System Report:

  Scramble

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  “We are not getting out this way!”

  Lionel was forced to shout to be heard over the chaos—the trembling walls, the frantic baubles, and the thundering echoes of whatever was going on upstairs. Bad as things were inside the chamber, however, they were worse outside.

  Having only just braced himself against the door he’d slammed shut, he could feel the torrent of water crash into the wood from the other side. It bucked like a terrified mule. Lionel bucked harder.

  From the brief glimpse he’d managed of the corridor, he’d seen enough dark and churning sea to rethink any plans of “let’s leave the way we came.” And that wasn’t even taking into account the fish-faced acquaintances that’d been riding the waves.

  Now, Lionel could hear furious gurgles and hisses as crude weaponry crashed against the door.

  How long it would last was anyone’s guess. He suspected the answer was “not long enough.”

  Inside the room, hope was in even shorter supply. There were no exits, no hidden passages, no conveniently forgotten ventilation shaft. And the two people trapped in here with him did not inspire courage.

  The Delver woman was still on the floor, clutching her head like someone about to lose their sanity. As for Annabell…

  Annabell was looking at him. Chin raised. Smirk cocked and loaded.

  “What?” Lionel barked as another impact shuddered through the door. Water was bleeding through the cracks and pooling at his boots.

  “I’ve figured it out,” she declared, puffing out her chest with the smug, self-satisfaction of a monocled toad.

  Lionel, still serving as a human-shaped buffer against the straining door, only managed a grimace. That last collision had rattled his teeth.

  “Look,” she said, sauntering across the chamber—sauntering, in a room that was trembling like a frightened jelly and filled with the manic ticking and whirling of unstable arcane contraptions.

  “Earlier,” she said, gesturing vaguely at the ceiling, “when something up there went KABOOM, a bunch of these little things went out.”

  Without a shred of concern for how it was glowing like a miniature sun and trembling like something about to explode, she plucked one of the baubles from its perch. It hummed angrily in her hand. With her other hand she grabbed another—this one dark, silent, and thoroughly burnt-out.

  “Now, reason dictates,” Annabell continued, “that either we’re supposed to turn these back on…” She lifted the dead bauble.

  “Or we’re supposed to make these noisy ones stop being so noisy.” She lifted the trembling, whining one—the one that was currently emitting a high-pitched shriek somewhere between “straining clockwork” and “tiny banshee.”

  “And if you ask me,” she added, eyes sparkling with unwise enthusiasm, “one of these sounds far more entertaining.”

  Before Lionel could challenge her logic, before he could even register the wild gleam in her eyes—the unmistakable gleam of a child who had just gotten an excuse to press the big red button—Annabell casually tossed the shrieking bauble over her shoulder.

  Away from him.

  Even if he’d seen it coming, he wouldn’t have had time to stop her. All he could do was watch in slow, horrified resignation as it arced through the air.

  A quiet, “For fuck’s sake,” escaped Lionel’s lips as the fragile, furious little thing shattered against the stone floor.

  ***

  Mayhem.

  It had, up until this point, merely been implied, but now it had taken on a very physical form—mostly crackling, burning, and falling down in large, unfriendly pieces.

  The fire ripped through the church, eagerly licking along blackened pews and swallowing hymn sheets whole. The chanting of the congregation had mostly been replaced by the roar of flames and the sound of burning timber arguing with gravity.

  Somewhere above, a blackened support beam gave a sharp crack! and came crashing down through the haze.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  Yenna could barely see. Smoke thick as soup swirled through the hall, stinging her eyes and turning every shadow into something alive and moving. She fumbled through the heat, searching for Alana—though “searching” was perhaps too deliberate a word for the panicked, half-blind staggering she was doing.

  Instead of the woman, what she found were two figures, barrelling through the flames and utterly indifferent to how their clothes were actively trying to combust.

  She dodged the first one on instinct, swinging the satchel at the second with enough force to make an impressive thunk as it caught him on the side of the head. It didn’t stop the man.

  He tackled her to the ground, knocking the air from her lungs as they went down in a screaming tangle of limbs and whirling smoke. Yenna kicked, twisted, clawed, but it was like wrestling a brick wall. He was larger than her. Heavier. And he couldn’t have cared less about her feeble attempts at gouging out his eyes

  He pinned her to the floor, breath hot, grip iron.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed the other figure—still smouldering—pick up an iron candle holder. A heavy one. The sort designed for both piety and blunt-force trauma.

