"You are correct, Miss Zelaine." Ngamba straightened slightly. "Now let us give you the basic grasp of our situation here."
Zelaine pulled a nearby chair out and sat down thinking this had the shape of a long explanation.
"Your friend joined our agency some time ago," Ngamba continued. "An odd jobs agency. A request came in to investigate this city, so here we are."
'Investigating a city,' Zelaine thought. 'That is the job of the police. Why is an odd jobs agency picking up police work.'
She kept it behind her teeth and let him continue.
"The job came through an online listing. Whoever posted it included some photographs. Truthfully we did not fully understand what the message meant at first, and we had not taken on a client in almost a week, so we came willingly."
The old man in the armchair shifted but said nothing.
"Once we arrived and began looking around we found out what had happened to the citizens." Ngamba paused, choosing his next words with some care. "The majority of the city's population is trapped nd contained inside books written by a certain author. Based on everything we have found so far, we believe that author is the perpetrator behind all of this."
Zelaine sat with that for a moment.
The paper giants. The books filling the sky. The pages that had dissolved when it ended. The citizens who could not be found anywhere in the streets.
It clicked into place cleanly and the picture it made was not a comfortable one.
"So where is the author?"
Zelaine asked it before Ngamba had fully finished.
"Yes, where is the author." Aninke leaned forward. "I thought you had him in custody."
*There it is,* Zelaine thought. *He is not Cale's friend.*
The old man spoke before Ngamba could.
"Almost. It was a failed attempt. The coding of his skill relied on someone else's assistance and guess what, whoever that someone was, he did not show up."
The room went quiet for a beat.
Everyone except the old man and Ngamba was shocked.
"Hold on." Cale's voice came out fast and slightly unraveling at the edges. "How were those paper giants summoned then. And when did he almost die, and how. Answer me. Did you know he was going to fail? Is that why you sent me away saying there would be a disaster in the city?"
He kept going, the questions stacking before the previous ones had been answered. Nobody stopped him.
'So we are all just standing here with nothing but questions,' Zelaine thought, a small smirk pulling at the corner of her mouth. 'Wonderful. I am not the only one.'
It was almost comforting.
Ngamba waited until Cale had finished. Then he spoke.
"We had pinpointed his location and engaged him directly. We brought him down but could not finish it. His task had already completed, and simultaneously failed. As a kind of defense mechanism on his way out he released troops of his own."
He paused.
"The paper giants were the troops."
"Just see for yourselves what his motives were. He passed out and it is about time he woke up."
Meanwhile, somewhere else entirely.
"The predators are being hunted by their prey."
Lennard Eisore muttered the words under his breath, his voice raspy and dry. He sat in a wooden chair, fingers white knuckled around a pen, but he could not move.
Not a single word had appeared on the paper in front of him. Nothing had emerged from the stagnant void his mind had become. His collar was yellowed with old stains, his clothes worn far past the point anyone should wear them.
He had not bathed in days. The air around him carried stale ink and something worse underneath it.
He felt them as they died. Sharp phantom jolts firing through his body each time one of his paper creatures was destroyed, a piece of his own vitality snapping with every loss.
He squeezed his eyes shut and worked on his breathing. He told himself that even if he had failed to stop the intruders, the ones higher up the chain would finish what he had started.
Then the footsteps came. Heavy and deliberate, growing louder against the floor outside his door.
Lennard understood immediately.
The door opened and they filed into the dim room. The old man, Ngamba, Aninke, Cale, Zelaine. Their movements were careful as they closed the distance to the desk, eyes adjusting to the low light, taking in the mess of papers and the broken man sitting behind it.
"Lennard Eisore." The old man's gaze moved across the desk and back to the novelist. "What a surprise. You let us come back."
"Odd jobs." Lennard's voice was barely above a whisper, his remaining eye fixed on nothing in particular. "I should never have ignored the warning about you."
The old man's expression shifted at that. He stepped forward until his shadow fell across the desk and his voice dropped low.
"So he was the one behind it." His knuckles creaked as he leaned in. "But I want to know why."
"I thought you were close to him," Lennard said, a thread of mockery still present in his ruined voice. "Why not ask him yourself."
"Who is he talking about," Aninke asked the old man quietly.
The old man did not answer.
He straightened and looked at Lennard steadily.
"Lennard. You lost your sister to the queen's guards. To gain the power to exact revenge on the queen you began your conquest for power."
Lennard remained calm as the old man continued indifferently, peeling back the layers of his past.
"Yes, that's the gist of it," the novelist replied, his voice eerily steady. "My sister was raped and killed by those guards in front of me. I had no power to prevent it and they even took my left eye with them."
"You know, why don't we listen to your story," the old man said.
****
"Woman's cloth-e-s suit you."
Leishna's voice came out of the dark beside him, shaking with cold.
