Searing pain ripped me back into the waking world. Not that it was much different from the flashes of unconsciousness that washed over my mind like ocean waves. Everything was dark. Most of my body was numb. I couldn’t feel my legs at all, and everything from my arms up was sticky with fresh blood. I couldn’t even see the end of the fissure above me that I had fallen through, nor hear any indication of Grace anywhere. I could only hope that she had escaped the collapse with more fortune than me.

  I felt my arms for injuries. Gashes went up and down them, but more worrying was something hard and sharp sticking from my left forearm, near the elbow. I couldn’t see exactly what it was, and I didn’t want to. Just touching it sent a rush of pain and nausea through me. I let that arm go limp, resolving to drag myself along the ground with just my right.

  I dug my shattered fingernails into a tiny bump on the rocky ground and pulled my body along for a few feet, before I fell still again, breathing hard. I couldn’t do it. I was in too much pain, and I was too weak from my injuries. I wouldn’t make it more than thirty feet before dying, and even then, where would I go? It was pitch black down here, and I didn’t have a light. Even if there was some miraculous way out, how would I ever find it?

  My face laid pressed against the gritty floor, hot tears mixing with all the blood and burning where they crossed open wounds. I shook and trembled, but I reached my hand out again, searching for more purchase.

  “Damn it, Belfry,” I muttered aloud. “If you die, you better not give up, too.”

  Speaking those words into the empty space of the cavern almost made them feel more real, the echo having the impression of tangibility as it bounced around the walls. Inside, I knew it was hopeless, but I’d learned to make do without hope a long time ago.

  I dragged myself forward again, and again, and again. Each time I had to pause to catch my breath and let the sharp pain dredged up by the movement wash back into a simple agonising throbbing. I could almost feel the blood pouring from my veins. I didn’t have long. Though the darkness was total, I could still tell that my vision was starting to go fuzzy. It wouldn’t be long before I bled out. I had to move fast.

  My hand finally landed on something that wasn’t flat stone. It was a lip in the floor, short but vertical, clearly carved. And then there was another one after it, and another after that. Stairs. My muscles burned like an angry volcano as I painstakingly pulled myself upwards, step by step, until I reached the top after the fourth step.

  I didn’t know what I expected. Maybe finding out that the cave wasn’t natural gave me some hope I might find a way out, or at least a light. But at the top of the stairs, there was simply more of the same darkness that I had been wallowing in for what felt like hours now. All I’d managed to do was waste the last of my energy. I slumped against the ground in despair. Just like always, it didn’t matter how much spirit I showed; in the end, the gods didn’t care.

  I blinked, and then blinked again, unsure of how much time passed in between. Then something changed. Where once there was only darkness ahead, there was now a soft, dark violet glow, coming from a water-filled depression on the tiled floor maybe ten feet away, just strong enough to cast the shadows of rubble on the walls all around it. It was blinding to me.

  I rubbed my eyes with my good hand, sure that I had finally slipped into the delirium that preceded death, but the glow didn’t fade. It was hazy and faint through the filter of blood loss, but it was there, real as could be. I had nowhere else to go. I barely had the strength even to look on, but I summoned whatever stubbornness I had left to push forward.

  The throbbing in my arms dulled as my fingers tingled numb. I came to a silhouette of rubble in the way of my path, and felt that it was no stone debris. It was a corpse, cold and covered in clothes. At first I was terrified that it could have been Grace, but the body bore no metal armour. No, as I crawled around to the side, I could see that it was the deacon who had attacked us. His hood and blindfolds had fallen away revealing wide, lidless, vacuous black eyes that stared into the void. I shivered, but had to keep pressing on.

  As I drew near, I could feel my focus lapsing every time I even slightly wavered from the task of just moving forward. Darkness pushed at the corners of my vision, clouding my eyes in waves. Every time it cleared, the light was a bit hazier, and other shapes began to form in the light, indistinct at first, but soon taking the appearance of humanoid figures, their features blank. I let out a small laugh when I was roused to full wakefulness again. I was losing it.

