Damien awoke to Sylph’s face hanging right above him. He blinked up at her and she leaned back, shaking her head.

“Whoops,” Damien said, his lips feeling gummy. “I accidentally yanked the Ether out of my own body with that one.”

“Not just you,” Sylph replied. “The whole chamber we were in got drained for a moment. That was terrifying. If I was a little closer, I probably would have gotten knocked out too.”

“Not a bad skill if you can actually get it to do what you want,” Henry commented from over Sylph’s shoulder.

“Easier said than done,” Damien said, sitting up with a grunt and picking a small rock out of his hair with a grimace. “I’m working on it, though. Didn’t realize I could do that. Actually, I really don’t know the full extent of what direct casting can do at all. But where’s Teddy?”

“He ran off,” Sylph replied. “I wasn’t affected by your magic too much, and I think he realized he bit off more than he could chew. It’s too bad, I was hoping to get the artifacts he had on him, but I didn’t want to leave you here.”

“Ah. Sorry,” Damien said. “I’ll be more careful next time.”

“Just keep the dangerous risks to a manageable level,” Sylph suggested. She helped him to his feet nodded at the room around them. “But at least we can progress again. With Teddy gone, the room actually looks different. He must have literally made a maze around us, which is why carving the path we came in didn’t do anything – it was new rooms.”

“I never knew earth magic could do that,” Damien said, shaking his head. “That’s honestly terrifying.”

“All of the older students have some pretty dangerous magic,” Sylph agreed. “It really is too bad he ran. I would have liked to see how we matched up against him one on one.”

“I’m sure we’ll get another chance,” Damien said, taking his first look around the room after waking up. Like Sylph had said, it looked completely different than it had before.

The glowing stones in the walls were considerably brighter and illuminated the surroundings completely, lighting up every nook and cranny along the walls. Instead of multiple passageways, there was only a single exit and entrance on either side of the room.

One of the paths led upward, while the other descended deeper into the ground. Damien approached the latter warily and peered inside. The light extended deep into stairwell. He couldn’t see any sign of traps or missing stairs. It almost looked welcoming.

“Well, this is certainly an improvement,” Damien said. “I guess we get back to it then? Maybe we’ll actually find an artifact now.”

“Maybe,” Sylph said, not sounding particularly convinced. Henry snorted and the they set back off, delving deeper into the underground of Forsad.

The rooms lengthened and the halls grew longer as they continued. Doors occasionally cropped up along the walls, some rotted away or simply just open archways. The ever present but impossible to locate drip of water echoed faintly past them.

Damien peered down one of the doors, his nose wrinkling at the smell of damp mildew that greeted him.

“These all smell like old people,” he declared. “And something tells me that anything obvious has probably already been looted. How are we supposed to find an artifact without any way to point us? Henry, isn’t there some magic that could help here?”

“We’ve already discussed that I’m not going to flat out give you spells if you don’t absolutely need them,” Henry said, forming a shadowy tentacle and flicking Damien in the back of the head. “And, unfortunately for both of us, dark and space don’t have any great tracking abilities. I had very high inherent magical sense that let me locate fluctuations in the Ether before your human spark messed it all up, but that isn’t something a human can learn.”

“Well, what magic does help? Could wind?” Sylph asked.

Henry grunted. “Ask your companion. I’m not a walking magic dictionary. But, in short, no. If artifacts were easy to locate, they all would have been found by now. The best way to locate them are just being really sensitive to lines of Ether or being lucky.”

Damien cast his net of mental energy out, highlighting the Ether crisscrossing the room. He squinted at it, trying to see if anything was out of place, but the glimmering strands looked exactly how they normally did.

“Is there something in particular I’m looking for?” Damien asked. “It’s just gold lines. Magic gold lines.”

“You don’t have the magical control for it,” Henry replied. “It would take so long to train it that you shouldn’t even bother right now. Fine control is the last of your issues. Sylph would have better luck.”

“And what exactly is it that I’m looking for?” Sylph asked, her brow furrowed. “I see the Ether, but it’s like Damien said. It’s just gold.”

Henry let out an irritated sigh. “I said you’d have a better chance, not a good one. Then again, your magical control is so abnormally high that you might really have a shot. Look for bends in the Ether. It should be straight, but powerful magic sources can tug it ever so slightly. The bigger the bend, the stronger the pull. Just remember that the bends are so small that you probably can’t even see them with your eyes – you need to sense them with mental energy.”

Sylph chewed her lower lip, narrowing her eyes in concentration. Damien didn’t so much as breath to avoid distracting her. Several seconds passed in silence. Then Sylph’s eyes widened.

“I think I see one – wait, I lost it.”

Damien hid his disappointed frown. “It’s okay, that’s more than I can do! If you saw one for a moment, then maybe–”

“Wait, it’s back. This way!” Sylph turned to a tunnel trailing off to their right side and stepped inside, bringing her wind armor to life around her.

“Huh. That was fast,” Henry said. “I knew her magical control was good, but that’s abnormal for a human.”

She’s hardly just a human with all the Corruption in her.

“Fair point,” Henry allowed. Damien followed after Sylph, ready to activate his mage armor at moment’s notice. Their footsteps echoed through the hall as the two accelerated – but not so much as to mistakenly stumble into a possible trap.

The tunnel routed them into a clockwise stairwell that headed straight downward. It was lit by flickering magical torches that used glowing stones rather than flame for light. The stone beneath their feet turned dark and waterlogged the farther they went.

Finally, the pathway terminated before a small, unassuming metal door embedded in the stone at the end of a short room. Damien and Sylph came to a stop before it, glancing around but finding nothing else.

“Well, that was anticlimactic,” Damien said.

