The capsule sliced through black skies, parting the planet’s anaemic air with the ease of a knife hurled through water. Light glanced off its chromed sides, the pale glare of the stars mingling with the stain of incandescent heat expanding like an inflamed welt on its underside, but never quite overtaken by it. Sparks scattered in its wake, never finding quite enough opposition in the tenuous atmosphere to coalesce into a blazing trail, nor the robustness to grow the screech of its friction into a fiery roar. Least of all did it find a force to oppose its precipitous descent, so that the incredible speed at which it had been vomited from the void was scarcely diminished.

It was not flawless, that capsule. Whatever paths it had taken through the realms immaterial had left its scarred, with burned, jagged gouges running down its flanks. An uneven round pit marred its front, as if a tendril of impossibly hot flame had lashed against it there. What yet intact quartz eyes spanned its length were extinguished, leaving to fall blindly into the endless night of the world below.

From those shadows, grey wastes rose to meet it. Sharp mountains stood in the distance like silent witnesses to its fall, as impassive before it as they had been to the aeons of desolation at their feet. A hulk of rigid angles and dim yellow lights briefly flashed underneath the arc of its trajectory, and was soon lost to the horizon. Soon the mountains, as well, receded into murk, and nothing was left but the expectant face of the lithic desert. It looked up lazily at the pod’s approach of the many eyes of its craters and cavern-mouths, unstirring in its dreary immensity.

The capsule struck.

Metal screeched against stone, its sound deadened by the emptiness. The tremendous impact, of momentum unhindered by compact heavens, pulverised and crumpled rock upon itself. The minute gap the pod had blasted into the loose grey surface blossomed into a spiderweb of cracks which soon tumbled down into an expanding sinkhole, as the shattered equilibrium of the world’s crust dragged more and more fragments into the exposed gash of its hollow underbelly. Had the stars in the black sky been any less apathetic, they would have briefly glimpsed the cavity of a small vault before it was buried in the settling debris of a great crater. But their snow-white marble eyes were jaded, and this moment of devastation went unseen and unremembered.

And below, in Laethem’s depths, the capsule fell still.

[hr]

“How far away?”

“Too far, Implementor. It went over the Dtheni ridge. Beyond striking distance even in the best conditions.”

“Hmph.”

Myrline turned away from the auspex-tech hunched over his console and stalked towards the centre of the monitoring chamber, the metronome clacking of booted heels cutting through the droning hum of machinery and sporadic rattle of switches. The station took up a sizable section of a spire-floor’s corner, but its acoustics were impeccable, their design enduring after centuries of less than optimal maintenance. The lighting, on the other hand, was feeble, and issued from the rows of consoles along the walls and their shifting emerald patterns on abyssal black screens as much as from the dirty-white tubes overhead. The shabby look this lent to the worn rockcrete walls irked her, but the best she could do about it now was spend as little time in the place as possible.

“You heard that. Stop tracking the meteoroid,” she barked, the command carrying from where she stood to the remotest monitor, “Return to standard operation status.”

There was a uniform murmur of acknowledgement from the auspex-techs, more metallic in some places than others, followed by snapping and clicking as they reoriented their instruments in the customary downturned direction and reactivated their resonance functions. Some did not budge a finger as they did, the knots of cables running from their temples to the consoles relaying their instructions to the machinery with the ease of a thought. Myrline’s eyes alighted most sharply on them, for a moment’s distraction from one of them would have been more disastrous for the entire grid than the missteps of every unaugmented technician at once. But they carried through their motions as diligently as they had thousands of times before, and she strode out from the corner chamber with some amount of momentary relief.

Outside, the hive greeted her with a nervous bustle of motion. News of the rogue meteoroid had been curtailed by the Spire Council to forestall tension and unrest - which the underdweller scum was counting on, if the latest reports on their activity were correct - but somehow word of some vague novelty never failed to slink out onto the passageways. There was nothing too abnormal in the sights around her, not overtly. Small groups in light grey boilersuits filed around the massive habitation blocks in good order, without tarrying in place longer than sanctioned nor raising their voices above the permitted low tones. To her practised, intransigeant eye, however, the minute traces of apprehension were almost glaring. A ring that formed at an intersection of connecting passages near the central well and milled in place very nearly long enough for the nearest Secutor to take notice, only dispersing when his crystalline red faceguard began to shift in their direction. Some mumbles rising to a momentary pitch before being guardedly quieted.

