The same place from which I’d entered the Drains.
The guttural god of light didn’t reach here. The light faded.
I found my feet.
Ur, too, recovered. Shadows breaking out of the walls, cutting off my escape.
9.06
I’m back.
The demon pulled itself free. A long limb here, serrated on one side with teeth, like some horrifically long jawbone. A length of connective tissue there, with flesh sloughing off. A pillar of flesh, extending floor to ceiling, like a long neck or a torso without ribs… all pitch black.
Welcome home, Blake, I thought.
If there were more details to be seen, I didn’t make them out, my eyes fixed on the floor. After the Drains, near-complete darkness and then the brightness of the lost god’s light, the contrast seemed stark here. Even the dim seemed far brighter than the tracts of utter darkness that the sunlight didn’t touch.
Light and dark.
Being in the Drains had helped, in a way. I’d spent far too long straining my eyes to make things out in the darkness. Now, in the midst of the factory, I was especially aware of the illumination from the windows, the way the dust lit up the shafts of light.
Two windows on the north face, four on the east face. The light that came in did so in dim, murky shafts, painting long stripes of light across the floor. The only paths I could travel. I couldn’t even think about moving through the deepest darkness. I couldn’t see what was happening in there. Ur’s domain in entirety.
Time seemed to move in slow motion. It didn’t, but it seemed like it. I had no heartbeat, no breath to mark the seconds. Motes of dust moved lazily through the air, stirred into flurries here and there by Ur’s movement. Ur moved with the force of the tide coming in, slow, impossible to hold back, covering too much ground to even fight against. If I tried to stop him, he’d only sweep in on either side of me, snatch me up, and devour me.
He was vast in a way I couldn’t put words to, the sort of massive that meant he extended from this reality to the Drains, and maybe to other places.
Comparatively, I was less than I had been. Which wasn’t a bad thing, not entirely. The meat had been carved from my bone, metaphorically speaking. My ears, after that constant noise, were almost ringing in the silence. No blood pounded in my ears or made phantom noises. Every noise I heard was real.
I had very little to lose here, as I’d already lost just about everything. At the same time, I had everything to fight for. I’d fought this far, and I wasn’t about to lose my momentum. He was weak, and I had only this one moment to grasp my next move, to wrap my head around the situation and deal with the shock of being back.
The only noises were Ur’s. Grinding his way against a solid surface, slithering, slopping. Faint noises.
If I wanted to, I could simply focus my gaze, ignore the movements in my peripheral vision, dismiss the sounds as something else entirely. Pretend the problem didn’t exist.
I heard a grating noise behind me, something moving against the wall.
I moved. Long strides. Not to the windows. The windows were a trap, I knew that now. The light they shed wasn’t protection, and Ur could and would grab me before I made it.
No, I ran to the place where the shafts of light across the floor criss-crossed. Diamonds and squares were formed where the light crossed paths. I felt Ur clutch me, and I tore free, falling in the process.
I pulled myself to my feet. I didn’t stand in the darkness. I stood at the center of the grid of light. Almost the center of the factory floor, eyes on the ground.
A makeshift diagram of light, diamonds and squares drawn out by the natural intersection of light coming in from the windows.
One maneuver on my part, one maneuver on Ur’s. I’d covered four paces, while Ur continued to swell in size, claiming all of the darkness around me. Grasping hands, moving faces of animals or insects, lunging movements, all in my peripheral vision. Every little movement distracted, demanding that I betray common sense and look, because any of it might be an attack, a bite, a claw, a reaching tendril, a trick.
Any of it might be a feint, as it turned out.
One lunging hand plunged past a shaft of sunlight, briefly illuminated, crumbling in the light even as it reached. Past the second shaft of sunlight- half the size. Past the third- flesh sloughing off to reveal a reaching, grasping claw, smaller than my own hand, but with fingers like kitchen knives.
I slashed out with the Hyena, pre-emptive, before it could do anything to me. It seized the blade, and it wasn’t cut. It pulled me.
If I’d been more clever, I might simply have abandoned the weapon, a casualty of war.
As it stood, I resisted and tried to match Ur’s strength with my own.
He slowly dragged me toward the darkness, inch by inch. I didn’t pull so much as I angled my body to make dragging me harder. Low to the ground, legs straight out, feet skidding on the floor.