“What do you see?” Avena asked, holding her free hand over her mouth and nose, struggling to hold down her breakfast. She stepped through after him.
Her boot step on something squishy and wet. Humid air wafted about her, the room significantly warmer. A finger’s width of brackish liquid rippled about her boots, the floor beneath soft like she’d stepped into a swamp. The lantern light fell on shiny forms rising out of the foul water, piles of bloated rot wrapped around bones.
Hundreds of bodies. They were piled on each other, mounds of decaying flesh. She clamped her hand over her mouth tighter, bile rising up her throat as she realized what they walked through. The dead had liquefied. The walls were covered in rivulets of black slime oozing downward, the deposits of an endless cycle of evaporation and condensation, the contents in this room never escaping.
“Elohm, bless us with the brightness of your Colours,” Bran whimpered. “Maybe we shouldn’t be here.”
“You can find your way back,” Dualayn said, his tone queasy. “Colours bless me, the putrefaction is . . . astonishing.”
Ōbhin nodded. He stared down at one corpse. “This one has scales.”
Avena’s stomach clenched. The body he stood over was larger than any human. Its skin had rotted black but held an impression of snake-like scales. A pebbled hide. One long arm reached across the foul puddle, fingers ending in flesh-rending claws.
“Elohm, shine bright Your Colours and fill this world of Black with Your radiance,” Avena muttered. “Is that a darkling? I thought they were more . . . human.”
“There’s another door,” Fingers growled. “Ōbhin, cut us out of here.”
Ōbhin sloshed across the room to where Fingers pointed. Emerald light flared. The sword hummed. Avena stared down at the monstrous corpse before her with a sick fascination. She felt a greater warmth on her face, like the thing shed heat.
“Utterly fascinating,” Dualayn said, stepping up beside her. “A true monster. Proof they are no mere legend.”
“I already had proof monsters existed,” Avena whispered.
Emerald light danced. Metal clattered. A breeze howled through the room and gusted about her. The air smelled fresh compared to the death around them. A promise of escape, but she couldn’t look away from the darkling.
Dualayn nudged it with his foot. The skin sloughed off, exposing bones of ruby red beneath. Not made of ruby, but possessing the same scarlet hue. They seemed to have a faint glow. The heat increased. A shiver ran through her.
“That should not be possible,” Dualayn said. “Where is it getting the energy to produce heat? This thing has been dead for three thousand years.”
“Don’t care,” growled Ōbhin. He was already out of the room. “Come, there are stairs leading down. The air’s rushing up from it. Smells a whole lot better than this putrid rot.”
Avena nodded and skirted around the darkling and its hot bones. She stepped through the corpses of humans melded into blobs, their flesh mixed together in death. Had that thing killed everyone in this room? Had they been trapped in here with it?
She exited into the fresh air and leaned against a metal railing pitted with black patina. The wind up the stairs felt refreshing. Many runners were crumbled, broken. Above them, roots poked through the cracks in the stone, frilly and thick and red. Small things crawled on the roots, little specks of scarlet.
“Ants,” Fingers muttered, studying the roots. “I’ve seen this type before. Should be black.”
“Whatever stained the trees would have affected them,” Dualayn said. “It must be in the soil. Though there is surprisingly little red down here. I thought Koilon was the Ruby City.”
“Maybe it’s the pillar that stained the soil,” said Avena. She took another deep breath of the dry, dusty air flowing from below. She felt soiled. Her boots had a rind of decayed muck around them. Her hair felt damp and stiff, like the very putrid rot had filled the atmosphere with minute particles of liquefied flesh. “Let’s just keep going.”
“I hope we are making progress,” Dualayn said. “I do not know which way we travel.”
“North,” said Ōbhin. He led the way down the stairs.
Avena followed, the soles of her boots sticking to the floor with a tacky sensation. Her toes wiggled in her dry socks, glad none had seeped through. She ached for a bath. To dunk her head in the deepest, hottest pool of water she could find and then scrub herself with the harshest brush ever made.
She would scour her skin clean of the filth they’d just plunged through.
The stairs had a landing and another flight that descended in a zigzag. At the bottom, they found a hallway. Rusting pipes, dripping with water, hugged the ceiling. Puddles formed in the dust, a layer of mud around the little lakes. Footprints disturbed the detritus, small, clawed. They looked almost canine. In cracks in the wall, insects scurried, vanishing into reddish dirt.
The hallway led not far, twenty cubits before opening into a much larger room. Their light fell away, unable to reach the far end. Support columns of grime-coated concrete rose twice as thick as Avena’s waist to the ceiling over her head.
More pipes and slots for diamond lights crowding the busy ceiling.
“Listen to that sound echo,” said Dualayn. “This room is vast.”
They stepped out into it and their footsteps echoed back at them, sounding loud. Avena winced at it. She raised her lantern up. The air stirred in here. A fuzziness rippled over her body. She swayed, a momentary loss of control. She staggered into Ōbhin, barely holding onto her lantern.
“Avena,” he said, steadying her. “Is it . . .?”
“Sorry,” she muttered, the feeling retreating. “Just momentary dizziness. It’s going away.”
He opened his mouth when something rumbled beneath them. Avena felt the quivering in her boots. It vibrated up her bones