Her glare quieted the nearest cluster, which promptly scattered along the inter-block passage, but then she turned away. Reprimands or even simple acknowledgement would confirm to their restless minds that the Council sought to suppress something, and the seeds of disorder would be sown then and there. Instead, Myrline purposely crossed the thoroughfare between the coreward hab-block clusters, vast and many-eyed pillars shadeless in the ubiquitous yellow glow of artificial light, cutting a direct path towards the well. Like an immeasurable sacrificial pit in the middle of a temple, the perfectly square abyss awned hungrily in the reinforced floor, the parapets around its edge all but invisible before its shadowy immensity. The pit measured nearly a full klick on each side and pierced the spire through its core, like a trail carved by an impossibly precise meteoroid into its semi-hollow massive. The dozens of elevator cabins and platforms that served as the main means of transportation between spire levels appeared minuscule in its maw, despite some of them being spacious enough to fit a hab-block’s base. The nests and strands of thick metal cables supporting them were no more than fleeting silver sparks in the gloom.

The entrance to the cabin she had ascended on was covered by a Secutor. His presence truthfully served no greater purpose than to denote that this conveyor was being used for pressing Authority business, as the transports in that well area were designated for exclusive military usage regardless, and so Myrline motioned the black flak-armoured figure aside with some irritation. There was the customary instant of unease when the cabin, which was more akin to an elongated cage with a lower half of solid plasflex, swayed under her entering steps before finding its equilibrium again. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the surface of the door as it closed. It was an unpleasantly ruinous sight. A sharp-edged stony face, still all too young, pale even for a Koytan and marked with weary shadows; once trim chin-length black hair deteriorating into greasy strands; dark grey uniform whose press and silvery pins could not hide how limply it hung in places. She grit her teeth and yanked a lever in the wall, and with a silent shudder the cabin began its downwards slide.

There was no independent lighting in the well, and so the cabin fell into darkness when it crossed the floor-stratum beneath, only to dazzlingly reemerge into the next layer, and thus again and again, in an accelerating succession that would have been kaleidoscopic had it not been so monotone in all its parts. Every shadowy interlude was exactly as long as the previous one, and every illuminated layer was so uniform as to appear a continuation of each other. The yellow light, the even rows of towering hab-blocks, the geometrically regular passages and crossroads, the grey figures that traversed these sterile landscapes in regimented order. In spite of the elevator’s now considerable speed, it was a long time until shades of imperfection began to appear in the defilade. Dimmer lights, grimier walls, the stench of rust and cinder in the air. The spire’s lower levels were ailing from the decay that crept up from the degenerate underworld, and though the figures moving about its bridges and grate-floored alleys - ever so gaunt now - were no less orderly, the hive around them was steeped in the rot of centuries despite their and the Council’s best efforts.

For all that it held to this tenuous and unwilling compromise, even that precarious balance stood on the brink of annihilation if the underdwellers were to breach it. If they struck at the generator districts, the entire spire would fall with it. If they cut through her defences, she would be the one to bear responsibility for it before humanity’s last silent grave. If she failed ---

The cabin ground to a halt with a moaning clank. Myrline breathed in, straightened her jacket, its edges beginning to wear from the periodic redundant tugging, and unlatched the door, stepping out into the subterranean corridor.

The depth she had reached was not the lowest one, reserved for the mustering of rank and file troops and the unloading of supplies from cargo platforms. Here, the elevator opened directly onto the entrance of a tunnel just about large enough for two people, once carved into the live rock, then reinforced and sporadically lit by evenly spaced illumination tubes. The two sentries that greeted her with their faceless salutes were not Secutors, but grey-clad troopers of the Entrance Guard. The bulky tubes and reserve tanks of their flamers gave them the look of something mechanical, but under their protective masks she was glad to know them as human as herself. 

