I moved, running back towards Dawes and Malstein, hoping I could make it.

  Two steps and the grouh me shifted as the low rumble of the earth elemental grew. My hoof stepped on a se as it cracked, and it seo the ground.

  The shaking didn’t stop, sending me from one side to another as rocks fell from the ceiling above. I scrambled forward, only for something to nd on my shoulder bde. I couldn’t hear my scream over the rumbling as I colpsed.

  More rocks fell, and I curled up, hands over my head and the bay neck as I waited for the storm to be over.

  The rumbling tinued, and the shaking of the earth. I couldn’t hear anything over either as more stones piled up around me. Something smashed down on my tail and I grit my teeth as my entire spine hurt. I whipped it over o me, every movement agony. I closed my eyes, just hoping the rock fall would keep anyone else away from me. And not hit me.

  I waited. I waited till the rumbling stopped, till the earth stopped shaking. I ted seds after that, settling on three minutes. Enough time for the rampagih spirit to have moved on after destroying the tunnel, short enough that any surviving shape-gers hadn’t dug their way to me yet.

  I opened my eyes, only to be met with inky bess. Okay, I didn’t care if maintaining it used up even ments than on my ears. I was making these able to see in the dark.

  I coughed and then tried moving. I could move, albeit every slightest moveme pain shooting up one part of me or another. My tail ached the most besides my already injured leg, the usually fluid movements stiff and trying to move the st third of it resulted in my entire limb seizing up. Groaning, I reached inside my pockets. One of the first rules of the tunnels, always make sure you had alternate light sources.

  Luckily I hadn’t lost my matches in the chaos, and after a few tries a small fme lit. Piled-up rocks and rubble greeted me on close to all sides. The earth elemental’s rampage had colpsed the roof down, but I’d gotten lucky. Nothing had nded directly on me, just gng blows and slight hits.

  Enough that I felt terrible, and parts of me ached, but I could move. If I could fight was airely different question, but I didn’t feel helpless.

  I didn’t think everyone else had been as lucky. I had heard nothing sihe roof had colpsed. Either the euo where they’d been was filled with rocks, or no one over there was making noise. Both possibilities were pretty awful, and there were still the shape-gers to sider.

  I doubted any of them were dead. Which meaing out of here as quickly as I could. There aough to stand up, albeit only in one spot. A few other pces where I might crouch.

  I turned around, looking over all the surrounding rubble. Edges of stone pressed against me, scraping against my skin as I forced myself to turn. I had maybe a foot of spaove, less than that in most dires.

  One of the rger rocks seemed precariously baop a pile of smaller stones. I could probably move it if I pushed hard enough, but that had its risks. Namely, disturbing any part of this could bring even more of the ceiling down on my head.

  Of course, the alternative was waiting in here for someoo dig me out. Assuming anyone was alive. I couldn’t hear any fighting still, no real sounds at all except my own movements.

  Then something. But not from the dire the rest of my group had been. The other way. A liquid hat sounded like a mixture of a bog and plumbing and a low growl mixed with a groan.

  A tendril poked through one hole in the rubble. I eyed it as it felt around. Then the end of it split, an eyeball f its way to the end.

  I jabbed my finger against it, willing the rot to transfer into the limb. The eye shriveled, grey liquid p around it as the tentacle withered. It turned sickly in an instant, gone from a thick rope of a limb to a shriveled whip. It fell to pieces while a shape-ger shrieked in pain oher side.

  I was already pushing against my small exit. Limited resources, fined space, I was dead if I tried to fight ihere.

  The rock tio shift while every cra the other side oozed flesh. It poured through, slowly encroag. Seemingly harmless. I would not wait to see how it could harm me.

  My shoulder hit the roce, twice, each time pain rog through me as thin fabrid skin collided with the stone. Ohird hit, it finally shifted, and my hands shoved against it, trying to keep the momentum going. It tilted and rolled, and I forced my way out. Ahead art of the tuill intact, te wide and thrice that long.