  A sound rang out through the cavern, the high, tinny chime of a bell. Despite my failing consciousness, the sound was clear as day. It was followed by a breathy, fluttering whispering, like wind that failed to stir the stagnant air, and then voices. At first, they were muted and distant, but every arm’s length I drew myself closer to the pool, they resolved into clearer and clearer tones. A small chorus of high and deep, heavy and light, gravelly and airy, all spoken in unison.

  “I come to bear a burden, to wear a sacred charge,” they said as they came into focus. “I come to honour the courage of the fallen, and lend my own to the living. O forebears who watch over me, O descendants who shall remember me, hear my voice.”

  They paused as if waiting for an answer. I didn’t want to indulge the delirious, dying hallucinations with any more energy than I needed to, but something pushed me to speak. “I hear you,” I said, my voice a faltering whisper.

  “I take this solemn vow,” the voices said. “To watch over this land as guardian. To keep to heart our virtues. To smite evil and preserve good against what darkness may encroach. To guide those who will take my place with a steady heart and sombre mind. To temper ancient power in the fires of justice.”

  Clinging only to a thread of life, I finally came to the side of the pool. It was shallow and triangular, with a point facing towards me. The water seemed alive with the violet glow from within. There, in the centre, emanating this guiding light, sat a small pearl-like gemstone with a deep purple sheen, the size of a curled finger.

  “With this act, you will live,” a single, stronger voice boomed. “You will achieve life beyond what you have known, but you will cast your present life aside. Do you truly choose to live, forever changed?”

  My eyelids drooped in exhaustion. As one with all the spectres around, I reached my hand towards the gem, and said, “I choose to live.”

  I lifted the stone up and out of the water. All but one of the phantoms disappeared with the sound of the splashing. The only one that remained lowered a long, ghostly sword that they rested upon my shoulder.

  “Our adage, you keep,” the booming voice said more softly, more comforting. “‘As One in war. As One in blood. As One in life, and in death, till our souls be bound forever, beyond.’” And as the sound of the last word faded, they vanished.

  I held the glowing gem up to my eye, mystified. I didn’t have time to wonder about what to do, and allowed myself to act on the first piece of intuition that came to my mind. I put the stone in my mouth, and swallowed it.

  The thing was just big enough for me to have to choke it down, but I was eventually able to force it down my throat. Almost immediately, the idiocy of what I had just done washed over my mind like a breaking wave. Eat the stone? What was I thinking? If all of that had been real, then some sort of magical ghosts were giving me one chance not to die, and I went and ate the help they gave me? Stupid, even to my dying breath.

  I laid there at the pool in silence. I’d wasted my last chance, all there was now was to wait for death to come. It took longer than I expected. The seconds crawled by, and while I had expected a numbness to eventually overtake me as my life fled, all that came was thirst. I hadn’t had any water in hours, not since I left home, but it still felt strange that I would feel thirsty over any of the pain that I had been dealing with since the fall, but I brushed it aside. Then the thirst grew stronger, and stronger, and stronger still, until my blood had turned to sand and my skin to brittle and dry paper.

  I choked and coughed on the gritty, stale air, and out of instinct shoved my face forward into the pool and took long gulps of the water. To my surprise, it tasted as fresh and clean as it looked, and with it sating that unholy thirst, it was divine, beyond compare even to the nectar enjoyed by the saints in the heavens.

  Soon, the pool was completely dry, and my thirst was slaked. I took a few deep breaths, enjoying the satisfaction of quenched thirst, before pushing myself wearily to my feet, having to brace against a wall to keep steady.

  Wait.

  It took a moment to sink in, but as I stood, the realisation that most of the pain was gone hit me. My legs were no longer numb, whatever sharpness had protruded from my arm was gone, and the distinct stings and stabs of pain from open cuts and slashes had faded completely all over my body. Deep aches still throbbed in every muscle, but it wasn’t enough to keep me on the floor.

