The four of us traveled beneath the ice for a week before the stone beneath us began to rise, taking the shape of mountains long entombed in the depths of the worldwide glacier. At first, I was worried that space would run out between the ice and the stone, but it proved not to be an issue. When the ice was just a foot or so above our heads, Nissikul reached one hand up and ran her fingers along it, and a way was opened for us. The black witch-ice, as she called it in her tongue, would snake out ahead of us and consume the ice in our path, rendering it into powder and piling it behind us as we passed. Between the call of Ravanur's compulsion and Nissi's abilities, we made good time, and it took only two days for us to find the mouth of the cave that contained the temple. Camp that night was a somewhat more festive experience than normal, and even though our rations were scarce, when we woke in the morning everyone's spirits were high. We packed our things quickly, excited to see the interior of the temple and find the conclusion to our quest. Before we knew it, we were standing at the entrance to the lost temple of Ravanur, and our excitement was very quickly tempered by unease.

"It doesn't look like a temple," Thukkar commented, disquiet evident in his voice. Volistad and I had been drilling in the language of the Erin-Vulur during the whole trip, and though I wasn't going to be carrying on a complicated conversation anytime soon, I could at least understand the gist of what everyone was saying.

Nissikul snorted and swatted Thukkar playfully on the back of the head, elaborately unconcerned. “Have some respect, ranger. You stand before the ancient heart of our god. It would not do to anger her here.”

The front of the temple was not particularly impressive. The cave we were standing in simply ended in a smooth, unadorned, unmarked wall of stone. Set in the center of the wall was an open doorway, gaping black like a window into the abyss. I shrugged. “I guess we just go inside?”

Volistad grumbled impatiently and started forward. "We came here to get you to the center of this place; we should just go. The Erin-Vulur are in great danger." He strode to the door confidently, his shoulders squared and determined. The rest of us followed a short distance back, wary even in the face of Volistad's obvious boldness. As the ranger approached the unassuming door, prickles of trepidation began to crawl up my spine, growing ever more intense the closer he got to the opening. Soon, the anxiety was so intense that I couldn't help taking a step forward and calling, "Volistad, wait!"

The ranger did not wait. With the kind of exaggerated nonchalance only displayed by someone who is very nervous, Volistad stepped into the doorway and disappeared into the darkness. We waited, all of us holding our breath. Three or four seconds passed in agonizing silence, and then Volistad called from within, "It's fine, come on!" We all sighed together and trudged to the door. My heart still raced in my chest, and that unfocused sense of unease remained. I looked over at Nissikul as she stepped past me and approached the door. She didn't seem to feel it. Sure, she seemed nervous, but no more nervous than her brother, or Thukkar. Why was I the only one affected like this? I shook my head and followed the Stormcaller inside, stepping into the darkness with my spine tensed against some unknown threat.

Nissi's light was making lazy circles of the room, and I was gratified to see that this room actually looked like it belonged in a temple. Every wall was covered in dense, circular script, just like the monoliths. Hanging from pins driven deep into the stone were long, limp banners, marked with Erin-Vulur phrases. They were lines from the High Epic, just like the graffiti on the monoliths had been. Had the priests here made the marks on the standing stone prison cells? There was no way of knowing. The room was broad and circular, arranged like an amphitheater. The stonework was the same as the outside of the temple. Everything seemed to have been shaped straight from the stone, worked by some method that left neither chisel mark nor errant chipping. The stone had not weathered or crumbled- though I guessed that had more to do with the glacier sealing this place off than it was the result of some magick or divine intervention. Scattered across the whole of the amphitheater was the detritus of regular ritual and use. Several vellum scrolls crumbled to dust on a low stone table that grew directly from the ground, flanked by several ritual tools, whose uses I could not divine from their shapes.

Nissikul crossed to the table and lifted one of the ritual tools, an odd contraption that looked like a mechanical six-fingered hand, tipped with claws. She held it carefully to her nose and sniffed, immediately grimacing with evident revulsion. “This is a kazakatta- a heart-taker. It has been used many times. I can still smell the blood.” She worked the handle in a manner I couldn’t follow, and the claws suddenly snapped forward, closing the hand as if it were wrapped around something. A heart, I thought, and swallowed hard. That was for tearing out a sacrifice's heart. "Your people would kill with that?” I asked, horrified.

“Not for a very long time,” Nissikul responded, putting the sinister thing back down on the stone. “They are mentioned in a few of my Elder’s scrolls, but they’re not needed anymore. They were for removing the hearts of the corrupted so that the Dark Ones hiding within could be entombed, or so I read.”

I stared at the razor claws, imagining them piercing my skin, sliding past my ribs, gripping… I shook my head again, forcibly not thinking about it- with only limited success. Volistad seemed not to have noticed Nissi’s revelation. Instead, he was inspecting another low table, this one spread with an array of weapons, each of them as fine as his own- but all of them crafted to a different pattern than the arsenal given to him by the Deepseeker. He ran his hand gently along the fuller of a thin, straight sword, the steel rippling with strange, beautiful patterns that must have been bestowed in the forging process. The hilt was wrapped in pale leather, which was still, somehow, intact. Perhaps it had been treated for longevity somehow.

