Zach Brenner's Arc

Chapter 80 of 86

The demon was dead. The black river ran still. Zach stood over the passage it had guarded and felt cold air rise from below. Ayla's light reached the edge and stopped. Beyond it, the floor dropped into nothing. He could not see the bottom or what waited there. Garrok kicked a chunk of rock over the lip. They listened. No sound came back. "That's a long way down," the barbarian said. Lyra knelt and pressed her palms to the stone. Her face went tight. "Something's alive down there. Slow. Old. Worse than the one we just killed." She pulled her hands back like the rock had burned her. Zach looked at the drop. His new blade had no light of its own. He had no rope long enough. Then the air behind them shifted. Armin stood at the passage mouth. The keeper of the fog had followed them down. He was gray as ash, thinner than before, but standing. When Zach first met him days ago, this man had ruled a buried city of stolen souls. The fog had made him a slave, forced to gather the taken. Now the fog was gone from him, and he had come on his own feet. "You should be dead," Zach said. "Killing the guardian gave me back my strength," Armin said. His dark eyes moved to the drop. "That thing fed on me for a hundred years. It made me take the villagers. Everything I did, it did through my hands." He stepped to the edge. "The one below is the root. It commanded the demon. It commanded me. I want to help you end it." Raven notched a bolt and watched him. "Why should we trust you?" "Because I know what waits down there, and you don't." Armin raised one hand. Thin threads of pale fog curled from his fingers. "I can't see the bottom either. But I can carry us to it." Talon glanced at Zach. "Your call, brother." Zach thought of the twins waiting at the castle. He thought of every empty village. The root was here. If they climbed back out now, the fog would only rise again. "Do it," Zach said. He took Raven's hand. "Together. Same as always." The others locked arms in a ring. Garrok gripped Talon's shoulder. Ayla held her staff high so the light stayed with them. Armin spread his fog across the group, and it lifted them off the ledge. They sank into the dark. The walls fell away. Ayla's crystal lit only rock, then nothing, then rock again, closer now. The air grew hot and thick. Far below, two eyes opened. They were larger than any Zach had seen, and they burned green. His boots touched stone. The fog set them down at the bottom of the world. The thing that had commanded Armin, the demon, and the whole black curse rose before them, vast in the dark. "There," Armin whispered. "The root."