Jask stared at his dead friend for a few seconds. Eventually, he asked, ‘Why are you there?’

Kara did not reply.

It didn’t make sense.

Kara was clever. Kara had spotted that something had been wrong when the majordomo came to collect what Jask now knew had been sacrifices. She had saved his life. She had taken him away somewhere safe where they hadn’t been gathered up, and they hadn’t been sacrificed. She had always been cleverer. Jask was only alive because of her. So what was she doing there? Why was she the one being eaten, and he the one watching it happen?

It just didn’t make sense.

After about a minute he walked away. The devils ate slowly, but it wasn’t a good idea to stay in one place. As he wandered, Jask thought about what he was going to do next. He couldn’t stay walking about aimlessly on one level ― that would only lead him into the jaws of the devils in the end. He had to find some way to go up.

Up was where the nobles lived, and where the higher-ups lived. Right at the very top was where the Seneschal lived, and the Seneschal would know how to fix everything, because they were in charge. They were in control.

Jask found a lift very quickly, but it wouldn’t respond to him because he was only a page, so he walked about some more until he found a dead guard. Their key card was in their pocket. He went back to the lift with it and swiped it over the panel beside the doors. They slid open and he stepped into the lift and pressed the top button.

The doors slid shut, an up arrow appeared on the interior panel, and the lift dropped like a stone as sparks flew from the ceiling and the panel and the doors. Jask crouched down in the corner and put his arms up over his head in defence, and the lift kept falling.

In those moments, he supposed it would have made sense to scream. That was usually what people did when they were scared. He was inside a lift that was falling towards the lower decks of the Sanctuary, the direction that the crashing sound had come from, the sound that he knew had been the devils getting in. Those decks would be filled with water, and if not, they would be filled with devils. He would be caught and eaten, if he didn’t drown first.

That was the sort of moment when people screamed. Not for help, because everyone who had ever been in that kind of moment knew that help was not coming, that help could not come. In that moment, people screamed simply because they did not want to go quietly. But Jask thought then that it really made no difference how he went.

When the lift hit the bottom of its shaft, everything rumbled, Jask flew into the air, and the lights went out.

The next thing he knew, he had a sore head and everything was blurry, but there were lights, and they were flickering. It took him a while to get his bearings and get back on to his feet, and when he did stand it was in a shaky manner. Trying his best to overcome that, he stepped out the lift.

Beyond it was where the flickering lights were. They were white, dim and broken. Every few seconds one would come on and shine down from the ceiling with a weak sort of light, as though its heart wasn’t really in it but the power to it meant it didn’t have a choice. It would buzz while it was on. Then there would be the sound of something sparking, it would flicker, and eventually it would switch off, finally giving up.

It took Jask longer than it should have to realise that he was not on the engine deck. That was strange. He had always thought the engine deck was the lowest ― it was shown that way on the maps. But here was something else. The humming of the engines was definitely there, but it was up above, faint, and though this place was warm, it was not as hot as he would have expected. The walls were not running with pipes and cables, either. Instead, they were smooth, polished, reflective, and black, like those on the upper decks.

There were doors, too, and they looked much the same. When he tried to open them, he found most were locked, but some were not. Behind those, he found rooms filled with desks and computers, and no one was at any of those desks, and none of the computers were on. Many were broken.

Jask walked around a few of the rooms to look at them more closely, but he found nothing. It was strange, but in some way it felt as though this place had been empty for much longer than the attack had been going on. For a very long time, maybe even years and years.

As he walked farther along the corridor, he began to wonder if there was an end to it. Maybe the lift had fallen not to the bottom of the Sanctuary, but through some hole in the world to a discarded place, a deck of forgotten things, another reality entirely. Maybe he was trapped here, alone in the empty darkness forever, or at least until he starved.

Then he came to the end of the corridor.

Beyond it there was a room, large and circular. Three other corridors came into it. All of the entrances were evenly spaced around the wall, and Jask could only imagine that each corridor was like his own, long and full of empty rooms, ending in a lift that didn’t work.

But this room was different. The lights in here did not flicker. They were bright and white and ran in strips along the ceiling, and the floor beneath them was made of thick glass. It looked into the ocean, down into murk and darkness, and it was with some relief that Jask noted he could see no devils down there. Thick or thin, he knew glass would be no protection against them.

There were two more strange things in that room. One was in the very centre. It was a black podium with several glowing white buttons atop it. Behind it was a person.

She was clothed in a red dress, and a silver tiara rested upon her head. A fur-trimmed mantle swaddled her shoulders, and she held her head high. One of her eyebrows was raised and the look in her face was entirely unconcerned; just a little curious. Her hands, gloved in white, rested on the podium, either side of the buttons.

‘Well, who exactly are you supposed to be?’ asked the Third Lady Silvon Paravir.

‘I’m…’ Jask stared at her. ‘I’m just a page. Milady.’

‘Oh, good grief.’ She chuckled. ‘Enough of the miladies, if you please. Do you have a name? I believe you tend to name yourselves.’

‘I’m… Jask. But you’re…’

‘Silvon Paravir.’ She took her hands off the podium and lowered them to her sides. ‘Most properly, I am The Third Lady Silvon of the Noble House of Paravir, but you could me Sil if you so wished. What are you doing down here, Jask?’

