Not unharmed.
Simply unconcerned.
Through the lens of Aim's glasses, the air around Const was full of light-lines — dozens of them, blooming and dying, every thread snuffing out the instant a new one was born, over and over, too fast to follow.
Why in the world would he do that..?
"Tch." Const's fist closed at his side.
His weight had shifted back onto his heels and stayed there, and his eyes kept making one small motion — to the dark at the far end of the broken chamber, and away, and back again. Whatever was on his mind, his face had decided not to be part of it.
Behind him, the Entity screamed.
The sound came out dry and torn, scraping up through a throat that no longer remembered its own shape, rising and falling around the edges of something that wanted, desperately, to be a word. Its arm lifted — reached — fingers spreading toward the hole in the wall where Const had been, like a drowning man reaching for a shore he could still see. The black crust sheathing its body crawled as it moved. Its surface never stopped running, slow and wet, like a thing kept perpetually at the edge of melting; and where its mouth had been, the corruption was folding inward, sealing the opening shut even as it tried to speak, swallowing every almost-word back down into it.
It did not sound like rage.
It sounded like something being made to do a thing, and screaming against the doing of it, and losing.
Const went through the breach in the wall at a dead sprint and was gone.
"He could have fought it, couldn't he—" Aim breathed.
Isolde shook his arm and start sprinting.
"Why are you standing around!"
The light in its head — it flared. Brighter than any of the other times. Brighter than when it fired the beams. And then it just — went out. And the moment it went out—
The Entity broke.
Both hands came up and clamped over its skull, hooked fingers digging furrows into the black crust, and it screamed — not at them, not at anything, just upward, into the dark, a long shredding howl while its whole frame shook like a struck bell.
"RUN, damn you!"
It ran.
But not toward them.
There was nothing in the motion that belonged to a body. It went from writhing stillness to full flight between one blink and the next, low and scrambling and impossibly fast, limbs striking the ground in a rhythm no living thing used — and it went through the wall, not through the hole Const had made but beside it, bursting its own way out in an eruption of stone dust, the breach Const left behind apparently too small a door for the thing now pouring itself after him.
"W-wait—!"
Isolde let go of Aim's arm.
"What now?"
Aim had stopped. He was staring down the ruined path the Entity had taken — the trail of shattered stone, the black smear of its passage.
"We can move now," Isolde said. "That man bought us the opening — let's go!"
"...but why did it chase him," Aim said quietly, "instead of us?"
"Who cares!"
She grabbed his arm again and pulled.
---
Pant. Pant.
"Which way now!"
"I don't know!"
"Oh, come on — Const gave you the floor plan, didn't he!"
"We've been running through gods-know-where for ten minutes, how am I supposed to match anything to a map!"
They sighed in unison before proceeding.
The corridor they were in did not look like the corridors from before. The stone was older here, the dark thicker. Their lantern light reached less far than it should have, as though the air itself had grown reluctant to carry it.
They turned left, because left looked marginally less dead than right.
Their footsteps rang on the stone.
Then the ringing came again.
Aim's stride hitched. The echo of their steps had arrived — but late, far too late, four or five seconds after the steps themselves, a neat double-set of footfalls played back to them from a corridor that should have returned sound at once.
Neither of them said anything.
They kept walking, faster.
Somewhere behind them — or ahead, it was impossible to say — a long, soft sound moved through the dark.
"This way—"
Isolde's voice reached him strangely. He saw her mouth finish moving, saw her already turning down the side passage, and only then did the words arrive, trailing after her like something that had come loose.
Aim's skin crawled. He said nothing about it. There was nothing to say that would help.
They went down the side passage. It bent twice and opened into a long gallery of broken pillars, and they were perhaps halfway across it when the cold came — not a draft, but a pressure, a vast displacement in the dark off to their right, the unmistakable bodily certainty that something very large had just arrived there, without any sound of arrival at all.
They froze.
The dark off to the right gave them nothing.
Then a footfall sounded — behind them, at the mouth of the gallery they had entered through. A single step. Unhurried.
They did not look back. They ran.
The far archway was thirty meters off, then twenty, and the air in front of it shimmered — wrongly, sweetly, like heat-haze over summer stone — and for one fractured instant Aim was certain the archway was both ahead of them and already behind them, that they had passed through it seconds ago, that they were running toward a place they had just left—
Then it was only an archway again, and they were through it.
A corridor. Another. A flight of sunken stairs. The sounds of their own running kept abandoning them and catching up in clumps, six footfalls arriving at once in a stuttered drumroll, then silence while their boots struck stone that refused to speak.
And always — always — the pressure. Sometimes behind. Sometimes to the side. Once, horribly, directly above, somewhere in the blackness past where the lantern light died, keeping pace.
It could have come down on them at any moment. Aim understood that with total clarity. Whatever was circling them in the dark moved in instants, was there and then there with nothing in between, and if it had wanted them dead on the stairs, they would have died on the stairs.
It hadn't.
It was a thought he could not finish, so he didn't.
"There—"
A door. Half a door — one panel of a great double set, fallen ajar, a black room beyond.
They went through it together, and Isolde dragged the panel shut behind them, easing the last hand-span closed so it wouldn't sound, and they stood in the dark — shelves rotted to lace, the smell of cold dust — and damp floor.
Nothing.
Not their echoes. Not the not-wind. Nothing at all, as though the temple outside the door had been picked up and carried away.
The silence pressed in, total, and somehow it was worse than the footsteps had been — because the footsteps at least had told them where it was.
Isolde's back found the wall.
She slid down it without a word, all the iron going out of her at once, until she was on the floor with her knees pulled to her chest. Her hands came up and clamped over her head, fingers buried in her hair. She bent forward over her own knees, folding herself as small as a person could be folded, and held her breath — actually held it, jaw locked, shoulders rigid, as though even the sound of air moving through her might be enough to bring the dark outside the door back down on them.
She was shaking, very slightly, and could not stop.
"We can't end like this — in here.. right..?"
Aim stood near the door, one hand still flat against the wood, and did not dare tell her it would be all right.
Neither of them knew the way out or what was after them.
And somewhere around the chamber, soft as a thought, a single unhurried footfall sounded — enclosing them.