He had no room for thought, though. That was not what duty was about.
Because he certainly had no idea. Not beyond giving Ulbecetonth something to focus on, something she couldn’t resist attacking. How effective that would be with just a sword on his back was another problem best left to men who weren’t incredibly stupid.
Men with simpler problems had simpler goals. Both of his were bobbing in the water. The severed heads of the Deepshriek floated, brushing against each other as though they couldn’t bear to be separated in death.
He could feel the great emptiness below him again, the vast yawn of space and silence that came before the moment of calamity. His shoulder seared with the agony. The water boiled with Ulbecetonth’s anger. He made a single desperate grab and caught the auburn and ebon hair of the two heads a mere moment before the water erupted and something seized him.
He struggled to keep ahold of sword and heads alike as the tentacle wrenched him from the water and pulled him into the air. The world spun around him as he hauled up to face a coral-scarred visage and a single burning eye.
“You came back,” Ulbecetonth murmured, voices echoing off of each other. “You hateful, vile little thing. You came back.”
Her voice robbed him of any sort of reply he might have had. It drank the breath from his throat.
“I could have given you anything, I would have given you anything, just to leave my children alone.”
“Can’t,” he replied, straining as the tentacle tightened around him.
“I wanted to believe.”
The world shifted, the tentacle raised him. The ceiling loomed closer, the mossy stalactites shimmering against the green firelight. For a moment, he thought he might be crushed against the tremendous stone teeth. The Kraken Queen didn’t like him nearly enough to be that gentle with him, though.
He looked down. In the shadows of the waves, he saw the thousand eyes staring up at him like a thousand hateful stars. Her mouth gaped open beneath him, baring row upon row of jagged saw-teeth that stretched down her gullet. And from the darkness of her mouth, eyes stared back at him.
They came lashing out of her gullet, eels snapping and screeching and smiling wildly as they reached out to snatch and chew and wail for his blood. His sword slashed wildly, beating back each eager maw, each wild eye. Heads were bloodied, the eels fell back, but rose again and again. His arm seared, his shoulder bled and Ulbecetonth’s teeth loomed ever closer as the tentacle lowered him like a writhing worm.
Tactics that did not range from stupid to desperate had never been plentiful. Now seemed a poor time to shun them. He hurled his blade and watched it lodge in Ulbecetonth’s cheek, the demon not even flinching.
Right, he thought. That’ll do it for stupid. He hefted the twin heads, aimed them as best he could. Now for desperate.
“Scream.”
They obliged as their sister had. The sharp whine amplified to a wail as they opened their mouths and made the air quake. They erupted, swallowing both his screams and Ulbecetonth’s as the great demon was sent reeling. Her tentacle flailed, weakening, as it shot up toward the ceiling.
Lenk seized the moss purely by chance, slammed against the stalactite as the tentacle tossed him, the screams of the Deepshriek having left him barely any wit to know what was happening. He held on purely by grit, clinging to the moss as he watched Ulbecetonth trying to shake the shrieks loose from her skull. She turned her scowl upward and, slowly, every tentacle joined in purpose as they slithered up from the deep and reached toward his precarious perch.
Desperate, stupid, everything.
He tied the heads to his belt, pried a patch of the moss from the stalactite, jammed it into his ears.
Sorry, Kataria. Sorry I couldn’t do it the right way.
He felt a tentacle brush against his boot, straining to reach him.
But it’s you I’m going to think of when I die. With my own thoughts, no one else’s.
He tore the heads free, lifed them, aimed them toward a sizable stalactite hanging overhead.
Hope that’s enough.
“Scream.”
They did.
The air and earth shook, their wails joining the Deepshriek’s agonized harmony. The air was flensed, the stone was cracked, Lenk felt blood pooling behind the moss in his ears. His shoulder bled. His arm felt too dead to hold the heads.
But the stone cracked. The stalactite quivered at its ancient root. Lesser spears broke, fell to dig into Ulbecetonth’s arms, face, ignored by the demon. The great old stone groaned ominously, its pain rivaling even that of the Deepshriek. Lenk felt something coil around his ankle, tug appraisingly. He could feel Ulbecetonth’s mouth yawning beneath him. He could feel her whisper to him from the dark.
“It was always going to end this way.”
And then, nothing. No more sound. Everything went silent as the stone cracked, quaked, broke.
And fell.
A spear sent from above, it plunged into her, making her two as it drove down into her chest. It split her squarely down the middle, dividing her, spilling darkness into darkness. Her scream matched the stone’s, the air’s, the water’s, sending the waves trembling and the rocks falling from above.
And still she reached. Still she pulled.
“I SHOWED YOU MERCY!” she howled. “I GAVE YOU THE CHANCE TO RUN! WHY? WHY DO YOU HATE ME SO MUCH?”
In every part of him, every drop of blood, every dying limb, every thought that was his own, there was no answer to that question.
The earth met her scream with another of its own. The ceiling cracked, the great wound left by the stalactite’s plummet widening. They came at first as small drops of silver, splattering upon her flesh to blacken the translucence. Then, they came as rivulets, seeping into her eyes.
Then, it came as a flood.
A great column of water descending from on high, drowning her in silver and steam and shrieks, with no end in sight.
The blood of the mountain.
The water that carried her to hell.
She remembered it.
The ceiling cracked further. His own perch twitched, quaked, collapsed. He plummeted into the water below. In the darkness, he drifted and watched her die. Her teeth gnashed down there, screaming out in water that wouldn’t obey her anymore. And Lenk watched her, breathlessly and bloodlessly, as her countless eyes winked out, one by one, until only one remained.
And it remained, fixed not upon him, but on the vast, dark emptiness surrounding it. Until it, too, disappeared.
Lenk closed his eyes and told himself he did the right thing. Ulbecetonth was dead. He was content to follow her.
Someone else, apparently, was not.
He felt himself dragged awkwardly through the water, Kataria’s violent thrashing pulling him away from the walkway vanishing beneath a rising tide and through a veil of steam.
Ulbecetonth’s skin crunched beneath him as he was dragged up onto her back. He stared up at the silvery water raining from above, falling through clouds of steam rising on sighs glutted by suffering.
Pretty, he thought. Kind of like clouds, right?
No one answered.
Never seen something so pretty.
A face, dark and stained by blood, appeared over him a moment later.
That’s more like it.
“You were supposed to run,” he said, voice weak.
“Where?” she asked.
“Somewhere else.”
“There is nowhere else.”
He heard the ceiling cracking overhead. All around, more and more scars appeared in the earth as more stalactites fell and more columns of silver plummeted into the water. The water drank the stone, the walkway, the statues, the archways disappearing as it rose upon tides of black and silver. Lenk felt himself rising as Ulbecetonth rose. And fell.