I knelt onto the hard stone and pulled the chain off over my head so that I could stuff the blade hastily into the keyhole. However, It did not fit! Or rather, it would not turn no matter that I kept trying hopelessly to force the key over, for it seemed that there was some sort of obstruction jammed within the hole.

"No!" I wailed fatalistically, hurling the blasted key away in a paroxysm of terror, fury and keening devastation.

The shroud of that last bleak emotion enveloped me utterly. As a last resort, for what else could I do, I banged my fists onto the ancient wood and then latched my throbbing fingers around the handle, preparing to yank it open with every once of my dwindling might, albeit with a pessimism that lay heavy in my stomach.

But miraculously, and unexpectedly, the door swung up.

The ease with which I had whipped it open was so unanticipated that I stumbled back violently and landed on my backside, thereby winding myself properly in the process. I scrambled onto all fours, pulling myself along the floor with my ravaged fingertips, so that by the time I bore my weight on my feet, I was already running toward the exit in the ground.

The door had opened up into a square chasm and I looked hurriedly down into its obscure depth, but could not fathom where its descending staircase lead except that it disappeared ominously into the dark. I cared not. I would that I was anywhere but here, and to that end I needed to move.

I soon realized that my key had not fit into the hole correctly because there had already been a key placed within the lock — on the opposite side of the door! Some one had been through here recently, but...

Surely those things could not unlock doors? But then who the devil would willingly enter here?! Did you not do just that, Aria? My own inner voice was accusatory and remorselessly harsh as I took one last look inside the black pit, my useless key forgotten in the darkness whither I'd sacrificed it.

I turned to leave, then stopped abruptly and quickly peered back down again. My brow furrowed uneasily. I thought I had seen something flickering in the darkness yonder, but as I strained my eyes into the depths, glimpsing aught, I realized it must have been my overactive and overtaxed imagination. Naught stirred the shadows below. With one last nervous glance within, I turned and sprinted over to where Thomas was pulling himself into a sitting position.

He gripped his head with white fingers, his nails caked with blood and grit.

"Where are we?" he groaned and then all at once he recalled our dire predicament, for his face turned green and his eyes darted madly around the room in trepidation.

"They are not here!" I breathed. There was no need to clarify, for he knew well of whom — or what — I spoke. "Get up, Thomas! We must leave..."

He required no more urging and leapt up instantly, only to fall back down when the blood rushed from his head. I did not wait for him to try again, but began hauling him by his arm urgently.

The eerie moan at the entrance to the hall abruptly ceased my steps and I whirled around, my gaze caught instantly by the feral eyes of a hell-born, crouching horror. The ears were flattened to its silvered head, its wet maw gaping partially, and the keen eyes flickered luridly in the dim lamplight — a bright, demonic malachite that withered my bones and sent me audibly, and painfully, to my knees.

I had unwittingly attracted all of its attention by dropping to the ground for it locked unwaveringly onto me, Thomas had meanwhile been forgotten. It remained hunkered into a preternatural stillness, not even a twitch of the eyelids, emitting a series of low, menacing snorts that I was not altogether sure were warning in nature or just the sound of its excited breathing. I hoped neither. The sound of it was sinister and chilling.

None of us moved. Thomas, like me, had also ceased to breathe for the only sound echoing around the room was the creature's diabolical purring and the sound of my heart's catalepsy — in and of itself a harbinger of Death's imminence.

Finally the monster grew impatient when neither of us moved. It lifted its head to howl maliciously at the domed ceiling before loping forward. I had not screamed, not once, in all the time we had scuttled through the laburinth, but I screamed now as it advanced purposefully.

Where time had slowed the last time I had encountered one of its ilk, it now sped into an indistinct blur. The creature sunk its unyielding jaws into the flesh of my lower leg and shook me violently from side to side as it used its teeth to find traction in my bones, puncturing deep into the marrow before flinging me carelessly to the side. I heard — rather than felt — my skull fracture against the wall, beside the hall entrance, with a blinding, stelliferous intensity. However, the pain did soon follow, exploding into existence directly behind the blinding impression of shattering bone.

What air yet remained in my chest had been suddenly jolted from lungs and I could do no more than watch in horror, my bleary eyes struggling to focus, as the hellhound approached me eagerly, its crimson muzzle clotted with my blood... and that of others. There was too much of it to be mine alone; doubtless it had, moments ago, submerged its grotesque head within some luckless man's eviscerated cavity. Was this the same daemon I had only just encountered when it had picked off the last of our remaining trio?