As I looked along the whole table, I noticed that all of the weapons laid out there were made in the same style, every hilt wrapped in the same pale leather as the sword. I thought about the limited combat training I had received in the Former program, and then back further to my life… before. I could hardly wield a straight sword, I had never so much as swung a weapon like that before, and more than likely I would just end up hurting myself. In fact, most of the killing implements on this table were the sort of thing that required at least some basic martial prowess, and I had little of that. If only there were an ancient, leather adorned standard-issue Pan-American battle-rifle waiting here for me. Something caught my attention out of the corner of my eye, and I moved down the table to pick it up. It was a curved weapon, meant to be wielded in a single hand, possessing a wide, crescent-moon blade. I gave it a few experimental swings. To my surprise, it handled the way my long forgotten machete had felt. I wasn't going to be doing anything fancy with it, but looking down at the sword, I was pretty confident that I could hit something with the edge without simultaneously injuring myself. I checked beneath the table, and as I had suspected, an array of metal scabbards had been piled in a heap. I found one that matched the crescent sword and sheathed it, then busied myself fastening the weapon to my borrowed ranger's belt. Excellent. When I finished, I looked up to find the others all staring at me, shocked expressions on their faces.

"What?" I asked, hoping I hadn't committed some grave sacrilege. I figured Thukkar wouldn't do anything about it, and probably not Volistad, but Nissi?

“You just peeled a sword out of a carving on the table,” Volistad said, awed.

"No, there were weapons piled all over that table. Look-" I trailed off as I looked back at the table. Sure enough, all of the weapons I had seen were no more than intricate carvings in the surface of the stone. There were no scabbards lying underneath it either. It was some kind of ceremonial display, and I had… what? I looked down at the sword belted at my waist. It was the same weapon I had picked up seconds ago, real as could be. I took a deep breath. It must have been the work of Ravanur. Having a god casually perform miracles for me never ceased to make me nervous. "A gift from Ravanur," I finally said, with much more confidence than I felt. "Her ‘Chosen One' couldn't just keep wandering around with a dull old climbing ax, could she?"

The rangers agreed easily enough, but Nissi didn’t move. She just stared at me, clearly unsettled. I noticed then that she had shed Volistad’s cloak- which she had been wearing as a sort of makeshift robe- and donned a set of strangely intact ritual robes she had found near all the implements of sacrifice. Volistad finally broke the silence by clearing his throat. “We need to keep moving, everyone.”

I nodded in agreement and led the way down the steps of the amphitheater toward the black, gaping doorway at its heart. Nissikul flicked her hand in a throwing motion and a second ball of blue-white light came into being, streaking through the door just ahead of me and casting its light into the corridor beyond. I squared my shoulders and stepped through the door, closely followed by Volistad.

I hadn’t made it three steps into the low hallway before Volistad seized the back of my furs and yanked me back with a bark of warning. He was a moment too slow, however, and I heard the click of a pressure switch as part of the floor sank slightly beneath my foot. Without a moment’s hesitation, he swept past me, shoving me hard into the wall. He continued the motion in a whirl of his cloak, his crystalline armor and helm glittering with pale luminescence beneath the glow of Nissi’s light. As suddenly as he had moved, he stopped, holding something in his hand up to the light. Gripped tightly between thumb and forefinger was a fat steel dart, glistening with a dark, greasy fluid.

I straightened back up, waving off Nissi’s concern. “This place is…” I trailed off again, not knowing the Erin-Vulur word for ‘booby-trapped’”.

Taking my meaning, Nissi filled in my question. “Burtazzik.”

“This place is Burtazzik," I repeated, struggling with the unfamiliar word.

"We will need to be more careful," Volistad murmured, his head swiveling back and forth as he scanned the floor ahead of us. After a moment, he pointed. "Trap." I followed his gesture, and sure enough, I could see the faintest outline of a seam in the stone, likely another pressure plate. "Let's go," the ranger said and held out his hand to guide me around the trap. I accepted the guidance and stepped carefully around the plate. I retrieved my own light from within my furs and switched it on, casting its sputtering bluish beam over the stone ahead of us. As soon as we were all past the trap, Volistad squeezed past us to clear the next stretch of corridor.

We continued this way down the whole length of the corridor, creeping slowly along in the wake of the keen-eyed ranger, listening all the while for the telltale click of a triggered mechanism. After about a hundred meters the corridor ended and we found ourselves standing on a narrow stone bridge over a vast emptiness. Nissikul whispered her magick orb of light to its brightest state, but the light still revealed nothing around us but an empty abyss and the bridge, which was barely wide enough for one person to walk semi-comfortably. Shit. I wondered how far I would fall if I slipped. I didn’t exactly want to find out, but there was no turning back.

