I had been walking through the cages for about two minutes when one of the prisoners shifted and made me jump. It wasn’t until right then that I realized I had lost my Webley and I spent an agonizingly long time debating whether I should go back and search for it. I should be able to find it pretty easily because I was reasonably sure it liked me and wanted to be found, but I had used it so much today that I don’t know if it’d even be helpful. Resigning myself to the possibility I might lose it depending on how the rest of this terrible day went, I continued.

  While I walked I took off the Mantle. The enchantment on it doesn’t work unless it has full contact with my body, and with most of the fasteners and straps broken, I didn’t bother to try and fix it. Now that I had mostly corrected what was happening to my body, I was aware of just how heavy the fucking thing was and sighed with relief when it crashed to the ground.

  The sudden noise created a cascade of terrified whimpers and cries around me, which prompted a fresh wave of anger. I’m going to kill every single one of those Distiller fucks.

  I quickened my pace, choosing turns mostly at random. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the layout, and it was so dark even my improved vision couldn’t see the walls or ceiling. Now I realized why most of the people here weren’t reacting to me unless I made noise: they simply couldn’t see me. It was another layer of torture that made me so angry my stomach and fists hurt from clenching. The only thing that let me know my sense of direction was my connection to Conner via the bloodstick.

  Suddenly the smell got—not worse, but more. It took me a second to figure out what I was smelling because it was competing with the smell of my breath in the t-shirt and the shirt itself. Another few yards and it clicked: blood. Tons of fresh blood. Another few steps and my bare feet found a tacky slickness I knew would haunt my dreams for the rest of my life, right along the blood-slick steps of the pyramid from the island.

  But the further I went, the more I realized the pyramid had nothing against what was happening here. As I increased my pace, my feet began to splash in the liquid that could only be blood, despite what I wanted to believe. I began running, almost stumbling several times on the slick ground, crashing into cages that I now noted were empty. I used a little bit of my new ability to extend the claws on my toes, giving myself needed grip.

  I came upon two large doors, wide enough to drive a van through. The blood was coming from beneath, at a pace that shouldn’t be possible. How many people had they taken?! I felt my heart fall into the pit of my stomach when I realized Conner was very close now, past these doors. I ran up and shoved them, but they wouldn’t budge.

  I snarled and dug my toe claws into the ground, set my shoulder on the right door, and shoved with all my might. At first, I feared I wasn’t strong enough to open it, my mind already shooting to spells I could carve on it to destroy it—but it started to move. Slowly. After it moved a quarter of an inch, blood began to move through the breach. The more I pushed the easier it became, along with more blood. I suddenly had a vision of being carried away in a tide of blood.

  Fortunately, reality wasn’t that bad—but it was still a nightmare. After making about a foot of space, blood up to my shins poured between the doors and cascaded past me. I took a step forward, reset my claws, and shoved it wider.

  Beyond the doors was a landing at the foot of a set of stairs, blood cascading down the steps like a water feature in front of a fucking casino. Beyond the steps was a vast, well-lit chamber. I had to squeeze my eyes against the sudden brightness. If they had set an ambush at these doors, I doubt I could have reacted fast enough to do anything about it, danger-sense or no.

  When my eyes adjusted I could see a room like an indoor coliseum. Great columns carved from the very walls surrounded the space. As I waded through the blood and began to climb up the stairs, more of the room came into focus. The thing providing light to the room reminded me of the orb in the big chamber when we had first entered, except I could feel its significance to the space around me. I’d bet my left nut that’d be the cynosure. Could they be connected? They looked similar, except this one was bigger and more real feeling. Like it was the reason this space existed.

  I got a full view of the room at the top of the stairs. The center of the room was taken up by a giant ritual circle, with about a hundred cultists muttering a chant in a language I didn’t recognize. They were spaced about twenty feet apart. In the center of the circle, directly under the glowing, staticky orb, was the man I recognized from the illusions. He was pinning another, nearly nude man to the floor with one arm and before I could shout in protest, drove a dagger into his heart. The move was smooth, practiced; like he’d been doing it all day.

  As soon as the dagger sank to the hilt, he pulled it out and quickly stepped away. Instead of going still, the man with the new hole in his heart began to rise in the air. Blood poured from him as he began to twist and convulse. The contortions became erratic and fast, his skin bruising before my eyes. Soon, the bruises became dark, his skin changed and his body was no longer recognizable as human. In mere moments, a new shoggoth was born. The leader gestured to the left. The shoggoth gave the impression of bowing before moving off to the side, where over a dozen demons and other shoggoths (shoggi? Shoggoth?) stood waiting. A glance to the right showed more.

