Behind us, the world burned in a furnace-heat and a green-orange glowering light. The beast tore itself free of the fallen pillar, leaving its own hindlegs behind in a bloody sacrifice, and grew new ones as it gave chase; the burning wave of light was accelerating behind us as its new limbs grew out from skeletal, stunted things.

We ran. There was nothing else.

If we split up a few of us might make it back to the surface; without a guide it was a thin hope.

But the enemy was near. A smoke-wolf appeared ahead of us, leaping as we crossed a cathedral of pillars and jagged thin stalactites. Kahlin caught it with his blade, ripping through with a single stroke.

A flicker and another was on a ledge of stone, waiting. Its yellow eyes glared in the dark.

The run was brutal; the panther’s body was still heavy with wounds. In the lead was the youngest of the stonekin, a spearman with long, well-shaped limbs, as articulate as the archer-woman’s hands. He sped through the black-

Ahead, there was a tear in space, a place where the light fractured and split into dozens of thin jagged planes joined together like a stained-glass window. I growled out in an alarm, but there was no meaning to the sound for the stoneskins. His headlong run threw him into the breach without ever seeing his doom coming.

He came out the other side divided, sliced into countless pieces with a perfectly clean blade.

Then the rift began to move.

As it strode lifted an arm, it revealed its shape. It looked like an inhumanly tall man, long-limbed and headless, with a body made of dozens of spacial tears. An elemental.

The world warped for a second, bending inwards, and the elemental flickered from one place to the next with a long smear of twisted space stretched out behind its path.

When the monster reappeared its outstretched hand overlapped a stoneskin’s face. The man dissolved into an abstract, reflected through the broken mirror of the spacial rift, and broke apart. The splatter of gore expanded from the elemental in a halo of broken stone but didn’t leave a single mark on its glittering skin.

It turned and flickered forward again, pursuing us in a volley of short leaps.

At the edge of the cavern, a burst of fire signalled the salamander’s arrival, drenched in a sickly and hellish coat of dancing flames. It called out, sending a lance of fire scattering towards the ceiling with ease.

Kahlin turned - there were still three behind us.

The wolf leapt from its perch, dissolving into smoke and reforming to vault past the spear that thrust for its head. Its jaws seized the soldier by the neck and its weight twisted those long, yellow teeth into the wound, dragging him to the ground.

“Split up! Lose them as best you can, and hide high, where the smoke won’t drown you!” The air was thick with it - small grasses and patches of fungus shriveled, hissing as the water within dissolved, and ignited. The darkness of the cavern was gone; we stood in a cathedral of fire.

The caravan soldiers broke. Two for the left, for a tunnel that led into shallow waters. One followed us as Kahlin skirted the space-elemental, taking a run for a deep shaft to the right. A straight drop, one that could lead to a second cavern below, or leave us in a dead-end pit, or even simply drop us so long and far our bones shattered.

But we would take these risk - blind, desperate - until we were dead or safe. There was no better plan than luck and adrenaline.

We crashed downwards. Kahlin’s fingers dragged against the wall in a spray of sparks, and the panther’s instincts guided it, claws ripping the stone for purchase, leaping, moving in a series of jumps that carried us down in a spiral.

Until our injured left paw struck the stone on a patch of slippery, wet moss. Our claws failed to catch the stone underneath, our muscles failed to hold, and we toppled down. The breath left our lungs as the floor below rushed up, ribs jarring, small sharp points in the earth ripping at our hide through the layer of protective symbiote vines.

Kahlin landed beside us, touching our muzzle. We growled and pushed our way onto aching feet. The last stoneskin following dropped, gasping, one foot twisting. He stood with a limp, and made a sign for ‘laughing at a dismal little bit of bad luck at the end of a long string of terrible luck.’

Nodding, Kahlin returned the sign of ‘life is awful and I will miss it’s sense of humor.’ He lifted his mask high, the painted face with its tusks and fierce eyes glaring up. At the top of the shaft, firelight loomed closer and closer, sparks dripping down over the edge.

We had landed in a honeycomb of caverns, packed close together, so that each space opened into three or four more. A maze of rough-shaped rooms full of small colonies of life, separated by circular openings.

A perfect hiding place.

I turned to Kahlin and growled for his attention, fighting the panther’s clumsiness and exhaustion to scratch a diagram into the soft mud. The hand I used was never meant for this, the razor claw a thing for killing, but I managed to etch a crude plan into the dirt.

He nodded, and we split apart, taking up position far to either side of the hole. The last stoneskin made to follow Kahlin towards his hiding place behind a boulder, but the caravan leader waved him off. “Run. This plan…”

It wasn’t very good odds.

The boy nodded, made the sign for ‘hope without optimism’ - and ran.

One by one, our enemies came down. The salamander dropped in a sparking cascade, seering the walls clean of life as it blazed down. Fire burst upwards as it landed, sweeping across the earth, catching against the boulders and curling up in waves of molten froth. The impact twisted its back, and it spent a long moment kicking, struggling, before its limbs were pulled into place by the healing flesh.

Kahlin stood and struck his sword out against the walls to ring. The beast turned. Even some hundred feet apart his body was leaking smoke, his clothes wrapped in little flickering tongue of fire as the blaze tried to catch hold of him.

He ran as the beast spat flame, the lance burning down a chain of tunnels to smash into a distant chamber’s wall and curl back on itself, a bloom of fire. The uneven walls and open doorways gave him the cover he needed, slipping out of the way, keeping himself away from a direct shot as he ran.

There was a shudder and the elemental appeared beside the beast. Every one of the folded facets of space within its body caught the firelight, turning it into a jewel of sickly-green fires.