  Ba my little burial chamber, the poking-through flesh formed into a wall that rippled and then pulled back, ripping the fallen rubble away.

  To my dismay, more did not fall down to repce it

  The ger was a lump of flesh, tendrils spitting out of the greyish loaf of flesh and pulling it across the floor. More limbs formed now, poking out and f into limbs resembling a frog as its body split in half.

  A tongue shed out at me from the new mouth, grey slimy flesh ing around my forearm. My skin burned where the oozing flesh touched and I grabbed it with my other hand, eling rot once more. I pulled and the tongue split apart a few feet down, sending me reeling as I tried to get it uned from me. I pried it off part of my skin, and underh had turned red.

  I wasn’t doing this fast enough. Already a sed tongue spat out, shing around my leg. I reached out, but it pulled me off my feet.

  I cried out as the bay head hit the stoh a resounding crack that made my vision swim.

  My hand reflexively pulled off the rotted tohe other one pulled me across the floor as I tried to focus, the bay head hurting even more than it bumped along the stones.

  I got my head up as I was dragged, seeing…four, no two shape-gers as my vision focused a little.

  Disappointing, the Imp said in my head. And there were hopes for you.

  The sed shape-ger was ing in behind the first, resembling a squat, featherless bird with hooked cws extending from chi-wing arms. Shrieking, it raised both and sank them into the back of the first ger.

  I…huh.

  The first ger turned around, the tongue releasing my leg and ing around one of the sed’s hands even as the bone bdes plunged deeper through the flesh.

  Giggling, a fox-peared o me in a puff of what smelled like a bouquet and looked like some fireworks local kids would ask me to make e summer.

  Mostly to distract warehouse guards while they tried to rob the pce. But some had actually been used as fireworks.

  So Tagashin hadn’t run after all. That was nice.

  The two shape-gers were still cutting and sshing at each other. R, one unleashed half a dozen spears of boo the other, which shrieked and responded with a hook cw that sent globules of flesh flying. White pus-like liquid sprayed out of the newly cut wounds.

  “The illusions won’t st forever,” Tagashin whispered in my ear. “I keep them going, but they’ll start w where the other is or why sensations of touch don’t match the rest. you do something?”

  I stood on unsteady hooves, thinking about it. Rot. I had rot. The rot had been effective on Hawkins. A beat-up, already injured, once before near reduced to nothing by me, Hawkins. But it had worked. And then Gregory hadn’t let me dance, and I’d met Tagashin the first time, and if she wasn’t su ass all the time, that would have been nice.

  One of the shape-gers was currently using its cws to nearly rip the other in half. That sparked a thought. Inside every shape-ger…was what Hawkins had tried esg as a st-ditch effort, or a true form?

  I ran forward, unsteady hooves almost sendio the floor twice, but I crossed the distance before the wound closed and shoved my hand in.

  When I’d dohis with Hawkins, he’d been gigantic, impossible to reach far enough ihis one was much smaller, and I could feel something inside, something with a firmer, harder sistency thaher internals. Skin?

  A tendril ed around me, but I still sent a touch of rot into it, just a little. Then I was hurtling across the tunnel as it bellowed, back smashing into the wall.

  I groaned, puked, and got on my hands and knees. My spi like it had been hit with a sledge. My tail…I couldn’t feel my tail. I moved forward, uain where anything was, only a blurry uain mess.

  I felt someone grab my throat, and I almost bit their arm till I realized it was Tagashin as the world became defined again.

  The shape-ger I’d touched was melting, but as it was, it had driven a massive bde of bone iher, splitting it in half.

  “Get me closer,” I whispered, and I was floating, moving across the tuill we were hem. The split shape-ger was ripping into the melting form of the other, sending goopy flesh spttering across the tunnel walls.

  A touy hand was deep enough and they joiheir rade. As the two melted, Tagashi me down ounnel floor.

  I coughed, pulling myself to a tunnel wall and at least sit up. “What was that spell you cast on me?”

