The spotlights winked out as the platform began its ascent. Elach looked towards the source of the lone spotlight that remained on directly above them; it was too far to make out at first, but as they ascended he could make out a large white crystal trapped between metallic claws. The claw moved out of the way as the platform grew closer, the last spotlight snuffed out giving way to utter darkness.

“They really like darkness here, don’t they?” Y’talla observed.

“It is the Gilded Night.” Elach tried to push away the stifling Issi around them to no avail. Wherever this lift was taking them, it wasn’t just going up. “Do either of you think we have a chance at catching those Glasrime and… Lava-something intruders?”

Flow chirped quickly.

“Lavassil. That’s what it was.” Elach nodded. “Thanks, buddy.”

Y’talla crossed her arms and shook her head. “If they’re strong enough that Hoalt is scared of them, then there’s no way. And if he’s scared that they’ll catch up to your friends, with how strong Prisoner is, then there’s absolutely no way.”

“Then there’s no point to any of this, which makes no sense.” Elach scratched his chin and sighed. “Let’s pretend Hoalt didn’t send us up here for no reason. I’ve got the dagger, which is something we can deliver, but he also could have given that to Prisoner. It feels like an excuse to get us to stay in this place if we decided we couldn’t catch the intruders.”

“Huh. That is an uncomfortable thought.” Y’talla bit her lip and thought for a moment. “Why does Hoalt need us here? Need you here, I mean.”

A two-toned song from Flow cut in, evoking images of shadowed faces that illuminated into nothing at all.

“Maybe it is nothing, but I’m still worried. Hoalt claimed he isn’t the tyrant I think he is, but that’s exactly what a tyrant would say.” Elach put a hand above his eyes as a small circle of light blossomed above them, the glass sides of the lift gently touching the roof above with a soft clink. “I guess we’ll find out eventually.”

The circle widened until it was wide enough for the glass to barely pass through, the lift humming to a stop in the middle of a small room that looked like a broom closet. Dark wooden brooms included. In fact, it was all brooms. Floor? Broom. Ceiling? Broom hanging from a hook. Wall? Brooms mounted as if they were swords. Far too many brooms, all carbon copies of each other and in perfect condition.

“I hate this.” Y’talla muttered, shying away from a handle that dangled down in front of her face. “Is broom-a-phobia a thing?”

Elach twitched as a shiver ran down his spine. This place’s Issi felt sickening. A foul stench spilled forth from the other room, along with a cool mist that was tinted with sickly green Issi. “I don’t think it’s the brooms.”

Stepping forward, Elach sent an order over his bond to stay quiet and stay back. He felt something on the other side of the door, a mass of Issi that reminded him of half a rotting carcass sticking out of a frozen river. He grimaced as he pushed the image of that poor damn kid out of his mind, the scraps of meat on a skeleton with one fractured orbital bone trying to haul themselves out of the lake…

“Damn it.” Elach muttered. “Damn it.”

His hand touched the dark, freezing wood of the door. The latch shattered with a simple push, too frozen and brittle to be of any use, swinging open to reveal a cave carved out of ice that glowed with a dark blue core. Sitting in the middle of the cave was a mound of flesh that pulsed in time to the core’s bursts of light, mostly pink with some dark red scars held together with thick, black metal stitches. Elach stepped foot out of the wooden closet and felt something slithering at the edge of his mind, a worm of Issi that he snuffed out with a thought.

The pile in the middle of the room shuddered as Elach absorbed the Issi he’d scraped clean, worms of spectral green Issi pushing through its wounds and dancing half in flesh and half in open air as if they were waiting for something. Wasn’t the first floor of each group of ten supposed to be safe?

One of the worms slipped out of the flesh mound, tumbling down and splattering against the ground. The spectral green Issi stayed in a puddle as Elach watched, tentatively moving closer as time passed without anything happening. He froze as the puddle started bubbling, then rippling, and finally condensing back into the worm it had once been. It let out a guttural noise somewhere between a monkey’s shriek and a bear’s roar, swiveling about at a feverish pace while flinging globs of Issi everywhere.

Then it stopped. One end of it paused and pointed unerringly at Elach, who gingerly stepped to the side to see if it would follow. It didn’t. Because it wasn’t him that it had locked on to.

The air vibrated in the room, a high-pitched whine shifting frequency until it settled on something approximate to words. “Companions Elach. Where?” A wheeze escaped the flesh pile. “Can’t see. Can’t feel.”

Y’talla’s eyes were wide as she shot Elach a panicked look.

Elach gulped. “I’m right here.”

The flesh mound slid away from Elach’s voice, as if he’d surprised it. The humming vibrations in the air reached a fever pitch, taking a moment to come back down to making words. “How? No feel. No see.”

