As I began to hurtle downward, the carved metal sides of the chute slipping past me in the dark, I could see down below me a distant light and a dark sphere within it, staring up at me like an eye.  The portal to the Void, a place I desperately did not wish to return to.

It would have been better to test my spell before jumping in here, I supposed, but since I hadn’t been afforded that luxury, I could only hope that my earlier experiments would work in reality as they had within my soul. 

Clearing my thoughts, I began to visualize the runes I had prepared, the grid of them coalescing in front of me.  Thankfully, the darkness seemed to provide a willing canvas for the spell, and with each rune I imagined, I felt the power of my Will expanding outward, beginning to echo, as the spell coalesced into … something.

“You cursed idiot!” I heard Phaedra’s voice call from up above me, and I wondered if she was talking to me or herself.  Even if I fucked this up and died, at least I would fuck her over.  There was some solace in that, but I couldn’t fool myself—I would regret it if I didn’t manage to see Mona one last time, if I fell in knowing that I had consigned her to spend the rest of her too short life in the dungeon.

The field of runes in my vision had begun to waver, my mind no longer doing a very good job of concentrating on them.  It seemed it was much easier to do this in a peaceful place without any distractions.  I reached out with my hands to either side, feeling the walls of the chute, dragging my claws against the metal in an attempt to slow myself down.  But the sides of the chute were smooth to the touch, and I found no purchase.

The Void and its surrounding halo of light, though distant, had gotten larger than before, and before I knew it, I heard the sound of screaming all around me.

That was me.  I was the one screaming.

I closed my eyes, trying to ignore everything around me, especially the feeling of air rushing past me.  Trying to ignore the fact that if I didn’t succeed at this, I would die horribly, returning to that infinite darkness, my soul slowly decomposing over the course of what would feel like an infinite span of time.

And then I saw Mona standing at the dais in the Temple.  She’d known who I really was, and who I wasn’t.  But she’d still believed.  She’d still chosen to believe.

I opened my eyes again, and focused my mind on the symbols I’d memorized, the field of them…  Sixty runes per side, but many of them the same, or similar…  And if you took in all of them at a glance, rather than focus on each one…

I felt it in my chest, the echoing of the Will of my soul, the elation of a fully-formed spell.  Soon I no longer felt such a great pull downward, and my hands began to slide against the walls of the chute more slowly than before.

With my hands and feet I continued to slow myself down, a little at a time, until I felt I was moving at a comfortable speed.  Then I pulled back and allowed myself to continue gently falling.

I was thankful that the chute was relatively small, such that I could indeed touch the sides when necessary to control my descent.  From what Mona had told me, usually anyone in here was unconscious or already dead.  This was probably the first time someone had fallen in on purpose, which was just as well, because though my descent had slowed, I was still acutely aware of the fact that nothing at all would catch me if my spell failed.

Thankfully, the runes still hung in my vision, semi-transparent, such that I could see through them easily, without ever forgetting they were there.  For a moment, I couldn’t help but grin.  It had worked.  I had done it.

From up above I heard a clanging sound, the tolling of a great bell, its sound echoing throughout the tower.  Was that an alarm?  The tower would be crawling with demons, soon, if it hadn’t been already.

But I shook my head and focused again.  There was nothing I could do about that yet.

The Void continued to grow larger, and up ahead I began to see the ring of light expanding, too—the place where the chute ended at the bottom of the dungeon.  I had no idea how long I’d been falling.  High on adrenaline, it could have been a few seconds, though it had felt like a minute.

I reached out and began to slow myself down.  My plan was to stop almost completely by the time I reached the end of the chute, and then throw myself to the side, to the balcony where I’d stood and looked down at the Void.

With my hands and feet I braced myself against the slippery metal, watching as the light grew ever closer, as it began to enlarge in my vision—

Oh, fuck!