The stone corridor led Myrline through a claustrophobic span that was deceptively short for how it awkwardly twisted and sloped, as if in preparation for the striking sight that awaited on its other end. Under the natural balcony of the outcropping she found herself on, almost wide enough to accommodate an entire hab-block, but minuscule in proportion, there gaped the enormity of the access chamber. The cavernous hall was at least a fourth as large as a spire level, and almost as high; testament to the immensity of the work that had reared Koytos itself, its smooth floor was covered in a labyrinth of control towers, depots, rail stations and inspection points, most of their angular carcasses now eviscerated by time or worse. In the potent floodlights that still lit the half of the chamber closest to the entrance, she could see the teeming of grey-uniformed bodies among the ruination. On the further side, however, only the distant lights of a few guardposts tentatively straddled the edge of what seemed to be boundless, bottomless shadow.

It was a sight that could awe a newcomer, but not one who, like Myrline, had seen it more often than the hive proper in the latter years. What instead drew her eyes was the handful of figures gathered around a wide plas-table set on the edge before her, near the pointed antennae of a field vox station.

Two of them turned to look as the clacking of her steps on the stone roused them from their contemplation of the sonar chart spread on the table. One wore the same dark grey as her, though the fabric of his uniform was stretched taut over the girth of his flaccid constitution. None knew how Implementor Zarec Guicon could have grown fat on siege-time fare, though rumours abounded of misappropriated rations and a ghoulish taste for reprocessed meats, but as long as he kept himself useful about the access, none thought to ask either; his unassuming stature and dull, faintly melancholy eyes drowning in rolls of pale flesh belied the mind that had won him his position. Presently, however, any wit in his features was further concealed as he flinched at the inhuman rasp that rose from the man across the table.

“Implementor Levran! Were you hoping to arrive as the next push began? Your punctuality would be wasted on the Pale Ones.” Myrline did not dignify the mechanical jibe with more than an undisguised contemptuous sneer. If Guicon was respected or tolerated at worst, Tech-Intendant Kleial was suffered. There was little about him that could endear - not his abrasive flippancy, not the mystique he deliberately and grotesquely cloaked himself in, and least of all his awareness of how indispensable he was for the hive. She avoided the sight of his fleshless jaw’s eternal sardonic grin and the five lamp-eyes set in a semicircle above it, of the wires and tubes protruding from his bulky frame’s rust-brown trappings, of the two faceless hulks of steel towering behind him. Even after years of reluctant collaboration, she could hardly stomach the wilful rejection of humanity that oozed from him like a miasma.

Guicon gave her a placid shrug and nodded upwards. “How is it up there?”

“Controlled,” Myrline leaned on the table, running her weary eyes over the charts. Masses of movement. Sharp spikes signalling the clatter of metal. Jagged plateaus, something heavy scraping over the cavern floor. The mutants were moving in force. “The Secutors don’t need reinforcement.”

“Good, it’s not as though we could spare any,” the older Implementor looked discontentedly over the troops shifting around the chamber below like grey rivulets. Numerous as they were, they were far too few to fully cover such an immense space. “If anything, the Council could have transferred some of them to our command. Lasguns are lasguns.”

“And donate more of those precious guns to the enemy?” Kleial leered, “Levran’s newfangled vanguard units have already cost us enough. My manufactora are not so boundless as to supply every genetic reject and untrained floorwatcher you fancy.”

“The vanguards are adequate as long as your machines cover them, Intendant.” Myrlinee picked up a simple magnocular device from the table and pointed its lenses at one of the chamber’s central thoroughfares. A column of grey-clad scrawny figures was marching down it towards the edge of the light, holding weapons that seemed bulky in their hands. Most of the vanguards were young, having just entered the age of conscription and immediately fallen under the purview of her new recruitment census. Lawbreakers, gene-deviants discovered by the Council’s periodic scans, children of unsanctioned couplings - all dangers to the hive’s stability, better served holding ground in the siege’s deadliest spots. Kleial was not wrong; more than one lasgun had been pried from their inexpert hands by the Pale Ones. But the mutants had paid dearly for it every time, and that was what mattered.

