The walk through the entry tunnel was silent and stress-filled, with hissing and chittering echoes breaking the silence every few minutes to leave Elach and Shar on edge at the prospect of what had befallen Lighthome. The light extraction system of the tunnel grew stronger and stronger the closer Elach got to Lighthome, magnitudes more powerful than what he’d experienced just the day before. He had to take the lantern from Shar to keep his technique strong enough to protect the wisplings, and even then he felt the drain on his bizarrely deep reserves growing almost too much to bear.

And then the darkness ended. Lighthome was the same as before.

“Welcome, guests.” Another ant said from a desk beside the entryway, their voice dull and slow as if they were half-asleep. “What aid can Malle provide?”

Elach turned to see that half-asleep might have been too generous of a descriptor. This ant’s head rested on Nevvi’s desk, weakly turned up to look at Shar while they ignored Elach. Their eyes were the dimmest red Elach had ever seen, their glow so weak that he expected them to go out at any moment.

Shar shot Elach a questioning glance, gesturing down into the bowels of Lighthome. He nodded that he did indeed remember how to get to the lightwell, then looked down at Malle in sympathy. Whoever these ‘great lights’ were, they were doing a horrible job at keeping their own people alive.

“We don’t require any aid, thank you.” Shar said softly, then paused. “Its eyes just went dark. Is it…” She gently placed a hand on Malle’s head, then shuddered. “It’s dead. And I can already feel the darkspawn worming its way into this bug’s light. I understand if you need to look away.”

“Do it.” Elach agreed, not looking away. Malle wasn’t going to be the last victim of Lighthome. “Destroying a mindless body so it doesn’t desecrate the memory of the person it used to be is a mercy. So I’m not looking away.”

It took all of eight seconds for Shar to efficiently remove any hopes the darkspawn might have had for possessing Malle. The lightblood that leaked out of the poor bug was the colour of sickened blood; a red so close to black that there was no coming back from it, and there was absolutely no luminance to be found. Malle had been doomed ever since Lighthome began siphoning its inhabitants for whatever Elach and Shar were about to encounter.

An encounter that never came.

The lightwell was empty.

Elach leaned over the gaping pit, a grimace permanently etched onto his face from the sounds of Shar dealing with all the possible darkspawn possessions. They hadn’t come across a single bug that wasn’t dead or dying, their inner light dimmed to the faintest of glows as Lighthome extracted its toll. The sticky shadows had closed off every path from the lightwell except the one he and Shar had come from, and in Elach’s mind the great lights were offering him a choice.

One; go back the way they’d came, and leave without anything to show for their efforts. To hope that the survival floor really was only that. Elach didn’t even have to speak to Shar to dismiss that option, as she was overflowing with Issi thanks to the bloodless slaughter the great lights had brought and the very bloody slaughter she herself was in the process of bringing.

And two; dive down the lightwell and see where all the centuries of stored light had ended up. There was a complete lack of sticky shadows clinging to the edges of the lightwell, and a mass of power so grand that Elach couldn’t look directly at it still sat somewhere deeper. A mass of power that was unclaimed, unopposed, and ripe for the taking.

Elach bit his lip and looked away. He was buying into this whole ‘tyrant’ thing a little too much; literally nothing had changed since yesterday, and he hadn’t been frothing over the lightwell then.

“Believe it or not, I feel the temptation too.” Shar said, flicking her hands to get off the remnants of dark fluids. She stepped up next to Elach and peered down into the depths of the lightwell and shuddered.

“How’d you know I was worrying about that?” Elach asked, turning back now that he knew it wasn’t his own mind being greedy. Whatever was down there needed to die, and he needed enough light to save Roxu. He looked over at Shar, her face split into a smirk, and he sighed. “Is my face making it that obvious?”

“Beyond obvious.” Shar laughed, her mist billowing out to contain the two of them. “If we’re lucky, everything down there has been condensed into a convenient mass for us to take and use. But the far more likely option is that we’re about to drop down into a mess of catacombs and chase the lightwell’s bounty around for hours.”

Elach manifested his chain directly above the lightwell and offered Shar his free hand. “Hopefully we’ll have enough time to come back and get Roxu out of here before whatever happens at the one-week mark happens.”

Shar gripped his hand tightly with a nod, then slowly moved to put her arm over Elach’s shoulder. She looked at him questioningly with every move she made, as if she was checking she had permission to do what she was doing. Eventually she was nestled up against him and holding on tight, ready for him to chain the two of them down into the pit below.

Elach stepped over the edge and pushed against the anchor above, shoving himself to the ground far below near instantly. Shar yelped in surprise at the sudden movement but quickly moved away from Elach, on high alert for whatever dangers awaited them in this pit. The surface was a single pinprick of white against a nearly completely black background, so far above that Elach couldn’t imagine how much light had been hoarded here.

And how much had been lost.