  Yenna’s heart thundered in her ears, saliva thick with soot and blood as he turned toward her. The flames danced across the man’s face, blissfully unaware how his robes were merrily burning around him.

  His focus was on her. He was going to kill her.

  Yenna could see it in his eyes—that cold, vacant certainty that comes when someone’s stopped being a person and started being an instrument. Her instincts took over. She screamed—“Fucking bastards! Let me go!”—raw and strained. She spat, clawed, cursed and bit into the hands holding her down, but it made no difference.

  Panic flooded her veins, hot and useless.

  This was it.

  This was how she was going to die — on the floor of a burning church, pinned by a lunatic, while someone swung a candle holder the size of a small anvil at her head.

  The man raised it high.

  And then—

  His fingers slackened. His eyes went glassy.

  For a moment, as the heavy candle holder clanked to the floor, he looked terribly confused. And then he simply folded, as though someone had reached in and scooped out the bits of him that did the thinking and the being alive.

  The man holding her down went limp a heartbeat later, slumping to the side like a felled boar.

  Yenna lay there for a moment longer, breath ragged, blinking through smoke and disbelief, before hurriedly dragging herself upright. Her body protested the decision, but she wasn’t in a mood to listen. She was coughing, wheezing, bleeding, and profoundly confused.

  Around her, more shadows were collapsing—toppling over one by one, like grotesque dominoes in a game no one wanted to play.

  If her ears hadn’t been ringing with the noise of fire, cracking beams, and general disaster, she might have noticed the delicate plink, crash, plink of glass breaking somewhere beneath them. She might even have heard the accompanying laugh—bright, manic, and far too pleased with itself.

  But all Yenna caught, cutting through the smoke and chaos, was a furious voice shouting from somewhere nearby:

  “No!”

  An instant later, a thunderous force ripped through the church. Pews screeched across the floor, hymnals scattered like startled pigeons, and the rippling aftershock nearly knocked Yenna over. More than that, however, it bullied the smoke aside, giving her a first clear look of the hall’s epicentre.

  Alana—who seemed to be held together largely by spite and anger—was peeling herself off the wooden altar she’d just split with her ribcage, spitting blood by the mouthful as if she’d run out of patience with even her own internal organs.

  As for the origin of the shockwave… It wasn’t difficult to spot.

  At the eye of the storm, dust and smoke swirling around him, stood the priest. He had yet to move from Mari’s corpse, even as he bore all the hallmarks of a man who had been through every possible argument with fire and lost. Flames had flirted outrageously with his robes, soot had claimed his hands in dark streaks, and multiple cuts were bleeding freely along his arms and sides.

  And yet he stood.

  Hands raised.

  Voice booming out a string of words Yenna couldn’t comprehend even while they echoed directly into her ears.

  Not that she needed a translation.

  The moment the first syllable left his mouth, the entire church trembled, and a certain timer made its presence known.

  A timer that had rapidly bled out in the chaos.

  00:00:15…

  Whatever lay at the end of that chant, it was bad news.

  00:00:13…

  Yenna’s first step, trembling and unstable, sent her shoulder crashing into a nearby stone pillar. Her second step was no better, nearly tripping over a stray corpse. By the third, however, she was running—staggering, faltering, yet nevertheless running.

  00:00:010…

  Through flames, smoke, and smouldering debris, she ran, ignoring the fact that her lungs were rapidly developing a deep-seated hatred for her and all things burning. “Alana!” she croaked between increasingly shallow gasps. “Stop him! We need to… Stop him!”

  00:00:07…

  Tripping over kindling church seating as she burst through the smoke, she saw her there; Alana, already on her own lopsided sprint, heading straight for the priest.

  00:00:05…

  They reached him at the same time, lunging, two trajectories converging with lethal intent. The priest, however, didn’t flinch. Not a glance. Not a pause. Beneath his robes, something… fidgeted as he continued his chant.

  00:00:04…

  Fleshy appendages—neither human nor insectile yet stuck in the cursed limbo in between—shot outward.

  They were fast. They were strong.

  One punched straight through Alana’s side, pinning her to the floor. Another cracked through the air, swatting Yenna aside with ease.

  00:00:02…

  She struck the wall. Hard. Hard enough for her vision to flicker out of focus. By the time it returned to several gasped breaths, it was already too late.

  00:00:00

  Warning!

  Prevention of ritual failed.

  The Deepest One awakes…