Graffita Neova's Arc

Chapter 6 of 10

Hazy crawled ahead on the painted line. Graffita followed, one hand on the cold stone. Then a new pull started behind her eyes. Lord Pyra, the shadow-being she carried in her mind, was slipping. She had kept him anchored since she entered the dark. Now his shape thinned, like smoke pulled apart by wind. "Pyra," she said. "Stay with me." His voice came faint. "I am fading. You held me a long time. It is enough." "It's not enough." Graffita stopped crawling. If he faded, her tether snapped. Without him she had no map back through the passage. She would sit here in the black until it swallowed her, the way it nearly swallowed Hazy. "Tell me how to hold you." "You cannot hold me on the crawl. You forget me a little each time you look away." His red and yellow eyes dimmed in her thoughts. "I was a lord once. People leaned on me. I tried to be worth it." Hazy turned. Her green eye found the empty air where Graffita stared. "Something's on you," Hazy said. "Thin now. Almost gone." "He's a friend," Graffita said. "He's fading. I don't know how to keep him." Hazy watched a moment. "Then don't just hold him. Make him." Graffita understood. She had been gripping Pyra like a rope, and a grip loosens. But she made things. She pressed her left wrist to the broken floor. The oldest blot, her darkest, met the black ink in the cracks. She pulled the shade out slow and drew a wisp on the stone. Two eyes, red and yellow, low and dim. Then a body above them, thin and dark, the way she remembered him at the red door. "What are you doing," Pyra said. "Putting you where I can't look away." She did not paint bright. Bright would erase him. She stayed dark, one careful shade, matched to the passage itself. The figure held on the cracked path, red pools glinting in the fractures around it. The pull behind her eyes eased. Pyra's voice steadied. "I feel the floor," he said. "I am on it." "You're on it," Graffita said. "You don't live only in my head now. You live on the road out." His painted eyes brightened a shade. "Then I can lead. The ink pools run back to the door. Follow the red in the cracks." Graffita looked at the winding path ahead. The red ink threaded through the broken stone, on and on toward the far door. She had spent nearly all her wrist paint on Hazy, and now on Pyra. Her wrist felt light, drained. But Pyra was anchored to the ground, not to her failing memory. She would not lose him in the dark. She rose to her knees beside Hazy and set her hand on the first shade. "Move," Graffita said. "He'll show the turns." They crawled. Behind them, deeper still, the other trapped shapes waited. And her wrist had almost nothing left.