Scene — The Endless Tunnels
The cavern is so dark it feels alive, a silence that presses against skin like cold breath.
A faint scrape echoes—a dull dagger dragging across stone.
Nyxar moves first. Always first.
He slides from shadow to shadow, a ragged cloak brushing the wall. Ahead, a creature no bigger than a fox—skinless, pale, all needle-teeth—snuffles for carrion. Its back arches at the scent of him, but too late.
The dagger is unremarkable: chipped, half-rusted. In Nyxar's hands it is absolute.
One thrust. A wet click. Silence again.
The thing twitches once, then folds like a broken hinge.
Nyxar wipes the blade on the cavern floor—no ceremony, no flourish—and melts back into the dark.
Hours later, after a trail of echoing footsteps and dripping stalactites, he finds a hollow in the rock barely wide enough for a man.
Perfect.
He lowers himself into a sitting crouch, knees drawn, back to the wall. Eyes half-lidded.
He doesn't lie down. Nyxar never lies down.
The narrator—if the tunnels have one—might whisper:
"This person is called Nyxar.
Safety before comfort.
Survival above all."
He breathes once. Twice. No dreams. Only the slow heartbeat of stone.
Even asleep, the dagger rests in his palm.
A pebble rolls.
His eyes snap open.
The air bends, like a ripple through black water.
From nothing, a book unfurls—pages of dark leather and bone, floating a hand's breadth from his face.
The Grimarca Noctem.
It opens of its own accord with a whisper like knives sliding from sheaths.
Page Thirty-Two.
New ink, still wet with the blood of tonight's hunt.
"Report," Nyxar murmurs.
The book does not speak in words so much as impressions—an eager hiss, the taste of iron. The glyph of the small creature already smolders across the parchment, a perfect memory of what once lived.
Nyxar flicks a gloved hand and the cavern brightens with a pale, deathly glow. From the pages drift shapes: a half-dozen skeletons, crude and uneven, each clattering into place with mismatched bones. Behind them, a finger-sized insect of black chitin buzzes circles like an impatient wasp.
"Patrol," he says simply.
The skeletons scatter into the tunnels, bones knocking together like drunken wind chimes.
One raises a jawless skull in salute, then drops it with an embarrassed clack.
The insect hovers by his ear, wings whining.
Hungry? the book's whisper suggests, sly and amused.
Nyxar tilts his head. "You're always hungry."
The insect chitters as if laughing. The book vibrates—was that a chuckle?
Even his own summons conspire to mock him.
He exhales through his nose, the closest he comes to a smile.
"Fine. Find something bigger next time."
The insect darts away, a tiny shadow with grand ambitions.
For a moment, the tunnels are lively: bones rattling in awkward rhythm, distant echoes of clumsy skeletons bumping stalagmites, the faint hiss of wings.
Nyxar watches, still as stone. The book hovers at his side, pages fluttering in a breeze that isn't there.
This is what passes for company: a cursed tome with a sense of humor, a handful of obedient bones, and a bug that thinks it's terrifying.
It suits him.
Safety first. Survival always.
And maybe, if the dark allows, a little laughter between the graves.