The darkness was too thick to be natural.

  Like all magic, spells of light and darkness required energy transfer. But darkness was merely the absence of light—a death of energy. One could not create light with only darkness, but darkness could easily be created from light. A powerful enough sorcerer could drain the sun. A powerful enough necromancer could wring the very air of all its energy.

  The torchlight in his hands felt like an air bubble at the crushing depths of an ocean floor. Blackness held at every angle, heavy and dense, seeming to bray at the edges. Even the orange tint of the fire appeared to drain away into nothing as it touched the stone walls. Of course, by now, they must’ve travelled deep into the earth. Darkness was to be expected. There would be no light down here ever again.

  Isaac found that, as his eyes struggled to pierce the dark, his other senses became highly sensitive. He could hear every scuff of dirt beneath his boots and every poorly controlled breath at his lips. He could faintly smell the bodies that used to be in the walls. He could feel the stiff and cool air on his sunburned skin, seeming to wrap around him like mist.

  “You need to untie me,” Isaac said.

  Zaria was leading the way, spear tip jutting into darkness, her every step as smooth and silent as a predator stalking through brush. He could hear her breathing, too. Her ears swiveled back and forth, and her hackles were raised like blades of grass.

  “Zaria. Untie me.”

  “Not treading this ground again, Isaac. Torch up, mouth shut.”

  He gritted his teeth and raised the torch overhead, holding it awkwardly in two overlapping hands. His pelvis ached with every step he took.

  They came into a rectangular room that was large enough to fit four coffins, laid end to end across the center. A hypogeum. An underground burial chamber for the dead. The coffins were merely blocks of sculpted stone with a shallow inlay for the corpse to rest on top. Loculi lined the walls like empty teeth sockets.

  Zaria brushed away some dust from one of the coffin inlays. “You got a layout for these catacombs?”

  “No.”

  “You know which way to go?”

  “Down.”

  She snorted quietly. “Terrific. Expert grave-robber you are, squire.”

  “You signed up for this.”

  “Aye. Suppose I did.”

  She glanced at the cobwebbed loculi around the walls, and Isaac used the opportunity to move in front of her, blocking the exit across the room. “We need to follow the vertebrae. The base of the tomb is at the feet of this creature, and we’ve barely reached the neck. The bone is our path.”

  She looked up at the dirt-packed ceiling. “Don’t see no bones, now.”

  “We should go find them, then, shouldn’t we?”

  “Your genius is stunning, love.” She made to move past him. “Try not to hurt someone with it.”

  He stepped in front of her. “Have you not noticed anything?”

  “Dust and stone, mostly. Along with my scent on your nethers.”

  He waved around the empty room. “We have not seen a single skeleton since we got here. It’s just been empty walls and empty graves.”

  “So?”

  “So what do you think happened to them? What do you think I’ve been trying to warn you about?”

  “Speak plain, then. Enlighten me of my peril.”

  He held up his wrists, the torch blazing overhead. “You need to untie me. We’re in the sorceress’ lair now. Her domain. You need my abilities.”

  She stepped forward, towering over him. “You had your chance to earn my trust. You squandered it, and it’s a testament to my good mercy that you still got your lifeblood in your veins.”

  “Zaria—”

  “No, Isaac. You got mass destruction at your fingertips. You could end my existence with a flick of your wrist. I ain’t risking that at my back.” She shoved him with the haft of her poleaxe. “You lead the way, you call out the threats, and I decide whether they warrant your freedom. Not you.”

  He exited the room with the torch held close to his chest, trying to wriggle out of his restraints. The torch might’ve been capable of burning them off, but that would likely destroy his hands in the process, let alone his spellcasting ability. He rubbed the well-worn cuts on his wrists and continued on through the darkened hall.

  They ventured through corridors and burial chambers, curving paths that seemed to twist and bend without any warning or reason. The ancient culture that built these catacombs made them deliberately maze-like—sudden dead-ends, looping hallways, and endless turns. Isaac was growing increasingly certain that they’d passed the same sepulchral chamber multiple times. Everything looked the same. It was impossible to develop a layout in the mind’s eye. There was only darkness and dust and vacant stone.