She shifted the magnoculars further back along the road, where a second, smaller column trudged in the vanguards’ wake at a distance. Twelve hulks of rust-coloured metal akin to Kleial’s bodyguards marched in perfect lockstep, dome-shaped heads staring stolidly ahead, arms ending in piston-claws and integrated heavy weapons rigid at their sides. Since the last cyber-priests on the planet had perished in the fall of Hive Baligae many decades prior, the venerable automata had been dwindling in numbers. As with most relics of the order, its inheritors in the Tech-Intendancy could maintain them well enough, but were unable to reproduce their design, and their losses to the mutant hordes, however rare, were keenly felt. Unbidden, the thought grew from this stray observation: the Pale Ones were innumerable, and Koytos only had so many robots, so many weapons, so many people. Eventually, it was inevitable that their sheer mass would drown out anything the hive could array against them, and then it would go the way of Baligae and Stagyas. It and, as far as she knew, all of mankind.

Only something unexpected could change that. Something from outside the dying world, like that insignificant meteoroid…

[i]No.[/i] She scoffed and clenched her jaw. That was not the way. They had not survived until now by hoping for miracles. They would trust in their own strength alone, and it would have to suffice.

For her, for Koytos, for humanity.

[hr]

Golog Kin-Breaker crouched at the summit of the ruined tower. Once a compact square pillar of a structure, the edifice had been eviscerated by surfacer weapons in the early days of the siege, and now bared its skeleton of stairs and crumbling floors to all sides through ample fissures in the walls. He preferred it this way; the sounds and smells of the battlefield reached him easily through the gaps. The padding steps of his warriors told him of their advance, how they split off to slip into the stone maze ahead and flank through hidden tunnels in the distant walls. The wafts of metal, unsettled dust and restless bodies showed how many had gathered where, who was afraid, who was impatient. All this Golog knew, though he had no eyes to see with.

His enemy alone was outside his reach. The surfacers were too far for him to smell, without a breath of moving air to bring their scents to his perch, and only the echoes of their war machines’ clanging steps reached him now and then. But he knew well enough that they were soaked with fear, twitching with unease in their holes. They were aware that the thing which fell from the upper world would herald his next attack, and they dreaded it even more than they must have the mystery of that impact. For many lifetimes, they had held their vault against every warleader who had tried to breach the last way to the surface, and then he had come and claimed most of it in less than half a generation. They were right to fear. No vault-lord in the lower world was or had ever been greater than he. 

The Kin-Breaker slavered with pride as he took in the immensity of his horde. More of his warriors had already been spent in this siege than in any conquest, and still he had the strength to both advance and hold his vast dominion in the lower world against his many rivals. His predecessors had paid with their reigns and their lives for rushing blindly to the surface, sure that their forces would overwhelm the sparse defenders of the uppermost vault, but he knew better than them. By moving forward with the steadiness of the iron-head worm, he had come so far that the sharpest eyes among the lookouts could see the vault’s far wall and the great doors that opened in it. He was patient, but he knew that soon he would reach these gates and storm through them, sweep away their last defenders and climb to the very top of the surfacers’ lair.

And then he would live like a god.

But Golog reined in his ambitions. Before that moment, many battles awaited still, and one lay just ahead. He rose from his haunches and grasped his shard glaive, the unbreakable weapon whose blade was a fragment of a metal lost to antiquity. Scales of that strange alloy were fixed to his armour, tightly held and padded with dry moss so that its jangling would not disturb his ears. His panoply was the envy of every warrior in the lower world, but it did little more than flaunt his wealth and authority; it had been a long time since he had taken to the field in person, and he knew that not even this protection could stop the strange weapons from the surface.

With almost silent steps, the Kin-Breaker loped down the spiral staircase in the tower’s center and out upon the vault floor. The semicircle of his warleaders and advisers already waited for him around the gouged door, and they prostrated themselves upon his appearance. Satisfied with the scraping of their hands and chins on the stone ground, the warlord clicked his tongue, and they obediently rose again.

