CHAPTER 235: PRICE OF OUR BEST

A week later.

The air in the cavern was still heavy, but with a different kind of weight. The stench of digestive fluids and superheated ozone had given way to a smell of cold ashes, wet stone, and dried blood. The voracious amber light was gone, replaced by the pallid glow of their oil lamps, which cast long, trembling shadows on the ravaged walls.

The scars of the battle were everywhere. Black, corrosive splatters streaked the rock. Fragments of whitish bone and desiccated flesh littered the floor, mingling with the shards of stone. In the center, where the heart of the abomination had pulsed, there was only a large burn mark, a vitrified, concave scar, as if the rock itself had been forced to remember the cataclysm.

And then there were their own.

Sitting propped against the wall, Zirel and Armin were ghosts of their former selves. Zirel, his torso wrapped in filthy bandages, breathed with a cautious slowness, each wheezing breath betraying the pain of his broken ribs. His right arm was immobilized in a makeshift splint. He stared into the void, his usually sharp gaze clouded by fever and exhaustion.

Armin was worse. His left arm, horribly dislocated, was clutched tight against his body with strips of cloth. His face, bruised and pale, was gaunt with suffering and a fatigue so profound it seemed to have extinguished the flame within him. He no longer spoke. He just stared at the tips of his boots, lost in a pained silence.

A little apart, Inès slept a fitful sleep. The wound on her shoulder, though cleaned and carefully bandaged, was no less horrible for it. A trickle of blood had dried on her lower lip, and a low moan occasionally escaped her lips between feverish dreams.

Only Maggie and Elisa still seemed upright, but at what cost.

Maggie kept watch, sitting on a stone, sharpening the blade of her halberd with methodical slowness. The metal scraped against the whetstone, a rhythmic, almost soothing sound in the sepulchral silence. But her movements were less ample than usual, and her shoulders, once so square, sagged slightly under the weight of a fatigue that was not merely physical, but existential. Her eyes, fixed on her blade, shone with a dark light, as if she saw reflected there not her face, but the echo of the telluric power she had unleashed.

Elisa, meanwhile, was motionless, her eyes open but not seeing the cavern. She was looking inward. Her hands, resting on her knees, trembled intermittently. A faint residue of green light, like a dying ember, seemed to sometimes ignite in the depths of her pupils before vanishing instantly. Her features were drawn, aged all at once. The two lead spheres rotated slowly again near her temples, but their movement was lazy, almost weary. The price of their victory was measured in consumed life force, in parts of themselves they had offered up to a power they had barely been able to control.

"We have to move," Maggie finally said, without stopping her sharpening. Her voice was hoarse, lower than usual. "The water is running low. And this cavern... it’s not sound."

She cast a circular glance at the organic walls which, though dead, still seemed to ooze a residual malice.

Elisa blinked, as if emerging from a deep sleep.

"They won’t last an hour of walking," she murmured, indicating the wounded with a motion of her chin.

"They have no choice. We have no choice."

The silence fell again, heavier than ever. The decision was made. They would leave this tomb of flesh and stone, or they would die in it. There was no other way.

Suddenly, a faint moan sounded. It wasn’t from Inès. It came from Armin’s mouth. He had lifted his head, his glassy eyes fixed on the vitrified scar in the center of the cavern.

"She... she laughed," he stammered, his voice broken and barely audible. "Remember? She laughed."

Zirel turned his head slowly toward him, a shiver running through his aching body.

"Quiet, Armin. It’s over."

But the wounded young warrior seemed possessed by the memory.

"She told us... ’Again’. She wanted to see... our best."

He closed his eyes, an expression of pure horror on his face.

"And we showed her."

Those words, whispered in the gloom, resonated like a death knell. They had won. They had survived. But looking at their broken bodies and the uneasy glint in the eyes of those who had saved them, no one, in the silence of that defiled cavern, could have said what that victory had truly cost. Or if, by showing "their best," they had unintentionally opened a door that should never have been opened.