Volistad led the way out onto the bridge, walking with the casual balance of the athletic. The rest of us followed, more slowly, our arms stretched out for balance. I looked over my shoulder at Nissikul and found her clenching her single arm to her chest and gritting her teeth as she took each careful step. Okay, I don’t have it so bad, I thought and continued walking. There was a sound like the crack of a whip, and Nissikul screamed. I whirled around as quickly as I dared and found her lying flat on the stone, gripping the edge with her single arm, her legs dangling over the side. I crouched and reached out to help her, and I saw it. Something like a black vine with thorns had curled up out of the dark and wrapped itself tightly around Nissi's leg. Most of the thorns had gotten themselves harmlessly tangled in the thick hide of her scavenged high boots, but some of them bit deep into her flesh just below her knee, and rivulets of blood had started to run down her leg. As I watched, the vine's grip tightened, and Nissi was dragged a little closer to the edge. She was only hanging on to the side by her fingertips now.

I seized her arm with both hands, and as Thukkar and Volistad approached from either side, I hissed, "Cut that damned vine!" Immediately, Volistad drew a short, well-used knife from his belt. He grimaced and squinted as he held up the knife before his eyes, taking aim, and then, without disturbing his own balance atop the bridge, he threw. The blade flickered through the air with a barely audible hiss and struck the vine dead-on. There was a sound like someone plucking a guitar string, and the knife bounced away into the dark. The vine remained uncut. It tightened its grip on Nissikul's leg, and she screamed in pain as the thorns bit deeper into her leg.

Thukkar crouched beside me, gripping the Stormwalker’s straining arm. “I have her. Try with your sword.”

I nodded grimly and stood, wobbling a little. Volistad gripped my arm to steady me, and I looked up into his face, which was twisted into a mask of mingled fury and worry. “Hold on to me so I can reach.” Then I drew out my sword and gripped it tightly. Volistad took hold of my other arm, holding it so that we gripped each other’s wrists. I took a deep breath, and then leaned out over the darkness, immediately feeling Volistad lean back to keep me from falling. I lifted my sword so that its tip angled back towards the bridge, aware of where the ranger stood. I didn’t want to cut him when I swung. I clenched my jaw, flexed my abdomen, and slashed, twisting my hips to lend power to the strike.

To my surprise, I didn't feel any resistance, and at first, I thought I had missed. Instead, as Volistad pulled me back to safety, I saw the vine whipping about, severed as neatly as if I had been trying to cut silk instead some kind of biomechanical cable. Thukkar dragged Nissi back up onto the bridge, and we all just stood there for a moment, panting, as the Stormwalker ripped the remnant of the vine away from her legs. As I watched, the wounds stopped bleeding, and a moment later, her flesh sealed itself neatly. "Damn," I said in Pan-American, "That's a neat trick."

Though she didn’t understand my language, Nissi took my meaning, and she smiled her eyes slightly in response, hissing through clenched teeth. “Can we get off of this Palamun utrezbekan bridge?”

I could guess the meaning of utrezbekan, so I didn't bother asking. Instead, I sheathed my sword, then turned and nodded to Volistad, and we continued on our way. We walked for several minutes, tense and waiting for another attack, but none came. I was relieved when the far side of the abyss came into view, and the bridge continued smoothly into another corridor. Volistad and I quickly crossed into the hall, then turned back to aid Thukkar and Nissi, who was now clutching the ranger's shoulder in a death-grip. He didn't seem to mind. "Excellent," I said, breathing out a short sigh of relief as Nissi crossed all the way into the corridor.

Volistad and I exchanged terse nods, and I could feel the unspoken accord between us strengthen. “We make a good team,” he said in my language, smiling a little- like a human. I returned the smile as an Erinye would have done and opened my mouth to say something. But before the words could reach my lips, I heard a pair of whip-cracks from out in the darkness behind us. My legs burned as two more of the strange, metal vines wrapped themselves around both of my calves. I yelped and fell as they immediately jerked my legs out from under me and dragged me back toward the abyss.

Volistad shouted in surprise and dove for me, seizing my arms. But we had been too thoroughly caught off guard, made careless by our own relief at reaching supposed safety. Before Volistad could try to brace himself and stop me from going over, I was yanked out and away from the bridge. The ranger didn’t let go, and together we plummeted down into darkness, screaming. More vines rose up in the darkness and seized me by the arms, yet another wrapping firmly about my waist. I heard Volistad struggling as he was entangled. He shouted my name in between furious snarls, and I tried to respond, but a vine wrapped itself around my throat, quickly cutting off my air. Thorns bit into my flesh, and I felt icy cold fear slide down into my spine. One false move and those thorns could open any of the big veins in my neck, and I doubted there would be any coming back from that.

Ravanur! I screamed in my mind as my vision went dark. “What the fuck is this! Why can’t you stop your temple from killing us!? The vines were still dragging us down into darkness, but I felt my descent slowing. Whatever these things were, they didn’t intend for us to become smears at the bottom of this pit. Ravanur did not answer me. Either she was incapable of doing so here, or she didn’t deem it necessary. Probably the second one. She seemed like a “god helps those who help themselves” sort of deity. It figured.

