The flames had gone out; as they walked across the vast ashy expanse of the cavern beach, their torchlight illuminated ashes, chitin, and burnt bones. Thomas didn't look too closely at the bones, now; they were burnt, but also kind of melted. Fire and acid; it was the realization of the acid which had truly disturbed him. Most of the bones were human, and he didn't know, didn't want to know, didn't want to think about, whether they had been dead when they had begun being digested.

The all-encompassing silence was eerie, unhelped by the fact that they could see only the short distance their torches illuminated. He could feel the rocks and sand grinding under his bare feet; he was listening for the sound, and it was not there. He felt like he was in a bubble of light and silence, separated from the infinite expanse of the shadowy world around him; it was intensely isolating, not just from the people around him, not even just from the environment he walked through, but from himself. It made him a trespasser in his own awareness, his own existence; a passive observer, a spy.

It also made the fact that he had no clothes left something that … just didn't matter. It was somebody else, and if they didn't care, and nobody around them cared, why should he? He was a trespasser in his awareness, but he was free. He didn't care; he didn't have to care. It was a strange and foreign insight.

Thomas had to keep glancing around him, to keep track of the locations of the others. And … in the absence of sound entirely, he found himself paying more attention to Arias; she had always kind of slipped behind his attention, barely noticed. Now he felt rather bad about the way he had ignored her in favor of the more talkative members of the party, because, as his attention focused on body language for lack of any other form of communication, he started to realize that she communicated extensively, at a level that had simply been beneath his awareness.

She used little hand signals to Anne to indicate what she was going to do next; flicks of the fingers in the direction she was going. She would get the older woman's attention, and use exaggerated motions of her head to direct attention to where she wanted Anne to look; Arias rarely looked with just her eyes, turning her head instead, so the others would know what she was paying attention to. And so much of it, Thomas just didn't know how to interpret; there were constant little motions from her hands and fingers, she changed the way she walked, she had several different ways of waving.

And Madelaine, he realized, was copying some of the gestures; she had immediately attached herself to 'Princess Arias' upon meeting her, and had begun picking up her mannerisms. And he found himself paying attention to Madelaine's gestures, as well, because her clumsy attempts to copy Arias were, in some ways, easier to understand, which in turn helped him start to figure out what Arias was communicating.

They picked their way across the vast expanse, finding only occasional sections of intact webbing. Arias had a particular little half-wave she used to signal that she'd found these sections, arm moving only past the elbow. They also found a few spiders, quickly dispatched, although they had yet to find any evidence of the horrible blank-faced thing.

One body, a dead woman. Anne had cut the webbing away until … goo, had started to slowly leak out. Partially digested, perhaps a meal they had interrupted with the fire. The woman's face was contorted in an expression he had looked away from. It might have been pain. He didn't want to know. Norris burned her; the thick webbing wrapping her burned.

The glowing green lights above them, reflected on the pool of the vast lake, no longer seemed so beautiful. Or, well, it was still beautiful, but a haunting and dark kind of beauty, deprived of a sense of childlike wonder that had filled him on first sight. Or perhaps it was still beautiful, and he just felt as alienated from it, in this bubble of silence, as he felt from everything else.

They didn't approach the lake; something stirred beneath the surface when Arias drew near, and she retreated again, waving them off. They searched the floor of the vast cavern systematically, their torches forming a tiny bubble of light. It must have been hours, for the distance, but the silence and the dark made every second an eternity, every hour an instant. Or perhaps his sense of time was simply still broken, although the world had stopped skipping, and things seemed to follow things in an orderly fashion. They criss-crossed the vast floor of the cavern, and then began exploring the edges. There were tunnels; they ventured into one. It ended a few hundred feet, and a half dozen turns and twists, in. Arias lowered a rope from another, and they climbed after her; they found a dense thicket of spiderwebs, which Norris torched.

The web burned quickly and brightly; Thomas had to turn away, lest it ruin his vision, but spindly shadowy shapes in the web jerked and twisted as the fire rushed in. Wind blew around his face, feeding the flames. They waited for the fire and smoke to clear, and proceeded in.