“If you’re trying to hide something important, you probably wouldn’t want to make the path leading up to it really fancy or exciting,” Sylph pointed out. “That would just end up calling all the looters over to your treasure.”

“Good point. So… door.”

“Door,” Sylph agreed, touching it carefully with the back of her hand. She nodded to herself, then summoned a black gauntlet around her hand and touched the doorknob. It creaked but didn’t budge.

“They locked it,” Damien said helpfully. “I guess that makes sense too.”

There was a sharp crack as the knob snapped off in Sylph’s gauntleted hand. She raised the knob to him and waggled an eyebrow. “Not anymore.”

Damien inclined his head. “You win that one. Open it already, let’s see if there’s anything there.”

He gathered Ether into a tear in his hand, standing at an angle so that he had a shot over Sylph’s shoulder as she pulled the door open. It swung slowly, revealing a dark room devoid of lighting. It took Damien’s eyes a moment to adjust.

A marble pedestal sat in the center of the room, its top carved into the shape of a claw reaching toward the heavens. Held at the tip of its claw was a red gem. It shimmered faintly in the light coming in from the room they currently stood in.

“Trapped?” Damien wondered. “Looks expensive to me.”

“Almost certainly,” Sylph said, squinting around the dark room. “I wonder how extensive the trap is, though. Do you think it’s just in that room, or would it have a larger area of effect? Or maybe it’s on the gem itself…”

“Your guess is as good as mine if not better,” Damien replied, rubbing his head. “If the trap is on the gem itself, we can avoid that by grabbing it with some cloth. I doubt it’s so trapped as to just blow up on contact, since that would defeat the purpose of having an artifact in the first place. The person who originally put it there probably wanted to use it at some point.”

“That’s a good point,” Sylph said. “So the gem is probably safe itself then. Now the question is the range of the trap.”

Damien squinted at the room and rubbed his chin. He and Sylph stood there for nearly a minute before he cleared his throat.

“What if I just teleported in, grabbed it, and teleported out? Then we can run like crazy and deal with the consequences later.”

“That doesn’t seem like a particularly intelligent plan.”

“That doesn’t sound like a no.”

“It isn’t one,” Sylph said, cracking a grin. “Just make sure I’m behind in case something explodes. I can take a hit a lot better than you can.”

Damien nodded, then gathered the Ether in his core. He flickered, appearing in the room for just long enough to pluck the red gem from the claw’s grasp. Damien took care not to touch the stone, just in case it had some runes he couldn’t make out.

The claws snapped shut, no longer held open by the gem. Damien vanished, having absolutely no desire to find out what that entailed. He reappeared beside Sylph, thrusting the gem into the pockets of his mage armor.

They both dashed for the exit as fast as they could. A rumble ran through the room behind them, followed by a loud groaning creak.

“Something isn’t happy,” Damien yelled, teleporting as they reached a corner to avoid slowing down. Sylph hopped off the wall, practically flying over his head as her wind armor accelerated her.

“You don’t say. Don’t let it get the gem back!”

“Keep dreaming,” Damien called with a laugh, teleporting ahead of her. Magic filled the halls around them as they darted for the exit, rumbles growing louder and passing through more of the underground behind them.

Damien flickered past a falling boulder and a scythe carved through it, splitting the stone before it could hit Sylph. They turned yet another corner, but the noise made no indication of growing weaker.

His jovial mood started to fade. Whatever they’d taken, something very clearly wanted it back.

“What did we steal?” Damien asked, risking a glance over his shoulder. “Why in the Eight Planes is the whole blasted place coming down around us?”

“Let’s worry about that once we’re in a better spot to fight,” Sylph replied, sweat beading on her brow. “Just keep running. I think I felt a breeze. We don’t want to be forced to fight in close quarters.”

They accelerated once more, using all the power they had to put distance between them and the rumbles. Sylph took the lead, shooting through tunnels seemingly at random. Damien just focused on keeping up with her. They did seem to be heading up a lot of stairwells and slopes, so he was hopeful that that meant they were growing near the top of the city.

More stone rained down around Damien. The noise at their heels was still growing louder, and the ground shook harder with every passing second. He gritted his teeth and grabbed Sylph by the shoulder.

“We aren’t going to make it!” Damien yelled over the growing din. “Stay close to me.”

He connected to the ring of runes in his mind, sending a mental command out into the Ether surrounding them.

“Shatter.”

Black lines erupted from Damien’s chest, spiking up through the ceiling above them. With a loud explosion, they detonated. He staggered, but caught himself on Sylph’s shoulder. Energy drained from his body, but Damien kept his grip on reality and avoided sucking the Ether out of himself again.

Stone cascaded down around them. Huge boulders crashed to the ground, and a tiny beam of gray light pierced through the ceiling. Damien and Sylph spotted it at the same time and shot toward it without a word.

Damien teleported multiple times, avoiding falling stones until he got a clear angle to peek outside. As soon as he caught a flicker of the drab stone streets, he Warp Stepped. Sylph was right on his heels.

She’d carved clean through all the rubble in her way, bashing what remained of it to pieces with her black gauntlet. The two of them ran a short distance back, then turned to observe the growing sinkhole forming in the ground.

Buildings toppled and fell into it as the rumbling slowly stopped. Finally, the city went still once more. Dust floated in the air around them, making the gray light even darker.

“Well, that happened,” Damien said, brushing himself off and pulling the gem out. “Got it, though. I wonder what was chasing us.”

Dark motes shimmered within the dust, snapping together as if pulled by an invisible force. They formed into a humanoid form, revealing Aven as she stepped out over the edge of the sinkhole.

“That would have been me.”