Abruptly, the vines released me, and before I could suck in a full breath of air, I plunged into a thick, rancid muck. It smelled like an unholy mixture of gasoline and bile, and I gagged as it filled my nose and seeped into my mouth. I thrashed and felt stone beneath my feet. Struggling to find my calm, I stood, spitting the foul goop out of my mouth and blowing hard to clear my protesting sinuses. I heard Volistad beside me in the darkness doing the same. I fumbled in my furs and was relieved to find my makeshift lantern was still there. I flicked it on and opened the shutters wide so that its glow spilled out all around me in a circle, illuminating both Volistad and me in its eerie glow.

I heard Nissi’s voice echoing far, far above us, calling for Volistad. I shouted back up at her. “We’re okay! Go on without us! We’ll find a way back up!”

Volistad shouted his agreement, and we waited as our words echoed up to our friends. There was a short silence and then Nissikul shouted back, "Fine! Stay alive!" Volistad chuckled at this. Evidently, it was a typical sort of response for her.

“Well,” I said, then immediately spat again to try to clear the awful taste from my mouth. “What should we do?”

“Find the source of those… rope-things,” Volistad said immediately. “I don’t see them anywhere, and that worries me.”

I held my light high and scanned all around us. We were standing waist deep in the foul muck, which stretched as far as we could see. There didn't seem to be any supports for the bridge down here. It was probably just a single, smoothly shaped length of stone like everything else in this place. About twice my height up the wall dangled one of the strange metallic vines. It was inert and lifeless. It seemed to have grown straight out from the stone. I dug in my furs for a moment, withdrawing a scrap of metal left over from the construction of my makeshift lantern. With a quick flick of my arm, I hurled the scrap side-arm at the vine like a Frisbee. When the metal reached the level of the vine, it suddenly animated, curling like a whip and snapping the chunk of scrap out of the air with an echoing CRACK. There was a subdued splash as the metal plunked down into the mire. "Fuck," I cursed, then switched to Erin-Vulur for Volistad's sake. "They won't let us climb, so where do we go?"

Volistad struggled over to me, his armor looking distinctly less impressive now that it was smeared with unknown muck. He stripped off his helm, revealing an expression of base fear that I wouldn’t have expected from him. His eyes were wide, and they flicked around at the darkness, looking for something and not finding it. “It smells like burug in here," he whispered. "I think… I think this might be where they spawn." As if on cue, something bumped against my foot, and I shrieked, trying to leap out of the mire, succeeding only in splashing foul gunk in all directions.

Volistad, however, was ready to strike. He dropped his weight and plunged his arm into the liquid. He twitched and shook as he fought with something below the water, but in a few moments he rose, heaving a writhing, wriggling mass up out of the water and into the light of my lantern. It was a burug alright, but clearly juvenile, only reaching the size of a medium weight dog back on Earth. Its segmented armor was not quite solid just yet, and its many legs rattled against Volistad’s armored forearm with spasmodic ferocity. It kept trying to get its mandibles into his flesh, but the ranger’s grip was unbreakable. “You were right,” I said, some of Volistad’s apprehension slithering into my own mind.

“Yes,” he replied grimly. “We can’t stay here. We’re lucky neither of us seems to be bleeding. One of these can’t kill us alone. But many?” He didn’t have to finish the thought. Instead, he turned and flung the larva he had caught far from us. It landed with a splash and disappeared.

“So which way is the way out?” I was turned around, and everything around me seemed to be the same fathomless blackness over the same filmy swamp.

The ranger frowned and closed his eyes, breathing deeply. He grimaced immediately. I sympathized. Though I couldn’t stop the smell from getting into my nose and mouth, I was trying very hard not to breathe too much. Volistad had just taken a big lungful of the foul stench. After a moment, he nodded his head in a direction. “That way. Fresher air.”

I marveled at the strength of that sense. What would it be like to be able to smell as well as one could see? I raised my lantern high and set off in the direction Volistad had indicated, and soon my thoughts were fully devoted to trying to move quickly against the constant resistance of the bog. Every so often I felt a curious larval burug nudge up against me, and each time I kicked the offending thing away, hoping to teach the little monsters to keep their distance from me. But their little prods and bumps seemed to come more and more often as we proceeded, and before long, the water around us churned with hundreds of the damnable things. How long before one decided to try a nibble?

After about a quarter hour, we reached a low, semicircular doorway, too low to walk through upright. Perhaps it was a cycling system, meant to keep the swamp we were slogging through at some optimal consistency. Either way, it seemed to be our way out of here, so we crouched low and squeezed into the tunnel. It was cramped, and it was an effort just for me to keep my lantern above the filthy water. It had worked even after I had fallen into the pool, but I didn't trust the jury-rigged circuits to function properly if they were immersed. I had to keep my head tilted up and to the side to breathe, because the crouch I was forced into, pushed my head down close to the waterline. My heart was thunder in my ears, and all I could think about was the horde of ravening larvae piling into the tunnel behind us. Could we fight something like that? Surely not in this space.

