“Almost there!” shouted Scorio. “One last pull!”
Somehow, impossibly, the great metal door rose. It wasn’t nearly as thick as he’d imagined, but still, the act seemed magical. Up it came, an inch at a time.
“Hestia!” barked Sal. “Go!”
She let go of the rope and dove for the stone block. Scorio fought to compensate for the loss of her strength, felt his heels slide forward over the rock.
The door began to drop.
“Pull!” shouted Scorio, reaching deep for more strength, ignoring the pain in his hands, the weakness growing in his arms. “One—last—”
Hestia dropped to her knees before the block and shoved it forward. It was a little over a foot tall, just enough to crawl through, but its upper edge hit the bottom of the door, which was slowly slipping back down.
“Pull!” shrieked Sal. “Pull, you blasted—”
And then the hook tore free from the ceiling in a shower of dust, the rope went slack in Scorio’s hands so that he crashed back into Havert, and the door swung closed, the pulleys clattering to the ground.
“No!” screamed Sal, wrestling his way out from under Nissa. “No!” He seemed a man possessed, tugging at his hair, running forward to glare up at the ceiling where a large hole now showed, the iron screw torn completely free.
“Get back!” Hestia’s cried, the panic and urgency of it splitting the air. “Something’s got the bottom of the door!”
Scorio climbed to his feet, heart pounding, and stared. The door had swung nearly all the way closed. Only an inch now remained, but curled around the bottom were five massive fingers, each ending in a glowing blue talon. Then a second hand crept under, grasped the Brass Door’s lower edge, and began to push.
Havert cursed, took up his club, and raised it high, ready to bring it down upon the knuckles, only for Nissa to seize his wrist and stop him cold.
“Wait,” she shouted. “Let it open the door! Hestia! Get ready!”
“Get ready?” The other woman looked up at Nissa from where she’d collapsed on her side. “Are you mad?”
“There’s but one way out of here!” Nissa released Havert and raked her hair back from her face. Her smile was wide, unhinged. “Why not let this fiend do the work for us?”
“Look at the size of its hands!” shouted Havert. “You want to let that in here?”
“She’s right,” said Sal, moving up alongside Nissa, stone-headed club in hand. “It might be large, but it’s just the one! This is our time, our hour, Havert! Before long, there’ll be a mass of them out there, but I know, I can feel it, right now there’s just this one! We club it when it comes through, and then—”
“You’re mad!” Havert glared at them both in disgust.
“The door’s rising,” wailed Hestia, scrabbling away from it.
And indeed it was. Whatever was on the other side was pushing it up, inch by inch, fingers flattened against the metal. Scorio stared, frozen. Hands that big. If it had human proportions, it’d be—what? Ten feet tall? How strong would it be? A blow from such a fist would end a life.
“We have to stop this,” shouted Havert. “We can try again, Scorio’s with us now, we can fix the pulley, we know it works—”
“No!” Sal brought up the twisted screw, the flanges flattened. “It’ll take me a year to make this anew! I can’t wait! I won’t wait!”
“Not your decision,” growled Havert, moving back to the door. “Better to wait than to die.”
“Havert, don’t do it,” cried out Nissa as the man raised his club. The door was now a foot off the ground. Scorio, moving as if in a dream, took a wide step and pushed the stone block under its edge.
“Havert!” shouted Nissa again. “Stop!”
The stocky man brought his club crashing down upon one of the hands, crunching the digits and glowing talons. A strangely garbled roar of pain sounded from the far side.
The hand withdrew, the door shuddered, began to drop, and then the mangled hand appeared once more, clutching ruinously at the door, two of the fingers twisted awry.
The door began to rise again.
Havert raised his club, face scrunched into a knot of determination and fear.
Then he sagged, dropped bonelessly to the ground, and Scorio saw Nissa standing behind him, clutching her own club, its head gleaming wetly in the mosslight.
“Havert!” Hestia scrambled over to his fallen form. “Nissa—what did you do? Nissa? What did you do?”
“I… he couldn’t… I couldn’t let him…” Nissa stared wide-eyed down at where the man lay, the back of his head wet in the blue light.
The door continued to rise.
Sal circled out wide, mouth working, eyes glittering, transfixed by the fallen Great Soul.
“It’s coming in!” shouted Scorio, snatching up his club. “Get ready!’
As the door rumbled all the way open, Scorio felt himself reach for something reflexively once more, a fumbling grab for what had to be his Igneous Heart. But there was nothing to take hold of, just a cold, throbbing void that enervated him so suddenly that he cried out in pain and stumbled.
The door slammed against the roof of the cavern, and a massive beast stepped forward, propping it open with one upraised palm, nearly filling the entirety of the space.
Scorio felt his knees go weak at the sight of the monster. It was nearly as wide as it was tall, its shoulders and arms muscled to the point of deformity, its head reptilian, snub-nosed like a tortoise, its maw open to reveal massive, saurian teeth. But more than the plated shielding across its chest and stomach, more than the talons that dug into the stone ground, it was the energy burning off the beast that caught him flatfooted and made his heart constrict.
For in the light of the blue moss, the beast’s hide was a deep, featureless black, while ragged lines of burning purple flame patterned its face, contoured around its body, and gathered in riotous intensity at its claws. Flames that surged and burned as if venting some inner furnace within the beast, leaving afterimages of light in its wake as it moved.
Hestia lunged forward to grab hold of Havert’s shoe and begin hauling him away, trying to remove him from the monster’s path. Nissa stood, transfixed, staring up into its burning, purple eyes.
Scorio let out a wordless cry of defiance and raced in, knowing it was madness to do so, and swung his club as hard as he could at the monster’s knee.
The second his blow connected, he threw himself forward into a rough dive, narrowly evading a clawed hand nearly two feet across as it came slicing through the air at where he’d stood.
Hestia screamed.
Scorio came up to his feet and saw the monster bend low to snatch Havert up in its maw, crunching the man in half between its saurian jaws. Whirring movement off to one side, then Sal unleashed a stone from his slingshot that pinged off the monster’s snout.
The beast paused in its ruminative crunching to turn and stare at him, purple eyes narrowing, and Sal let out a wail, sprinting through the open Brass Door into the darkness beyond.
“Hestia!” shouted Scorio, backing away from the huge, hunched-over back, the upraised arm that still held the door open. “Get out of there!”
Nissa was a shadow, pressing herself along the far wall to slip out through the doorway, dragging a pack along after her, face a panicked blur, eyes wide, shocked into a daze.
“Hestia!” Scorio ran out wide as the monster oriented on the last remaining Great Soul in the room. He caught a glimpse of the other woman pushing herself back with her heels, staring up, mouth agape in horror.
The monster released the door and stepped fully into the cave, closing the distance between them.
Scorio had no time to react. No time make a conscious decision. The huge door began to close with utter finality.