Shar turned her head and nodded when she heard Elach’s footsteps approaching. “Did the other two go back into your headspace?”

“Y’talla wanted to help the wisplings feel at home, whatever that means, and Flow didn’t want to see Izzik again. After seeing what we saw with Occril, they don’t feel comfortable around him any more.” Elach sighed. “I’m not sure I blame them. All these people could become Occrils if they don’t horrible deaths.”

“These darkspawn are a little too similar to the hungry wolf’s subjects down below for comfort.” Shar agreed. “I’ll speak to the Emperor about this floor once we return. It could be part of the reason one of our own returned shrouded in the wolf’s embrace.”

Elach kept the surprise out of his face. He hadn’t heard anything about this. This had to be one of the secrets Shar was keeping from him. “Oh?” He said plainly, leaving space in the conversation for Shar to fill in herself.

“Yes, this is a secret. No, me telling you won’t draw the Emperor’s ire. There is no possible way that Prisoner wouldn’t tell you this the moment we met up with him, so there shouldn’t be any harm in you finding out a little prematurely.” Shar chuckled, crossing her arms as she traced an unseen presence with her eyes. “Especially not when it’s a little too entwined with what we’re dealing with.”

Nodding to himself as he followed the same presence as Shar was, Elach let his thoughts wander while leaving the conversation empty. If the wolf Hoalt’s Issi had somehow infected these people, then it had to have come from somewhere. The floor was completely off-limits to anyone who hadn’t cleared all the ones before it, so why was this one alone in its corruption? A corruption so thorough that it squirmed through the dirt, nipping at tree roots to try and find a conscious host. It was absolutely everywhere, and yet completely confined to this one floor.

Shar didn’t take the bait of silence, waiting patiently until the presence slowly made its way to the grove. Izzik was being overly cautious in his return, which Elach felt a little slighted at; Izzik had very little trust that Shar could defeat Occril. And that Elach would survive the encounter.

Emerging from the shadows with a lantern stuffed to the brim with little yellow lights, Izzik was the image of buzzing happiness. “The Elach and the Shar. Izzik has gathered enough little lights to ensure safe passage through Lighthome.”

“Mmhm.” Shar nodded absentmindedly, looking around Izzik at the stain that was slowly approaching. “Elach? Are you feeling the same thing I am?”

The stain that he’d assumed was Izzik was closing in on the grove, growing quieter and quieter by the moment. “I think I am.”

“Then we need to leave now.” Shar said, turning on her heel to face the grove’s exit.

“What is wrong? Does the Shar feel something?” Izzik worriedly asked, holding the lantern close to his body to keep it safe. “Is Occril not dealt with?”

“Occril’s gone, but someone else is coming.” Elach whispered, suddenly not wanting to raise his voice. This presence was far heavier than Occril or the scorpion’s were. “If everything starts going wrong, I’ll try to chain us out of here.”

Shar vigorously shook her head. “No Issi from now until we get back to the hideaway. My scarf is dangerous enough as is, and we can’t afford to leave a trail for that thing.” Shar shot Izzik a look as she spoke, his light vibrant through the gloom of the grove. “That means your light, too, Izzik.”

Quiet spread over the group as Izzik dimmed, hurrying over to the log that was the exit. Not a word was uttered for the first hour of travel, communications being exchanged in glances and shrugs while every noise was met with wincing and terrified glances backwards. The stain never moved any closer, yet it always seemed to be there in the distance whenever Elach reached out as far as he dared to get a look.

A nervous chittering laugh erupted from Izzik during the journey when faraway lights of lanterns cut through the night. Shar moved in front of Izzik to shield his own overflowing lantern from the oncoming bugs, pulling Elach to her side to try and reduce the escaping light to as little as possible, but it was a pointless gesture. Izzik’s lantern was simply too bright.

Without so much as a single uttered word, the fight had begun. Eight wings carried two bugs to the sky, their massive compound eyes glowing dim green as their techniques wreathed them in the light equivalent of speed Issi. Shar tapped Elach on the shoulder and gestured upwards with one hand, her entire focus on the four bugs that remained grounded.

Elach nodded and took a deep breath, feeling at the pittance of Issi he had left to deal with these two. He knew it wasn’t enough, and Flow responded to that feeling with a desire to join the fight once more.