I could feel the little wriggling bodies bumping into me again, and I had to suppress the urge to scream. Unthinking, I swatted at a particularly inquisitive one with the back of my free hand, and it sunk tiny sharp mandibles into my flesh. I hissed and tried to draw back, but the little bastard had a firm grip on me. “Volistad! I’ve been bitten!”

He whirled, quickly shoving me past him, a growl already gathering in the base of his throat. The waters before him were already churning as the larvae there sensed my blood. Furious, I slammed the little burug clinging to my arm into the wall until it let go of me and dropped senseless into the mire. I thought about the sword at my waist, immersed in the muck. I would have to clean it later. There was no use in drawing it; I would probably just cut myself or Volistad and make the whole situation worse. Instead, I put out my free hand and took hold of his sodden cloak, then turned continued forward down the tunnel, leading the ranger with me, backward. Behind me, past the reassuring form of Volistad, I could hear the larvae churning up into a frenzy. A strange, whistling cry went up from the roiling mass, taken up in wild, dissonant chorus a moment later. Volistad answered with a bestial roar that tore its way out of his chest and filled the tunnel with the sound of his battle-rage. I felt the ranger moving through my grip on his cloak, and I glanced over my shoulder to see him wielding an ax in each of his hands. He timed each of his swings to a step backward, and we moved on like that, me in the lead, Volistad slashing in great arcs and spattering the walls of the tunnel with black ichor.

We moved that way for what seemed like an age. I could sense Volistad beginning to tire. He still swung in rhythm with his careful backward steps, but I could hear him panting. Fighting for even a minute was exhausting. I wondered how long we had been doing this. Five minutes? An hour? Ahead of me, the light of my lantern fell on a fine lattice of steel bars, and I cursed vehemently. Volistad grunted a question at me, and I seethed back, "Blocked! There are bars in the way!" Water was coming in through the bars, and it seemed cleaner than the muck we had been wading through. Water could get in, but the burug larvae couldn’t get out. And neither could we.

Volistad cursed, redoubling his efforts against the ravening swarm, but he was already grunting in pain as bites got through and found the soft places between the crystalline plates of his armor. We didn’t have long. We would soon be overwhelmed, and I would soon get to live out my fantasy of being devoured by piranha in a dark alien sewer, so at least I had that plus. I cast about with the lantern for any sign of something I could use to bend the lattice, maybe force it aside so we could get past it, but nothing presented itself. Volistad roared again, but this time, the sound was filled more with desperation than rage. He wasn't swinging the axes anymore. The larvae were piling onto him, snapping at his unarmored face and bearing him over backwards into the water. I screamed and tried to drag him back upright, but the boiling swarm of hateful little bodies took me from my feet as well, and I plunged into the water in a cloud of wildly chomping mandibles. This was it. We were going to die in the darkness and it would all be for nothing. Maybe Ravanur could turn Nissikul into a god. She would be a better choice anyway; she knew this planet, knew the Erin-Vulur. She might not know Barbas, but she didn't have to know him to kill him. Why had the dead god of this place thought that I could do this?

Pain blasted through me, suddenly, beginning at my closed fist and shooting out in a burning network through my entire nervous system. Someone was screaming, so loud, deafeningly loud, and for a moment I thought it was me. Then I realized that my jaws were clenched shut from the angry current searing through my bones, and the sound was coming from all around me. It came to me in an instant, as a spasm rippled its way up my spine and made my body into a bow. I was being electrocuted. Electrocuted!

As suddenly as the pain had come, it ended, and I found myself floating on my back on the surface of the muck, bumping up against the steel lattice with the movement of the disturbed water. There were no burug clinging to me. Holy hell, there were no burug attacking me! A stone dropped into my stomach as I remembered. "Volistad!" I thrashed my way back towards where he had fallen, searching the water frantically. He was lying there, unconscious, and I was terrified to note that he was not breathing. I couldn't feel his pulse, but my hands were shaking, so I couldn't be sure. Was he dead? It didn't matter; I had to get him out of here. I got my shoulder under him, and half carried, half pushed him down the tunnel towards the grate. It was completely dark. My light had gone. Come to think of it, it had probably electrocuted us. "Fuck!"

I stumbled in the dark and smacked my hand against the stone to steady myself. But I didn't touch rock. Instead, I slapped awkwardly at a solid bar of metal. I gripped it, then fumbled up the wall, not daring to hope. Sure enough, there was another. Above that? Solid metal. A hatch set into the ceiling of the tunnel. I pushed. It wasn't latched, apparently trusting to its own weight to keep juvenile burug out of whatever lay above. Straining, with my one free arm, I pushed the hatch up until it reached its tipping point and fell open with a crash. It was just as dark above me as it was in this passage, but I wasn’t staying where I was. Awkwardly, I stepped up onto the metal rung, manhandling Volistad up with me. He was very heavy, especially in his armor, but I couldn’t afford to stop. Already, I could hear movement in the water below us. Some of the larvae had not been killed, just stunned, and they were starting to come around. I doubted they would be happy when they fully woke up. So I struggled up the rungs, one at a time, until I could get my feet onto something like solid ground. I carefully felt out a safe place to set Volistad, then turned to the hatch and lifted the heavy metal portal so that it swung back down into place. I felt at it for a moment, and I was relieved to find a locking bar set into it. We were very lucky that hadn’t been in place before. Nonetheless, I slid the bar into place. We were safe from the larvae. All I had to do now was keep Volistad alive.