The sound of metal grating on stone resumed, louder, as if to chase away the echo of Armin’s words. But the doubt had already entered them, a bitter seed planted a week ago in the soil of their terror and nourished by the monstrous power they had had to invoke to avoid death.

——

The sound of metal grating on stone suddenly seemed unbearably loud. It punctuated the silence, hammering home the reality of their situation. Armin’s words, laden with a toxic truth, still hung in the damp air.

Elisa stood up. Her legs trembled for a moment, but her gaze had regained some of its focus, a glimmer of urgency dispelling the torpor.

"He’s right," she said in a low but clear voice. "We answered its provocation. We played its game. But staying here brooding won’t help us. This cavern is an open wound. It still seeps with its presence. We have to leave."

Maggie nodded slowly, putting away her whetstone. She rose in turn, her imposing mass casting a shadow that seemed to swallow the flickering lamplight.

"Wake them," she said to Elisa, pointing to Inès and the two men. "Gently, but firmly. I’ll look for water. There must be a source that fed these pools."

She moved away, her heavy steps echoing in the silence, her halberd held with a familiarity that spoke volumes about her state of permanent vigilance. Even exhausted, she was a sentinel.

Elisa knelt beside Inès. She placed a cold hand on her forehead, murmuring a few words in a language that belonged only to them. The lead spheres near her temples vibrated imperceptibly, emitting a hum so faint it was more a sensation than a sound. Inès stopped moaning and her eyelids fluttered before opening, revealing glassy, disoriented eyes.

"Elisa?... It hurts..."

"I know. But we have to move. Hold on."

She helped her sit up, handing her a half-empty waterskin. Then she turned to Zirel and Armin.

"You heard. On your feet."

Zirel clenched his teeth, a grunt of pain escaping him as he pushed against the wall to stand up. He leaned heavily against it, his face pale.

"Easy for you to say when you’re the one with all your strength," he growled, his voice thick with resentment and pain.

Elisa didn’t defend herself. She looked at him, her golden eyes filled with infinite weariness.

"My strength, Zirel, has a price you can’t even imagine. And it’s still due. Now, help Armin."

Shame colored the thief’s face. He nodded briefly and offered his good hand to Armin. The warrior looked at him, hesitant, then took the hand. With a superhuman effort and muffled curses, they both stood up, swaying, forming a pitiful crew of mutilated men.

Maggie returned, a skin filled with water that smelled of sulfur and stone.

"That’s all there is. It’s drinkable, barely. Drink."

They passed the skin around, drinking eagerly despite the taste. The water was cold and painfully reminded them they were alive.

Their preparations were quick and macabre. They gathered the little equipment that had survived: a dagger, Inès’s crossbow snapped clean in two, shreds of bags. They made crude walking sticks from fragments of dried tentacles, sturdy enough to serve as supports.

Elisa pointed her spear toward a narrow tunnel, different from the one they had entered a week before. Its entrance was almost entirely covered by a desiccated organic membrane, like a veil of mourning.

"This way," she said. "I feel... a draft. Faint, but it smells of stone and wind, not this rotten flesh."

They filed into the passageway, forming a slow, painful procession. Maggie led the way, her halberd slicing through the remaining membranes like giant spiderwebs. Elisa brought up the rear, her senses strained, listening for the slightest echo of anything that might lurk in the darkness. The green glow in her eyes was once more a barely visible ember, but she was watching.

They walked for hours, or perhaps days—time had lost all meaning in the total darkness. They heard only the sound of their own dragging steps, their labored breathing, and the occasional scrape of the butt of Maggie’s halberd against the wall.

Then, suddenly, a change. The air no longer smelled stale and of death. A slight coolness, laden with the moisture of rain, caressed their faces. And in the distance, very far away, a light. Not the evil amber light of the core, but a faint, natural, grey light—the light of day filtering through an entrance.

A glimmer of hope. Terrible and fragile.