Strange, blurry images all around. Everything seemed to be made of mist. The voice was scared, jagged almost.

  “They come.” It said. “They come, and we cannot stop them. There’s no choice.”

  A pause followed that, then another voice. This one was lower than the first, it sounded stronger. It wasn’t. Just…Solidified. Decided, and with the conviction to see that decision through. Even if that conviction led to its destruction.

  “Then we must do it. Release the creature, and may the Gods have mercy on us all. May our world survive the fight to defend it.”

  Silence, blackness. Numbness. Oblivion.

  That’s what I recall, from seeing the carving. That’s what ran through my head. It was all…Scattered. Disconnected images and ideas, subtext without context. Disorienting as anything I’ve ever experienced—including the thousand or so concussions I’ve had over my career—and unnerving in a way most couldn’t understand.

  I can barely make sense of it now, after all I’ve learned of magic and all my experience in organising such scattered visions. You can imagine, then, that the little shit idiot I was back then didn’t know what to make of the sight even in the slightest. Perhaps fortunately, I was knocked out the moment I first felt it.

  When I came to, Vara was staring down at me and Laryck was pacing, panting and whimpering like a child.

  “We’re going to die.” He groaned. “We’re all going to—”

  —”Shut up.” Vara cut him off, her voice like a razor as she peered down at me. “He’s waking up. Are you, Kyvaine, are you waking up?”

  I blinked, and nodded. “Bright.” I groaned, blinking more and trying to banish the infernal glare from my eyes. No matter how I did, though, it persisted.

  “That’s not you,” Vara told me, helping me stand as she did, “everything is bright suddenly. It’s these…lights.” Her description could’ve used some work, though even I felt a bit bad about pointing that out while she worked so hard helping me stand.

  Looking around, I saw what Vara meant. The room had lit up so suddenly, so perfectly, that I’d mistaken it for my own vision failing me on account of my unconsciousness. A closer inspection showed that the light was very real, and eerily pristine.

  There’s a certain messiness to firelight that you come to expect without even really thinking about it. A shoddy, unevenness to it as the flames themselves constantly reshape and resize. The patch of light is inconstant, mercurial. It swells and recedes by the second. By the fraction of a second.

  Not the lights I was seeing now. The glow they gave out was steady as a surgeon’s hand, and it was pale. Like sunlight shining underground. I looked to the sources, and shielded my eyes from the glare of curious objects. Those glimpses I managed through the pain struck me as things of glass, bearing some unknowable source at the centre of each from which the glow came.

  I knew something of magic of course, Thaumaturgy was an under-studied subject in my youth but my father valued knowledge enough that my extensive education—more extensive than most nobles—had included a smattering of arcane theory. This, I knew, was magic. It could not have been anything else.

  “Starlight.” I whispered, remembering the old name. Vara studied me as I said it, alert. Laryck just kept panicking. “This is called starlight, it’s a form of Thaumaturgy that…” I struggled to remember the details. “Basically wizards use it to make a very steady form of light that doesn’t generate heat.”

  Vara looked suitably unimpressed, as always.

  “I can see that just by looking at it,” she pointed out.

  I was in a foul mood. My head hurt, probably where I’d smacked it on the stones falling, and I turned away from her to study our newly-illuminated surroundings. They were a daunting sight, bigger even than I’d have thought while submerged in the dark. You might have fit all of Sheppleberry in just that chamber alone.

  Indeed, someone had fit a town there.

  Buildings dotted the place, and between them ran what I now saw were carefully paved roads. Posts jutted from the ground, where once lamps might have been, and despite the clear age of everything I realised most of the structures were in more or less perfect condition. Everything was untended, though, and clearly long abandoned.

  What unnerved me most was the grass. It shouldn’t have been alive and growing. It was. Magic. Unnatural . I shivered.

  “Let’s be gone from here.” I grunted, looking around and making the most of this fearful light as I sought out our next path. In the corner of my eye, I saw the stone carving still. It seemed to quiver, and I thought distantly that I heard a beat coming from it. Like a drum…Or a heart. I drove both thoughts out of my mind. Whatever magic was at work, I wanted to be as far from it as possible. This was a very wise course of action, and one of the few that I still stand by decades later.

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  We wandered around for quite a while, and I found my nerves fraying. Laryck had stopped his complaining but retreated into a grim silence, while Will wasn’t saying anything at all. I was the one now stuck hauling the boy along, and given that his consciousness had slipped away entirely I was forced to do so by carrying him on my back. Big as I was, the weight slowed me a lot.

  “Which way?” Vara asked, as we came to the first of several doors—or rather, open arches—out of the expansive chamber. For once I was without a reply, suddenly taking this too seriously for my usual bluster. Before I could answer, we heard it. One note, deep, sounding. It echoed along the walls, the floor, through the air. Rumbled past us. It sounded like the footstep of God. An angry footstep.

  “What the fuck was that!?” Laryck yelped, eyes darting around fast enough to pick out arrows mid-flight.

  “Another reason to leave.” I growled, looking around frantically. There were other arches, and at first it was hard to pick one. But my decision was made for me quickly and shortly when I realised one key detail about one of them. “There, look.”