  He could not get over the feeling of being watched. There seemed to be an unnatural stillness to the air. Every sound they made was swallowed in an instant.

  He kept his eyes peeled for traps. Sigils carved into dirt and stone, ready to unleash fire and raw entropy and necrotism. Hex barriers at doorways, deadfalls in the floor. Animated machinery, shooting spikes and swinging axes. Perhaps even the necromancer herself, a cocoon of darkness surrounding her, aware of their presence from the very start, awaiting just the right moment to strike.

  “Stop,” Zaria hissed.

  Isaac froze, nearly fumbling the torch. “What?”

  “Something up ahead.”

  She nudged him forward with her weapon. Isaac raised the torch high, steeled himself, and continued down the hall.

  He saw the blood first. Its redness was vibrant compared to the ancient stone around them, pooling in the shallow grooves of the dirt floor. Next came the gradual reveal of boots, tattered cloth, and the vague suggestion of legs and arms. A slumped over body, half fallen into a loculus. Judging by the general shape, it was human.

  Zaria nudged him back. She stepped forward and poked the foot of the body with her spear tip. It sunk through the foot and came out as dry as when it entered. Nothing moved.

  Isaac paced over, squatting down and balancing the torch on the edge of a higher loculus. He grabbed the shoulder of the corpse and found the flesh just as stiff and uncompliant as the other fresh body at the mouth of the skull. Like they had both been killed around the same time.

  He flipped the corpse onto its back. A screaming skull stared back at him. It was a human face with the same sigil carved into his forehead, but the similarities ended there. This thrall’s life force had been sucked down clean to the marrow. His body was drier than the dirt beneath him, all his muscles and organs had deflated down to wrinkles and folds, and the skin wrapped around his bones was like thin fabric over stored furniture. The symbol of parasite magic stood empty on his forehead, but the rapid desiccation had given it the appearance of something carved into tree bark.

  What remained of the man’s expression was locked into a scream of terror—his eyes were only shriveled remnants lying in their sockets, his bones poking against husks of flesh. Isaac thought, briefly, that if he had managed to make that expression, then the charm magic controlling his brain had failed. It was probably why he was dead.

  “We’re not alone down here,” Isaac said.

  “Healthier looking, though.”

  “No.” He pointed at the parasite sigil. “There’s another sorcerer who entered this tomb before us. I found a body like this at the surface. They’ve got multiple human thralls under their command.”

  “You only mentioning this now?”

  “I’ve been rather distracted lately.”

  Zaria glanced behind her. “Who is it?”

  “I don’t know. No one should’ve come here but me. It’s a strict Diet mandate. All transmutation specialists cannot interfere—”

  “Quiet.”

  Her ears swiveled back and forth. Slowly, beginning to feel his heart pound in his chest, Isaac grabbed the torch and stood up.

  It began as a soft chittering sound, like a swarm of insects rustling through grass. It seemed to bleed from the walls, coming from every direction. Slowly, the noise shifted, the quiet shuffling growing sharper sounds, something as hollow and brittle as old wind chimes.

  “Untie me,” Isaac said, fighting down panic. “Untie me right now.”

  A moan trembled out from the darkness. It was rasping and thin, hissing like a dying breath. Behind it, the chittering grew louder, building up into a wave of shuffling cracks, like a tide of dry reeds scraping across stone and dirt.

  “Zaria!”

  She placed a firm hand to his chest and nudged him behind her. “Keep the torch steady.”

  The pirate stepped forward, poleaxe grazing the edge of the darkness. The growing cacophony reacted, churning around them like a shifting swarm of flies, undulating and crackling. A rattling gasp echoed down the halls.

  Zaria growled from deep in her chest.

  A skeletal arm emerged from the darkness, as smoothly as a pin piercing through black fabric. It waved limply, missing fingers and palm bones like a broken doll’s hand. Another arm joined it, far above at the ceiling, angled down and faintly spasming. And another came above the first, pointed the wrong way and unable to articulate further, and several more came after that, splayed like twitching feathers below a wing, and all at once there were dozens of arms, grasping and bending and waving like limbs on a centipede.