“Is everything done as I’ve ordered? Are all the warriors in place?” he growled in the chest-deep voice of a native of the deep vaults.

“Yes, great Kin-Breaker,” replied one of the warleaders, stooped in servile cringing. Most would have balked at that title of infamy, but Golog wore it with nonchalant arrogance: let all know there was no blood he would not spill in his bid for power.

“The Glaathi will be stirring again after that quake from the upper world,” Uluudh, one of his veteran advisers, spoke up, “It’s just the sort of thing they would take for a sign from their putrid god. I doubt the sealed tunnels would hold them back.”

“Then send word to Ogon to take his warband against them. If they clear the tunnels, tell him to clog them again with their rotting carcasses.”

Uluudh made a sound of assent and scampered away to summon a messenger. At a curt grunt from Golog, the others scattered in the same way, their footsteps rushing in all directions. The Kin-Breaker listened to their sound growing faint for a few moments, then unhurriedly crawled forward over the unnaturally smooth ground, his long loose-jointed limbs stretching and bending like the legs of a spider. He smelled broken rock and dust ahead; his hands found grips in a broken wall, and he deftly climbed onto the roof of a small monitoring cabin, his dense armour of little burden for the still powerful muscles underneath. From his new forward station, he breathed in the first signs of the starting battle.

Feet and hands scrabbled over stone, metal quietly rattled. His warriors were on the move, advancing, encircling, probing. Soon came the surfacers’ reply, the sizzling and strange smell of burning air spat out by their weapons. Golog’s scouts had told him that the vault’s defenders made a habit of sending their youngest, weakest runts to the very front. Perhaps they wanted to lure him into striking this weak, inviting target, all the more likely since their far more threatening machines were usually close behind. 

The warlord knew better than to fall for such transparent bait. More scorched wafts filled the air, but now they came from his own side, fired by the chosen warband he had armed with trophies seized from fallen enemies. These clumsy armaments, guided by eye rather than ear and instinct, were not made for Pale Ones, and almost none of their shots ever struck home. But these surfacers were young and nervous, and the mere sight of his horde returning their fire threw them into a panic. Their cries rose in pitch, their shots became scattered and disorganised. They were already as good as dead.

Heavier running steps came and passed. The Kin-Breaker expected the machines to show themselves now, and he was not disappoint as the crash of heavy mechanical movement drowned out the frightened voices. More fiery intangible spears cut the air, this time impossibly fast and regular, and other arcane smells accompanied them - acrid fire reeking of earthblood, something difficult to describe and crackling like a sack of dried bones. Golog had felt some scraps of armour struck by the strange forces let loose by the unliving monsters from the surface; it was as though the iron was melted and cooled in the same breath, and only ashes were left beneath.

Yet the machines were not invincible. He heard the heavy steps again, and then sharp Pale One battlecries, tremendous crashing and shattering, the screech of wounded metal. Under the cover of the surfacer vanguard’s disorientation, some of the strongest and bravest among the horde had slipped past them. They carried great shard-mauls tipped with spikes of ancient alloy, and their sudden attack was clearly costing the machines dearly. The Kin-Breaker grinned to himself as he savoured the sounds of the surface’s most terrible weapons being smashed to scrap. Many of the champions would be dead as well, but more were always eager to take their place.

The commotion of battle was steadily rising. More voices shouted as the surfacers’ main force came into motion, and their weapons’ fire filled the air. Savage cries answered from his side as his warriors surged to take advantage of the frontline’s disarray. The deafening scrape of enormous iron plates pushed ahead as massive shields filled his ears.

It was now impossible to follow the course of the battle, but he had heard and felt enough to be satisfied. The Kin-Breaker bared his pointed teeth in a rapacious smile, knowing that his conquest of the upper world moved ever ineluctably closer.

[hr]

His first sensations were a hard impact, followed by silence, distant points of light in blackness, and the smell of dust. This, he decided, was birth.