"You cannot even see me."
They walked, each of them dragging one of the siblings behind them across the cave floor. Despite being beaten badly, one beheaded and one with a severed leg, both siblings were still breathing. Still alive.
'Understandable.' Atiya glanced back at the body he was dragging. 'They are outside the village barrier now. The curse may have reasserted itself, making them near impossible to kill again.'
Both he and Leishna were soaked through from the water, their clothes pulling cold and heavy against their skin with every step. Atiya had solved his half of that problem practically.
Sera was close enough to his size that her clothes were usable, so he had taken them and put the soaked robes over her instead.
He had also taken her brother's head off as a precaution before they moved, and both siblings were now unconscious and being dragged rather than walking anywhere on their own.
Leishna had swapped into the brother's robes. They were considerably too large for her, the sleeves falling past her hands, the hem dragging slightly, but the dry fabric held more warmth than what she had been wearing and she had pulled them tight around herself without complaint.
Though the cold was still there. There was no pretending otherwise.
"Still suits you," Leishna said, her teeth chattering between the words.
As they walked a faint triboluminescence bled through the dark ahead of them.
'Is there some kind of gem deposit down here.'
"Any idea...what that...might be."
"We should be...reaching the exit...soon." Leishna paused between words, her breath coming in visible bursts. "No idea...what the light is...though."
Neither of them could get through a sentence without stopping for air. Atiya took her answer for what it was and kept moving.
The cold light opened up around them as they entered the larger space, iridescent and still, casting blue and white across the walls and floor of the cavern. It lit the walls and the floor and the high ceiling of the cavern in shifting blue and white, quiet and still.
Danger? Name a safe place first.
They walked toward the source.
It came into full view gradually and then all at once, and this time the danger was not the manageable kind that spells imminent and certain death.
A black deer stood at the center of the cavern. Blue crystals grew from its body like spikes, erupting through the hide across its back and shoulders and flanks, catching and refracting the light in every direction.
A single horn rose from its head, the same crystal, the same deep blue, sharp and perfectly formed.
Hingcha Sangai.
A yai beast standing at the absolute pinnacle of the deer species. A nightmare of frost and body manipulation, its power so immense that even an Ascension 3 yai user could not subdue it without preparation.
Without the right preparation specifically. Without knowing exactly what they were walking into before they walked into it.
Atiya and Leishna had walked into it from the wrong end of a cave dragging two unconscious bodies, soaking wet, with frostbite in their hands and a yai reservoir that had seen better days.
The deer had not moved yet.
Its eyes found them.
"It is blocking the exit!"
Leishna's voice came out tight and low. She was right. The passage out was directly behind the Hingcha Sangai, its body filling the space between them and everything beyond this cavern.
"No. No, no, no."
Atiya wanted to scream. Wanted to throw himself at it with his bare hands and tear through it on sheer desperation alone. He knew exactly what that would produce. He would be in pieces before the thought finished forming.
His legs stopped moving. Leishna's did too. Neither of them took another step forward.
They could not outrun it. The Sangai could cross this cavern in a fraction of the time it would take them to reach the passage mouth. Every option that existed a minute ago had simply stopped existing. The cavern walls, the bodies they were dragging, the frostbite still working through his hands, all of it collapsed down into a single point.
*Is this really the end.*
The thought arrived and sat in his chest like something physical. He had survived the village. He had survived the water and the creature in the deep and the two speedsters in the dark.
He had come through all of it on stubbornness and application and the refusal to stop moving and now he was standing in a cave looking at something that could end him in seconds and he had nothing left that was going to change that math.
'I cannot accept this. I refuse to accept this.'
He screamed it internally and took a slow step back, keeping his movements small and unthreatening, every muscle in his body coiled around the singular desperate instruction of do not provoke it.
From the floor beside him, Sera's severed head had regained consciousness. Her eyes had found the Sangai and whatever she had been about to say died behind the gag of wet cloth stuffed in her mouth.
Even she was afraid of it.
The deer moved.
Its body shifted and it began walking toward them, slow and unhurried, each step precise, the blue crystal spikes catching the cavern light. Atiya's hand went to Sajibu instantly.
The Sangai paid his hand no attention at all.
It walked past the line where it could have closed on them and instead turned its head left, away from them, and moved in that direction. Then it stopped and twisted its head back, one crystalline eye finding them both, and pulled back slightly.
Indicating.
Leishna's voice came out barely above a whisper. "What should we..."
Atiya looked at the deer. Looked at the passage it had been blocking, now unguarded. Looked at the direction it was gesturing toward.
He knew what the answer was. He had always known what the answer was in situations like this one. There was only one law that held in every circumstance, stripped of everything else.
The weak follow the strong.
"We follow it," he said quietly.
And the moment an opening presented itself, run.