  A writhing mass of bone shuffled into the torchlight, blocking the narrow hall. Isaac imagined a ball of snakes twisting together. There were rib bones connected to femurs, arms jutting from pelvises, chittering skulls acting as kneecaps, vertebrae studding shoulder blades, and they were all encased in a porcupine shell of arms, all of the bones sliding and crackling against each other as if seeking some undefined structure, constantly building and disconnecting. He saw human bones, canine bones, feline and bird and reptile, binding together with no more thought of unity than one would chop down a forest, saw the different trees into planks and use them to build a house.

  Atop this swirling mound of bodies sat a skull, the head of a rhino with two overlapping jaws, one inside the other, and it roared with a chorus of voices, a rattling siren call for all that hated life and blood and flesh.

  Zaria raised her weapon overhead, scraping the spear tip along the ceiling, and smashed the axe blade down into the rhino skull. It split in half, the two jaws still biting as they separated from their joints, and the mass below surged forward in two parallel waves, almost like reaching for a hug. She stepped back and swung sideways, the axe splintering through the nest of bone with such force that arms and ribs rained down like leaves from a tree. She yanked the blade back, the cavalry hook ripping out an entire skeleton’s worth of bones with it, and struck again, sundering and cleaving as the writhing mass became loose tentacles and pouring chunks, growing a pool of splintered bone across the dirt floor.

  When nothing was standing higher than her ankles, she stopped, leaning on her weapon and breathing heavily. But the bones were still moving, still shuffling and sliding, already forming connections again. And the waves of chittering around them only grew louder, surging through the black.

  Something fell on Isaac’s shoulder. A finger bone—human metacarpal—wriggling like a maggot. He jerked back into the wall of loculi, flailing it off, and the rapid wave of his torch illuminated the area behind him. A sea of bones crawled in his direction, scapulas and jaws and kneecaps scuttling along dirt and stone, covering every surface like writhing films of moss. They rained from the ceiling and leaped at him from the floor, flinging themselves in bouncing arcs. He stumbled back, shielding himself with his arms, feeling sharpened bone slice through his skin as they began to leap and pour over him.

  “Run!” he shouted.

  They sprinted ahead, leaping over the rattling pool of bone already reforming itself into knots and limbs. Another conjoined mass of skeletons leered at them from the darkness, but Zaria lowered her polearm forward like a game of jousts, spearing the tangle of bone through its center frame and dragging it along as she ran. More walking piles of bodies came, wriggling and jerking and moaning, but the hyena kept charging, the swarm of bones caught on her weapon head growing wider with each impact. The bones detached from the central mass and began to snake up along the haft of her weapon, squirming towards her hands, but she smacked them off on a wall like ridding a broom of dust.

  They ran through corridors and burial chambers, dodging pockets and swarms of bone, the masses sloughing off and into each other like droplets of water. There was no way to see ahead. The torchlight did not go far. All they could do was run forward into darkness, reacting to whatever came ahead, be that a curve in the hall or a shambling ball of ancient corpses.

  Then he saw it—overhead, the giant vertebrae began to poke through the ceiling. It continued on through an intersecting corridor, and it came so suddenly that he almost ran straight through the intersection without spotting it. Isaac grabbed his companion by the tail, eliciting an almost girlish shriek of surprise, and yelled: “This way!”

  Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

  Now, following the bone, the tilt of the floor was obvious. They must’ve been descending this whole time, but the darkness had prevented him from taking notice. The corridor they found themselves in now was almost a ramp leading deep into the earth, forcing his feet to slap down into the slope and his momentum to build into an almost uncontrollable pace. Zaria stayed in the front, swatting away clusters of bone whenever possible, ignoring the fingers and toes that leaped like grasshoppers.

  He only saw it when it was too late. He had dodged a leering arm from a high loculus, only to turn his head forward and suddenly see a churning wall of bone in front of him, something that completely sealed off the hall ahead. With his downward momentum, he couldn’t stop in time. Zaria was either unable to stop as well or had never planned on it in the first place—she braced her shoulder and smashed through the thick layer of slithering remains. Isaac barely missed the wide gap she made, slamming half his body into the broken membrane of arms and legs.

