Zach Brenner's Arc

Chapter 79 of 86

The keeper lay gray on the tower floor, the whole fog trapped in his body. Zach caught his shoulder before he slid further down. "You said it comes from below," Zach said. "Show me where." The pale man's dark eyes rolled toward the floor, toward something under the buried city. Zach called down the stairs. His companions came fast, boots ringing on stone. Raven reached him first, then Talon, Lyra, Ayla, and Garrok filling the small room. Zach knelt close. "Can you get us there? Armin, can you send us to the source?" It was the first time Zach had used his name. The keeper studied him, weighing the light he could feel but not touch. "Yes," Armin said. "I can get you there." His voice cracked. "But I must warn you. He is guarded by creatures. And he himself is a powerful demon." His hand shook as he gathered the last of his strength. "Take us down there," Zach said. Armin pressed his palm flat to the stone. The fog inside him bled out through his fingers and spread across the floor. It did not sleep them. It opened. The tower floor turned soft as water. Zach grabbed Raven's hand. "Together," he said. The others locked arms in a ring, the way they always had. The gray swallowed them. They dropped into a wet dark. Zach landed hard on black rock. The air stank of rot and old smoke. Ayla lifted her staff, and the silver crystal threw white light across a vast cavern. A river of black water moved through it. At its center, on a mound of bone, sat a shape. It rose. Claws scraped stone. Red eyes opened in a face too large for any man. Around it, hooded things unfolded from the walls, dozens of them, claws out. Lyra pressed her hands to the rock and went pale. "They're all around us," she said. "And the thing in the middle. Its heart barely beats. Like Darkthorne did." Garrok raised his axe. "Then we start swinging." "No." Zach remembered fire and steel sliding off these things. "Steel won't cut them. Lyra, ice. Ayla, light with her. Talon, keep them off the mages." He drew his new blade. It had no magic of its own. It had only him. The demon charged. The cavern broke into noise. Lyra's frost cracked across the front rank and Ayla's light burned through the cracks, and the hooded things shrieked and fell to ash. Talon cut between them, two blades flashing. Raven fired bolt after bolt. Zach drove straight for the red-eyed thing on the bones. It swung a claw that would have split him. Zach dropped under it and buried his blade in its chest, twisting. The slow heart stopped. The demon fell. Its body sank into the black water and did not rise. The river went still. The fog had no source left to feed it. Zach stood in the sudden quiet, breathing hard, alive. Behind him, Ayla's light showed a passage the demon had guarded. Something waited beyond it, deeper still.