>>5239148…It’s fine, you tell yourself.
[Don’t let me sleep too long, please? I’ve still got work to do]
{Sleep as long as you like} She smiles.
You’ll rest here a while, and as you close your eyes you lose yourself in the feeling of Ozmas’s fingers on your cheek.
{Reyva}
Her voice feels distant, but her body’s so warm, cradling yours.
{Rey!}
You think you offer up an exhausted ‘what?’ to her echoing question, its urgency at odds with how far away it sounds.
{REYVA!}
Your senses snap back to a dungeon of reeking meat and twitching flesh. Ozmas is frantically clawing at your sides, tearing away the wall of biomass you’re halfway subsumed in, arms and legs being devoured by the ravenous structure. With tremendous strain you fight against the thing’s pull, as much mental as it is physical, until with the sound of tearing skin and cracking bone you collapse into Ozmas’s arms.
{I thought I’d lost you} She says, shaking as she clings to you, your strength slowly returning. {I was trapped in this place, and when I snapped out of it the walls had almost swallowed you whole}
[It was like I was asleep. I saw things, things that…] You trail off, trying to make sense of the amalgamation of memory and blissful fantasy that threatened to drown you. […what did you see?]
Ozmas freezes, her hands wavering before she helps you to your feet.
{Something impossible} She finally answers as the two of you limp to the nearby rift, with you leaning on her small frame. {Come on…}
{…we need to keep going}
The forest you find yourselves in stretches high enough to where you can’ see the tops of the trees, a constant downpour of black rain running down the faces in the grey tree bark like tears. There’s six amalgams that stalk you through this place, each one equipped with and wielding copies of every Relic you and Ozmas possess with enviable skill. You and she are exhausted when you find the exit, only to trade vast spaces for cramped quarters, the next floor a winding labyrinth of sharply-angled walls and blind corners.
You hear them before you see them—their cries echoing through the corridors and piercing into your mind long before they round the next bend in a tidal wave of soft, doughy bodies. You take point, your chitin expanding to shield Ozmas as her Lexicon reinforces sword and skill alike. When your blade cleaves through the screaming, mewling constructs their cries are drowned out by a frenzied, sorrowful bellow from somewhere deeper, still. There’s no place to go but forward, and with every fragile body you cleave through the closer the agonized howls’ source grows.
(Climb)