They appeared on Elach’s shoulder already whipping up a technique. It bit into Elach’s shoulder with the pinch of a perfectly sharp needle, their Issi running through his pathways and caressing his shattered container. What Issi he had left was forced from his container to his pathways, Flow’s Issi soaking into his container with liquid relief from the side-effects of scraping it raw.

“Hopefully that’s enough to deal with this.” Elach muttered, rolling his shoulder to urge Flow upwards. The relief quickly turned into a burning itch, his stomach rumbling as Issi poured into his container. “Nevermind. This is more than enough.”

As Flow’s technique transformed Elach’s stored energy into Issi at an alarming rate, he set a minefield of anchors in the air where the two dragonfly people were buzzing about at a breakneck pace. He already felt a headache coming on, and the dizziness that came with far too little sleep, so he didn’t bother thinking when he grasped one of the dragonflies and dragged them to the ground with the intent of anchoring them to the ground.

What actually happened was far messier. Chains wrapped themselves around the dragonfly, stakes anchoring them in place as they struggled against their binds. Then Elach made a grasping motion and let his hand drop, the dragonfly suddenly driven into the ground at an imperceptible speed Elach knew all too well.

His front was immediately covered in luminescent green internals, the remains of the fragile bug painting a thirty foot diameter in their grisly demise. The other dragonfly hovered in place in horror, staring at what used to be their companion, the sounds of Shar butchering the rest of the ambushers drawing their attention away for just a moment too long.

“Sorry for this.” Elach muttered, his vision blurry and shaky as he tore holes in the dragonfly’s wings to use as handholds. It screamed out in pain and terror for a short moment before Elach chained himself down to the ground, the dragonfly between his feet and their destination an afterthought of his technique.

He scraped the dragonfly’s insides off his face and looked up at Flow, who had perched in a tree just outside of the splash zone. “Can you turn off whatever you did to me? It’s starting to feel awful.”

Flow tilted their head to the side, singing three sharp notes that stopped their technique instantly. They looked over at Shar and whistled, then disappeared in a whirl of chains while cackling maniacally.

“Yeah, we did find the most brutal wisp manifestation on the world piece.” Elach chuckled in agreement. “I really hope we don’t end up on the other side of her sharp edges.”

“Unless you have a penchant for betrayal, then you don’t have to worry.” Shar said, muttering in annoyance as she tried to clean her clothes. “Come help me dispose of the bodies.”

Elach wiped off his arm and walked over to her, bending over to pick up half of a bug-person with a grunt of effort. “Not going to take these with you?” He asked. “Not enough slaughter Issi in these to make it worth it?”

“Exactly right.” Shar confirmed, walking over to the edge of the beaten path and hefting the largest bug-person into the bushes. “Do we need to do anything to prevent what happened with Occril from happening to these people?”

Watching as the thoroughly mangled and decapitated corpse flattened the bushes, Elach let out a grim chuckle. “I think you already took care of it.” He shot a look over at the two splattered dragonflies he’d dealt with. “Actually, we both took care of it.”

“Izzik cannot believe this…” Izzik finally spoke, drawing Elach’s attention. He might have forgotten about the bug-man in the intensity of the moment. “They were not weak fighters. And yet they fell to the Elach and the Shar without putting up anything resembling a resistance. Just like how Prisoner cut through Izzik’s people to get at the heart of the darkspawn.”

“Heart of the darkspawn?” Elach narrowed his eyebrows and stepped towards Izzik. He didn’t mean it to be intimidating, but seeing Izzik shy away was slightly cathartic. “You didn’t say anything about that before, Izzik. And that sounds exactly like a clear condition for this floor.”

“Y-yes, well, if the Elach knew of the heart, the Elach wouldn’t have agreed to help Izzik.” Izzik stammered, holding the lantern between himself and Elach as if it would protect him. “If the Elach had taken the time to learn from the memory eggs, the Elach would know of the dark heart already.”

Shar scraped one of the dragonflies from the forest floor, and Elach made a show of watching her do it. Once she dumped the pile of remains in yet another bush, he looked back at Izzik with a perfectly neutral stare.

“I don’t believe you, Izzik.”