  I doubled over, falling to my knees in shocked, giddy laughter. I wasn’t dead. I wasn’t dead. I didn’t know if I had heavenly messengers to thank for the intervention or sheer luck, but either way, I had to keep one hand on my face just to reaffirm to myself that it wasn’t a trick. I was really healed.

  I caught a laugh in my throat and covered my mouth, finally coming down from the high of unexpected life to remember that I was still in the monastery, or at least underneath it. I had lived through the fall, but the deacons still alive would doubtlessly still be hostile, and I still needed to find Grace. If she had died, then me surviving here wouldn’t really have been a good thing after all.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  I knelt down, feeling around on the ground for the deacon’s body, and picked up his cane. The tip was broken off, but it was still more than long and sturdy enough to serve its purpose. I leaned heavily on it as I limped around the room, mindful to keep watch for the stairs I knew were around here somewhere.

  I ran a hand against the walls at the perimeter of the chamber, desperately hoping to find a door, or really any kind of passageway out. I was keenly aware of the aches in my legs as I limited myself to a slow pace, but the pain I really began to notice as I kept searching was a sharp cramp in my chest. It was somehow an unfamiliar pain, but at that moment I put it down as a broken rib or two. I monitored my breathing, doing my best not to provoke it.

  My hand hit a sudden cavity in the rock wall, and I almost fell over. I hadn’t realised how much I’d been leaning on it. I tapped the cane against the walls ahead, feeling the perimeter of the hole. It was roughly rectangular, and large enough to be a doorway, though the stone wasn’t especially smooth. The depression was deep enough for the cane to fit its length inside without hitting the end. If it wasn’t an exit, it was still as close as I had found to one. I stepped inside and followed the hall.

  I kept running my hand along the wall as I walked. Every now and then it fell into another hole, though these were small, short, and relatively shallow, feeling more like shelves carved into the stone than a branching path. Most were empty, until the path I followed turned a corner, and I felt something round and rough sitting on one. Oblong with a lot of weird ridges and holes on the bottom half, and a texture like crumbling stone.

  I was a little afraid to see what it could be, but I still wished to whatever gods could hear me that I had a light. The shadow felt oppressive in that little hallway, and every step I was terrified that I was going to miss branches or side paths that turned this place into a labyrinth. I sighed in frustration. As I did, light suddenly blossomed in the tunnel. A faint purplish mist—or perhaps smoke—escaped my mouth, and momentarily glowed like a flicker of flame before fizzling out. The brief flash was enough for me to see the general contours of the cramped tunnel, as well as a T-shaped fork several feet ahead.

  Instinctively, I slapped a hand over my mouth. That was magic. It was certainly, doubtlessly magic. Magic done without burning any blood, no less, unless what I had spilled in the fall had mysteriously caught fire without me knowing. From my understanding that was impossible, unless someone trained for a very, very long time.

  Shakily, I moved my hand away to rest on the shelf again. Maybe that gemstone was some kind of…blood gem? And it was fuelling magic without me realising it? Nothing else seemed to make any sense in that moment, but it wasn’t like I was the person to ask, nor was it the time for those questions. If I’d been granted magic, I would absolutely be taking it.

  Experimentally, I held the cane up to my face. Though closing my eyes didn’t make any difference in the pitch black, I did it anyway and concentrated on my thoughts. I need light, I thought to myself. No, I need fire. Just a little bit, so that I can find Grace….

  With that, I exhaled again, slowly. That same mist floated on my breath, and settled on the handle of the cane. It began to fade for a split second, before the glow renewed itself and grew brighter and brighter, until a bright, smokeless, flame sprang to life upon it like a torch, the inside a scintillating mix of pale yellow, orange, and pink, all hemmed in by a deep violet border. The wood began to snap and crackle, but hopefully it would be enough to get me out of here.