  He dropped the torch and stumbled to the floor. A giant slug-like mass of skeletons fell from the ceiling, crushing him into the dirt. It enveloped him like sharp, flowing water.

  “Isaac!”

  Zaria tried to turn around, but an avalanche of bone poured from the loculi around her, and more masses shambled in from the dark, full of sharpened rib cages and chattering skulls. She swung, bashed, and stomped, lost in a swirling shower of bone.

  On the floor, Isaac wrenched his arms and legs, trying to break free, but the bones were a sliding cocoon around him, squeezing tighter and tighter. They pressed into his skin like beds of needles, threatening to crush and perforate him at the same time. All his training failed him, and he flailed desperately, overwhelmed with terror.

  He managed to get his arms free. When he lifted them overhead, they caught on something.

  It was an old, rusted torch sconce, something unused for centuries. Now, it was barely more than a rusty blade of metal sticking from the wall. And Isaac had snagged his restraints on the jagged edges.

  He pulled his bindings down with all his strength. The mass of bones continued to stab and constrict around him, slithering up towards his neck and face. For a horrible moment, the torch sconce seemed ready to break from the wall, and the bones were nearly at his mouth, rattling against each other in an overwhelming crescendo.

  Then his bindings tore through, and his hands were freed.

  Quickly, with the ease and grace of a lifetime of practice, he performed the mnemonics around crawling curtains of bone, balling two hurricanes into the palms of his hands. He slapped his right hand into the ground, bouncing the force off the floor and into the air like an ascending geyser of wind. He broke the cocoon around him, creating constellations of flying bone above, and, with his left hand, he slashed a lance of wind in a sweeping arc overhead, flinging the wriggling swarms of bone back into the darkness like dust in a storm.

  He jumped to his feet, already performing the movements for another spell. Ahead, Zaria caught her balance, having nearly been thrown to the floor. She looked back at him, and naked fear crawled across her face. She watched with wide eyes as he faced her direction, a churning ball of fire growing between his hands. She took a step back, trying to say something. Her quiet whisper was lost under the crackling flames in his palms.

  “Get down!”

  She dropped to the floor and Isaac shot the fireball over her head. It roared down the narrow hall, shadows racing across stone. Twirling masses of bone flailed like bonfires breaking apart in the wind. But the fireball ended in a dying light, swallowed by the darkness beyond, and the bones themselves did not burn for long. They were hollow, stripped clean of all the substances of life. Humanoid shapes reformed themselves, undulating in their direction with smoldering limbs and crackling faces.

  At his back, the chittering became overwhelming, and Isaac turned to see a triangular wall of bone lurch towards him like a wave in the ocean, streams of arms and legs sucking into it from the ground. He stumbled back, trying to create space, but the tide of bodies gushed forward like a churning liquid, surging over the torch he had dropped on the floor.

  Suddenly, there was no light. Only darkness. Only the chittering of sliding bone, only rasping cries and hissing screams, only the slither of necromancy, only the overwhelming rush of limbs and heads and bodies.

  Isaac felt a massive wall loom over him as he rushed through the mnemonics.

  White light burned from his hand. The tide of bones above him lurched back like a tongue, screaming in rage and fear. Hissing steam erupted from its nest of connections, the old bone melting on its frame, and Isaac poured more energy into the casting, intensifying the anti-necrotic spell until it was blazing as bright as a lighthouse in the palm of his hand. When he stepped forward, open hand held in front, the wave fell apart around him, the surging tide below scurrying away like a swarm of insects, all the individual bones bubbling and steaming and bursting into blue flames.

  “Get behind me!” Isaac yelled.

  Zaria stepped around him as he marched on. Ahead, the wriggling slugs of bodies slithered away, their cries of fear echoing down the long, empty tunnels, and those who could not squirm and crawl and shamble fast enough were burned to ash under his white light, acrid smoke rising in wisps and clouds. Another solid wall of bone presented itself at a junction of corridors, a pulsing orifice of limbs, and Isaac balled another hurricane in his free hand, smashing it apart like a bird’s nest. Splinters of bone flew past him from behind, and Zaria’s groans of effort told him there was still a tide at their back, only barely held at bay.

