The doors groaned as he forced them wider, stone slabs grinding on stone. The serpent carved across them split down the middle, fangs parting to reveal the dark.
Heat licked his face. The chamber beyond was immense, the ceiling lost somewhere in black, the floor broken by veins of sick green light that bled up through cracks in the stone. Each pulse made the walls quiver. The air hissed softly, a thousand threads of breath twining together until it felt like the room itself was alive and whispering.
Eros stood on the threshold and tasted metal. The scarf over his mouth filtered nothing. He stepped in anyway.
His boots scuffed grit. The hiss rose, settled, rose again, matching his heartbeat until he couldn't tell which one started first. He took another step, then another, the daggers sitting heavy on his hips. The small crossbow rode his shoulder, the cracked limb lashed tight with a strip torn from his shirt. It wasn't pretty, but if he got one clean shot from it, it would be a miracle. He would take a miracle.
Shapes stirred at the edge of the green glow.
Amanda.
She stood a few paces ahead, hair loose, eyes bright in a way that made something inside him crumple. "Eros," she said. Her voice was soft, then it wasn't. The syllables turned brittle, jagged, scraping the inside of his skull. Behind her, the slavers rose from the stone, faces slack and gray, fingers lifting to point at him one by one.
He knew they weren't real. He knew it like he knew the heat in his lungs was poison. And still his knees wanted to give.
The scar across his belly burned. Heat flooded outward, a wave that scorched the fog from his head. The vision tore like wet paper. Amanda vanished. The corpses sagged into dust. Only the hissing remained, and the whispers threaded deeper now, quiet as teeth sliding together.
«Not real. Not her.» He swallowed hard. «Keep walking.»
He took five steps. Ten. The floor sloped downward. Pillars rose from the cracked stone, their surfaces carved with lines that made his eyes ache: suns gnawed by jaws, rings of teeth, coils upon coils. Some of the grooves glowed the same mealy green as the cracks in the floor, as if something poisonous moved behind the stone and bled through.
A shadow uncoiled between the columns.
It lifted into shape with slow, inevitable weight. Scales caught the light, slick and black, each plate reflecting a thin smear of green. The head rose last, wide as a doorway, pale, blind eyes rolling open like dead moons. When it shifted, the floor murmured. When it drew breath, the air thickened, and Eros felt it fill his lungs uninvited.
He had fought beasts. He had bled under claws and teeth. He had watched a monster's beak open over his face and known he would die. This was not that. This was a room deciding he didn't belong in it, a presence he could not touch with a name.
The voice arrived with no sound.
Mortal.
It cracked through him, from teeth to heel. The word existed only in his skull and still rang off the stone. His hands twitched toward his ears before he realized there was nothing to cover.
You stink of ash. Of borrowed fire. Have you come to kill me?
He forced air through his throat. "I don't exactly have other plans."
So small, the voice said, the hiss under it like sand dragged across glass. So fragile. You bleed well. Will you bleed for me, little thief?
"Try me," he said. His voice came out rough. «What am I doing. Talking to a god. Sure. Why not add that to the list.»
The serpent's head dipped, curious. The tongue flicked, tasting him. The hissing in the chamber sharpened as if the walls were leaning in to listen.
Eros edged left, daggers clearing their loops with a whisper of leather. He kept one eye on the nearest pillar. Runes crawled across its surface, old and wrong, and where the serpent's tail brushed the stone, the lines flared and spat sparks. Chains, then. Not metal, not rope, but words and shapes—a cage written into the room. Useful, if he could live long enough to make it matter.
He lifted the crossbow. The cracked limb creaked. The serpent watched the motion, head tilting, and then it moved.
The rush of it was a storm. He didn't dodge so much as fall wrong and keep falling. Venom spat from its mouth in a wide fan. Where it hit stone, smoke licked up and the floor hissed. Drops streaked his sleeve and ate tiny pits into the leather.
He rolled behind a pillar and felt the impact of the serpent's body in his bones. The column shuddered. Runes flared, spat that same green fire, and a shiver ran through the god-thing as if something had plucked a string buried in its spine.
Bound, Eros thought. «You don't like your chains.»
A coil slammed around the pillar and squeezed. Stone squealed. Eros darted out the other side, put his back to a broken wall, and fired. The bolt cracked away and struck high on a scale, skittered, then vanished into the dark.
"Perfect," he muttered. "Almost impressive how useless that was."
The serpent surged, tail rearing. He dove, the tail scything air where his head had been. It chopped a neighboring pillar in half. The top slid, paused, and crashed down in a storm of dust and grit.
He cut left again, keeping the columns between them. Every time the god lunged, he put himself where stone and rune could bite it, and every time it recoiled with a rippling shudder. He learned the rhythm the way you learn to survive a beating: by feeling each strike and remembering the ones that don't kill you.
A whisper grinned in his head, soft as breath on glass. Turn around, Eros. Amanda again, close enough to touch. You always run. You always leave me.
He almost looked. The scar in his belly pulsed. The heat rolled through him, duller this time, like coals under ash but enough to burn the voice away. It left a headache the size of the room in its wake.
"Not now," he hissed between his teeth. "Not ever."
The serpent lunged, mouth yawning wide. He threw himself forward, slid on dust, and felt the hot wash of breath whip over his back. Fangs like curved swords clashed on stone, sending chips skittering. He shoved his shoulder into a fallen block and heaved, wedging it between two cracked slabs. The makeshift barricade made a narrow throat where the god would have to compress to reach him.
