The two demons left the torch burning on the obsidian floor and retreated into the darkness. There was a sound like rusted hinges squealing as a heavy door swung on them followed by the heavy crash of metal on metal and the solid thunk of a bolt being slid home.

“Those fuckers locked me in,” she said, gaping at the direction the noise had come from. Hald wasn’t playing around, but Mira had the unsettling feeling that if she somehow managed to do what he wanted, she wouldn’t outlive her usefulness for very long.

He couldn’t keep her in there forever. Surely someone would miss her soon. If nothing else, Maluk was supposed to be her bodyguard. He’d come looking for her, unless he was in on it too. But no, he’d defended her from Lortas back at the outpost base. And either way, Alyr would want to know where she was. His motivations were selfish, but that was precisely what made her trust them.

All she had to do was sit there and wait for Hald to let her back out. He was bluffing about leaving her locked in there. That decided, she picked up the torch and looked around. As expected, there was a thick iron door with a couple of slits in it blocking her way out. She could almost make out the stairs on the other side, but the torch didn’t shed enough light for her to be sure.

The rest of the room was a circle of bare worked stone with a ceiling so far overhead that it was lost to darkness. The only interesting feature at all was the floor, which Mira refused to spend any amount of time looking at. No way was she helping that bastard Hald.

With nothing else to do, she stood there. After a minute of holding up the torch, she tossed it back onto the floor. Time went by slowly while she fumed at being locked up. That had happened far too many times since she’d been dumped onto a shit heap of a planet. After what felt like hours but which was really only twenty minutes or so, she let out a heavy sigh and sat down.

Slowly, despite her attempts to resist so much as looking at the constellation pattern embedded in the obsidian, Mira found herself tracing the blue lines with her finger. As soon as she realized what she was doing, she put her hand in her lap and scowled. She decided if she was going to be wasting time there, she might as well go back to bed.

The floor was cold and hard. She had no blankets or pillow, or even the cloak she’d grown accustomed to wrapping herself in during her many, many, many nights on the side of the road. At least then she’d usually had a fire to sleep near, or a warmer climate. That certainly beat a glassy cold floor.

Hours passed and Mira refused to bend to Hald’s whims. Her stomach rumbled and her throat felt dry and scratchy, but nobody showed up to let her out. Finally, she gave in. Even though she had absolutely no interest in helping Hald after the way he’d treated her, she was just so bored and in need of a distraction from an empty belly that she turned her attention to the floor.

The torch had long since burned out, leaving her in almost complete darkness. The small pinpricks of light in the floor were still visible, though not the blue lines linking them together. Mira tried touching them through the glassy obsidian, but whatever they were, they weren’t anywhere near the surface. She ran her hands over the entire thing, but it was all one smooth plane.

Frustrated and lacking any better ideas, she struck the floor with the spent torch. That worked exactly as well as she’d expected it to, which was to say that the torch bounced off the floor and her hand hurt. Mira didn’t have a clue what she was supposed to be figuring out to break the seal.

Last time she’d been asleep when she’d done it, but she didn’t actually remember the dream all that well. Plus, it had been that demon who could mess with people’s heads controlling the whole thing, so she doubted that anything would happen even after she fell asleep.

Eventually, despite the conditions of her captivity, she did sleep. She dreamed of being held prisoner, with a dozen different jailors all demanding different things from her. Jorath was there, as were Hald and Drey, the gardener who’d tried to captivate her. Her old landlord from Earth made an appearance, and worst of all, a shadowy figure with a crown made of obsidian and sparking lights connected by blue veins. It alone hissed and laughed at her and made no demands.

Something about the figure made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. It didn’t threaten her. It didn’t even approach her. It just stood there, outside the door to her cell, mocking her with its laugh. When Mira woke, she could still hear the echoes of it in her head.

Maybe it was her subconscious interpreting her surroundings into bad dreams, but maybe not. She could see that crown from her dreams in the floor. And abruptly, she realized something. The floor was alive. It didn’t move or breathe or talk, but it lived. The more she thought about it, the more she was sure of it.

There was one other thing she could think of that was alive even though it shouldn’t have been, and that was a demon’s heartstone. The ones she’d seen had been small enough to be held in her hand, but if her guess was right, she was standing on top of an enormous heartstone easily twenty feet wide. She couldn’t even imagine how big the demon it had been pulled out of would have to have been.

There was a simple way to test her theory. She settled herself down onto the center, placed both hands on the cold, glassy obsidian, and closed her eyes. It was strange to attempt to establish a resonance with a heartstone she wasn’t physically holding, but she thought it was worth the attempt.

She sat like that for half an hour. Nothing happened. Normally it only took a minute or two to get into the right mindset to really reach deep into a heartstone, but in this case, not only was that deeper connection not happening, there was no resonance at all. After another half an hour, she decided that she’d been mistaken about the whole thing and tried to stand up.