‘The lift fell.’

‘Hm, makes sense.’ She glanced past him, as though she would be able to see all the way to the end of the corridor he’d come down. ‘The Sanctuary is rather falling apart, no wonder all its systems are failing. Of course, this deck hasn’t been used in a very long time.’

There were a great number of things Jask wanted to say. He was quite sure something very bad was happening down here, possibly related to the devils, but he wasn’t clever enough to decipher any of it. He wondered briefly if Kara would have been, but then he noticed something that distracted him.

‘Um… your suitcase isn’t here.’

She frowned at him. ‘You were one of my welcome retinue, weren’t you? Yes, my suitcase. The one I loved so much I wouldn’t ever let a servant carry it. It’s about five decks up.’ She walked around the podium to stand in front of him and put her head to the side. ‘Do you know how all the ships that came to the Sanctuary managed to find it?’

‘It’s sending out a beacon,’ Jask replied. Everyone knew that.

‘It sent out a beacon, rather more accurately.’ She smiled, a terrible smile on pale lips. ‘That system seems to have failed as well now. But there you have it. A beacon to all of humanity to bring them here. A beacon saying, “Here is the Sanctuary, here you are safe from the devils, here we will protect you”. A lie for those born with no name, but true enough for the guests.’

She began pacing around Jask in a circle, again and again. ‘My suitcase is a beacon, too. A beacon for the devils, to bring them here. As many as possible, from as far away as possible. The devils are intelligent, you see. The ones here know if they leave the Sanctuary be their supply of food is steady. The ones I brought know only the chase. A great swarm to ravage the sides of the Sanctuary and turn it into a ruin.’

Jask shook his head and stared down, through the glass, into the dark ocean below. ‘Why would you do that?’

‘My family is one of the few that have ever left the Sanctuary,’ she replied. ‘We sailed away many generations ago, with the beacon in hand. Our mission? To gather that swarm, and in the end, bring it back here. Oh, we were almost destroyed by it along the way, but we succeeded, and here I am. Why? Tell me, do you know why there are so few servants?’

‘Yes,’ he said, softly, still looking down.

‘Four thousand years of sacrifice,’ the Third Lady declared. ‘Except we don’t think it has been four thousand. Why trust the Seneschal’s history? We live in a world that makes no sense, Jask. We live in a world where people keep arriving, somehow. No matter how many ships make it to the Sanctuary and no matter how many more are torn apart trying, there are always others. We make grand claims about the time before the devils, but I don’t believe there ever was one.’

She stopped pacing, in front of him once more. ‘My family believes that this had no beginning. It has been going on for eternity and will continue for eternity if it is not stopped. That is all this world is. An endless, unchanging process. People flee the devils. Most of them die, but some arrive at the Sanctuary, where they are registered. Many are sacrificed. Others live out their lives, and when they die, more arrive to replace them. And nothing happens, for all time.’

Then came her smile again. ‘Well, here it is. Something happening.’ She pointed down. ‘This is an observation deck. Whether it was ever manned or if it has been abandoned like this since the dawn of time, I cannot say, but my family found it, and through it they found what is underneath this Sanctuary.’

She walked over to the podium and pressed one of the buttons. On the other side of the glass, lights lit up, vast and bright, shining through the murk, down to the very ocean floor. It must have been hundreds of metres down, but Jask could make out something very clear.

It was a crack in the skin of the earth, wide and long, splintering. A crevasse. A chasm. The light did not penetrate it.

‘You see?’ the Third Lady said. ‘There it is. We all dream of it. We all dream we are floating above it, because we are. Because the Sanctuary is.’

‘What…’ Jask shook his head. ‘What is it?’

‘Not a normal chasm,’ the Third Lady replied. ‘Things go into it, but let me tell you ― nothing ever comes out.’

Narrowing his eyes, Jask stared at it for a while longer. He was certain there was something about it…

‘Wait,’ he whispered. ‘We’re sinking.’

He looked up at the Third Lady in horror, but she smiled back, nodding.

‘Yes, we are. There is no way of knowing what is inside that chasm, but one thing I can be certain of is that it’s something new. Today I am ending an eternity of sacrifice, and bringing the first change this world has seen since forever.’

Jask backed away from her. ‘No, this isn’t right. You’re destroying the Sanctuary. We’ll all die!’

The Third Lady’s smile disappeared. ‘Trying to leave, I see.’ She reached behind the podium and produced a gun, levelling it at Jask. ‘I can’t allow that. You see, there’s really no way of knowing if going into that chasm will kill us or not. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. If it does, I don’t really want to die alone. So you need to stay.’

‘No.’ Jask shook his head. ‘You need to be stopped.’ He turned and ran.

The gunshot echoed all through the room.

‘That’s just not acceptable,’ the voice of the Third Lady said, as Jask hit the floor. ‘Look at what you made me do.’

The pain in his back was dull. He tried to crawl for a few seconds, but he wasn’t strong enough. Or maybe he just didn’t want to enough. He wasn’t sure. All he knew was that he was bleeding, and it hurt, and the Sanctuary was sinking.