The Demon dropped to the sand and rolled, grinding its massive body against the ashen surface to smother the flames. The impact shook the island hard enough that Sunny grabbed the branch with both hands, and beside him Cassie pressed herself flat against the bark. The fire dimmed where the sand smothered it but reignited where the oil still clung to the joints, and the Demon rolled again, harder, tearing furrows in the ground that sent grey dust billowing into the dark.
Sunny watched through the canopy's gaps and calculated. If the Demon extinguished the fire before the sea creatures reached the island, the plan was dead and they were stranded on a tree above an enraged guardian with no weapons and no way down.
The Demon rolled a third time and the flames were shrinking.
Then Nephis touched his arm and turned her head toward the sea.
Sunny followed her gaze but didn't see anything in the pitch-black water below the Barrow's slopes. But he could feel it through his shadow sense. The shadows at the waterline were changing. Something was displacing the dark sea as it moved toward the island, and the displacement was massive, larger than anything his sense had registered since they'd arrived in the dream realm. It was as though the sea floor itself was rising.
The air changed next. The temperature dropped several degrees in the span of a single breath, and the sound of the waves went muffled, as though something had been laid over the water to dampen it. A wall of fog appeared at the edge of his shadow sense and rolled inland, moving against the wind.
The Demon stopped rolling. It rose from the sand with the oil still burning in patches across its armor and turned to face the sea. The rage drained from its posture and was replaced by something Sunny hadn't seen from the creature before. It squared its four arms and planted its legs wide, bracing against the ground.
The fog reached the Barrow's slopes and began climbing.
"Close your eyes."
Cassie's voice was tight and urgent. She'd grabbed Sunny's wrist with one hand and Nephis's with the other, and her grip was strong enough to hurt.
"Both of you. Close them now and don't open them until I say. Whatever you hear, don't look."
Sunny resisted the instruction, every part of him rebelling against the idea of going blind in a combat environment.. But Cassie's voice held a terror he'd never heard from her before, and she could perceive threats they couldn't.
He closed his eyes.
The fog touched his skin a moment later, and everything changed.
It started with sound. The rustle of the scarlet leaves above them faded until it was barely audible, and the crash of the waves grew louder and closer, as though the sea had risen to the base of the tree. Sunny's shadow sense, which should have been unaffected by fog, began
Sunny's shadow sense, which should have been unaffected by fog, was warping. The shadows around him were bending in directions that didn't correspond to any light source, and the edges of solid objects were blurring as though the fog were dissolving the geometry his sense relied on.
Then the voices started.
Cassie's voice came first, from somewhere below and to the left. "Don't look... don't look... don't look..." The words repeated and overlapped, layering on top of each other until the individual syllables lost their meaning and became a rhythmic pulse that pressed against Sunny's skull.
The voice was Cassie's in every way, the same pitch and cadence, the same slight tremor that appeared when she was frightened. But she was sitting next to him with her hand on his wrist, and her mouth was closed.
The copies multiplied. They came from every direction, growing louder and more distorted, until the sound stopped resembling language and became something closer to a weapon, a concentrated pressure against his eardrums that made his jaw clench and his teeth ache.
"DON'T LOOK DON'T LOOK DON'T LOOK DON'T"
Then the sound stopped.
The cutoff was so abrupt that Sunny flinched. One moment the noise was unbearable, and the next the world was quiet, as though something had removed sound from the environment.
Sunny kept his eyes shut and focused on his breathing. The real Cassie's hand was still on his wrist, her pulse hammering against his skin. On his other side, Nephis was motionless.
A voice whispered near his ear.
"Open your eyes."
It was Cassie's voice. Clear and calm, coming from the right direction. Sunny almost obeyed before something stopped him.
He couldn't identify what was wrong at first. The voice was perfect. But something about it didn't fit, and his body had recognized the problem before his mind caught up, locking his eyelids shut.
Then he understood. The voice was too calm. Cassie had been terrified moments ago, and now she sounded serene. And if she were leaning close enough to whisper in his ear, he would feel her breath against his neck. He felt nothing, and her hand was still gripping his wrist from beside him, not from in front of him.
He kept his eyes shut.
"Open your eyes..." the voice repeated, patient and coaxing. Then the patience cracked, and what came through the gap was ancient and had nothing to do with Cassie.
"OPEN YOUR EYES!"