He lay unmoving for some time as he absorbed all that was laid out around him and tried to make sense of it. Under his back was a rough presence, rigid and stinging with many small points. It was not pleasant, but nor was it unbearable, and so he let it be, sweeping aside the tiny spikes of pain. Above him was emptiness. He could vaguely see something large and grey with the corner of his eye - his [i]eye[/i] - but was shapeless, indistinct, no more than a sign of presence. Everywhere else, his sight met nothing but empty murk and innumerable white eyes far above.

It was restful. The darkness felt welcoming, somehow familiar, a protective and reassuring embrace he did know he could long for. The lights did not feel like an intrusion. They were but an ornament to the gloom, a toy for his eye-

His [i]eye[/i].

With jittery, uncertain motions, he raised his right hand to his face, smelling the dust and pebbles that stuck to it. Cautiously, he ran his fingers over the bare smoothness of his forehead, the timid bristle of his eyebrow. After that, nothing. He lowered a trepidant finger into the cavity, and felt nothing but more unblemished skin. His hand quivered as he withdrew it. The absence rankled him, chilled him with anxious unease and a nameless feeling that resembled impotence. He knew that it was wrong to not find anything in that hollow, that he lacked something he should have had. Suddenly, the ground below him seemed less tolerable than before.

He tried to push himself to his feet, propping himself up on backward-turned hands until he could raise himself upright with a shove. More things came into his view as his head moved up. The amorphous grey presence resolved itself into a compact enormity of matter - a wall, yet more than that, a monumental outgrowth of the earth underneath him. He lay, he saw now, at the bottom of a titanic pit, so wide and deep that its rim was lost in shadow far above. It reminded him of the aberration of his socket, but magnified on an incalculably greater scale. As with it, there was a wrongness about this staggering hollow, obvious in the great shattered heaps of boulders, some of mountainous size, that rose around him. It was as if the earth had fallen inward and met a hungry gap of emptiness that swallowed yet more of it.

His arms strained, shoved, and for a moment he staggered on his two feet. But his legs were unsteady, and he collapsed forward, landing on his outstretched hands. The unsettled dust stung his nostrils. Laboriously, he moved on four limbs. A hand and a knee. A hand and a knee. He looked around.

The seed of the cataclysm lay behind him. Rounded, hard and smooth, it bristled with angular growths whose purpose he could not imagine. It was surprisingly intact for having struck such a blow, but it had suffered all the same on its deformed, dented underside, and an odd darkened gouge ran along its side. Something about that last detail unsettled him, not merely as another image of mutilation, but with a deeper, more obscure feeling he could not catch hold of. He left the object behind and crawled towards the edge of the pit, his motions quickening as they gained confidence.

It was a long way. The fissure was immense, so much so that soon he stopped thinking of it as one. He was moving along a surface, one that seemed without end, among the feet of ruined colossi and fractured giants of silent stone. Cold began to set in. Breathing, something so natural he had not noticed it until now, became more difficult, first stifled, then almost painful. Whatever sustained him in this abyss was fading, and it was being replaced by an emptiness that had little in common with the soothing arms of night. He redoubled his efforts, the ache from his scraped and torn hands and knees rivalling that in his belaboured chest. Would he truly be safe if he reached wherever he was going, the thought stung him, or was his survival just a brief accident whose time was quickly expiring now?

His eye had begun to darken, his breath grown ragged, but inexhaustibly he crawled on, unconscious of his own tremendous endurance. The wall of the abyss now towered before him, and the pale lights were nothing but a memory. With fading sight, he saw heaped stones at its foot, and among them, a gap. Small, perhaps just wide enough for him. A final, furious effort pushed him through its mouth, its edges scratching his sides, and into the blissful reward of warm air. Unbalanced by his passage, stones fell behind him, sealing the opening.

Exhausted, he did not immediately notice that the darkness was now absolute, even more than at the foot of the wall. He lay on his belly, breathing deeply, feeling nothing but the strained beating - in two places, as it seemed - inside his chest. Gradually, more sensations came to him. The smell, still dusty, stale, dry. The solid bodies all around him. And to his ears, at last, so feeble, yet persistent…

[i]Water.[/i] Somewhere far away, he clearly pictured in his mind, ran a flow of something light and limpid. Water.