  He took a turn into an intersecting hall, still following the vertebrae, but he stumbled, having to lean his shoulder into stone. When he pressed a hand to his chest, it came away shining red. The cocoon of bones must’ve stabbed him all over his body. He was so full of adrenaline as to hardly notice—even now, he could barely feel the punctures. Most of them were likely shallow, but his energy stores were already draining at an unsustainable pace. He wasn’t sure which would him weaken him faster—the magic light burning from his hand, or the blood leaking from his body.

  He had no scrolls left. He could not defeat them all by hand. There were too many. They were going to die.

  Zaria grabbed him by the shoulder, pushing him forward. “No slacking, squire!”

  He stumbled forward, letting only a ragged gasp escape his lips, and he continued on with brilliant white light shining high above his head, feeling her presence at his back. They marched together as one.

  The vertebrae in the ceiling were a straight, curving line heading down into the earth. But the paths through the catacombs were circuitous and long, bending and turning, leading them through burial chambers and mausoleums, passed coffins and endless sockets of loculi. The spinal column disappeared from sight frequently. Every turn was a guess, every room a hope, every vanishing a fear.

  “Isaac! Behind!”

  He turned, and a vague humanoid shape sprinted at them from the darkness, fast and large and spiked with sharpened arms. He smashed it down to chunks with a sharp blast of wind, all the separating bones burning and boiling under the white light.

  They were growing bolder. Fiercer. Trying to angle themselves into ambushes, twisting into deadlier shapes. They were still circling around his spell light like wild animals around a raging campfire, but they weren’t beasts. They were intelligent. Controlled. Waiting for one gap to exploit, one single slip of weakness.

  But their ferocity might mean something else, too. It might mean they were getting close to the exit.

  When he reached a four way intersection of halls, they sprung their trap. Shapes and masses flooded in from the darkness, coming from all directions, leaping and churning. He could not cast fast enough.

  “Zaria!”

  A bulbous mass of skulls leaped at him, but the hyena smashed it down from overhead, scattering the screaming faces across the floor. Isaac pressed himself into her back, seeing a torrential rain of bone flying sideways down an adjacent corridor, and he only barely managed to encase the hall with a solid wall of ice, trapping the body parts like flies in amber. In the third corridor, cylinders of flailing arms and legs spun across the ceiling and screeched across the walls, but Zaria slashed with her axe, cleaving through hands and femurs, and Isaac incinerated the uncoiling limbs as they detached and squirmed. Every scattered piece of bone smaller than a pelvis was burned to cinders as they continued forward.

  He couldn’t sustain this pace for much longer. The arm casting the light was shriveling, all the energy in its cells sucking away. His legs were unsteady, and his vision was blurring. His body was draining so quickly of lifeforce that it was becoming a conscious effort to draw breath. He pressed a hand to his shirt, and it came back almost dripping wet with blood.

  And he was back in the yard again. The morning sun shined on his face, and his uncle’s voice shouted in his ear. He had attempted to cast the warding light dozens of times that session, and he was now only managing sparks from his fingertips. He panted, leaned on his knees, and told his uncle that he could do no more. If he tried again, he was sure he would faint.

  And, in a rare moment, his uncle had stayed his cane—instead, he had kneeled down next to him, and told him that he must try again, he must push himself beyond his limits, because the time would come where he would be in great need of this spell, and it would not be a time where he could falter. He had great strength hidden inside of him. He could reach heights of power beyond his expectations, if only he changed those expectations themselves. And the only reason he was challenging his nephew so harshly now was because he believed, in his heart of hearts, that the boy could meet the task ahead of him.

  The light began to flicker and fade. He could no longer hold his arm above his head. Immediately, the swarms of bone seized in, braying at the edges of the light, hissing and screeching.