I fumbled my way in the darkness back over to him. We weren’t in a very large space, little more than a wider tunnel than before, though this one went straight up. I could, with a little strain, stretch out and touch both walls. It would have to do. I stretched Volistad out on the ground, then settled my nerves and felt for his throat. My heart thundered in my own ears, making it hard to focus. What if Erinye physiology was different? What if he didn’t usually have a pulse there? What if- I hissed out another breath of relief. He was alive. His pulse was hard and strong, if a little slower than I had expected. Good. Now the breathing. I would need to get him out of his armor to do proper lifesaving techniques, but perhaps first… I leaned up off of him and then dropped my weight down hard just below his chest, aiming for where the diaphragm would be on a human. He surged up, suddenly, and I scrambled off of him, struggling to roll him onto his side as he spewed foul water. He heaved several times, vomiting and coughing water. I knelt beside him and patted his back awkwardly, knowing that the gesture probably meant little through a solid plate of armor.

After a while, Volistad seemed to be breathing normally, and he pushed himself up into a sitting position beside me. “What happened?” His voice was little more than a croak, but he seemed fully back in control of his body. “We were-” He coughed and trailed off. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know the words in his language. Instead, I just sat beside him. We sat there for a while in companionable silence, just breathing clean air and letting our heart rates fall back down to a more reasonable rate. After a while, Volistad murmured. “Thank you. You saved my life.”

“Only after you saved mine,” I replied. “I could not have fought so many. They would have torn me to pieces.”

Volistad was silent. I knew what he was thinking, that he had failed anyway. In his eyes, he hadn’t fought hard enough, hadn’t kept them at bay, and as a result, they had gotten past him and to me. I didn’t have the words to explain to him why he was wrong, so I just slapped him about the head. “Don’t be silly, Volistad,” I said. “Now let’s go. The way out is up.”

I fumbled my way over to the spike ladder and put a foot up on the nearest metal bar, then hopped up and seized one a little way above my head. Volistad followed my lead, making much less noise in the dark. We climbed in silence in the crushing dark, our already tired muscles straining against the weight of our waterlogged clothes. After a long time, I felt my head bump gently against something solid. Nervously, I lifted one hand up to feel for another hatch. Sure enough, there was one just above me. Carefully, not wanting to fall off of the crude, narrow ladder-spikes, I lifted my hand and pressed it against the hatch, giving it an experimental push. It moved, just a little, but it was just as heavy as the one below us. I took a deep breath, climbed to press my shoulder against the metal portal, and heaved with my legs and back. The hatch lifted open, swinging away on its hinges. I didn't dare push hard enough to fling it open. Instead I flopped over the edge of the hole into the space above while keeping the hatch lifted with one hand. Volistad quickly came up and helped me hold it up while I got to my feet, wary of the edge of the shaft we had just climbed. I held the heavy door in place as he scrambled up in a clatter of weapons, and then, when he was clear, I let the hatch slam shut with a hollow BOOM that raised dust from the ground all around us.

I stopped. I could see the dust. Which meant… I looked around and found the source of the light. We were standing in a great circular chamber, which had not been shaped to the same precise smoothness as the rest of the temple. Ringing the rough, craggy walls there were clusters of aquamarine crystals, glowing with a soft radiance that cast a soothing, relaxing light across everything in the cave-like chamber. The ceiling was high and scattered with stalactites, from which grew shaggy, highly reflective moss. The floor was uneven, though paths had been carefully shaped to crisscross through the space. All around us, I could see what looked like overgrown garden plots, full of plants I had never seen, and fungi larger than anything I had heard of before. It was a god's garden. A literal Garden of Eden, though it seemed to be meant for a different purpose than the one in the ancient Christian holy text. I could smell a hundred commingling, fascinating scents, and I wished I knew what Volistad was experiencing. His own sense of smell was so powerful, I was sure he was breathing in the olfactory equivalent of a vibrant tapestry. If only…

Volistad suddenly retched. "Palamun above," he grumbled. "We stink." He pointed off in a direction with somewhat frantic motions; his face wrinkled up against his own foul aura. "Flowing water," he muttered, clearly trying to breathe as little as possible. "That way." He led the way through the garden, and I tried to suppress my laughter at his reaction. I guessed that he had suddenly been hit with how rank we smelled because of the sharp contrast with the inviting smell of the garden.