  The rough stone hallway was flooded with lavender light, and when I caught sight of the shelves, I immediately backed away from the one I had been leaning on. It bore a skull. Humanoid, though larger and taller than what I would have guessed ordinary proportions were. The lower jaw was missing, allowing the skull to sit flat against the shelf. And looking around at all the other shelves around me, it was a wonder I had stumbled upon that shelf with a single lone skull, as the rest of them were completely filled with them, all sitting in compact rows and staring out with their hollow eye sockets.

  These tunnels must be an ossuary network. I’d heard off-hand about the extensive catacombs that ran beneath major cities like Kirkwall and Yorving, but Vandermaine had never had any such burial customs. Like most folk in the eastern Fountainheads, we burned the dead and ground their bones to powder to be laid beneath the land they lived on. It was unnerving to see so many complete skulls, all untouched by the hand of time, except perhaps in some yellowing or cracks here and there. Any free spaces in the shelves were packed with bones of other kinds, all clearly given less attention than the heads of the dead.

  Nervously, I held the violet-flame torch out, pressing onwards to that juncture. A spike of pain shot through my abdomen, and I gasped, leaning on a wall for a few seconds as I groaned and summoned the will to stand back up again. The cane started to crack and split where it burned. It wasn’t a real torch, and that sunset-coloured fire could be burning differently than the normal kind. I had to move fast. I forced myself onto my feet again, and made it to the crossing.

  I looked left, and then right. Right was a dead end ten feet ahead. Left disappeared into darkness, so I went that way. I started to smell something. It was smoky and a little woody with a hint of floral notes. I stopped for a moment to take it in and try and place it. It was almost like…incense? Was I getting close, or had it drifted down through the fissure in that cavern I landed in?

  My fears were confirmed when the tunnel I was in abruptly stopped. A solid stone brick wall blocked the way forward. I knelt down for a rest, leaning my head against the cane. I could go back, but I hadn’t felt any other possible routes before I lit the fire. I could have missed something, but…I really, really felt that I hadn’t. Trying would be better than nothing, but struggling and dying from thirst or starvation would have been worse than if I had just given up and died after the fall. The knife of pain in my gut stabbed again, this time shooting up into my shoulders and down into my legs. It felt like someone was trying to slice my back open from inside. I dropped the cane, and the fire flickered and went out.

  As the cane clacked against the floor, I heard something. A voice. A familiar voice, high-toned and with a little bit of scratchiness to it. I couldn’t tell what they said, but my desperate mind knew who had said it.

  “Grace…” I mumbled, placing my hand up against the brick wall. It had come from there, surely. I’d already put the fears of hallucination to bed after the gemstone had healed me. She had to be on the other side of the wall.

  Wait. Bricks. These tunnels were all carved out of natural stone, and the dead end on the other passage was too. This wall was brick like the ones at the monastery. It was a way out. It must be.

  I hauled myself to my feet, leaned against the wall, and pushed as hard as I could. Another flash of pain shot through me, this time reaching all the way into my fingertips and face, but I couldn’t stop. Though the wall seemed sturdy and immobile, as I heaved on it, it began to make a grinding sound as it slid along the floor. It cracked open, revealing a rectangular frame, and light began to push through the cracks. Firelight.

  There was a gasp from the other side, and a set of fingers appeared on the door’s edge, easing the load by pulling from the other side. With the awful sound of stone against stone, the door slid open enough for me to squeeze through the gap. I fell to my knees in a boxy room filled with barrels, mostly shoved against the wall, but a few stacked in small piles throughout. A ladder at the opposite end led up into whatever floors lay above.

  More importantly, instantly at my side was Grace, seemingly unharmed but wearing a face that dripped with worry. She put a hand on my shoulder as nervous and happy tears freely fell from her chin to stain the dusty floor. “Belfry!” she said, being as loud as possible while still staying within a whisper. “Belfry, oh good and holy saints above, I’m so glad you’re alive. I thought you were dead when you fell, I couldn’t see anything down there.”