  It was the only arch that led to a staircase. A staircase heading up, not down as we’d gone to get here. Even Laryck didn’t need that much spelled out, and we hurried on.

  The sound rang out again, just as we reached the stairs. Again, it ran through me. Struck some deep chord in my guts that urged flight and desperate panic. I drove the emotions down as best I could, which, being a spoiled little rich fuck who’d never worked a day in his life, was not very well.

  “What is that?!” Vara asked, sounding almost as panicked as Laryck now. Before I could come up with an answer—either glib or endeavouringly helpful—we heard more noises, different noises. The rattling of hard limbs and hard joints in motion, footsteps lighter and sharper than human heels. Skeletal, I thought. We’d heard this before just an hour earlier, and knew by now that it was the sound of undead in motion.

  “Hurry!” I yelled, hauling Will that much faster as I tore up the stairs. The boy felt lighter on my shoulders, the frenzy of fear giving me strength, I thought, and we were able to scale the stairs quickly enough.

  Laryck was quickest of all, naturally. Too panicked to bother hanging back for the rest of us while we slowed him, he shot off ahead.

  The sound rang out a third time, closer now. I heard more with it too, a great rumbling, a scraping. Heavy limbs and heavy talons striking the stone floor, scrambling after us. I didn’t dare risk a look over my shoulder to see what was in pursuit, knew that to do so would be to slow. To slow, in all likelihood, would be to die.

  We just ran.

  Another twenty paces and the sound rang out again, deeper, closer. Sooner. The intervals between soundings were shrinking with each new one, I knew, and all the while that noise—that damned scraping pursuit—was drawing nearer. We reached the top of the stairs and hurried on down the corridor before us. We heard it again, closest of all now, barely ten heartbeats had passed since the last sounding. We kept running.

  I recognised where we were—the same corridor we’d first entered this infernal dungeon in, coming up from the other end instead of the one we ended up heading down. Ahead of us, of fucking course, were the undead. Five of them, battered and with a few wounds where angry steel had mangled them. But making straight for us.

  What happened next was nothing like so controlled as people tend to think, hearing the story. Laryck, ahead of Vari and I, froze up when he saw the undead and started backing away. I barely noticed them. I was so bloody terrified of whatever was behind us that the things in front—things I had fought and seen wounded already—simply didn’t register. My brain took long, slow moments to register the shambling undead and pointed steel. By the time I did, we were already impacting.

  Apparently, this surprised the undead as much as it did me. They could’ve skewered me easily enough, and must have thought I was in some way bluffing or feinting with my mad charge. I wasn’t. So the two creatures I slammed into were quite unprepared for it.

  I wasn’t moving all that fast, not with Will’s weight. But I had so much mass behind me that it didn’t really matter. Will weighed about fifteen stone, I weighed something like twelve. Between the two of us almost four hundred pounds smashed into the two undead before me at a pace somewhere north of most men’s jogging speeds. They weren’t just knocked back, but down. Instantly. I barely even slowed down as I bowled the pair over, and thought I felt bones caving in under my foot as one frantic step brought a heel down upon one of their heads.

  Behind me, Vara must have fought like Glyca the Shapestealer herself. I figured this much because she wasn’t horribly torn apart and killed, despite the three undead still active and in varying states of disrepair. Perhaps the hole I’d punched in them had been distraction enough. Either way, she made it through too. Even Laryck did, after a moment, the urge to flee driving him forwards.

  We were past them, the undead left behind us. I still didn’t look. All of it had taken only five or so heartbeats, and now we were at the first door we’d moved through.

  But then the sound rang out again, the scraping grew closer. Now I heard hissing, felt a hot wind. My spine tingled, the skin of my back crawled, and I knew, somehow, that what I was listening to was not the sound of any physical locomotion at all.

  It was laughter. Laughter of a kind so alien and unknowable that I had no idea what part of me bore the instincts to identify it at all. And I wouldn’t find out. I just fucking ran.

  Laryck and Vara were up the rope first, miraculously it was still there. I tried to drop Will as I approached it, all thoughts of his life now abandoned for my own.

  But I couldn’t. This wasn’t my moment of actual heroism, to be clear. I physically couldn’t drop him, little bastard had his arms tangled around me and seemed to be suddenly conscious enough to hold on. I had no choice but to try and haul his weight up on my back as I climbed. It seemed a doomed effort, but I managed it all the same. Slowly, excruciatingly, I made my first yard upwards.

  The noise returned, adding haste to me. I barely made another foot before it returned, one heartbeat removed now. Then again, half a heartbeat. Then again, quickly enough now that the sounds seemed to be bleeding into each other. I screamed, climbed, cried, pissed myself and hauled dead weight and live weight and stupid weight and arrogant weight all upwards as the chasing thing came close and the world grew dark and the walls started trembling and the pits beneath me laughed and cried and roared their triumph.

  It was Vara and Laryck, hauling the rope up with me at the bottom, who saved my life. Another second and I knew whatever had been after us would have found its grip on me. The skies were sweeter that day than any sight I’ve seen since.