The beast stopped distractedly of a sudden and glanced back towards the trapdoor that lay behind it. I too wrenched my foggy gaze thither, bursting into horrified tears when I saw what had drawn the monster's gaze.

Thomas stood within the pit, on the first step, and only his head was now visible to me. As he pulled the squeaking trapdoor down over himself, he whispered, "I'm sorry," before he disappeared from view with a last tragic look in my direction. The door slammed shut against its stone frame and the distinct click of the turning key signaled his craven desertion of me.

I might have screamed or sobbed, had I the wherewithal to do either, but it was all I could do to keep my senses about me. I was numb, my body spent of all emotion.

The creature, however, seemed uncaring that he had allowed Thomas to slip from his grasp, and nonchalantly turned back towards me as I lay quivering on the floor from blood loss and terror. I closed my eyes in resignation and silently begged the lord of the underworld to yank me from this mutilated shell; the sweet agony of that small surrender, my whimpered prayer, calmed me somewhat as I waited... and waited.

As if in answer to my silent plea, a furious roar resounded throughout the vaulted chamber. I recoiled with a scream and my eyelids sprang apart with the shock of the booming vocalization. Another of the creatures had meanwhile entered the hall — this one equally as large and just as feral as its silver kindred.

There the similarities ended for the matted fur of the newcomer was dark grey and its dander stood completely erect as it bristled with mad savagery, its rabid glare aimed sadistically at the spectral creature beside me. My ghostly attacker moved confidently toward the grey and the two circled each other with heightened aggression, each monster uttering a bizarre sequence of guttural, hostile moans.

I lay transfixed with a terrifying dread convulsing through my marrow. I had for the moment been forgotten, a piece of offal lying cold and discarded as the massive brutes faced off. I blinked and yelped suddenly as the beasts collided viciously — the ghost clamping its serrated maw onto the shoulder of its opponent as the grey struck it in the neck with harrowing ferocity.

The two animals — the ghost and the grey — thrashed wildly, jaws snapping with fierce intensity, as each sought to sunder the other. The chamber echoed with vitriolic snarling and the shadows, cast by my lamplight, moved eerily against the walls with dizzying speed. I descried the trapdoor with heavy lids, but could not lift my right limb even a little and had not the will to crawl to safety.

Thus, I rested my head on the stone. I longed for death now, the excruciating pain in my leg and head unbearable. I hoped that my body would soon untie the bounds that held my soul anchored and thereby release me from this agony and terror. I was barely cognizant of the fight still in full effect and my eyes now operated but poorly in this escalated stage of my shock; even if I was of a mind to lift my face and witness the obscene battle playing out beside me.

Something knocked into me with the weight of a full grown bear and I screamed, nearly blacking out from the pain. However, the sudden, violent contact had shocked my brain enough that I blinked away the darkness converging from my peripheral and looked up into the largest yellow eyes I had ever beheld.

The grey stood over me now with its bloodied snout pressed into my neck. A primordial instinct whelmed to the fore and I angled my throat conveniently, pressing my skin flush against its flaring nose in supplication; an unmistakable act of submission. It now had unrestricted access to the warm blood gushing just beneath the barrier of my fragile skin.

I tensed only a short moment as subsequently, finally, it opened its mouth and I prepared myself for the feel of it's fangs.

Instead, I suffered only the stroke of a scalding, fetid tongue that flicked out roughly across my neck as that of a giant cat. My eyes popped open as it ran its coarse appendage along my face next, the disgusting warmth of it causing waves of revulsion and horror to crest over me. I lay completely still the while it lapped its way unremittingly down my body and hovered strangely over the seeping wound at my leg.

I did wonder, in a curious state of delirium, where the ghost had got to, but as I searched the shadows I had my answer. Seven pairs of eerie eyes danced along the shadowed walls of the chamber, blinking and moving as they prowled the perimeter.

I tried to swallow but my own tongue had tripled in size and there was naught but dust in my mouth: a veritable drought brought on by acute terror. I whimpered feebly as the grey lowered its snout to the mauled flesh of my extremity.

