Chương 134: Chapter 67: Don't Look at Me Like That

Once they stood up, their breathing still heavy with the viscous memory of the blood and Alistair's shadow looming over their consciences, they returned to the edge of the circular room. The plan, drawn with the coldness of those who can no longer afford the luxury of a mistake, was simple and brutal. Astrid, with her ancient shoes that endowed her with a supernatural, stealthy lightness, would be the extractor.

They would tie a sturdy rope around her waist, and if anything, anything at all, went wrong, Magnor would yank her out of there with the brute strength of his bear-like arms. Selena, for her part, would watch the giant's back, her senses and her strange perception of the Void alert to any threat emerging from the surrounding darkness. The room had not changed. There stood the stone figures, silhouettes frozen in their eternal clamor of hunger. And, in the corner, the simple altar.

Kneeling before it was the clean, gleaming skeleton of Alistair, his bones crossed in mute prayer. Beside him, resting on the stone as if it had always belonged to that place, was the sword of distorted reflections. The artifact. With a knot of anticipation and fear in their throats, they executed the final step of the plan. Astrid nodded, a quick dip of her head, and then she launched herself. It was a spectacle of unnatural grace and speed.

Her footsteps did not echo; it was as if she slid over the air, a blonde and silver blur that crossed the room in a breath. She reached the altar, her hands closing around the hilt of the sword. And instantly, the price became visible. From her ears, two thin crimson threads sprouted, tracing dark paths down her neck. But Astrid did not let go. With gritted teeth and a fierce determination lighting up her blue eyes, she hugged the sword against her chest, as if it were a precious and accursed child. —Now!

—she cried, her voice a tense thread in the silence. Magnor pulled. The muscles of his back and arms tightened like steel cables beneath his skin, and the rope stretched with a groaning sound of protest. But the resistance was not just physical; it was as if the very air of the room had turned into thick honey, or as if the weight of the place's curse were clinging to Astrid and her burden. The giant grunted, anchoring his feet into the stone, but he could barely move her.

Without a second thought, Selena lunged toward the rope, adding her weight and strength, pulling alongside Magnor. It was a joint, desperate effort, a silent struggle against invisible inertia. Slowly, inch by inch, Astrid was dragged backward, out of the altar's circle of influence, away from the motionless skeleton. When she finally cleared the room, falling to her knees in the corridor, both of them released the rope, panting.

Astrid breathed raggedly, the blood still staining her neck, but her hands gripped the sword with an iron tenacity. —They said… that everything would be fine —she murmured between gulps of air, her eyes staring at nothing with a troubling detachment. —I even think I managed to see… my old home. In the distance. She said no more, as if revealing that flash of illusion, that personal mirage at the moment of the theft, were a secret too intimate or too dangerous.

Quickly, Selena applied a lesser healing scroll to the wounds on her ears. The written touch stopped the flow. The dried blood remained like a tattooed reminder on her skin. There was no time for more. They retrieved the artifact, wrapping it in a thick cloth to muffle its strange reflections, and resumed their march, venturesome deeper into the labyrinth of corridors that throbbed with the sickly life of the cave.

In one of the numerous turns, where the darkness thickened and the air smelled of dead stardust and old ink, they heard them. Voices. They did not come from any visible body, but from the very shadows accumulating in the recesses of the stone. Intersecting whispers, fragments of incoherent dialogues, like echoes of conversations trapped in time. The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement. —The Immortal King sent me to find the artifact…

—hissed a shadow, its tone full of a phantasmal certainty. —That is not possible, the Immortal King died when I was a child… —another replied, with the nostalgia of an impossible memory. A third, with a guttural and musical accent, intervened: —Sultan Nasir al-Mu'tasim is the only one worthy of the dungeon and its power… Suddenly, as if uttering that name had broken a spell of silence, all the shadows fell quiet. Selena felt, rather than saw, how their indistinct forms turned toward them.