I heard splashing and stopped staring around at the garden to see where we were going. Sure enough, a waterfall fell from somewhere high up on the cavern wall, splashing crystal clear liquid into a deep pool, clearly shaped for easy bathing. I didn't wait for an invitation. I dropped my sodden pack and my sword belt and began stripping out of my soaked furs as quickly as I could. Volistad wouldn't be beaten, however, and as I was shaking my one entangled foot out of my twisted hide pants, he took a few quick steps past me and dove into the pool with smooth precision. He surfaced a moment later in the middle of the water, all of the dirt and grime and filth of our journey coming off of him in the wonderful water. I finally kicked free of my pants and splashed my way in after him, doing so in a considerably less dignified manner.

Even without soap, the bath was one of the most relaxing things I had ever felt. It was cold and crisp, but not so much that it bothered me. I wasn't sure if that was the blessing's work or not, but I felt like I was bathing in a mountain spring- which, I guessed, I was. I submerged and just hung there, suspended in the cool, comforting dark, finally safe, finally clean. I hadn't realized how tense I had been since… since the foul power below had invaded my dream with Barbas. Had it been so long since that disastrous night? I had been traveling with Volistad and the others for only a fortnight, but it felt like a lifetime ago. I felt like a different woman.

My lungs began to burn, so I surfaced, letting the water run down off of my body. I put a hand to my smooth, hairless scalp. I missed my hair. I understood why it had been taken, but those beautiful raven locks… that was the part of being Joanna Angeles that I had actually liked. Clean, well-kept hair, smooth skin, enough food to eat. I thought about where I was and laughed out loud. I was in a god’s garden, swimming in a pool of the clearest water I had ever seen. I had two of those three things, so what if I didn’t have the hair. I looked over at Volistad, and to my surprise, I found him watching me.

He wasn’t doing or saying anything untoward, but the way he looked at me abruptly reminded me that I was standing naked as the day I was born in a secluded, secret pool with a naked man. A beautiful naked man. A black cloud of shame feathered its way over my brain as I remembered my last moments with Barbas before… before he had… I turned away, trying not to do so in a way that would hurt Volistad, but knowing that it would anyway.

“It is all right,” the ranger said, gently, in my own language. “It is not time for those things right now. I was simply… what is the word… admiring your beauty.”

Despite myself, I felt the edges of a grin tugging at the corners of my mouth. “You’re not so bad yourself,” I replied coyly, giving him a very obvious once-over with my eyes.

Volistad cocked his head to the side, unsure, and I realized I had thrown him off a little with my use of slang. He probably wasn't sure if I was complimenting or insulting him when I said, "not so bad." I turned back around, feeling his eyes travel up and down my body. "It's just a saying. It's a way of saying that you're quite pretty yourself by deliberately understating it."

Volistad blinked. “I only understood half of that.”

I laughed again. “Just know that it means you look good.” I blushed, embarrassed, but I wasn’t sure he could actually see that with the odd quality of the light. Besides, he seemed a little too distracted to notice something like blushing.

Volistad smiled then, both with his eyes and his mouth. It was a good look on him, even if his fangs lent the expression a savage aspect. “Joanna, are you sure you aren’t a goddess? Because right now…” He trailed off, self-conscious.

I felt a cold spike of anxiety go through my stomach, and my own smile faltered. I looked away, the heat of the moment suddenly gone. The water felt uncomfortably cold, no longer the refreshing pleasure it had been just a moment before. "I- I guess I'll be one soon, whatever that means." I got out of the water and shivered my way over to my clothes. They were soaked and filthy, and I didn't want to put them back on. "Fuck," I said under my breath. Then I sighed and started dragging the lump of sodden furs over to the pool to wash them.

Volistad got out of the pool as well, and I carefully avoided looking at him. Still, I could see him out of the corner of my eye, and the fact that he was as perfectly muscled as the mythical Adonis did not make the situation easier. Before meeting him, I would not have thought extreme paleness would be attractive in a man, but this was a little different. He looked like Michelangelo had carved him straight from the purest marble. As he walked past me, I looked up, and I was surprised to see that the skin of his back, as well as the outside of his arms and the front of his legs, were mottled with subtle patches of gray that covered him in a pattern of small spots like those of a leopard. I was surprised that I hadn’t noticed it before, but it made sense. He was usually fully clothed, and his face was unmarked by these spots. I supposed it must have been some kind of vestigial camouflage, though I couldn’t imagine Volistad’s people running around on Chalice unclothed and unprotected to utilize this natural advantage. I wondered if that meant that the Erinye were somehow not native to this world. It would fit with what I knew of them. No one could have evolved in this kind of climate, could they? It was warmer down here, underground, but there were too many things that would make life all but impossible here. In any case, though I could not possibly have guessed his origin, I marveled in Volistad’s beauty. He was an intriguing vision of a man, walking the line between a comfortable familiarity and a fascinating strangeness. I knew that I was very attracted to him, and he had made it clear how he saw me.