As the salamander lurched after Kahlin, I showed myself. A hiss ran from the panther’s mouth, its scorpion sting raised up high, body flaring with golden marks I’d placed upon its skin myself; it was a proud and lazy creature, born to feline superiority.

This running and hiding I’d forced it into were humiliations, and after so much fear, so much desperation, so many times I’d watched as others fought-

I felt the same. It was time to turn.

The elemental flickered out of existence, and reformed a split second too late to catch us. The panther flung itself aside as it appeared, hand outstretched, elongated fingers tearing open the wall behind us. There was no violence to how its touch broke things apart. They simply fell away like a puzzle coming undone.

It shivered out of existence, the warped plates of space folding inwards until nothing was left. A kaleidoscopic motion that let it dive through the thin substrate of space between here and the Beyond, reforming in a heartbeat’s time.

Again, we barely escaped, feeling the pull of the wind as air shifted unevenly through the elemental’s lanky frame.

In the distance, Kahlin’s sword rang and rang. It wasn’t part of my plan, but it made a good signal, touching each wall he moved past as the blazing salamander chased him; its firelight echoed through the chambers in reflections, the uneven doorways making it flicker out here and reappear there, constantly making the light shift against our back.

We took a long, arcing path, parallel Kahlin. Again and again, the elemental appeared, often trying to block our path or come in at some strange angle. On weary feet we dodged, the panther alive with hatred as its smooth athletic frame curled to avoid each blow.

The elemental was strong and relentless but it wasn’t fast. Its strange body was graceless and slow compared to us.

The heat rose as we turned slowly, leading it towards the sound of Kahlin’s sword, the hissing cries and crackling spits of flame from the salamander. Until the fire was dead ahead of us.

Until we heard the ring of the sword against the wall opposite.

The elemental flickered into place in front of us, hand outstretched, long fingers pointed like spears.

And I left the panther’s mind.

The elemental ‘saw’ through Mana, the same as me, its consciousness spanning partway through the veil of worlds. I took that sight as I left the physical shell of the panther and my consciousness, lacking a spiritual thread to return to my core by, fell into the infinite sea of the Pale Beyond.

In that space I was a blazing light - and in the real world the panther echoed the flare of my departure by unleashing the light of its luminous markings, the burst of golden radiance obscuring everything for a fatal second as I seized the flow of Mana with all my strength and twisted.

For a fatal moment the elemental was perfectly blind.

It flickered forward, and the panther leapt aside. Kahlin, the flare of light warning him, flung himself down as the salamander barrelled forward.

They collided as the elemental blinked through the wall. The salamander shattered, its fires warping into blazing vortexes that churned out countless sparks as the inferno fell through a dozen spatial tears, the shifting pressures and differential heats creating whip-thin tendrils of flame that lashed across the walls. The world was full of fire, ripping outwards in unpredictable arcs and strange flattened blades, the stone turning molten, smoke and steam obscuring the elemental’s form until it could only be seen a strange warping center to a maelstrom of green-orange hatred.

The panther struggled across the ground, and Kahlin fought for his feet, tearing free his burning mask and letting his cutlass fall as the blade turned to the color of fire. He crawled drunkenly with the clothes of his back alight, and stumbled onto his feet as he found the cover of a wall to shield him.

The panther managed a half-dozen steps, but the smoke and the burning air had infected its lungs. It fell alongside him, golden eyes hazy, its life simply spent. Death came as soon as the will to move forward died.

Kahlin signed for ‘peace upon the grave’ and kept going. For the moment the elemental had no eyes to see, blinded as I clawed and tore open the fabric of Mana, strange illusions and ripples of magic filling the air.

I held it back for him.

And I waited for the enemy to find my soul, drifting along in the vast Beyond.

In the naked space of the Pale Beyond I was terribly, terribly vulnerable. The world I saw - the world of magic - was beautiful and luminous, an endless forest thick with life and dancing motes of light that were tiny spirits with tiny, brightly happy minds. Nothing held still. Rot crawled from the trunks of the trees with incredible speed, flowering out into blossoms that took flight, became birds, leaving the cracked shell of the trunk behind to slowly shiver and shake, twisting in space, becoming the cast-off skin of a serpent and aging in reverse until a snake as broad as a river slithered across the earth.

It was beautiful; everything had the quality of a dream, where certain objects carried an innate knowledge. I looked at a stone and knew every riverbed it had ever slept in, the churning of the earth in the molten days it was formed, the egg it would someday become.

There was simply too much. I looked into the sky and became dizzy, sick, a thousand rainstorms superimposed. There was no linearity of time, and so I saw all of them at once with a sickening overlap that made my mind fragment to keep track of them all.

That was how it would happen. The world would feed me so much meaning my mind bloated, and split open, one into two, two into four, until I was ground down by the beauty of the Beyond.

An ibis bird landed nearby my wisp of soul, lifting its mouth to sing a note of pure clarity. It was the sound of a dawn rising over the horizon and letting its light turn a land of murky shadows into the beauty of day. The world shivered and the overlapping realities melded into a single vision.

Not long now. They're coming.

I will protect you.

It was a brave thing, this little piece of my soul broken off and become its own. I could feel the fear in its heart - just as I could feel the Abyssal energy pouring towards me, its touch staining the earth, making the spirit-flames die in the air and flicker out.

The ibis, cursed with knowledge, would feel the terror of their presence much more acutely than I did.

Either the enemy or the Pale Beyond would tear my mind into a thousand pieces, none of them able to comprehend that I had died.