The battle was won and a false rain fell over the scene, the steam gathering into droplets on the cavern ceiling.

Everything hurt. I was suppressing the panther’s sense of pain, holding down the worst of the agony for us both. Still. Wound’s stretched across half the beast’s body and left its limbs slow, clumsy, left legs dragging behind the right. I was in awe of Kahlin’s ability to stand, without any my tricks to numb the burns that covered his arms and clawed over his face.

The salamander was dissolving, the arrow laden with enough venom to rot the flesh around the wound down into a black pulp.

Kahlin took three steps and crashed down, leaning heavily against a stone tree. Uncorking the blessed water he washed it over his rocky skin, the burns receding, the Abyssal taint of his wounds purged under the healing energies. With what was left, he beckoned the panther close and ran a shower of luminous water over its burnt side.

“Thank you, friend. That’s a second time you’ve saved me. As for that thing-” He gazed at the salamander. Tiny twitches, death-rattles, ran through its frame as the flesh melted from its arrowhead-shaped skull. The bones still glowed like coals. “Well. My father told me stories about dragons, and I’m glad to say I saw one. But I’d be happier never to see one again.”

It wasn’t a dragon. Not even close to one of the old, star-eating terrors that flew between worlds.

But I couldn’t speak - and if I could I wouldn’t take away his story of being a ‘dragon’ killer.

“Is it safe to touch?” He turned towards me. Or the panther.

I meowed. The fact that I couldn’t talk in this state was infuriating, but he barely seemed to notice.

Stepping forward he hung his blade at his hip, drawing a thin skinning knife instead. He was going to have the beast’s skull for a trophy.

In the distance, one of his men had approached the glass dome in the stone orchard’s heart, prying open the broken frame of the doorway. For just a moment.

A fleeting moment.

There was a kind of eerie calm. Then the grinding pressure of Abyssal energy spread through the air.

I felt the thread connecting my core to the panther, my host, much abused by me constantly pushing and prodding the mechanical levers of its skull-

I felt that spiritual thread between core and creation SNAP.

A moment of pure insanity followed. The break disoriented me, left me adrift in a horrible moment where I forgot the ground underfoot, forgot the sky above, forgot my own name. The number of facts in the world narrowed to a single one - I had been broken. I saw through the panther’s eyes but no longer understood what I was seeing. They were just colors and masses and shadows.

The first thought I managed to have was - why am I still here?

The thread had broken. But I was still in the body, not returned to my heart, my core.

I was lost.

What if I died now?

Slowly I worked my way back into the world, the panther’s own brain confused, alarmed, feeling my panic bleed in from the edges of its consciousness.

A spiritual thread breaking was normal. It happened every time a creation died.

If a creation I was inhabiting died, my spirit could still return, but I’d be forced to move through the infinite sea of the Pale Beyond and suffer who-knows-what pains. And if I tried now-

They would be waiting. The ones responsible. They’d severed me, made me helpless, and as soon as they killed this husk they would be waiting in the Beyond to finish my soul.

We’d been caught in an ambush and I couldn’t speak to warn them.

Nobody else knew. Nobody understood we were in the jaws of a trap.

In a real body, full of pumping blood, the thudding gristle of the heart, the sloshing fluids of the brain, fear was so much worse. It crushed down from all directions. It made the pulse too loud, the heartbeat too violent. I didn’t know how mortals withstood this kind of pressure.

Kahlin was paused, seeing me in my dazed stupor staring at him. His hand was caught reaching for the exposed skull. “Are you-”

The salamander’s body twitched.

He jerked back, fire already building on his fingertips, hot little beads of blue-green flame clinging on to his skin. The archer drew and let fly in a heartbeat, sinking an arrow into its side, another into its leg. Kahlin drew his sword up and brought it crashing down, splitting the beast’s head in half.

It didn’t matter. Blue-green flame flared in its belly, rising hotter and higher, its flesh beginning to stitch together. We’d killed it, yes.

We’d killed the beast Arak had crippled to Bronze so it could slide under the barriers. We’d chased it down, past those walls, and now-

Now his bindings were coming undone. Thorny ridges of hard, plated scale pushed from its body, its awkward face becoming thin and reptilian as it grew back, flesh crawling over bone in a tide of grey-red sinews. The heat rose and rose unbearably, and the stoneskin soldiers clutched their faces, struggling even draw breath.

There was no choice but to run. Behind us the ugly creature started to peel itself away from the fallen stone tree, willingly ripping away its broken hindlegs to grow new ones. It was worse now, its wide eyes set in cruel armor, its soft skin hidden behind scale. Horns burst from its skull as it drew in its first breath.

The arrows slowed it down. They bled poison into its flesh, enough to make its regeneration take tens of seconds instead of heartbeats.

Behind us, the cavern erupted into flame. It danced in the arms of stone trees, turned the glass of the central dome to molten slag. It wreathed the body of the

That was behind us.

Ahead of us, in the dark, shadows closed in.