Chitin and ash littered the ground. The smell was one he had long grown accustomed to, and he barely noticed. They moved past the nest. And then Arias was leaping backwards; Thomas rushed forwards, and had barely gotten ahead of her when a large yellow-white lump rolled around the next corner, spikes and …

The world shrank around him as Thomas made himself larger; an arrow flicked past him, embedding into something more like flesh; one enormous compound eye focused on Thomas, and he had to stop himself from shivering, as he took in the length, the endless rows of chitinous legs moving in a rolling wave, as the enormous … caterpillar? No, more like a centipede, with long black spiral horns … no, antennae … Thomas shook his head, forcing himself to focus, watching it barrel across the distance separating them, its pincers, each several feet long, opened wide. He watched the pincers, and the mouth, a smaller bony-looking opening, like a three-pronged beak.

Thomas stepped backwards as he caught the pincers, and they tried to close on him; the force wasn't something he could resist, and just the attempt ripped the flesh of his palms open wide, the pincers jagged and sharp on the interior edges. He slid past the pincers once they had closed where he had been, and tried instead to wrap his arms around them, to try to hold them closed. Flashes passed by him; Anne's arrows, Norris' magic. Arias had moved past him as well; the centipede, or whatever it was, thrashed.

And then opened its pincers again, and closed them again, as if his arms weren't there at all. Thomas blinked in shock, and stepped back, looking down at his left arm, which … just stopped, just past the elbow. He'd let his arm slip down when the pincers had opened, and failed to get it back out when they closed. Thomas looked at the lower portion of his arm, laying on the ground. It … didn't hurt. It didn't even seem to be bleeding the way it should; blood was spurting out of the stump, but somehow it seemed like it should be gushing, or even spraying. Somebody grabbed him; he shoved them back, and then stepped forward. He felt the growl in his throat; the centipede was starting to back up, jerking; Arias was behind it, cutting with her rapier.

It jerked again as his fist took it in one compound eye, head swiveling away from him. Thomas reached down and grabbed his arm in his free hand, snarled, and kept walking towards it. He was yelling, but wasn't paying attention to the words; he knew what he felt, which was that, if this beast wanted his arm, it would get his arm. The centipede kept staggering back, trying to retreat; he shoved his arm into the eye, and kept shoving. The centipede jerked and twitched, trying to swing its pincers back around at him, but he just slid across the ground, inside their reach. Thomas kept shoving, green and yellow pus starting to gush around the appendage. The insect thrashed, jerked, twisted, fell, its legs no longer moving in sequence. He shoved.

Thomas stepped back, and spat bitter centipede-gunk that had sprayed into his face from his mouth. His mouth and tongue were numb. Somebody was … oh. Norris was punching him to get his attention. Thomas let himself shrink back into his normal size, and immediately had to spit again, as the small amount of ichor that he hadn't gotten the first time suddenly multiplied in size relative to his mouth. Disgusting.

The others were staring at him. Thomas looked down at the stump of his arm – Norris had begun tying a tourniquet around it, although his attention was a wide-eyed kind of expression at Thomas, and Anne was holding her longsword in a torch flame, looking pale. Oh, that would hurt. It did hurt. He didn't stop himself from screaming; he couldn't hear it, and neither could they. He was glad he couldn't hear the sizzling; the smell was bad enough.

Thomas couldn't explain. He just looked up at the alien 'stars' overhead, feeling a strange kind of giddy freedom. He didn't care. Part of was the strange sense of disassociation brought by the silence, the darkness, the utter foreignness of this; it didn't feel real, at an emotional level. And part of it was that, on a rational level, he knew that, like the injuries to his ears, it wasn't permanent. They just had to make it back to town and find a magical healer; he'd been through this before, and the urgency of the terror just wasn't there. And it would be expensive, but, well, what was money for? Norris washed the ichor off Thomas using magically-conjured water. He had no clothes to ruin, at least.

They set up camp, to sleep for the night, after returning to the original entrance – he was startled to notice a chalk mark on the stones he hadn't observed anyone make – and putting the boulders back in place to wall up the larger cavern. The agony, too, felt removed from himself, like observing another experience it. But it did still make it difficult to fall asleep, particularly as he became aware of other injuries; the ichor had been acidic. His mouth hurt, his chest hurt, his groin hurt. The flesh was a vivid irritated red, and itched intensely. The itching felt more immediate and real than the pain, but faded in and out of his awareness, where the pain from the stump, and tingling pain from a hand and fingers that were no longer there, just didn't stop.

Vivid dreams met him, when he did manage sleep. Confused and sexual, but full of sound of light and presence, and somehow more real than his waking reality; he wasn't entirely certain who his partner was, or even whether they were man or woman, only the senses of pinning wrists against a wall, of urgent need, of salty flesh and panting breaths and moans and eager submission, of his hand around a throat that moved into his grip; of taking control by giving pleasure.