Thorne didn't look back as he stepped into the corridor. The ruined cell behind them was already fading into darkness, motes dispersing like a dream.

Zarash trailed after him, dragging one clawed hand along the cracked wall. His tail flicked every few steps, the tip snapping against the cold stone.

They moved in silence, the only sounds their footfalls and the distant groan of settling masonry.

It was Zarash who finally broke it.

"You know," he rasped, voice hoarse, "this facility has no exits."

Thorne didn't answer. His eyes drifted along the corridor, searching the dim arches and the faint lines of old wards etched into every surface.

Zarash huffed a short, disbelieving laugh. "No, truly. The vault was sealed. No tunnels. No transports. The only way in or out is through the descent gates and those are locked by the Circle. Even if someone wanted to open them, it would take days."

Thorne kept walking.

"…They should have come by now," Zarash went on, as if he couldn't stand the quiet. "There are watchers. Scrying orbs. The Sathal Enclave once interrogated one of the researchers, he said that any fluctuation in the ambient aether was enough to summon a full detachment."

Still nothing.

Zarash's tail slapped the floor again, harder this time. He flinched at the echo.

"So explain to me," he demanded, voice rising, "why no one is here. No alarms. No Purifiers. Nothing."

Thorne's hand drifted to the hilt of the dagger at his belt. The leather grip was smooth, his fingers wrapped around it in an effort to calm himself, the edge enchanted to hold an impossible keen.

Zarash noticed the motion. His scaled brow furrowed.

"…Do you even have a plan?"

Thorne stopped walking.

The corridor stretched ahead, vanishing into darkness. On either side, cells gaped open, black thresholds into worse darkness still. The air was colder here, thick with the smell of old blood and something chemical.

He turned his head slightly, considering Zarash in the corner of one eye.

"I have an inkling," he murmured.

Zarash stared at him, aghast. "An inkling?"

Thorne didn't answer.

He was listening.

There, beneath the silence, a soft scrape. A rustle, like something shifting its weight.

He took a single step closer to the nearest cell, his boots scuffing the dusty threshold.

"…Here," he whispered.

Zarash's tail gave a violent twitch, claws clicking against the stone as he backed away. "What are you doing?"

Thorne didn't respond. He was already studying the wards.

A ragged lattice of sigils covered the doorway, black lines etched into iron, silver inlays pulsing faintly. Containment runes, webbed like cracks in glass.

And inside…

Something watched him back.

It crouched low, a hunched mass of twisted limbs and patchwork skin. The faint glow of the wards lit the angles of its body: spined ridges running along the crooked spine, seams stitched from disparate flesh, scaled, pocked, mottled.

Its hands, if they could be called hands, ended in long, hooked talons that scraped slow arcs across the floor.

But the face…

Where a face should have been, there was only bone. Overlapping plates fused and re-fused until nothing remained but a solid, jagged mask. No mouth. No nose. Just a faint vertical crack where the eyes might once have been.

Thorne felt the hair along his arms prickle.

Because behind that mask, something looked at him.

It moved.

A slow, deliberate motion, one arm unbending, the talons clicking out to rest against the threshold.

Zarash swallowed audibly. His voice came out strained.

"Don't," he hissed. "Whatever you're thinking, don't! That thing..."

He gestured with one shaking hand, scales darkening along his knuckles.

"... it isn't sane. It isn't even alive in any way you'd understand. Better to call the Purifiers, let them scour this whole vault. You can't control..."

Thorne didn't look away.

He raised his dagger closer to the wall of magic.

The blade caught the torchlight, the aether along its edge flaring cold and blue.

Inside the cell, the creature's head tilted. The cracked bone plates shifted with a quiet creak.

Their gazes met.

For an instant, nothing else existed, just that silent communion across the warded threshold.

Zarash's voice dropped to a rasp.

"Don't be a fool," he whispered. "It will kill you. Kill us both."

Thorne's fingers tightened around the dagger's hilt.

Slowly, very slowly, he stepped closer to the wards.

The thing behind them stirred, unfolding another jointed limb, talons curling against the stone.

And in the cold dark, Thorne felt something answer in him, some old, quiet recognition.

He never looked away from the thing in the cell.

He didn't need Zarash to understand.

Because this was his inkling of a plan.

And whether or not it would work…

He was about to find out.

Thorne drew a steady breath, feeling the familiar tingle run down his spine as he pressed his will into the dagger. The aether along the blade pulsed brighter, the lines of binding magic etched into the steel awakening under his touch.

Aether Binding.

A thousand invisible filaments unfurled, sinking into the ward lattice that sealed the cell.

Behind him, Zarash's voice cracked with desperation.

"Stop. For the love of all the gods, stop."

Thorne didn't move.