  Pain wracked me again, strong enough to force me to quell a brief sense of nausea. The flashes were coming faster, but my head was spinning too much with both pain and relief to fully process that.

  “Grace, I—” I paused, trying not to be sick. “I’m glad you’re alive too. I thought you might have fallen with me. I–agh!”

  I fell to my hands and knees from another lance of pain. Something burned in my chest, like my heart had started pumping flames instead of blood.

  “Belfry!” Grace cried, staying at my side, though her hands were shaking. “What’s wrong? What happened down there? Do you need medicine?”

  “I don’t–ghk,” I grit my teeth against the mounting feeling of fire. “I don’t kn—AAAAAAH!”

  I fell over onto my side as the pain finally crested into agony. I squeezed my eyes shut as spasms began to rock my body. The feeling was indescribable. It was as if a million tiny insects had sprang to life inside my body and were eating me from the inside out. Every nerve, muscle, organ, and bone burned like hot metal wires were run through them. I tried to talk to Grace, but all the sounds that I could manage to make were muted screams that gradually grew louder and louder as the situation only worsened. Whether she talked to me or not, I couldn’t tell through the deafening ringing in my ears.

  Stings like fiendish paper cuts crawled across my back, then over my arms, face, legs, and finally torso. I felt the floor below me become sticky with blood. I felt things inside me snap and buckle, and I was reminded of my broken bones after the fall. They twisted and shifted, until the shape of my own arms and legs felt foreign and strange beneath the agonising inferno of pain. My face felt like it split at the front as something inside was dragged out and forward, and the darkness behind my eyelids turned white as my eyes burned. Tiny blades stabbed through the back of my neck and flexed strangely, and six more cut through the back of my head until I felt like my skin had been completely perforated.

  White-hot flashes shot through my back in three spots, at my shoulder blades and the base of my spine. They stood at the precipice of numbness as I felt a distant pulling sensation from each point, as though I’d been attached to three separate meat hooks that were now in the process of drawing and quartering me. I arched my back as if it would keep my body together, but the feeling didn’t stop until I sensed pieces of my torn back brushing up against barrels and the stone wall. Then, in a final act of torture, a raging fire burned through my entire body, and I felt the pain of immolation, until finally, at last, the pain began to subside.

  I breathed heavily, each one a labour against what felt like a hundred ton weight that was pressed against my entire body. Slowly, warily, I opened my eyes, expecting to see my guts splayed across the floor from whatever horrific magical punishment or trap I had invoked.

  I saw Grace. She stood against the back wall, her spear in one hand and the other over her mouth as she stared at me in abject shock. The sight was blurry and strange. I blinked, and my vision began to resolve into clarity, but it did so slowly. An orangish block of colour sat at the bottom centre of my vision.

  Then, I tried to look down at myself. There were no guts spilling from my torso. Instead, I was surrounded in the shredded remains of my clothes and splatters of blood. Where once had been the ordinary body of a human, there were now scales. Cream-coloured plates ran down the length of my chest and belly. My hands were stretched out, with my little fingers missing, while the remaining four were stubby and tipped with sharp, black claws. Sunset-orange scales covered the backs of them, while the underside had the same cream colour as the plates along my front.

  A yawning pit of dread opened in my stomach. I stood up, getting to all fours in a motion that felt worryingly natural. My head banged against the low ceiling of the room, and I had to keep it low. I turned backward, finding that I could stretch my neck to the sides more than I used to be able to. The sections of my back that at first I had thought were segments of bone and muscle torn away and laying limp behind me were in fact broad, scaly wings. My torso had been lengthened, and behind it stretched a tail with thick, ridged scales and two sets of fins that flexed along its length, one halfway down and a second much broader pair at the tip.

  I trembled, unable to parse exactly what emotions I was feeling. Fear? Despair? Disbelief? Shock? Probably all of them. I clenched my jaw shut like it would keep them all from spilling out.

  The phantoms had been right. I had lived. And I had changed.