Chapter 110
The stairwell closed in around us just at the end, the kind of dark that felt like it didn't just exist, but it moved, bending reality to its whims, pressing down heavy on your shoulders. My flame guttered in my hand, throwing faint sparks of cyan across the slick stones. The shadows bent long and thin, like skeletal fingers scraping the walls.
Kaysi walked just ahead of me, one hand held to the damp rail, the other clenched tight against her chest. I didn't need to see her face to tell that something was wrong with her. I could feel it in the way her boots faltered—quick, then slow, uneven, as though her body was caught between running and pressing forward, holding on to the small nerves dangling before her as if she were soon to lock in place entirely.
Her breathing quickened, ragged like knives dragging across glass.
She stopped, unable to keep pressing forward—it was as though her mind went to another place, a place I believe it knew.
This place gave but a small, bittersweet taste, almost as if the air kissed the edges, bearing the resemblance to my old dark home of the abyss.
"Josh," she breathlessly mutters my name, barely able to make out the word, voice sharp and thin.
The sound ripped through me. Not because it was strange, but because I'd heard it before—from her, because of me.
The image haunted me, and my hand clenched. For a heartbeat, I—I saw it again: my fist crashing into her ribs, her body folding. The terror in her eyes when I slammed her to the ground as she took what could have been her last breaths by my hands as I carried her near lifeless body to the Abyss, soon after defeating my brother, all for my father's evil experiments. The blood, her screams.
No matter how many times I calmed her now, I couldn't erase the fact that I was the one who'd broken her to begin with. And the blankness I caused when she stopped remembering things the way they used to be.
I force the memory down and swallow it like fire, sharp and painful.
"Kaysi! You're breathing too fast." The words came out harsher than I meant. Her body flinched. Damn it Josh, that was the last thing she needed.
I forced the edginess from my tone and crouched slightly, my eye level meeting with hers. The flame in the palm of my hand lowered a bit. The cyan glow was painted over her face. Her pupils were wide, trembling as though her body were still in two worlds at once.
"My tone was softer, less tense," I spoke. "Slow down... In through your nose, out your mouth. Match me."
Her lips parted. She tried once and choked on it. I exaggerated my own breath, loud in the silence, inhaling long and steady. Hold. Exhale, slower.
Again...
Again...
Her chest began to follow, though each breath still hitched like a lock catching.
"That's it," I murmured. "Don't fight it all at once."
"I'm fine," she whispered, though her voice betrayed her. "I can keep going."
I smiled, faint and sharp. "I know you can," I whispered softly. "But not like this. Not while your head's still back in..." My jaw tightened. "...Wherever it is you go when you feel like this. You've done this before."
My words slipped, but I caught them before I spoke any more of what was on my mind. I held back the word that wanted to rise: "You've walked through the Abyss itself before." You've seen these horrors that play in your mind behind shadows that would unmake anyone else. This? This is only a stepping stone and a shadow that follows you now.
I hope one day, when she is ready, she will share words of encouragement.
But for now, I had to help her. This was a new nightmare that haunts her in the wake.
Honestly, this terrified me more than the dark.
Her eyes flickered up, confused. She doesn't know why I'd say what I just did. I kept those words to myself.
She hesitated, as if arguing with herself more than with me.
I wanted to reach out and steady her trembling hands. But that wasn't my place, my role.
She straightened. Her grip on the rail steadied. Her breath found rhythm again.
Good. She was still shirking, but this was the Kaysi I knew—the one who would step forward no matter what she faced ahead.
I still felt I couldn't let her—not until she was ready.
She held there looking at me, as if she wanted to confront me with a thought in her mind. I did not pry.
If she remembered everything, she wouldn't see a teammate. Or even an enemy. She'd know the man who broke her and handed her over to a monster.
I'd rather she hate me for what I am now than for what I did then.
"Now I believe I am ready to push and keep going. I don't think the people came down here by chance; I think it was planned."
I didn't answer because I already suspected the same idea.
The air changed. It was subtle at first, the way the damp gave way to a faint tang of iron. The walls widened into a corridor carved too cleanly to be storage. Symbols etched the stone in patterns that hummed beneath my skin, though the light only brushed them.
Old. Older than this church.
Older than any church I have ever seen.
Kaysi brushed the wall with her fingertips, pulling them back as though stung. "Josh… these aren't Christian markings."
"No," I said flatly. "They're not."
I recognized some of the shapes, like the stretched veins. They were the same scripts in the Abyss, etched in the stones that lined the forgotten passages there.
But I couldn't tell her that. "Stay close to me. These look like the old rites from pagans; the church here had buried more than you'd think."
The corridor ended in an archway of blackened stone, polished like coal.
Faint light bled from the cracks between the doors set into it—orange, flickering. Torchlight.
And voices.
Low, rhythmic. Chanting.
Kaysi froze. "That's—"