There it continued its assiduous task, licking at my blood with long, fetid stokes; seemingly only intent on stopping the seepage, bizarrely staying its fangs as it did so.

At length, the flow ebbed until finally it ceased altogether, yet the creature did not relent its awful bathing of me. At last, with a final sputtered farewell, the chamber was doused into darkness — starvation having finally snuffed my rushlight. It had served me well thus far, but could spare me no more of it's feeble light.

I closed my eyes instead of straining them, the better to hear what my eyes could not perceive. I became aware of the grunting and growling of many animalistic voices, presumably circling like a pack of wolves. By chance I heard the faint padding of a set of paws drawing near, but the grey let out an awful warning that rumbled through its chest and the curious animal retreated whence it came.

On and on the process continued repetitively — a succession of beasts would stray too close and my benefactor would growl his displeasure ere they hissed their responses and withdrew. Eventually, my drowsy mind could stay wakeful no longer, in spite of the frightful grey that yet stood watch beside me, alternately licking, growling, and snorting warm air onto my cheeks.

Though I willed it not, Morpheus arrived nonetheless to dull my brain with numbing slumber, his timing ill indeed. Had I not lost so much of my lifeblood already, I would have fought him tooth and nail. This was not how I imagined I would die.



❅



"Aria?" A calloused hand patted my cheek and I groaned discontentedly. "Wake up!" The voice that beckoned me to wakefulness was markedly overwrought, an edge of both fury and despair in it's resonance. "Please, Aria, get up!" It urged again, the volume increasing as shadowed light pulsed behind the screen of my eyelids.

I opened one eye a crack and then the other, but could see naught through the blurry glaze of tears so I blinked them rapidly away. Had I been crying all night as I lay unconscious? Why should that be? My body began shaking forcibly as I struggled to push myself into a sitting position and I felt a pair of steely hands move instantly to my arms to pull me upright. Familiar fingers, warm and tender, began brushing the wetness from my cheeks with painstaking gentleness.

I blinked again and a man's face began to take shape before me as my vision came into focus by slow degrees. It was a beautiful face, not withstanding the scarlet streaks of gore that coated it.

"Lucian!" I catapulted myself into his arms at the speed of a lightening bolt, whether by his pulling me in or by my own paroxysm — the desperate need to be enveloped in the safety of his arms.

I cried as no woman had ever cried before, my heart practically rending with the powerful anguish that had suddenly beset me. I sobbed pitifully as flashes of horror beset my brain. He ran his fingers over my back, into my hair, soothing me with nothing but his touch, and letting me weep till the dam had run dry; till all that remained was an intense exhaustion. I was alive.

'Twas merely a nightmare! I sobbed, though the words were indistinguishable. I am safe! I opened my eyes again as Lucian pushed me back so that he could study my face.

"You're alive?" His question held such bewildered shock that I felt the trepidation seep back into my bones. He had just repeated what I had only seconds ago been thinking...

"What?" I shudder. Where the devil was I?

I looked around and the violent shaking increased tenfold. The realization — that I had not, in a dreaming stupor, evoked the horrors of the night — struck me brutally in the gut. It had all been real after all. No!

"Lucian," I whispered, my grave inflection befitting the tone of charnel-house ghost. "Why are you here?" But I knew. I could feel my face lose all it's sanguinary hue, what scant amount there had been. "How...?" I could not finish the thought.

Deep within the blighted pit of my darkest fears, a dreadful understanding began to take shape. And the shape was hideous. My wide eyes moved over his bloodied chest and the grim line of his mouth ere I brought them back to his terrifying gaze.

"No!" I choked. Please deny it, Lucian!

"Yes," said he.

The force of that one word was a sickening catalyst that wrenched me from my sanity. I doubled over with shocking gasps as my stomach heaved, trying to purge the terror from its searing emptiness, but naught emerged save empty gasps. Lucian remained at a wary distance all the while I endeavored to salvage my compos mentis. I would have died of apoplexy if he had touched me, or I might have climbed the very walls to get away from him — had my leg not been savaged to uselessness.

"Lucian!" came a furious whisper nearby.

I heard the raspy call, yet I could not see to whom it belonged. More brine pooled into my vision as I continued alternately to vomit ash from my belly and sob with terror.

"Lucian!" it called again, anxiously. "We need to hide her in another tunnel... Fendrel comes this way!" I recognized Carac's grave tones through the tumult of my disoriented fear.