The creature inside the cell shifted, its grotesque limbs stretching as it half-crawled, half-rose onto the long, crooked legs. The stitched seams along its flanks bulged and tightened, pale skin straining against scales.

It was moving closer.

Thorne split his focus, one eye tracing the delicate knotwork of the containment runes, the other fixed unblinking on the creature's faceless helm.

A line of sigils near the threshold glimmered faintly, an anchor glyph. He slid the dagger along it in a smooth arc.

The rune went dark.

Instantly, a shudder rippled through the entire wall of wards, black lines flickering as if the magic holding them had drawn its last breath.

Zarash let out a strangled curse. He stumbled back, claws scraping against the stone.

"Fool!" he spat. "You've doomed us both!"

Thorne took one measured step back, mirroring him, his gaze locked on the creature.

It lifted its head.

The plates of bone shifted with a dry creak, tilting toward the threshold. Though it had no eyes, he could feel it seeing the space beyond its prison, smelling freedom like blood.

He called to the motes.

A slow exhale sent them tumbling from the cold air, swirling in rippling currents around his outstretched hand. He shaped them into a wall, no thicker than paper at first, then denser as he layered strand upon strand of invisible force.

The barrier settled across the hall, a silent partition between them and the thing that watched with head cocked to one side.

Zarash's voice came again, thin and high with panic.

"It won't hold. This thing is unstoppable. You don't understand, it will break you."

Thorne didn't answer. He pressed more motes into the wall, binding each thread to the next until the barrier hummed faintly, like a taut wire ready to snap.

The creature moved.

One limb slid forward, talons rasping against the stone. Another followed. It crept to the very edge of the ruined threshold, the mass of its body filling the cell's mouth with an unnatural shadow.

It lowered its head.

And for one breathless instant, it simply looked at him.

He felt the strangest sensation, no malice, no hunger. Only a vast, empty readiness.

Thorne inclined his head the smallest fraction.

His voice was low, steady.

"Give them hell."

The thing's chest expanded in a sudden, massive breath.

Then it threw its head back and roared.

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The sound was not fully human, nor fully beast. It was a ragged, bottomless bellow, fractured by something that might once have been a voice. The walls shook under it, hairline cracks racing up the archways.

Thorne felt Zarash tremble beside him.

The creature turned its faceless helm back to him.

It nodded once.

And then it moved, bounding forward in an ungainly, unstoppable lurch. It smashed through the opposite wall as if it were paper, sending splinters of stone and ragged chunks of masonry skittering across the corridor.

Dust boiled up in its wake.

Thorne stood perfectly still, watching the breach it left behind.

Somewhere beyond, he heard distant screams, the researchers, the wardens. No one had been ready.

No one would be spared.

Zarash's breath rattled in his throat.

"…We are alive," he managed, voice shaking with disbelief.

For a moment, Thorne didn't speak.

Then he let the motes dissolve from the air, the barrier falling into nothing.

"Not for long," he murmured, already stepping toward the ragged hole in the wall.

"Come on."

The vault had become a slaughterhouse.

Thorne and Zarash followed in the wake of the first creature, keeping to the edges of the hall as the thing rampaged ahead.

It smashed through walls as if they were no thicker than paper. Containment wards sparked and sputtered, failing under the sheer weight of its passage. A line of iron-barred cells disintegrated in its wake, debris cascading across the floor.

One of the doors it tore free crashed down an adjoining corridor, striking another cell with a shuddering impact.

And whatever was inside that second cell…

Woke.

Thorne caught only a glimpse of it, a lurching silhouette, almost insectoid in shape, with too many jointed limbs and a glistening black carapace stitched over pale, shriveled flesh. Its head was a bald, eyeless dome, its mouth a yawning circle lined with hooked teeth.

The thing uncurled from the darkness like a spider rising to greet dawn.

It didn't hesitate.

It bounded over the ruin of its threshold, limbs cracking like wet branches, and vanished after the first monster.

A chorus of screams followed, high, thin, and desperate.

Zarash swallowed audibly.

"They were sleeping," he murmured, voice numb. "The researchers. They were sleeping..."

Thorne didn't reply. He was listening to the footsteps, the ones not belonging to the creatures.

They came from deeper in the vault, hundreds of boots drumming against the ancient flagstones.

The shouts followed, urgent commands echoing down the ruined halls.

"... squad three, cut them off..."

"... containment wards, now!"

"... you, with me..."

He turned, just in time to see a company of battle mages fan out into the corridor.

They were armored head to toe in layered spellweave and chain, runes glittering along their vambraces. Most carried staves tipped with glowing iron orbs. The leaders had blades, flat, leaf-shaped weapons, etched with suppressive scripts.

At the sight of the two nightmares tearing into the outer labs, the mages didn't hesitate.

A volley of aether-laced bolts streaked across the hall. The first creature convulsed under the impact, its patchwork skin sizzling. The second shrieked, a brittle, insectile screech that made Thorne's teeth ache.

