Wary, he climbed to the second, high step. One presence was directly before him; almost it seemed to warp the air, so that he felt that if he squinted just right, he’d be able to determine its outline.
But it passed before him, allowing him to hurry up the next few steps and leave it behind. On he climbed, the light from the left playing over his body, climbing the arching steps and avoiding the floating, invisible presences until he reached the top; there he saw the steps descend on the far side to a black archway set in the wall across from his point of entry.
Nonplussed, he moved smoothly down, giving the presences wide berth, pausing occasionally to let them pass by or when their paths intersected. Slowly, carefully, he navigated his way past them, and at last, reached the archway. Turned to consider the steps, and wondered how he might have fared if he’d tried to assay them as an Emberling. Might he not have been able to pick out their paths so distinctly? What would have happened if he’d come too close to one?
He was happy not to know.
Taking a moment to sweep more Iron into his reservoir to replace that which had naturally vented forth, he stepped into the darkness and emerged into the fourteenth chamber.
A low ceiling, and him at the top of a tight cylinder of a room, all of it consumed by the spiraling steps that began right at his feet and curled tightly down and around. Great steps swept around the central axis through six complete revolutions, the floors below looking like a dead centipede that had coiled upon itself. A great beam of light speared down the central axis to illuminate the barren floor at the bottom, leaving the steps themselves in a deep darkness that completely failed to foil his darkvision.
Again there were no obvious foes. Scorio tongued the inside of his cheek as he considered the ceiling, the air above the steps, the central column of light itself. No floating presences, but… narrowing his eyes, extending his senses once more, he thought he felt a strange twinge coming from the third step down. Crouching, he stared at it. There was nothing unusual about it, but the third step felt more… ponderous? Alarming, in some subtle manner?
Scorio looked past it and sensed further collection of similar sensations from random steps as they curved down and out of view.
He considered. Then, seized by impulse, he stepped right off the edge of the step into the central shaft, into that searing white light, and plummeted down the axial core.
Wind tore at his slashed and ruined robes, pulling at his hair, and his stomach pressed itself up against his diaphragm. The winding steps flashed past him, and at the last moment, he exerted his will and ignited his Heart, embracing the rush of power and summoning his enhanced form so that he was wreathed in scales when he landed lightly upon the bare stone, dropping to one knee and placing a taloned palm on the rock as he caught himself neatly.
Other than the jarring shock to his body, he felt no pain, no dizziness, nothing but grim satisfaction in his form’s new ability to handle such acrobatics.
Talons scoring the rock, he turned to the dark archway before him. This time he didn’t spare a glance for the spiral staircase that rose above him; he swept Iron into his Heart, the turgid mana responding more freely to his will than ever before, and when his reservoir was once more saturated, into the archway.
The fifteenth chamber was a crude cavern, roughly circular, the floor strewn with sand. No illumination; there was a sense of stillness, of calm, and then a section of the far wall moved, seemed to animate, and unfolded itself to face him.
Scorio took a step back, eyes widening in alarm as he gazed at his monstrous foe. He’d seen it before, once. At the very beginning of this life.
He took a slow, uneven inhalation. He heard again the screams, Nissa yelling in horror, Havert’s cries as he was torn apart.
The fiend was wider than it was tall, its hide an eruption of igneous stone, like huge spars of lava cooled to black. It leaned forward, knuckles pressed to the floor, each forearm as large as Scorio, each fist massive enough to crush his head with ease. Its head hung low and center, a mass of segmented rocks, its maw filled with saurian teeth. Incandescent eyes fixed on him.
But it was the deeply carved and ragged lines of burning purple flame that Scorio remembered best. Riotous like lightning trapped within the rocky hide, the purple light smoldered in patterns about its face, contoured its body, elevated it from some rocky horror into an eldritch force of nature. The trapped lines of flame surged and burned as if venting from an inner furnace, perhaps in time with its pulse or some deeper, more magical rhythm, but with each flare, the light left after-images in Scorio’s eyes.
The fiend twisted its head to one side, regarding Scorio with something akin to quizzical interest, then smashed a fist down into the ground, cracking the rock, and let out a roar so powerful that Scorio felt the sound in his chest cavity more than heard it with his ears.
“Come on, then,” he said, lowering himself into a crouch. He raised his arms and willed his form to emerge. Black scales slid out over his arms, coalesced around his knuckles, swept over his shoulders, down his back, over his thighs. Light, flexible, supple armor that hindered him not at all. Searing white claws emerged from his fingertips, their light equal to the burning purple, and Scorio allowed himself a dark smile as he stared at the rock fiend on the cavern’s far side. “I’ve grown a little since we last met.”
Again the fiend pounded the cavern floor, then it took three or four loping steps forward, knuckling as it went, only to hurl itself at Scorio, its strength such that it came flying right at him, claws burning as it brought a titanic fist around to clobber Scorio where he stood.
But Scorio leaped aside at the last moment, a sweetly executed dive that should have brought him up at the creature’s flank—but the fiend pivoted with alarming speed, a forearm the side of a door ripping through the air to try and backhand his head off.
Scorio’s impulse was to duck, to retreat, but a part of him, cold and impersonal, told him that to dance and bob and weave would be to expend his reservoir and leave him defenseless.
No.
With a cry, Scorio summoned his shroud. The air shimmered as his mana poured forth, and the fiend’s fist crashed into the translucent barrier. The blow was powerful enough to split rock, but it crashed into his shield, and it was the fiend’s fist that splintered, as if it had struck a wall of steel with all its force.
Scorio lunged in and thrust his burning claws into the beast’s side; slashed at the massive, corrugated black rock armor, and though he tore deep grooves he failed to penetrate deeply enough.
The rock fiend leaped back, shook out its fist, then lunged forward and tried to snatch at Scorio with its other hand, intent on scooping him up between its talons.
Scorio ducked under and threw a wicked uppercut at the fiend’s elbow, slamming his talons into the joint.
The white burning points sank deep, and this time the fiend roared in pain. It swept its arm around to batter Scorio away but missed; Scorio leaped over the arm that came at him like the boom of a ship, landed lightly right before it, ready to tear its face apart, but again his foe’s speed shocked him.
Before he’d fully landed, the rock monster drew back and punched him with everything it had.
Scorio barely had time to cross his arms before his face and summon his shroud once more before the fist the size of a barrel crashed into it. The force was such that Scorio was thrown back, shroud and all, heels sliding on the uneven floor, forcing him to stagger and catch his balance.
Victorious, the rock fiend threw its arms open wide and roared at him again, spewing ropes of spittle and causing its lightning flames to flare as if oil had been tossed into its depths.
Scorio dismissed his shroud, took a deep breath, then bellowed right back. And in that moment, he summoned his Tomb Spark power, that shimmering hemisphere whose purpose he hadn’t yet divined.