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  I studied the circle the cultists were in. It was something I hadn’t seen before, but the longer I looked at it the more it began to make sense. It was an ongoing ritual, a combination of summoning and transformation magic if I were to guess. My inspection was interrupted as a wail tore through the room, dragging my attention away from the circle.

  Behind the leader, huddled together in a scared pile, was a sobbing mass of humanity. Dozens of malnourished and battered people. As I watched, the leader walked over, grabbed the nearest one to him, and dragged the young woman to the center of the ritual. That’s when he noticed me.

  “Ah,” he said. I could tell what he said more from the shape of his mouth than by any noise he made. The people behind him were loud. “You look… much improved since our last conversation.”

  He said it in a way a teacher would say “You’re on time” when they were hoping you’d be late so they could punish you. I ignored him and swept my eyes over the prisoners behind him, the blood stick guiding me—there.

  Conner.

  He was alive. He was alive!

  Of course, the blood stick was telling me he was alive, but it was one thing to trust a magic doodad and another to see it with my own two eyes. He looked…

  Horrible.

  He had lesions up and down his sides. His eyes were sunken and bruised, his skin clung tight to his skeleton. His hair was patchy, as was his beard, suggesting his body lacked the nutrition to grow fucking hair. How the fuck was he still alive?

  My eyes locked onto the leader. I don’t know what he sensed or saw in my expression, because he stopped saying whatever bullshit had been spewing from his mouth.

  Anger filled me. Rage like I had never felt in my life rose from my throat and filled my mouth with hate. If I had any presence of mind, I would have been slightly embarrassed that my first impulse was to roar.

  ***

  Interlude: Conner

  Conner waited for his turn to die or be turned into a monster. He’d been distracting himself from his many pains by figuring out the ratio of deaths to monsters. So far, it took about twenty deaths to create one of the weird shifty monsters, and about thirty to make one of the spiky centaurs. A part of him wondered if anything of the people survived inside the monster, or if it was just another form of death. He hoped it was the latter.

  He desperately wanted to sleep. Being locked in a cage for months, with only a single can of soup a.. day? He guessed? He had stopped counting time in minutes and hours during what he assumed to be his first month of capture. Stuck in a lightless room, the only way to tell time was from the infrequent visits of his captors as they brought someone new in or to remove one of his peers. That, and mealtime.

  He was sure it was once a day. The pure cruelty of his captors—he couldn’t imagine them doing anything but the bare minimum to keep their stock alive. And that’s what they were: livestock. A resource to be used.

  The thought brought him back to the present, and to the approaching figure of the man Conner thought of as “Jim.” He was the leader here; that was apparent. Even with Conner seeing the man for the first time this very day, he could be nothing but. As he approached, Conner wondered if his turn had finally come… only to be relieved and disappointed both when Jim grabbed someone else.

  Then he paused. He began speaking. This didn’t sound like the terse orders he sparingly gave. This was new. Conner barely had the strength to stay awake, but he forced his tired body to move himself into a better position. A neighbor's thigh was used to brace his shoulder, and using that as a lever, he lifted his head to see what had gotten Jim’s attention.

  A… homeless man. With a T-shirt over his face. And—mostly black skin. But black like ink. Like he was almost done with a full-body tattoo. His hair was lanky and mostly plastered to his skull by some kind of fluid. At first, Conner thought the man was nude save for the t-shirt and underwear, but he saw that he had some form of pants still on him. It was reduced to the waistband and scraps of the left leg, giving the impression to Conner that he had been in a severe accident and that was the only clothing he had left. Why was he wearing a shirt over his face?

  The smell, Conner realized. He had been in it so long he could no longer smell it. He often feared if—by some miracle he lived through this—he’d never smell again. God, just to smell a lemon again…

  Then the man met Conner’s eyes. There was recognition there. What? How? Who? The next instant, the man was staring down Jim. Suddenly, the man didn’t look homeless anymore. He looked more dangerous than the monsters crowding the sides of the room. The air seemed to distort around him as if the universe was being drawn into him. Jim stuttered to a halt, his speech suddenly without wind as the man across the room went absolutely batshit and let loose the most terrifying roar Conner had ever heard. There was no way a human throat could produce that sound—those sounds! Multiple voices were layered together, plus other sounds that no one would or could categorize as human.

  Conner was frozen in fear, but Jim wasn’t. The cultist shouted a command in a language Conner didn’t recognize and suddenly the monsters were charging forward with frightening speed. Conner found himself rooting for the strange man, if only for the fact that he was clearly opposed to something that was happening here. He had no hope that the man would survive the rush of monsters, despite his weird roar—

  In the space between one thought and another, a mass of writhing appendages Conner could only recognize as tentacles burst from the man's back and struck down half a dozen of the leading monsters.

  “What the fuck,” Conner rasped, his first words in over a month.