My screaming resumed as it became clear to me that I was no longer slowing down at all.  The closer I got to the bottom of this infernal trash chute, the faster I was starting to fall.  I focused on my spell, on the runes that still hung in my vision, humming with the energy of my soul.  I hadn’t messed them up, had I?  It was the same spell as before, it hadn’t weakened, but—

With a jolt of clarity, I realized exactly how I’d fucked up, and my scream grew louder, filled with rage at my own stupidity as much as anything else.  Time began to slow, my own mortality suddenly clear to me.

There were runes in the spell that changed, I remembered, depending on how close you were to the Void.  I’d been able to ignore them, more or less, because I wasn’t trying to fly precisely.  But the closer I got to the Void, the more I felt its pull.  A pull my spell did not, in any way, account for.

Fuck, fuck, fuck…

My mind frantically searched for a way to fix it, trying to remember hundreds of pages of Gravity and Time, realizing that my super simplified spell had been simplified a little too much.

A memory flashed to life in my mind.  It was strange, I thought—you were supposed to see your life when you were close to death.  But instead I was sitting at the wheel of a 2007 Hyundai, in a maelstrom of shattered glass and bent steel, an explosion of pain and grief and rage.

Rage at the driver, probably drunk, who had run the light.  Grief because I felt Maria next to me in the passenger seat, her hand reaching for mine, her last instinct, the last feeling of us being together, before everything became dark.

I felt it again, the way I had felt when fighting Shatterbone, the darkness in my Will expanding outward, filling my body with unholy energy, my muscles tearing themselves apart.  My arms thickened and my claws lengthened, screeching against the metal.  I pressed my feet outward, expanding till I could put the full force of my strength against all sides of the chute.

The light reached me at last, and as I emerged from the darkness into the flickering glow of the dungeon, my claws dug into the metal of the chute, crumpling and twisting it, mangling it just like my old, piece of shit Hyundai had been mangled.

When I opened my eyes, I was hanging from the chute by one grotesque arm.  I looked over at the balcony, where I saw two guards standing, staring at me with slack-jawed faces.  Certainly, no one had ever broken into the dungeon this way before.

I took a deep breath, wondering if I could throw myself over there.  But it was a long way, at least fifty feet, and I would need to throw myself fast enough not to be pulled down at all.  If I missed the balcony, the only thing between me and the Void was empty air.  There were rocky cliffs, but they were much too far for me to ever reach.

I tried to remember the spell, tried to think of how I could fix it, and I realized something silly—if the Void was a black hole or something like it, of course it had its own gravity.  No different than the gravity of this world itself, merely a smaller version of the same thing.  And for the moment, I was directly on top of both of them.  They were pulling me in entirely the same direction.  Which meant…

In my head I took my first spell and tried to inscribe it again, on top of the first, copying it—changing only a few runes, the distance between myself and the “earth”, the amount of force…

Suddenly, I was no longer hanging by my claws desperately.  I could swing myself back and forth easily, as if nothing was pulling me down.

I threw myself forward, towards the balcony where the guards were standing.  I didn’t want to crash into them, or the tips of their spears, but they were closest.

Thankfully, one of them stumbled to the side, trying to avoid me, and the other only stared at me, still dumbfounded, as I managed to grab the balcony railing with my other hand, which sadly was already transforming back to normal size.  With a grunt I pulled myself over the railing.

At last the guard I’d landed right next to sprang to life, and I saw his spear moving, his face calm and ready for battle.

“Ah, excuse me,” I said.  “I almost missed my stop.”  Which thankfully distracted him long enough for me to grab the shaft of his spear with my normal-sized right arm while my hulk arm punched him in the jaw.  He fell backward, sprawling on the deck of the balcony, leaving the spear in my hands.  My body and legs had returned to normal size as well, but my left arm, the one that had saved me from certain death by being the only appendage which had held onto that damned chute until the very end, was still freakishly huge.