“That barely drained my Issi at all.” Elach mused, looking inward as much as outward. His container was dangerously close to needing another compression. “Roxu will push a whole lot of things over the edge.”

Shar, however, was concerned with the present. Of the skittering darkness that skirted around the dim beam of light. “We aren’t safe here. Hells, we aren’t going to be safe as long as we’re down here. But I have a really bad feeling about staying in one place.”

“An Issi feeling, or a gut feeling?” Elach asked.

“Both, unfortunately.” Shar said tightly, her attention focused solely on something far down one of the tunnels. “The feeling of power shifted the moment we touched down, and every other tunnel is emanating a feeling of hopeless doom. It’s…” Shar shuddered, and her Issi flared. She took in a raggedy breath, and Elach was reminded exactly which kind of Issi she was manifested from. “It’s intoxicating.”

“So that bad feeling; is it for something bad happening, or from something bad not happening?” Elach asked, staring down the same path as Shar was while he spoke. He felt a mass of Issi down it, but it wasn’t the brilliant power of the lightwell. It felt far closer to Occril and the scorpion. “Did you absorb Occril and the scorpion already?”

Shar waved a hand dismissively. “Oh, I consumed their pieces the night we came back from the grove. It was a good initial taste, but now I feel like I’m staring down a high-class buffet.”

“And the bad feeling?” Elach prodded.

“I am the bad feeling.” Shar muttered. “I know we don’t have a whole lot of time, but can’t we take a little detour? Roxu’s going to make you so much stronger, and whatever’s down that tunnel could be my Roxu.”

Elach didn’t really feel like arguing with Shar, since she was technically right. And if she was going to end the eternals with him, becoming strong had to be a priority. “If we start feeling the lightwell’s power shrinking, we have to go to it right away.”

“Of course.” Shar agreed, turning to look at Elach with anticipation. “Are you coming with me?”

“I don’t want to be alone in the dark.” Elach chuckled, gently pushing Shar towards the tunnel. “Let’s go give some darkspawn infested bug-people a merciful death.”

The lightwell’s power never shrunk. No matter how far Elach delved into the tunnels, it was always a shining mass of Issi in the background; a beacon that seemed to cry out for attention the further they strayed from it. Like a flame crying out for a moth.

Bugs down in the tunnels weren’t that different from those Elach had fought up above. They were consumed by the darkspawn, yes, but they didn’t seem to be overly influenced by it. Most of them shied away from Shar’s blatant excitement at the prospect of a challenge, but they all eventually caved and swarmed her with a mindless vigor.

Shar cleaved through carapace after carapace with her deadly mists, cutting the bugs down to size whenever they got too close. Elach kept his distance from the fights the best he could, letting any bugs that tried to flee past him go, but they kept coming back. Each and every one of them. As if they hadn’t been fully infested, and the mere attempt of running away let the darkspawn fully take over their minds.

“This isn’t as exciting as I’d hoped.” Shar sighed as she wiped a dark blue fluid from her hands, the body that used to carry it already tucked away in her mists. Of the dozens of bugs she’d fought, she’d only taken three bodies. “It feels like the darkspawn is splitting itself thin, if that’s even possible, and only fully controls the minds of the bug-people who it knows we’re fighting. Maybe it’s smarter than we thought?”

“I don’t even know if ‘it’ is an it.” Elach mused, watching a mantis-like bug-person skitter down one of the tunnels in fear. He knew it would be back soon enough.

“That’s a good point.” Shar agreed, then crossed her arms in thought. “Everything we know came from Izzik, Occril, and to a lesser extent, Roxu. What if they all lied to us? Or they could have been infected by the darkspawn from the very beginning, and it led us down here on purpose?”

Elach considered that option for a moment, but it didn’t feel quite right. Izzik being infected, sure, but he’d seen Occril’s untarnished memories; there really did seem to be something else out there. And Roxu seemed to want to get out of this place more than anything else. Yet part of it did ring true, and it worried him.

The mantis shrieked off in the distance, and rapid heavy footsteps signaled its return. Elach glanced over his shoulder and chained the bug to the ground and tunnel walls, making it easy pickings for Shar. Black-orange blood splattered the walls, and the death rattle of the mantis echoed out along the dead walls until it twitched no more.

“I think I just want to get out of here.” Elach decided, grimacing down at the rapidly dissolving blood. He breathed in and felt something in the air; a tint of Issi that something was trying to call. “Whatever you felt earlier, I think we just drew it out.”

The far end of the tunnel grew darker than before, accompanied by the sound of scraping stone and labored breathing. Elach stepped forward and manifested a web of chains between Shar and whatever was down the tunnel, slightly illuminating it with his Issi as he felt something strain against his chains.

A snort of annoyance preceded shattering chains. Elach grunted in pain as the connection to his technique was ripped away from him, devoured and crushed by a mass of chitin that leaked extremely dark green fluid.

“That’s the biggest maggot I’ve ever seen.” Elach noted.