  Something with seven legs and three skulls leaped at him like a frog. With a roar, Isaac straightened his arm, concentrated the light, and shot it from his hand like a ballista bolt of raw energy. It skewered clean through the flying mass, sending it flailing to the floor as its bones burned and flaked to ash. Isaac turned and shot the light again at the crawling legions behind them, focusing the beam into a lance of shining brilliance that scoured the corridor clean. Bodies and shapes and creatures screamed as they burst aflame, writhing layers of bone scattering in swarms.

  He roared his defiance into the shadowy halls, echoing a primal cry down the festering graves. He challenged the darkness to fight, and he found the darkness afraid.

  He continued on, bathed in radiant light, marching past empty graves and silent coffins. Ahead, a crawling layer of bone retreated back into the dark like the white foam of a wave. Twitching masses flung themselves to the ground as he approached, falling over into their base components to run away with greater speed. Rasping shrieks echoed from every side corridor and adjacent passage. Any shifting mass that did not retreat was burned to ash and smashed to pieces with the heavy blade of a poleaxe.

  The vertebrae changed. They were no longer cervical—instead, the blocks of bone began to sport the articulation joints of thoracic vertebrae, each protrusion larger than the blade of a windmill. And, in the distance, the corridor widened further and further until the walls disappeared from the edge of his light. All of a sudden, there were no more loculi and coffins. The catacombs had ended.

  They had made it through the neck. They were almost into the torso. Almost to the necropolis. Almost to safety.

  A large stone door stood at the end of a circular chamber, carved into the bulge of a massive sternum, and Isaac could only compare it to the gate of a high-walled castle. Vertebrae acted as the central pillar of the chamber, the floor around it carved with religious reliefs and mythologic figures. Giant clavicles curved away from the sternum into adjacent corridors, the shoulders somewhere far off in the darkness.

  Zaria ran across the chamber, pieces of splintered bone falling from her leather armor. She bashed into the massive stone door as if she meant to knock it over. All she received in response was a puffing cloud of dust and a slight quake in the walls. “What stupid idiot made a door out of stone?”

  Isaac had only barely reached the vertebrae in the center of the room. He had to lean on it for support.

  “Isaac! Work your book-learning!”

  He pushed himself off the vertebrae and made to speak. An instant later, he was face-down on the floor and the light was gone. Complete darkness, a frantic heartbeat in his ears. He tried to cast the spell again, but his arms were stiff and empty. He flopped them into position, working the incantation like a wet campfire. When he got the light shining from his hand again, Zaria was leaning over him, pulling him up to standing.

  “Fuck me, love, you’re bleedin’ bad.”

  He couldn’t feel the punctures anymore. He knew that was a very bad sign.

  She leaned him against herself as they walked, their difference in height bringing his head to the top of a breast. “Exit, right? Door leads to safety, aye?”

  Isaac managed to nod.

  “Well, come on, open sesame and all that.”

  He flopped his arm towards the side of the door. “Lever.”

  “That easy, is it?”

  He grunted into her fur.

  She moved him across the rest of the chamber, then gently lowered him into a sitting position at the front of the door. “Stay awake. Breathe. In out, in out.”

  “Hurry up—cutthroat.”

  Zaria raced over to the lever. It was located in the range of his light, but he couldn’t see that far anymore. His vision was growing narrow and dim. He felt cold all the way to his soul. Back the way they came, the chittering continued to echo and churn. It seemed to be growing louder and faster.

  He heard some wrenching sounds off to the side, then a clamped snarl. “Is any blasted bit of metal gonna work properly?”

  He could hear them coming. It didn’t sound much different than rushing water. Only drier, full of cracks and scrapes, punctuated with raspy screams and grinding roars. The chamber they were in held many doors along the opposite end of the sternum. There were many open mouths of darkness. Every one of them seemed to twist and boil.

  Zaria was next to him again. “It’s not budging.”

  He concentrated on breathing.

  “Isaac! It’s stuck!”

  “I don’t—” He swallowed some saliva. “I don’t know. Do something.”

  Zaria stared back up at the massive stone door.

  “Do something,” he said. “I’ll cover you.”

  “You couldn’t cover piss in a blanket.”

  He grabbed a sliver of her ruined leather cuirass and pulled himself to a hunched standing position. His fists clenched, and the white light grew brighter. “I will cover you.”