  “Just a purging,” Tagashin said, watg the two melting shape-gers tio shriek and stab at each other. “sed the acid, and it wasn’t a fast-ag kind, as well as helped clear your head for a bit. These things probably ’t make anything more powerful. They also seem to die, and rather quickly at that. Figured out a trick?”

  “Hawkins,” I rasped. “He had a human-sized core for ck of a better term. There’s a part of them that forms that core. It’s probably resistant to most forms of magic, but it must be unstable life energy of some kind. Diabolic rot is anathema. So would a neancer. No idea how they shrink but-”

  “Yes would have sufficed,” Tagashin said. “Sorry they smacked you around, I create illusions for most sense, but touch is hard to repce.”

  She sounded genuinely sorry as well, which was nice?

  I vomited on the floor.

  “Don’t move,” Tagashin told me as she drifted closer to the dead shape-gers. “Even if you had no other injuries, I’ll wager that the back of your head hitting the floor addled your brains some. Rest.”

  I looked at the smug Kitsuné floating in the air o me, smirking as she idly poked the deg shape-ger with her cw.

  “They’re kind of gooey, aren’t they?” she said as she pulled a cw back, a glob of white flesh stu it with a string leading back to the dead shape-ger. “Was this what they were made of, or just something that’s fortable to be?”

  “Where have you been?” I asked tiredly as I got up, wing as I put my weight on my hooves. No more strenuous activity until this leg is fully healed. Preferably after several straight days of warm baths, tea, and maybe being held by- no, no thinking about that right now.

  My legs buckled, and I hit the ground. Groaning, I tried crawling instead.

  “Scouting,” Tagashin replied. “I said to rest. Being your secret hidden on for when things went wrong. The basilisk would be beyond me, so I saw what else might be lurking out there, and behold, shape-gers!”

  “You just didn’t want to get petrified,” I muttered as I crawled over to the still roiling pile of flesh. Please let it be dead and n to reform itself.

  “People rarely want to be petrified Malvia,” Tagashin snarked. “And besides, in that fined of a space, illusion only do so much. Doing much more would have meant prying back that magic-resistant hide on the basilisk’s letting the magic work on its brain. But, by the time you’d arrahat, you were already busy rotting out the rest of it.”

  “So best just to pretend you ran away?” I said as I poked the puddle of flesh with my k didn’t react, tinuing to writhe.

  “Well, it’s not my reputation being hurt,” Tagashin said. “Besides, showing back up would lead to an immediately messy frontation with the Captain. And also being away gave you a secret on the gers didn’t know about. And it turned out you needed one.”

  “The elemental that showed up, was that you're doing as well?” I rying some of the flesh free of the pool with my kwo knives? Sometimes it was one and sometimes two, same with that strip of flesh I was cutting out. Its writhing ceased the moment it fully separated. We probably would o torch this before we left, or something to ensure everything in here was dead.

  “No,” Tagashin said, vulpine grin turo a frown. “No, I did ne that. Stop pying with that flesh. We have a living oo take strips out to study if we o. No, the elemental being here wasn’t my doing. And ting on it as ce is a fool’s choi this kind of game.”

  “Life is chaos,” I tered. “Not everything that happens is directly ected. And besides I…”

  I frowned. I’d had a point oip of my tongue, but that thought had drifted off. Instead, I felt my stomach heave, and I was sick all over the dead remains of the shape-gers.

  “That purge is wearing off,” Tagashin noted. “You o lie down and sit still.”

  “Last ger,” I muttered.

  “Is dead, killed them, or was chased off by that elemental? But you’re right, someone should go check. Stay here, sleep. I’ll leave an illusion over you, keep you safe till I e back. Just sleep.”

  The Kitsuné touched my shoulder and, with a shuddering breath, it felt like all the tension in my body departed. And with it went my ability to fight, to stay scious. By all rights, I should be distrustful, being put to sleep by this fae creature in a tunnel by myself.

  Instead, all I felt was relief as I drifted off to slumber.

  Saithorthepyro