Graffita Neova's Arc

Chapter 4 of 10

The empty bottle hung in Graffita's hand. Morphy stood safe beside her, but the others were gone deeper into the dark hall past the red door. She stepped to the threshold and looked in. The passage swallowed the light. She could not see the floor, the walls, or which way the others had gone. Their footsteps had left no sound and no trail. "I can't see anything," she said. "I don't know which way they went." Lord Pyra drifted to her side. His red and yellow eyes were the only light in the dark. Once he had been a man with people who leaned on him. Now only that glow remained, and it dimmed a little more each hour. "Feel with your feet," he said. "Not your eyes. The path is broken. It leads where the cracks lead." Graffita stepped in. Her foot found stone, then a gap. She knelt and pressed her palm flat. The floor was fractured, split into jagged pieces. In the deepest cracks she felt wet pools. She lifted her fingers. Even in the dark she knew the smell. Ink. Red in some cracks, black in others. "The ink runs downhill," she said. "It pools where the path drops." "Then follow the pools," Pyra said. "They flow the way the others walked." She pressed her left wrist to the broken floor. Her oldest blot, the darkest one, met the black ink in the cracks. The two matched. A faint line of her wrist-color spread along the split stone, tracing the path forward. It was not bright. It was dark on dark, low enough that no shadow-being would flinch. But her eyes, close to the ground, could just follow it. Graffita crawled deeper, marking the floor as she went. The pools guided her. Each crack she touched lit with the dull color of her wrist. Behind her the line glowed faint, a thread back to the door. Then Pyra's light stopped moving. She turned. His eyes flickered near the threshold, thinning. "I cannot cross far from the door," he said. "Go on. But if you leave, hold me in your mind. That is the only tether I have left." Graffita hesitated. To go forward, she had to leave him behind. To leave him behind was to let him fade. She looked at the glowing thread she had made, then back at his dimming eyes. "I know your name," she said. "Lord Pyra. I won't forget it while I'm in there." His eyes held. They did not brighten, but they stopped thinning. She crawled on, following the ink through the cracked stone. The dark no longer blinded her. Her wrist and the pooled ink showed the way. Deep in the passage, a shape moved. Small hands. Painted fingers, like Morphy's. She had found the first of the others.