  She looked to him, then back at the door. “I suppose brute force is my specialty.” She walked up to the door, cracked her neck, braced against the stone, and began to push with all her strength. More pockets of dust rained down, the sternum itself seemed to shake, and, slowly, the door began to scrape along its ancient path, moving inwards at a glacial pace.

  A roar came from the darkness. More joined it, warbling and torn, and the chittering rushed into a frenzy of movement, like a thousand crackling fires combining into an inferno. The roars became a chorus, a synchronized battle cry.

  Isaac gritted his teeth and performed his mnemonics.

  They came at him like a horde of beasts, sprinting from all directions. He pointed his finger at the largest mass of bones he could see. A gust of energy snapped through his arm and the mass exploded in a burst of raw sound, like concentrated thunder. The noise was deafening, slapping his eardrums, and the shockwave blasted apart the nearest beasts like a blackpowder bomb. Shrapnel made of splintered bone hit the back ranks, shredding many down to their base components.

  He pointed again, shooting the raw sound at points of maximum effect, tearing apart entire lines of galloping masses. Shattered bone flew through the air in streams. But they were coming from every side, pouring out of every chamber entrance in gushing tides, and they had staggered their lines, coordinated their charges. He couldn’t cast fast enough. There were too many to kill. They closed the distance with rapid speed.

  He performed new mnemonics, losing even more ground in the casting time, and slammed the twin hurricane balls into the floor. A tidal wave of wind erupted from the ground, knocking back the edges of the horde like a solid wall of force. The masses of bone were slapped into showers of arms and legs, and, for a moment, their advance was halted. But the front lines were replaced with new bone immediately, almost stumbling over each other in rabid fervor, and the tide continued in as if it had never been struck at all. Isaac casted the wind again, sending constellations of bone spinning through the air, but the lines only grew thicker with sprinting masses. It felt like beating the ocean tide with a broom.

  Behind him, Zaria had managed to push open a crack in the doorway. Pale yellow light trickled in from beyond.

  Isaac fell back, increasing the strength of his white light. The first swarm of beasts that leaped into it immediately burst into blue flame, melting into puddles and ash at his feet. A restless mob of skulls and fingers and limbs grew at the edge of the spell, hissing and screeching. They swiped into it, bit at it with teethless jaws, each thrust into the light boiling their bones.

  The light began to dim. He had reached the ends of his strength. As the casting radius shrunk around him, the horde closed in. He could see eyeless faces and sharp ribs and twisted legs, piles of bodies squirming like slugs, entire waves of bone splashing at the backs of creatures only vaguely shaped like living beings. They came in, closer and closer, hundreds of arms reaching and grasping.

  She had widened the crack in the doorway to a small gap. More yellow light, glimpses of statues and buildings.

  They were almost at him. The light was nearly gone. Each swipe of claws barely missed his chest. The horde was frenzied, smelling blood and life.

  And, all at once, Isaac felt a sense of calm. A feeling of rightness. A sense that he had achieved his place and purpose. Everything he had ever known had built up to his moment. And, as he pulled the last bit of lifeforce from his body, a single sentence wormed through his mind.

  His father would’ve been proud.

  The light at his hand grew from a dim flicker to a blaze, and the horde scrambled over each other as they fell and burned. The blaze grew into a shining beacon, and the screams of the dead echoed down the chamber walls. The beacon erupted into a second sun of light, every shadow in the room erased, every flicker of darkness destroyed, every line of color fading into pure, radiant white. All movement of bone and death vanished from sight. There was only whiteness, thick and bright like the darkness had been black and empty, seeming to cover all of existence. For a long moment, he felt as a star shining in the night.

  Then the spell ended, the light dying like a snuffed flame. He caught a brief glimpse of the chamber as the incantation died, and he saw only twirling clouds of ember and ash. The room was silent and empty.

  His heart skipped in his chest. His legs buckled. He collapsed.

  Stone on his face. A carved relief. Figures and words.

  Movement. Distant voice. Pressure on his back. Shaking, yelling.

  The world flipped. He bounced, held off the floor. A yellow light. Walls and doors.

  Running and running.

  The world went black.