The mud was cold. That's what he noticed first. Without the mana, the cold got in. Real cold. The kind that sits in your joints and asks questions.
Kairito pressed his palm against his chest. The hole was still there. Fingers slipped through easy, like reaching into water. No blood. No pain. Just a clean absence where the furnace used to be.
He pulled his hand out. Looked at it.
Dirty. Still ten years old. Still useless.
"We need to move." The princess's voice came from his left. She was on her feet. Wobbly, but up. Her gray wool was torn at the shoulder. Three clean lines. Fingers. The gray thing had touched her there.
He didn't answer. He was watching the crater.
The water in it was moving. Wrong direction. Pushing against gravity, welling up in thick ropes that coiled and uncoiled like snakes. The stars above reflected in it, but the stars were wrong too, too many, too close, bleeding into each other.
"What is that?" she asked.
"I don't know."
He'd said that before. Meant it then. Meant it now. The space in his chest was talking to the water. He could feel it. Not magic. Something older. A frequency his bones remembered.
The breathing from the dark got louder.
Something came out of the crater.
Not the gray thing. Something bigger. It rose from the black water like a drowned tree surfacing, slow, deliberate, shedding mud and light. Segmented. Each segment was a ring of bone, and inside each ring, teeth. Hundreds of them. All facing inward.
It didn't have a head. Just a column of concentric mouths, getting wider as it rose, and at the top, a hollow space where something watched.
The princess grabbed his arm. Her grip was iron.
"Your magic,"
"Gone."
"Then what do we do?"
The thing's lowest mouth opened. The sound that came out was low. Subsonic. He felt it in the hole in his chest, a vibration that made the edges hum.
It was calling.
"Run," he said.
They ran.
The ground was wrong. Soft in some places, hard in others, like the earth had forgotten how to be earth. His sandals slapped mud. Her boots, she'd changed into boots at some point, made a sucking sound with every step. Behind them, the thing didn't move. Just rose. Higher. The rings of teeth stacked into the night sky, and the stars bent around it.
They hit the treeline. Branches grabbed at them. He took a branch to the face, felt the skin split over his cheekbone. Didn't stop. The princess was faster than him now. Her legs were longer. She was pulling ahead.
He tripped.
Root. Hidden under leaves. His knee twisted, and he went down hard. Chin hit dirt. Bit his tongue. The taste of copper filled his mouth.
She stopped. Turned.
"Keep going," he said. The words came out wet.
She looked at him. Then past him, at the thing rising above the trees. Then back at him.
She came back.
"You're an idiot."
She grabbed his arm, hauled him up. He was light, ten years old, perpetually, and she was strong. Stronger than she looked. They crashed through the undergrowth together, her shoulder under his arm, his feet dragging.
The thing's call changed pitch. Higher now. Urgent.
The trees around them started to move.
Not wind. The trunks twisted. Branches reached down, fingers of wood and bark, groping for them. One caught her hair. She yanked free, left a clump of it in the twigs.
"Left!" he shouted.
She went left.
They burst into a clearing. Moonlight. Open ground. And in the center, a circle of stones. Old. Moss-eaten. The kind of place you find in old stories and avoid.
He knew it.
He'd slept here three years ago, on the run from a mercenary company that wanted his mana for a weapon. The stones had hummed then. Quiet. Patient.
Now they screamed.
"What is this place?" She was breathing hard. Her face was cut in three places. Blood dripped from her chin.
"Old ground." He pulled away from her. Stood on his own. The hole in his chest was wide open to the moonlight, and the moonlight was wrong too, too sharp, too focused. "The seal was here first. Before the tower."
She looked at the stones. Seven of them. Arranged in a spiral that didn't quite close. At the center, a depression in the earth. Shallow. About the size of a child.
About his size.
"You can't," she said.
He looked at her. Really looked. Mud. Blood. Her hair coming loose in brown ropes. Her eyes were gray. He hadn't noticed that before. Gray like winter sky, and right now, they were wide.
"You don't even know my name," she said.
"Doesn't matter."
"It's Sera."
He stared at her. The thing in the trees was close now. He could hear it pushing through, the trunks snapping like dry bones.
"Sera." He said it once. Let it sit.
Then he walked to the center of the stones.
The depression was exactly his size. He sat down in it. The earth was warm. Living. He could feel it pulsing beneath him, a heartbeat that wasn't his, slow and deep and old.
"Whatever happens," he said, "don't step inside the circle."
She was at the edge. Her hand was out. Reaching.
The thing broke through the treeline.
It was taller now. The rings of mouths stacked twenty feet high, and each mouth was open, and each mouth was singing a different note. The sound was beautiful. That was the worst part. It made his bones want to answer.
He lay back in the depression.
The earth closed over him.
Warm. Dark. The hole in his chest connected to something, a current, a flow, deeper than mana, deeper than magic. The old ground was drinking him. Or he was drinking it. Hard to tell.
Above him, through the dirt, he heard her scream.
Heard the thing's song change.
Heard the stones crack.
Then nothing.
Just the dark. Just the pulse. Just the taste of something ancient moving through him, filling the hollow space where his fire used to be.
He opened his eyes.
He was somewhere else. A hallway. Long. The walls were roots, woven so tight they looked like stone. Torches burned along them, but the flames were blue and they didn't flicker.
At the end of the hallway, a door.
No handle.
He walked toward it. His feet were bare. His sandals were gone. He didn't remember losing them.
The door was wood. Old wood. Carved with a spiral that matched the stones above. Seven rings, each one a different language. He couldn't read them. But he understood them.
Turn back.
He put his hand on the wood.
The door opened.
Beyond it was a room. Small. Circular. In the center, a table. On the table, a cup. In the cup, something that looked like light but tasted like iron.
He was ten years old. He'd killed more men than he could count. He'd torn holes in the world and called it justice.
He picked up the cup.
Behind him, someone laughed.