Was this another side effect of what Greg-Theryx had done?  Had I lost some of the control I’d once possessed over my body?  I slowly tried to open and close the fist of that hand.  It still seemed to be my hand, at least, though I felt a strange pain within it, as if I’d pushed it past some threshold of failure.

The guard on the ground had begun to scramble backwards, and I took a few steps to close the distance and placed my foot on his chest, bringing the spear to bear on his throat.

“Give me the keys,” I said, and smirked.  “Your god commands it.”  The guard said nothing, only took a ring of iron keys—nothing like the fancy obsidian one Phaedra had kept for me—and tossed them towards me obediently.  I caught them with my hulk hand, and then let out a deep sigh.  I looked around the balcony, my eyes scanning over the cells, briefly pausing on the cell that contained Rhea, or had used to.  But I didn’t know which one Mona was in.

“Where’s Desdemona Fell?” I asked, and the guard pointed mutely at the cell right next to the wayward paladin’s.  “Good.  You’re being helpful so far.  Are you Shatterbone’s men?”

“No, my Lord, we’re not.”  This time it was the other guard who replied, who had been hanging back at a safe distance, seemingly torn between retreat and attack.  His eyes met my own, before he briefly looked down, no doubt glancing at my misshapen, very naked, body.

“That’s the correct answer,” I said, then took my foot off the guard in front of me, and took a couple steps back.  I sized up the two guards, then stared at the farther one.  He looked nervous as hell under my withering glare, shrinking away from me, but if he’d been standing straight, he would’ve been about the same size as me.  Just what I needed.  “You,” I said.  “Take off your clothes.  I require them.”  With my free hand I gestured at myself.  “Obviously.”

For a moment he stared at me, as if he was considering running away.  But then he sighed and began to undo the straps holding the armor to his body.  He hesitated, admittedly, when he got to his drawers, but after I raised an eyebrow he completed undressing.  In my infinite beneficence I left him his undergarments, then marched both of them into one of the nearby, unoccupied cells, and locked the door before getting dressed.

“Sorry, but I can’t risk you telling anyone that I’m down here.”  Phaedra would certainly put two and two together eventually, but I hoped it would at least take her a few more minutes to get down here with Ignak’s goons.

“We would never betray your confidence, Great Lord Greg-Theryx,” said the guard I’d punched, raising his fist in salute.  He still seemed nervous, as if I might still kill him at a whim, even through the iron bars that now separated us.

I smiled at him, taking care to keep my fangs hidden.  “You know, I actually believe you.  But I’m feeling justifiably paranoid at the moment.”

“Of course, you know best!” the other guard said.  I’d locked up a couple of potential allies, but there was no way of knowing how deep their loyalty really was, and I didn’t want to find out when one of them turned their spears on me.

I turned and walked towards Mona’s cell.  I wasn’t able to see inside it, not very deeply, but as I grew closer, I blinked my eyes and at last I felt her.  But when I saw the fading ember of her Will, I felt my rage return.  What the hell had been done to her?  No wonder I hadn’t been able to feel her from the tower’s pinnacle.  But that hardly mattered now, did it?  She was alive.

I fumbled with the key in the lock for a moment before I finally got it to latch.  The door swung open and I raced in.  She’d been asleep, but came to when I knelt next to her, and for a moment her eyes filled with panic.  “Who the fuck—” she began to shout, until I reached out with my normal hand and touched her, gently, on the shoulder.  Her expression changed at once—from anger, to shock, and finally to a deep, devastating sadness.

“It’s me,” I said.  “I broke out.”

She merely shook her head, as if once again, I had only disappointed her.  “You shouldn’t have come, Greg.  Now we’re both doomed.”

“Shouldn’t have come?” I growled.  “How could I not?  I thought we had a deal.”

Her eyes widened.  “I suppose we did, didn’t we?”  She made it sound like it was a distant memory.  I suppose, in a way, it was.

“So let’s go,” I said, and jingled the keys in my hand.