the collapse hurt it? All the better.
At first, the black lake hesitated.
Its limbs hung mid-air, twitching as rubble poured down in bursts—boards, stone, splinters of the collapsing ramp. It flinched like a beast startled.
But then it learned. It stopped chasing the noise. Stopped reacting, and started reading it.
One limb broke from the others, moving low. It slid along the outer edge, snaking across the hanging vines with eerie grace.
Orin was mid-stomp, trying to kick off a rotted log loose, when it struck. The tendril lunged–silent, precise like a snake. He dodged, but the gash in his thigh slowed him. It caught his ankle.
And it didn’t squeeze.
It chewed.
The flesh tore under jagged inner ridges—slow, savoring, testing the strain of tendon and bone. Orin let out a strangled grunt and drove his sword downward—straight into the thing’s hide, blade sinking halfway to the hilt. He didn’t seem to care about his foot. Only the strike. The tendril recoiled, leaking something thick and steaming.
Orin tore himself free, dragging his body backwards, teeth bared, blood soaking through torn trousers in deep blooms.
Then another tendril—faster—curled around Tarth’s waist and yanked.
Elios turned without thinking and swung with everything he had. The falchion hit just behind the creature’s grip—steel biting deep, cleaving through the tendril’s base like an axe through wet wood. The severed length thrashed in the air, just inches from Tarth’s ribs.
The lake growled. Elios took a glance down and saw water parting. A giant maw opened beneath the surface. Rows upon rows of jagged teeth, each one as long as a man’s arm, pointed skyward like lances. The stench of the dead erupting made his stomach knotted, bile rising.
Then it struck. Not just its limb.
The entire thing collided with the cliff, as if trying to swallow it.
Wooden steps broke away like rotten teeth, clattering into the dark. The whole slope lurched, tilting toward the lake’s yawning mouth.
The group staggered, footing lost.
“Jump!” Elios shouted. “Grab the stone—vines—whatever you can!”
Orin and Tarth followed without a word, faces tight with pain. They threw themselves sideways, clutching at the rough wall. Elios sheathed his blade and lunged for a jagged outcrop, fingers clawing into wet stone.
They were less than ten steps from the top. But those ten steps felt longer than the years behind them.
Then the creature struck again.
The impact hit like a siege weapon. Tendrils, bristling with slick barbs, slammed the cliff face, ripping vines off the rock. Stone peeled. Debris poured down in a deadly cascade.
It was furious.
One tendril smashed at the ledge beside Elios. The stone gave way.
Tarth caught him by the collar just before he fell. One arm looped tight, anchoring him to the cliff.
But the next blow was already coming. They couldn’t dodge. Tarth closed his eyes.
Elios didn’t. His gaze locked on the object swinging from Tarth’s belt—the echo rod he’d handed off earlier. An idea struck like lightning.
It hunts by sound.
But what about a sound that wasn’t meant for it to take?
Elios reached down, ripped the echo rod free. He cranked it to its highest setting—beyond the hazard level, beyond calibration— and slammed the lever forward.
The pulse went out like a popped bubble.
Elios had expected thunder, but he heard nothing instead. The creature, on the other hand, definitely felt something.
The lake’s hill collapsed, the surface beating against itself in confusion. The limbs that had reached for them folded back. A roar that felt like mountains grinding beneath the earth escaped its maw. Water stirred, waves broke, as if the thing was trying to shake something out of its mind.
The echo rod shattered in Elios’s hands. It was never meant for this—never built to scream that high. Its final act had come at a price.
Below, the lake writhed.
Rageful. Then calm again.
Tarth seized the moment, twisting toward the cliff above and shouting:
“Throw us a rope! Help us up! I know you’ve been up there!”
A beat of silence.
Then a voice called back—flat, cold, unmistakably hers:
“There’s no rope here, idiot.”
Then came the twist of her tone.
“But he has one.” She pointed.
Tarth looked down. The rope—tied around Elios’s waist since the beginning—still dangled behind him, swaying in the air like a lazy tail.
Long enough. In the chaos, none of them had remembered.
Tarth’s face lit up.
“Captain, toss the rope!”
But Elios didn’t turn. His eyes were still locked on the thing below, watching for any movement. He lifted his blood-slick hands and gave a thin, bitter smile.
“My wrists are fractured,” he said. “You’ll have to figure it out.”
“I’ve got it,” Orin said, already scrambling along the cliffside, dragging himself by a mess of tangled roots. He reached Elios, tied the rope to the hilt of the captain’s falchion, then leaned back and threw.
“Heads up.”
The falchion spun twice—then landed.
The woman caught it effortlessly. She unraveled the rope, tied it tight around her forearm, then drove the blade deep into the dirt behind her, using it as an anchor. One knee braced against it, she leaned back and began to haul.
Elios rose slowly, body swaying as the cliff peeled away beneath him. When he reached the top, the woman was already stepping back.
He looked at her and said quietly:
“It left.”
She nodded once.
“You did well.”
Tarth and Orin were pulled up next, without incident. Tarth flopped to the stone and exhaled hard — almost as if he had forgotten to breathe the whole time.
They all stayed silent for a while, letting the relief wash over their heads—They all survived.
Then Tarth looked at Elios and groaned.
“Captain, why didn’t you use that right from the beginning?”
Orin snapped back before Elios could speak.
“Look at his hands, you ingrate. We’re alive, aren’t we?”
But Elios shook his head.
“No. Tarth’s right.”
He flexed his ruined hands and winced:
“If I’d thought to use the echo rod that way earlier, we wouldn’t have had to gamble so hard. Still, the result of that final pulse exceeded my expectations.”
The woman stepped closer, curiosity in her voice:
“What was that weapon you used?”
Before Elios could answer, Orin jumped in. Feeling alive must've made him much more relaxed than usual.
“You don’t know an echo rod? It’s not a weapon—it’s a terrain scanner. Oh, works a bit similarly to that monster down there…”
He trailed off as Elios shot him a look—sharp enough to silence.
Then Elios turned to her.
“We’ve got questions for you. A lot of them. This is an ongoing investigation.”
He glanced toward the mouth of the cave—where the red light of dusk waited.
“But first…”
His voice lowered to a growl:
"We get out of this cursed place."