“Was that Issi worm behind my eye yours?” Elach asked.

“Worm? Technique. Yes.”

“I kind of destroyed it.”

“Destroy? How feel?”

“Uh, I feel fine?” Elach said. “Thanks for asking?”

The vibrations became slightly agitated, but it didn’t seem directed at Elach. The best way he could describe it was self-frustration. “No. How feel worm?”

“How did I sense your Issi?” Elach asked for clarification.

“Yes.”

“It was in my body, and it wasn’t mine.” Elach shrugged. “So I destroyed it.”

“Destroy.” The flesh-pile asked in confusion. “How destroy?”

Elach opened his mouth, then shut it. How had he destroyed the Issi worm? He’d used his purification technique to scour it clean of Issi, but now that he thought about it, that shouldn’t work on techniques. Only on plain Issi. Maybe that had changed too when Y’talla took over Sentence’s bond.

“I used my purification technique and stripped away your Issi.” Elach explained. It was the simplest explanation, and it felt mostly right. “My bond lets me do that for some reason.”

“Bond?” The vibrations focused in on Elach, and he heard Y’talla let out a yelp of surprise. “Bond. Yes. Understand. Follow.”

The mass of flesh began trembling and exuding a pool of green Issi underneath it, which then condensed into a sort of sled underneath it. It slid towards the end of the cave, leaving behind a faint trail of sickly green, then stopped and waited for Elach to follow it. He sent a warning to Flow and Y’talla, but also indicated that it seemed to be safe for now. When they stepped up the flesh mound slid further away, stopping and waiting for them to catch up before moving once more.

This pattern continued a dozen times before the flesh mass reached the end of the cave. Elach had to hold his breath at this point, the stench of putrid rot too much to handle this close to the mass of flesh. It shifted as if to make sure Elach and his companions were indeed there with it, then without warning let out a massive spray of Issi that coated the ice of the cave.

The ice melted away in a heartbeat to reveal a wall of buildings in front of them, a ceiling of ice not that far above their heads, and a ring of the same ice just a few feet away from the buildings. It was like they’d stepped foot in a miniature, darker recreation of Glasrime’s glacier. The flesh mound squelched between a building and the ice wall, squished to fit through the space, and moved forward until it turned down an alleyway. From the vibrations that followed, Elach knew it was waiting there for them.

“Well that was terrifying.” Y’talla muttered, rubbing her shoulders as she followed Elach. “If this thing is our welcome, why didn’t anyone warn us? You looked like you were going to kill it, and I really don’t think that would have ended well for us.”

“I think everything here is designed to surprise us.” Elach said as he ran a hand along the ice wall. “See how we react to new things, I’d guess. If someone instantly tries to kill something that doesn’t look like what they already know, or that they think looks dangerous or disgusting, then that’s someone who’d be pretty dangerous with too much power. Hells, they’d be dangerous with the smallest amount of power over anybody.”

“...You’re talking about Hollow, aren’t you? Not the ‘dangerous with powe’r part, but the early judgment part.”

Was he? Elach thought back to what Hollow had become, the obsidian and bone wraith with flowing grey static. “I think I am. She looked absurdly dangerous and powerful, but she would never attack first.”

“Come. Follow.”

Elach shared a look with Y’talla and jogged to catch up with the fleshy blob. The moment Elach poked his head into the alley he caught sight of the blob moving, sliding through the narrow passage like pudding flowing through a man’s toes, accompanying sound included. The scraping pop when the blob flopped out of the alley, followed by a wet thunk and Issi leakage were almost enough to send Elach over the edge of nausea. Y’talla’s retching showed she hadn’t fared as well as he did, though it wasn’t followed by any wet splattering, so she’d managed to hold her lunch. A small victory.

“Rest. Learn. Help.” The blob vibrated, Issi worms condensing into three larger versions of themselves that pointed off in different directions.

The first pointed to a tall and wide building that had a sign decorated with a bed. It took up almost half of the cavern’s circumference, and was at least a hundred feet thick. “Rest.”

Another pointed off to a building that looked like a library, a fenced-in yard around and behind it with green grass and practitioners training. “Learn.”

Finally, there was the third worm. It pointed straight forward to a bulletin board in the middle of the clearing, filled with messages and requests pinned to it. A few people sat nearby at an outdoor cafe, a piece of paper from the board sitting in the middle of their table as they had a heated discussion. “Help.”

“This floor different. All one.” The blob sputtered for a moment, its vibrations cutting out, then back in. Elach grimaced as he realized the thing was laughing. “Get strong. Give help. Find exit.”