"Down," he snapped, grabbing Zarash's shoulder.

They ducked behind a section of broken wall just as a stray bolt punched through the air above them, carving a glowing furrow in the ceiling.

For a moment, the only sounds were shouts, the crackling detonation of spells, and the raw, animal roars of the beasts.

Zarash pressed his scaled back to the stone, breathing raggedly.

"Where are you going?" he hissed, voice pitched low. "If we stay here, they'll eventually clear them out and..."

But Thorne was already moving.

He slipped into the shadows along the broken wall, boots finding silent purchase among the rubble. The mages were too occupied to look his way.

He didn't look back.

Zarash's voice followed him, tight with something like panic.

"Thorne, Thorne!"

He ignored it.

Ahead, a storage alcove gaped open, a simple recess where researchers must have taken their meals. The room had been half-destroyed by the first beast's charge. A table lay overturned, one leg splintered. A cold, half-eaten meal lay scattered across the floor, a broken ceramic plate in jagged shards.

Thorne crouched without slowing. His hand closed around a tarnished fork lying among the wreckage.

A ridiculous weapon, but a contingency nonetheless.

He slipped it into the inner fold of his coat and kept moving.

Every corridor he passed bore the scars of the creature's passage, deep gouges in the flagstones, smears of blood trailing away into darkness.

The vault felt different now. Not a prison anymore, just a labyrinth coming undone, one cell at a time.

He picked his way around a collapsed archway, stepping over a lifeless shape in a torn uniform. The researcher's throat had been crushed, head turned at an impossible angle.

He didn't pause.

He jogged through the broken mouth of the corridor the first creature had carved, the air thick with the stink of ruptured sigils and scorched blood.

And then he saw it, the long hall he remembered from before.

The corridor full of cells.

Full of nightmares.

The old wards still flickered across the thresholds, pale blue light straining to hold. But the damage was spreading, hairline fractures spiderwebbing through the containment lattices, cracks racing across the iron bars.

He slowed, scanning the cells.

In each one, something worse waited. He felt it in the way the air hummed.

They watched him in return. Shadows shifting behind the barriers. Breaths rasping through whatever passes for lungs.

He moved past the first few cells, one holding a spindly, flensed shape that pressed its forehead against the barrier, another occupied by a knotted mass of tentacles knotted around a cage of bone.

Further.

Past a cell that held only darkness, so deep even his Sight could not pierce it.

Further still.

Until he saw it.

A figure crouched in the last cell on the left.

It was enormous, easily twice the size of a man, crouched on haunches like some nightmarish hound. Coarse, grey hair matted over shoulders broad as a wagon axle. Its arms were thick, ending in knuckles the size of hammers.

It lifted its head as he approached.

He met its eyes, small, gleaming red points set deep under a shaggy brow.

The thing didn't growl. Didn't move to lunge.

It only watched.

He stepped up to the barrier, careful to keep his breathing steady.

"I will get you out," he said, voice pitched low and even. "When I do, you will help the others."

The creature tilted its massive head.

It didn't answer, of course.

But it didn't look away.

He slid the dagger free.

The runes along the blade sputtered as he willed them to life, flickering in ragged pulses. The reservoir of bound aether was nearly gone, he could feel it, like a dying heartbeat in the steel.

One last time.

He studied the lattice.

There, an anchor rune, linked in sequence to the next containment node. If he cut that one first, then the stabilizing ward behind it, the rest of the matrix might collapse under its own weight.

He set the blade to the first rune.

Pressed.

The dagger hissed, spitting pale sparks that died before they struck the floor.

The glyph flickered, dimmed.

He moved to the second, sliding the edge in a clean arc.

This rune resisted, its lines glowed hot, fighting the drain. For a heartbeat, the dagger almost slipped.

He adjusted his grip, pressed harder.

The rune shuddered then guttered out.

Instantly, hairline cracks raced across the entire wall of wards.

He took one step back, holding the dagger low.

The creature behind the barrier shifted its weight, thick fingers curling into fists.

"Go," Thorne urged, voice tight. He gestured sharply, palm up. "Go! What are you waiting for?"

The massive head cocked again, as if considering the invitation.

Behind him, the corridor shook with a distant roar, one of the creatures he'd freed, bellowing in agony.

The hairy brute in front of him didn't hesitate any longer.

It rose to its full height, nearly eight feet, and threw back its head.

A sound burst from its throat, not a roar this time, but a low, rattling growl that vibrated in Thorne's bones.

It stepped forward, pressing one vast hand to the failing barrier.

And pushed.

The weakened lattice splintered. The air filled with the crackling shriek of failing sigils.

The wall dissolved in a scatter of sparks and falling dust.

The beast stepped over the threshold, close enough that Thorne could smell it, old blood and damp hair.