There were no eyes, but she felt the weight of a concentrated attention, ancient and heavy with intent. —They are coming! —Selena managed to exhale, at the same time opening her mouth, preparing a wordless word of power, a defensive verb that would consume part of her future. But Astrid was faster. With a sharp, decisive movement, she pricked the tip of her index finger with the point of a dagger. Without a groan, she let the blood drip onto the stone floor of the corridor.

Then, with her bleeding finger as a brush, she traced a series of erratic and complex movements over the rocky surface. As she drew, the blood did not pool; it was absorbed by the stone like a thirsty sponge. And where her finger passed, the rock itself responded. With dull, deep rumbling, the corridor behind them began to close. It was a transformation: the walls buckled, the ceiling descended, the floor rose, sealing the opening in a matter of seconds with a solid and impenetrable mass of living, enraged stone.

The advance of the shadows was blocked by a barrier of rock that did not exist moments before. A heavy silence, broken only by the ragged breathing of the group, filled the corridor of no return. Magnor slowly lowered his staff, adopting a less tense combat stance, though his eyes continued to scan the new wall and the darkness ahead. —That was a timely move —he said, his grave voice acknowledging the fact without embellishment. —Remember to bandage your finger. Do not waste blood in this place; you may need it.

It was then, while Astrid nodded with that calm forged in urgency, that her skin began to change. It was something deeper, more obscene. The surface of her face, of her hands, rippled like the surface of a lake under an invisible stone. Then, with a dull, wet sound, the sound of a veil being torn from within, her skin literally turned inside out. It was not a violent tearing, but a slow, inverted unfolding, like the turning of a glove.

What lay exposed was not the bright red of fresh muscle, but a layer of dark, shiny, and damp fibers that throbbed with a rhythm of their own, alien to the beat of a human heart. Blood vessels thick as worms writhed among the muscular bundles; a sweet, metallic odor of raw flesh and hot iron flooded the corridor. Selena and Magnor leapt backward, survival instinct screaming louder than any bond of camaraderie. The figure that had been Astrid looked at them; she felt it on her skin. How can she look without eyes?

Selena thought, and from the mass of vibrating flesh emerged a voice, but not from a mouth. It was a torn sound, dragged from the depths of that new anatomy, resonating directly in their bones: —Why… do you… look at me… like that? —Astrid's voice, but shattered, mixed with the gurgling of moving fluids. There was no possible answer. Before their eyes, the muscular mass began to writhe. These were not contractions, but transformations.

The bundles unraveled and intertwined in impossible patterns, living geometries of agony. The humanoid shape dissolved, collapsing in on itself into an amorphous, pulsing mass, the size of a man but without definite features, save for a translucent, purplish skin beneath which throbbed networks of black and blue veins. From its surface, the voice emerged again, now a collective, mournful whisper: —Don't… look at me… like that. A chill ran down Selena and Magnor's spines.

It was the chill of pure horror, of seeing a companion, a mind, dissolve into something that was no longer human nor monster, but a nightmare made throbbing flesh. But the nightmare did not stop to contemplate its own horror. From the central mass emerged, so fast that the air hissed, two appendages. They were living spears of sharp, whitish bone, bursting from the flesh like the thorns of an infernal beast, and they moved with a speed that eclipsed the crack of a whip. Selena did not even have time to blink.

A dull, deep, and sudden pain exploded in her right eye socket. The light, the visual field, the very sensation of having that eye, vanished completely, replaced by a warm, painful darkness that extended into her brain. A thick, hot liquid began to run down her cheek, not just tears, but something more vital, darker. To her left, a grunt of stifled agony. Magnor was staggering.

Where the front half of his left foot used to be, steel boot and all, there was now only a jagged, bleeding stump, with the metatarsal bone exposed like a broken, white fang. Blood gushed out, painting the stone a vivid red. The crimson and purplish mass, now with its two bony appendages dripping dark fluids, slowed down. It moved slower this time, as if the act of attacking had fatigued it, or as if it were savoring its next onslaught.