It didn't care. It hit the gap with its mass and drove forward. Runes along the broken edges flared, brighter, brighter. Smoke poured from seams in the floor. A sound built under everything, too deep to hear, more felt than known, like a cliff thinking about falling.
"Come on," Eros panted. "Come on, you ugly thing. Bite your own chain."
The tail came first, slashing through the rubble. He took the slice on his forearm, stepped into the arc where the muscle bunched, and chopped downward with both daggers. Steel struck the seam between scales. The blades held. The tail jerked and knocked him sprawling, but he had time to yank one dagger free and scramble for cover.
The tail hammered the pillar at his shoulder. Stone cracked in a clean, awful line. The column leaned. Runes went from glow to glare. The serpent thrashed again, trying to pull back from pain it didn't expect.
The pillar gave and fell.
It didn't collapse gracefully. Segments slid, caught, then cascaded. The serpent twisted to avoid the weight, but the topmost drums smashed against its neck, pinning head to floor for a heartbeat and then another. Runes along the fallen stone bit and spat, scarlet now, a color that didn't exist in the rest of this place. The stink of charred venom filled the room.
Eros was up before he decided to be. He sprinted into the dust and smoke, lungs tearing at the air. The god heaved and the fallen stone rose an inch. Two. He had seconds.
He hauled the crossbow off his shoulder, jammed the last decent bolt into place, and braced the cracked limb with his forearm. The binding cloth creaked like a wound remembering itself. The serpent's head dragged free another inch, pale eye rolling toward him.
"Look at me," Eros said. "Look right at me."
He aimed for the place where the light was brightest, the blind white center of that dead moon.
Behind his eyes, whispers turned to screaming. The chamber pressed in. The voice of the god poured through him again, a split-open laugh. You are yours to ruin, little thief. Die properly this time.
"Later," Eros said, and pulled the trigger.
The bow kicked. The string snapped with it. The bolt flew.
It sank into the god's eye with a wet thud.
Apophis reared on instinct, a shudder rolling the length of its body like thunder ripping a flag. The broken pillar slid. The runes flared, faded. The serpent's scream hit like a wall. Eros stumbled, clutching his ears too late. Pain burst along his jaw and under his tongue.
The god writhed free of the rubble.
He had time to think move and then nothing else. The tail found him, not an arc this time but a line. It punched him off his feet and into the wall. The world went white. The wall cracked behind his spine. He slid down it and the ground came up wrong and far and then too close.
He coughed and red leaked from his mouth. His ribs felt like a fist full of knives. His left hand wouldn't clench. The crossbow lay in pieces a few feet away.
The serpent's shadow fell over him.
It loomed, one eye weeping tar around the bolt, the other milky and fixed. Black saliva stretched in ropes from its fangs. He tried to roll and his body said no. He got a knee under him, then the other, swayed, and the god finally brought its head down close, tasting him again.
Fragile, the voice whispered, suddenly intimate. You burn beautifully.
Venom split from the serpent's lips in a thin, contemptuous line.
It struck his chest and face and hands.
Fire without flame ate. His skin blistered and sloughed under it. He screamed and tasted his own throat coming apart. He had died before, but not like this, not while pieces of him slid from him in strings and the room laughed in his bones and the voice of a thing that thought itself eternal told him how small he was.
He tried to drag the heat from his belly scar, to stoke it, to make it burn out the poison the way it had below. It came, but slow. The venom was faster. His fingers wouldn't close. His vision narrowed. The dagger was still there, somewhere near his right hand, and he could not feel it.
The god watched him come apart with a patience older than stone.
So fragile, it said again, the hiss wrapping the words like ribbon. So temporary.
The chamber tilted. The green veins in the floor streaked, then blurred, then became one long smear of color as the world let go.
Everything went out at once.
***
In the darkness, still the fire ate him alive. Flesh sloughed from his bones, breath collapsed in his chest, and through it all the laughter of a god hissed like venom in his skull.
Then it was gone.
Darkness smothered everything, deeper than ash, deeper than the grave. No pain, no body—only the trembling shadow of thought. Eros drifted, shaking though he had no skin to shiver.
The Reader's Notes hovered before him, pages opening with the calm inevitability of a guillotine. Beneath Immortal Martyr, three embers glowed faintly. One guttered, flickered, and died. Only two remained.
Eros stared, the weight of it pressing into him harder than Apophis' tail had.
Two. Two chances before the book ground his soul to dust.
He clutched at his chest, expecting to feel the scar's heat, but here there was nothing. Only memory: the scream, the venom melting him apart. He wanted to vomit but had no body left to purge.
Fear coiled sharp and tight. For the first time, doubt gnawed louder than anger. Maybe he couldn't do this. Maybe the god's laugh was the truth: fragile, small, temporary.
But the void gave no answer, no mercy. Just the faint scratch of unseen keys typing across the pages.
"You have consumed one of your flames, Reader."
The voice rang flat, merciless.
Eros shut his eyes—not that it mattered here. He forced one thought into the dark, bitter and hoarse: «I don't have a choice. I never did. So I'll keep burning until the book runs out of kindling.»
The diary closed. The void tilted. He fell again, tumbling back toward the waiting world, two flames left to his name.