The world flexed around her. One long beat of a titan-sized drum strained her chest to the point where she thought her heart was going to tear itself out of her body. Crying out, she curled up into a ball and fell over. The pain was immense, enough that all she could do was sit there and sob until she passed out.

* * *

“It’s been awhile since they fed me a fresh victim.”

Mira’s eyes flew open and leaped to her feet. Standing over her was a featureless black blob shaped like a man, a three-dimensional shadow come to life. Just like in her dream, it was wearing a glassy obsidian crown speckled with glowing white pinpricks and thin neon blue veins connecting them.

The shadow thing cocked its head to the side and said, “You sure don’t look like much. Probably won’t be much fun, but it’s been ages and I’m so bored. Let’s see how long you can survive.”

“I… wait, what are you going to do to me?”

“Me?” the shadow asked. “Nothing. You don’t have to worry about me. I’m just a spectator. It’s… well… everything else that you have to worry about.”

Mira looked around. She was still standing on that smooth chunk of speckled obsidian, but instead of being in a pitch-black cell of a room, she was in the middle of a grassy field. It wasn’t the kind of wild fields she’d become accustomed to lately, but rather the well-manicured stretch of grass she would expect to find at a park.

The sky overhead was bright and sunny, and there was a gentle breeze. It was the perfect summer day, except that there was no way it could be. She was supposed to be locked in an underground chamber carved out of a mountain at an elevation so high she’d been afraid of freezing to death on the way there.

“What is this place?”

The shadow laughed. “It’s a playground, of course. Why don’t you come with me? I’ll show you around.”

“No offense, but you seem like the last person I’d want to follow anywhere.”

“Suit yourself.” If the shadow was offended, it didn’t show it. “It’s not really safe here, but then, it’s not really safe anywhere.”

Then it did something strange, even by Mira’s adjusted standards given the way her life had been going lately. It simply leaned forward and folded its legs up to sit in the air. Then, with its elbows propped on its folded legs and its chin on its hands, it sat there, three feet off the ground, and stared at her.

“Uh…”

“Oh, don’t mind me,” the shadow said. “The show’s about to start.”

Mira glared at it. “What show?”

“You know, I used to tell my victims. But, uh, well, it’s more fun for me if I keep it a surprise. And it has been a long, long time, so I’m hoping for a good performance from you. It would just be a shame if you went and died in the first few minutes.”

Mira ran a mental checklist. Her heartstone was gone, too far away for her to reach out to it. Even if she didn’t have to be touching it now, distance still mattered. No demon tattoos marked her arm anymore. Her shadow hadn’t done anything strange since that one time, and there had been plenty of close calls where it could have helped out.

There wasn’t even a loose branch she could arm herself with anywhere in sight. If it came down to a fight for her life, her best and only real option was to run like hell. The problem with that was that she’d seen how fast some demons could move. Maluk was so quick it was hard to follow him with her eyes. Kalkus flew far faster than she could run. Jorath could literally teleport.

Running was not a great option, but unless a relatively weak demon was the imminent threat, she didn’t see what else she could do. Even if it was and she pulled the heartstone out of it, she was already bonded to the vilraf heartstone. She wouldn’t be able to use it to defend herself.

The ground started rumbling. It was subtle at first, so faint that she wondered if she was imagining it. Within a few seconds, she was sure she wasn’t. Soon after that, the ground split open and the top soil started rising up. Underneath it was a creature made of rocks and dirt, with loose roots poking out of its back, shoulders, and skulls from where grass was still stuck to it. It gave itself a great shake, sending clumps of soil flying, and slowly its eyes focused on Mira.

“Good,” the shadow said. “It’s finally starting. Let’s see what you can do, young demon hunter.”

“Oh fuck that,” Mira said, staring back at the dirt monster. It was at least eight feet tall, and hunched over so that its arms dangled almost all the way to the ground. It wasn’t just tall; it was wide. Those arms were thicker than her legs, and its legs were like telephone poles.

It looked like the physical manifestation of the phrase ‘dumb as a rock’ with its almost vacant stare and slack-jawed expression. Mira froze in place, wondering if the thing would eventually just wander off on its own. Unfortunately for her, what passed for its two brain cells must have finally rubbed together, because it let out a throaty bellow that shook the ground, and started charging directly at her.

“Have fun!” the shadow called out as she turned and ran in the opposite direction.

“And fuck you too,” Mira yelled back. She ran for all she was worth, but just like she’d expected, it was a losing proposition. She took more steps, but its legs were far longer, and it began to steadily close the distance. If she didn’t think of another plan soon, it was going to run her over, and she didn’t fancy getting stomped on and kicked when it caught up to her.

“Time for the backup plan,” she muttered as she stopped running and spun in place. The rock monster’s face lit up in child-like glee as it barreled down at her, and Mira couldn’t help but think that she would have lived marginally longer if she’d just kept running instead.