I was too weak to protest, my eyes too steeped in tears to fight with any dexterity, as a pair of sturdy arms lifted me easily and carried my damaged frame from the circular chamber — the cavity that seemed to be the heart of Hell.

"The door is locked from the inside." Carac sounded bewildered. I assumed he spoke about the trapdoor. Why he should sound so confused by the notion of the door being locked from the other side, as if that were a circumstance he was unused to, seemed ridiculous to me; considering that I had just discovered that there were monsters in the world. I was married to one.

Abomination! I could no sooner stay the thought than forestall the revulsion from my countenance as I espied the blood caked to his neck, chest, and mouth.

"Knock again. Ross is perhaps not yet awake," said Lucian, unaware of my eyes darting wildly betwixt the pair of them.

Daemon!

I listened as the two morbid interlocutors spoke quietly. I heard their words and understood their meaning, the hysteria continuing to build in my chest, although my body was now too slack to give it any purchase. I remained limp and trembling in Lucian's arms.

None of this is real, I groaned mournfully, but my lips continued only to produce garbled nonsense which, as a consequence, induced the sinewy bands, under my back and legs, to tighten their hold — the owner of those arms lowering his golden brows into a perturbed frown.

"Hush," Lucian cajoled softly, leaning his face close to mine.

"Keep her quiet!" Carac commanded with a hiss.

"And how would you have me accomplish that!" came Lucian's seething response. "Gag her? Beat her? Terrify her further, mayhap?" However, his acerbic suggestion earned him only this reply:

"Better that than the alternative, Lucian!" he murmured darkly.

I felt as though we had walked for hours, since leaving the dim light of that hellish atrium, but in sooth it had been no more than a scant few minutes — merely an illusion conceived by my wavering consciousness; it had been rising and ebbing as I drifted in the dark, like the last pulsating beats of a dying heart.

At long last I was set down, the cold stones of tunnel wall against my back, as the sound of steel striking flint fractured the silence discordantly. A light eventually flickered into life and, thereby, cast my companions into macabre relief.

"Where is Caine?" Although he'd spoken directly to Carac, Lucian's eyes were still fastened to me.

"Attempting to remove her scent from the great chamber."

"Good." Although Lucian did not seem relieved by the news. "I little know how that is possible," he replied. To which Carac merely shrugged.

I stared in transfixed alarm as the two faces, no longer as familiar as they once were, observed me warily, as though I were the monster and not they!

"Will you not speak?" Carac moved a hand toward me and I recoiled against the wall at my back. He seemed altogether disturbed by my reaction and... hurt.

They both looked at a loss, but Lucian would neither speak nor touch me, not since he'd placed me on the floor. I swallowed what little spittle there was in my throat and endeavored to make my tongue translate my addled thoughts.

"You are-" I gripped my belly as another wave of nausea crashed over me. I tried again. "You are..."

"Breathe, Aria" Lucian murmured through clenched teeth. When I shook my head, he reached for me, but I slapped his hands away and began shrieking in earnest. My ear-splitting struggles were instantly and efficaciously checked by my husband who muffled my cries in his bloodied chest.

"Easy, my love!" he crooned as Carac glanced into the darkness behind us in an agitated manner.

"Aria!" Carac groaned impatiently, "keep silent, I beg you!" But I found my voice even as Carac gentled his.

"Monsters!" I blurted, then steeled myself to issue the word again. "You're all monsters!" This time I hurled the accusation at them venomously and they both flinched from the acidity of the expletive as I sobbed my throat ragged.

"Yes," Lucian confirmed with an anguished grimace, his canines moving blatantly into view. "Monsters..."

However, I would not be fooled by wounded eyes; those same eyes that had lately stared out from hellish beings. Varúlfur! The word struck out at me from a dormant memory long forgotten.

They were rabid, man-eating demons and I had seen first hand what violence they had wreaked. My leg yet burnt with agony, my blood still clamored furiously through my brain, and my affrighted heart had all but rent from my breast — it now lay palpitating erratically in my throat. Had I been asked my own name, I might not have trusted my tongue to form it. Aria was no longer; only a broken, tormented shell of a girl who now lay cradled and delirious in a stranger's arms.





🌟Is her reaction really so harsh? Wouldn't you have reacted the same way? Comments?🌟