But the throwaway comment about me being a goddess was frightening, on a base level. I couldn’t even consider sex- I was going to change, very soon. I was going to be changed permanently and intimately. What would that entail? What would it cost me? Would I even be myself anymore? I wanted to sit and discuss it with Barbas, in our cabin by the lake in the midst of the peaceful, green wood. But he was forever lost to me. He had- or at least something that looked and sounded like him had- tried to kill me. He had damn nearly succeeded. It hurt, now that I had a moment to think about it. I had trusted him, even after our short time together, and that security had been shattered. I hadn't trusted someone like that in a very long time, and the one I had trusted had broken me and left me to die. And I was seeking an ancient, frightening power, so that I could change into someone capable of killing the man I had trusted. Even though he was an AI, I had begun to love him. All of that was rushing through my head, now, and all the sexual chemistry in the world could do nothing before the scourging heat of that pain.

There was a sharp sound of splintering wood, and I looked up to see Volistad, still naked and dripping from the pool, smashing the base of a very large brown mushroom that sprouted up from one of the garden plots. His greathammer swung in a series of precisely aimed arcs, quickly cracking through the stem of the mushroom and tipping it over so that it rested on the side of its broad, smooth cap. With the brisk motions of great practice, he severed the rest of the stalk completely from the cap with the serrated inside edge of one of his climbing axes. He then split the woody stalk into several chunks and began making a pile of them.

I got up, leaving my filthy clothes at the edge of the pool, and crossed over to him. “What are you doing?”

"I'm making a fire," he said simply, his voice just as warm and amiable as before. I felt a silly sort of relief that he didn't seem put off by my sudden switch in mood. Immediately, I felt a little irritated at myself for feeling apologetic. He had made an advance; I had been put off and turned him down. I didn't need to be sorry about that. Still, his apparent lack of anger was heartening. It meant he was a better person than many I had dealt with over the years.

“That’s a good idea,” I said. “Then our clothes can dry.”

“That’s what I thought too.” Volistad piled the stalks of the mushroom into a little pyramid, and then lifted a small rock that I hadn’t seen in his hand. He switched from Pan-American into Erin-Vulur and said, “This is the yetavota. This part," he said, gesturing to the cap, "is not very tasty. But if you are out of food, you can cook pieces of it over a fire, and they will keep you going. You usually find them growing on the sides of deep caves, if you find yourself near the stone of a mountain."

“The stalks,” he said, indicating the little pyramid. “Burn for a long time, and produce little smoke.” He flicked the dark claw of his forefinger hard against the little stone in his palm, and a few sparks spewed out over the pile of stalks. None of them caught. He harvested some of the thin, gill-like structures from the inside of the cap, and brushed the greenish dust of the mushroom’s spores off of the handful of crumbly mushroom flesh in his hand. He piled this kindling in the heart of his pyramid, and then flicked a stream of sparks into it. These caught, and a small, fragile orange glow began to issue from beneath the pyramid. Volistad bent low and blew gently on it, and after a few minutes, small tongues of flame began to lick at the edges of the piled chunks of stalk. He looked over his shoulder at me and smiled with his eyes, clearly pleased with himself.

I returned the smile in the manner of his people, a little of my uneasiness swept aside by the simple joy on his face at a job well done. “I should learn these things,” I said with my limited Erin-Vulur vocabulary. “I’m going to be here for a long time. Probably forever.”

Volistad looked up from his fire, which was now going strong. “That wouldn’t be so bad, would it?”

I looked at him, really looked at him then, taking in his easy self-assuredness, the nonchalance with which he tended to his tasks, utterly unconcerned with his nakedness. I thought of the vicious, cruel cold of the planet, and of the raw violence that was all I had experienced from his society. But then I thought about how it had felt to fight alongside him, his sister, and Thukkar- how they had thrown themselves into the fight with the minotaur without a second thought, without even knowing who I was. I remembered the ten days of travel, and the easy companionship we had shared, none of us affected by the fact that just a short time ago, two of them had been actively attempting to kill me. It had been a good time. Not an easy time, not a comfortable time, but a good time. "I think I could, Volistad. With friends like you and Nissi and Thukkar, I think I could grow to like this place."

Volistad smiled with his eyes and simply said, “Good.”

With the fire going, we washed our clothes and laid them out to dry. We roasted some thick slices of the mushroom cap and hunted through the garden for some fruit, of which there was a surprising abundance. After we had eaten, we sat together by the fire, almost intimately close, and I was very aware of where our hips touched each other- even if I pretended not to notice or care. Volistad carefully tended to his armor and his impressive array of weapons, his movements almost meditative in their rote precision. Somewhat less smoothly, I cleaned all of the muck from my new sword, and I was surprised to notice that the leather of the hilt was unstained, and seemed ultimately unaffected by its submersion. Likewise, the blade seemed as perfect and new as it had when I had picked up the sword, and I wondered what power or property could bring a weapon so close to being completely impervious.

When we finished our work, we just sat together by the fire, barely touching, neither of us speaking. We just sat and basked in the warmth until the heat and the fullness of our bellies caused us to drift off to sleep. And for the first time in ten days, I slept well, despite the stone floor, despite all that had happened. For just a little while, I was completely at peace.