The command hit him like a physical force. His eyelids strained against the pressure, his whole body fighting the compulsion to obey. Sunny clenched his fists so hard the nails cut into his palms and held on.
He didn't open them.
Seconds crawled past. Each one felt longer than the last. The pressure withdrew slowly, testing, probing, then pulling back. The voice returned one final time, distant and fading, as though whatever spoke was already losing interest.
"No matter... no matter..."
Then it was gone. Below them, the Carapace Demon roared and struck its scythes together. The metallic crash cut through the fog, and Sunny felt the pressure around them recede as though the sound had driven it back. The Demon had recognized the thing in the fog as its real enemy, and whatever it was, it had drawn close enough to fight.
The first impact shook the tree to its roots.
Sunny grabbed Cassie and pulled her against him, one arm wrapped around her shoulders and the other gripping the branch. Nephis braced on his other side, her gauntleted hand locked around a secondary branch above them. The tree swayed and the branch bucked, and for a moment Sunny was certain they were going to be thrown into whatever was happening below.
The sounds that followed were difficult to process. Metal shrieked against something that wasn't metal, and wet, heavy impacts shook the ground in irregular patterns. The Demon's roar came again and again, increasingly strained, answered by something that produced no sound of its own except the displacement of earth beneath its weight.
The battle lasted hours.
The battle lasted hours. The intervals between impacts grew longer as the night wore on, which meant either the combatants were tiring or one of them was winning. The fog remained thick, and Sunny kept his eyes closed through all of it, unwilling to test whether the thing in the fog had truly left or was waiting for exactly that mistake.
Cassie didn't move. She sat pressed against his side with her face turned downward and her staff across her knees, and her breathing stayed even and controlled long after her trembling stopped. Her blindness had been a vulnerability for every day of the Forgotten Shore. Tonight it was the only reason she could function while the thing in the fog hunted for open eyes.
Nephis was silent beside him, her shoulder rigid and unmoving against his.
At some point Sunny became aware that the impacts had stopped. The silence that replaced them was different from the manufactured quiet the fog had imposed.
He waited, and the fog was still there, cold against his skin, but the pressure behind it had diminished. The shadows his sense could reach were settling back into their natural shapes, the distortion fading like ripples smoothing out on a water surface.
"We can open our eyes."
Nephis's voice was hoarse and barely above a whisper. She'd kept her eyes closed as long as he had. If she was opening them now, it was safe.
He opened his eyes.
Grey dawn light was seeping through the canopy, turning the scarlet leaves above them into dark silhouettes against a pale sky. The fog was retreating toward the waterline, thinning as it went, and the dark sea was pulling back with it, the tide receding in the early light.
Below them, the Ashen Barrow was destroyed.
Trenches ran through the grey sand in patterns that suggested something enormous had dragged itself across every meter of the hilltop, and the fallen leaves that had covered the ground were gone entirely, stripped away or buried. Chunks of the hillside itself had been displaced, leaving craters deep enough that the exposed soil beneath was dark and wet.
And at the center of the devastation, the Carapace Demon was limping back toward the tree.
Two of its arms were gone, severed at the shoulder, the stumps leaking azure blood in steady streams that left dark trails across the churned sand. Most of its rear legs were broken or missing, forcing it to drag itself forward in a lurching gait that bore no resemblance to the measured stride Sunny had watched during the scouting days. Cracks ran across its metal carapace in a web that covered its entire body, and one of its scarlet eyes was dark and empty, the socket crushed inward.
Sunny looked at Nephis, but she was already looking at him. Her face was pale and drawn from the night, but her eyes were sharp, and sparks of light were already gathering in her palm as she summoned her silver longsword.
She didn't need to say it, because he could read the calculation in her expression as clearly as he could read terrain through his shadow sense. Neither of them spoke for a long moment. The only sound was the Demon's labored breathing drifting up through the branches, slow and wet and wrong.
"We finish it," she said.
Sunny looked at the crippled behemoth dragging itself through the sand below and felt something he hadn't expected to feel. Not triumph or the cold satisfaction of a plan succeeding.
He felt sorry for it.
The Demon had guarded the tree through every night of its existence, fighting off the horrors of the deep with something close to duty. It had never abandoned its post or retreated, and now it was broken and bleeding and still trying to reach the shade of the thing it had spent its life protecting.
The feeling lasted less than a second. Then Sunny's training compressed it into a footnote and filed it under variables that didn't affect the outcome.
He stood.
Then he summoned the Azure Blade.