Life.

If there was water, he realised in a way that astounded him, he could survive.

Breathing deeply, he rose to his hands and knees again. He moved without haste now, crawling leisurely, but with surety undaunted by his blindness. He smelled walls in his path before he met them, felt the emptiness of tunnel turns and branches at his sides. The darkness here was not constrained, as it had seemed at first, but winding and sinuous, enclosed in many passages that ran deep in the rocky earth. He could scarcely imagine the spaces he was moving through, but he held steadfastly to his guide, the clear, flowing sound that drew closer little by little.

It was, he thought, very close by the time he heard the other. Somewhere behind him and off to the side, a heavy, rhythmic dull thumping on the tunnel floor rolled to his ears. More sensations followed it closely: a stench of something warm and unclean, the perception of something very large moving in the dark, and a strange weight inside his head. He did not immediately understand what the latter was, and the realisation only unfolded after a few moments of confusion. Something [i]alive[/i] was approaching, and somehow, by means he still could not grasp, he felt this life, this thinking mind as it neared. He had no sense of what it was, but instinct stirred in alarm within him. He hastened his pace, but it was not enough.

Massive, horrid, something loomed behind him, sending out foetid breaths that almost made him wince. A monstrously large hand forcefully curled around him, filthy nails digging into his skin, and he lost his grip on the ground as he was lifted with dreadful ease. He felt something - a mouth - opening before him, disgorging its rancid breath, and then he was moving helplessly towards, into it-

Anger surged up, surpassing his alarm. He had survived the journey through the abyss. He would survive this. His hand reached forward, brushed over the sharp points of gigantic teeth and found the coarse sides of the cheek. With a surge of strength that almost rivalled his captor, he seized it and tore away.

The next moment, a dull, raucous roar deafened him, and he fell, landing painfully on his tailbone. His hand was warm and wet, dripping with something that ran down his arm in twisting rivulets. He hardly had the time to think about it before the hand seized him again, swung him through the air and let loose.

He struck the wall with a crack and a jolt of lacerating pain throughout his body. He had not imagined anything could hurt so much. Dazed, numb from the spreading agony, he tried to reach for something, but found himself rising again, a furious grip around his ribcage wracking him with more torturous fracturing snaps, feral roars rattling his desperately groping mind.

His hands moved almost of his own. He reached forward again, but instead of avoiding the thing’s teeth he eagerly grabbed them, heedless of the wounds they tore in his wrists, and stretched his fingers around its jaw.

Then he wrenched.

The bellowing was so stunning that he barely felt the blow of his fall, though he himself cried out as it cascaded through his broken body. Hazily, he felt his assailant stumble away into the dark, howling and gurgling as it gripped its limp lower mouth. He did not think of it anymore. The pain. He could not die. He had to survive.

Life. Water.

With no thoughts, no conscious hope, he tugged in the direction he thought he had heard the flow. The throbbing in his head filled all his senses now. He could no longer move his legs, or perhaps he did, yet felt nothing but pain. His left arm hung deadly from its broken shoulder. Every twitch seemed to nearly tear him into bloody shreds.

Still he moved. Stubbornly, he dragged his mangled body ahead, leaving behind a damp, viscous trail. His senses struggled to rise above the pain, sporadically warning him of walls, turns, descents. In the moments they did, he could feel the running water increasingly close.

Rapid, continuous motion. He sensed it in front of him, its strength enough to momentarily dissipate the fumes of torment that clouded his head. He leaned forward, trying to reach it with his lips, only now conscious of a thirst almost as overbearing as the pain, but it was too far below the lip of its dimly perceived stony canal. With an effort that made him groan, he leaned forward, trying to reach deep, deeper-

Too deep.

The half-agonizing, half-insensate weight of his body slumped over the sheer edge. He tried to grasp for it, but it was futile, and instantly he was wreathed in cold more pervasive than he had known outside. He spluttered, flailed, but the current had him in its grip, and carried him far, far and down.

The last thing he felt before utter inanition claimed him was the chill of water spilling down his throat.