For a heartbeat, it looked down at him.

Then it turned, dropping to all fours.

It bounded away in a ground-shaking charge, the corridor trembling under its passage.

It didn't look back.

Thorne let out a slow, shaky exhale.

He pressed his palm to the cold stone, feeling the vibrations fade into the distance.

Behind him, the screams were already multiplying.

The researchers had never stood a chance.

Thorne stood for a moment, breathing in the ruin he had caused. The air was thick with the shrieks of dying researchers and the snarls of freed nightmares.

But it wasn't enough.

He turned to the next cell, its threshold intact, pale glyphs still pulsing steadily.

His dagger felt heavy in his grip, not with power but with finality.

He looked down.

The light along the blade was dull, lifeless. The aether reservoir within it had been spent to the dregs.

It was nothing more than a lump of shaped metal.

Slowly, he exhaled.

"Fine," he murmured.

He slipped the dagger back into his belt and reached into the inner fold of his coat.

His fingers closed around the tarnished fork he'd scavenged.

It was laughable, using a dining utensil to tear down centuries-old wards, but laughter had no place here.

He pressed his will into the fork, letting the ambient motes seep into it.

They answered eagerly, crawling along the tines, sinking into the iron.

But almost at once, he felt the limit.

The utensil could only contain a fraction of the aether the dagger had held. Its crude lattice strained and buckled under even that small burden.

A bead of sweat slid down the side of his cheek.

"Hold," he hissed.

The motes quivered inside the fork, threatening to tear it apart from the inside.

When he felt the next heartbeat of aether would shatter it entirely, he sealed it, locking the power in place with a twist of his will.

Break.

The crude lattice firmed just enough to hold.

He stepped to the cell's threshold.

Inside, something waited.

A crouched silhouette, half-hidden in the shadows, tall and thin, with limbs that looked too long for its body. Its skin was stretched tight over jutting bones, pale as old parchment. Its face was split by a jaw that hung open, lined with rows of glassy black teeth.

It bared them at him, silent.

Thorne pressed the fork to the first anchor rune and released a thread of aether.

The glyph fizzled and died.

He moved to the next, and the next.

The fork glowed dully with each use, its shape sagging at the edges.

A ward sputtered out in a flicker of cold light.

He advanced to the final containment glyph.

The fork shivered in his grip, already softening under the strain.

"Just one more," he whispered.

He drew the tines across the rune.

The glyph dimmed, but not fully. A faint glow lingered along the interlocked lattice.

The fork sagged like melting wax.

"Damn it," he hissed.

He tried to press again, but the utensil gave out in a shiver of heat, collapsing into a puddle of warped slag in his hand.

Thorne's curse echoed up the hall.

He tossed the ruined fork aside and looked back at the creature.

It watched him with baleful eyes, jaws flexing.

He spread his hands, shrugging.

"What can you do," he said flatly.

For an instant, they simply regarded each other.

Then the monster lunged.

The half-dead lattice of the final containment ward cracked in a single thunderous pop.

The entire matrix collapsed, shards of sigil-light scattering across the threshold like dying fireflies.

Thorne's eyes went wide.

The thing cleared the space between them in a heartbeat, claws raking the air.

His instincts reacted faster than thought, Deadzone Reflex, his evolved skill saved his life once again.

Time seemed to stretch, every motion bright and precise.

He shifted sideways, weight flowing through one heel as the monster's claws tore past where his head had been.

Stone erupted behind him in a spray of dust and splinters.

He spun, the ambient aether already answering his call.

It swirled around his hand in a coiling vortex, raw, unshaped, volatile.

"Enough," he spat.

He flung out his palm.

A lash of aether unspooled, bright as a comet's tail. It struck the creature square across its face with a crack like splitting bone.

The thing reeled, jaws snapping closed with a shriek.

Thorne didn't stop.

He willed the lash to twist again, striking across its chest, scoring burning lines along the parchment-thin flesh.

"Go!" he roared, voice ragged.

The monster recovered, its head snapping back to face him. Black teeth clacked together in a wet, grinding sound.

It crouched, coiling its limbs as if to spring again.

"Kill them!" Thorne shouted, voice rising over the din. "Kill those sadistic researchers, you stupid thing!"

For a moment, nothing moved.

Then the creature bellowed, a noise that sounded like a hundred voices screaming at once.

Its eyes fixed on him.

And then, at last, it turned.

It bounded past him, claws tearing furrows in the flagstones.

In three strides, it vanished down the corridor, following the scent of blood and freedom.

Thorne lowered his hand, breath coming fast.

He closed his eyes.

One more monster loosed.

One more distraction bought.

Slowly, he straightened and wiped the sweat from his brow.

He was running out of weapons. Out of tools.

But he wasn't out of purpose.

Not yet.

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