A primeval fear struck their hearts as the voice ripped open their minds and thrust its meaning into their consciousness against their welcome. It was not a fear borne of humankind; it was rather a fear of a mouse running from a predator, flailing helplessly in the jaws of a snake as it swallowed it whole. In its portent of doom they felt their minds grind to a stop, their worst memories in life surface to the forefront of their consciousness, visions of blood drown their eyes and the acrid stench of sulfur and ash assault their nostrils.

It was as if the image of death itself had found its avatar, and they were facing it. And now, they weren’t simply going to perish in euphemism; they were literally going to die.

Mirai’s Quan bristled and snarled upon her forearm at the sight of the monster, cognizant that the presence of the demon exuded the same soul-stench as the MAHA from the beyond when its hands turned fuligin. Mirai slapped the faces of her unconscious comrades as hard as she could in a struggle to awake them.

“GET UP, IDIOTS! GET UP!”

But stand they could not, and those standing could barely unglue their feet from the floor. The Thales-turned demon made a slithering cackle and sprung its body forth, leaping in their direction with a hundred legs. Elwin and Mirai ignited their Quans, facing their doom, tugging their friends upon the ground, but the demon was lunging at them so fast, they could not hope to –

With a blinding flash of cerulean light, a massive creature bodied the demon-centipede in its strike, skidding backwards, carving the roads with its claws, its tail of rock just a single feet away from Elwin and his entourage.

It looked back with its jaws, serrated teeth bared, its amber eyes radiant.

“FLY, DISCIPLES OF ASTINEL! FLY ON YOUR HEELS!”

It thundered its command like lightning through their heads, jolting awake the unconscious and the injured once more. Hûnbaba reared on his hind legs and drummed his chest, each hit blasting gusts of wind, mustering out an ancient roar that shook the roof. Without waiting the great spirit began to lumber towards the intruder, gathering speed, and with a sickening orchestra of the earth smashing upon earth rammed into the centipede demon, his basalt jaws interlocking onto the miasmic scaled necks of the enemy, each of them roaring a scream that sounded like the world was beginning to end. Those who hadn’t had the faintest idea that such beings existed couldn’t believe their eyes, nor what they were hearing; with the cacophony of the mythical battle unfolding before them, the sixteen witnesses each in their squadras barely struggled into a run, making it towards whichever passage was available. But alas; the passages were indeed blocked with piles upon piles of Tenebriton; the demon must have blocked them while they were busy fighting each other over Astinel’s staff. Elwin could feel no weaves of ORI around the rubble, and could produce no fire nor draw water out of the air. He closed his eye – but all he could see in his Asha was darkness.

They had to hope that Hûnbaba would protect them and prevail.

But what if he couldn’t?

With the uncomfortable thought in their heads they ducked and weaved about the pillars and the hewn stones as the two titanic beings struggled under the starless sky.

Hûnbaba gripped the demon by the neck and threw it into three pillars, breaking them all. Dust fell around the kismets.

“Where’s everyone? Where’s –”

Elwin saw Lucian’s sprawled body upon the floor, just yards away from Hûnbaba’s hind legs. The demon-centipede reared its tail and slapped Hûnbaba hard, knocking it back, about to step upon him –

He didn’t know why exactly and how, but a corner of his mind that wanted to understand Lucian propelled his feet towards his former enemy, and hoisted his unconscious body up, as Isaac frantically commanded a gale in his direction, voice breaking, tumbling them both away, narrowly avoiding where Hûnbaba stomped to balance himself, pulverizing the basalt underneath.

The centipede noticed Elwin and Lucian upon their midst, and fired the quills from the sides of its body onto them, intending to impale both, but Hûnbaba came between the demon and the huddled boys, the spears of bones embedding into his turtlelike carapace instead.

The demon snapped its cobra-jaws hard on Hûnbaba shell, crumbling it in several places. Hûnbaba extended his claws with a sound of blade against grindstone and, digging it deep into the arthropodal segment of the centipede’s belly, ripped several scales clean off to expose the indigo flesh underneath, but the scales grew back just as fast as they were destroyed. Seeing that his claws had barely an impact on his enemy, Hûnbaba rammed the demon into the subterranean river, the waters exploding forth in phreatic shocks.

The noises of their struggle almost ruptured their eardrums, and for a second neither Elwin nor the half-conscious Lucian could hear the frantic hollering of their own friends near the boundaries of the hall. All they heard was a sharp ringing, a tingling upon their lobes.

“ELWIN! GET BACK HERE!”

Katherine leapt from across the hall and with a hand took Elwin’s forearm in her grip; she then blew jets of fire out of her soles, somersaulting them forward to safety, throwing them onto the mossy pavement by the side of the hall next to the rest of the kismets.

“Are you crazy? After all he put you through?” Katherine exclaimed, looking at Lucian’s half-conscious body next to Elwin’s battered form.

“DUCK!”

Mirai yelled, pulling them down, as the tail end of the demon slapped into the wall behind them, cracking the dense rock in several places.

“Stay together, understand?” Katherine begged Elwin, grabbing his arm. “Don’t go running off into the night alone. Please.”

Hûnbaba’s radiant light against the pillars cast a play of shadows upon the walls, revealing a glint of the battle-uniforms of the students taking refuge in the corners. The others were safe for the time being.

“Alright,” Elwin sputtered, the poison taking its toll on him.

They watched intently, fearfully, at the sights unfolding before them.

The centipede demon thrust its chimerical tail into Hûnbaba’s radiant flesh, penetrating it until the spike protruded from the great spirit’s back; Hûnbaba bellowed in displeasure and grabbed the insectoid tail with both of his paws, and locking his jaw onto dead center, twisted it until he ripped it clean from the demon, hurling the piece towards the kismets’ direction whereupon it fell and evaporated into thin air, smelling like a bloated corpse that made everyone except Isaac nearly wretch.

The great spirit had the upper hand due to his sheer size and superior strength, but in the darkness of that hall, the light which he radiated became his undoing.

In a mere instant the kismets blinked, the shadows cast on the roof and the walls from Hûnbaba’s cerulean light slithered as if alive from their positions and became thick ropes of miasma that gripped his body. Without wasting a single second the demon-centipede coiled around the great spirit’s torso like a python, commanding each strand and rope of shadow produced to grip him tighter; and with a hideous melody of crunches began to crush Hûnbaba’s carapace, the basalt beginning to fracture under the pressure of the coil.

Hûnbaba looked the kismets in the eyes from the great distance, as if to say farewell; and before they registered the minutiae of wisdom that flowed into their heads the turtlelike carapace broke into pieces, and the demon-centipede chomped its maw upon the glowing sphere of green within the great spirit’s being.

Hûnbaba’s eyes extinguished at once; and the basalt and water which held his form fell to the floor, supported no longer.

It swallowed what appeared to be Hûnbaba’s Kaha, and as the light of his heart reached the core of its sickening length, all students heard a burst of fire. All the hall became shrouded in utter darkness, sounds akin to a lobster shedding its old shell reverberated off the walls, and the ridged abdomens of the demon buckled against one another as its body expanded with newfound nutrition.

When the darkness receded they saw the demon again, and this time it was coiled across not just two but five pillars, its length exceeding half the height of the roof, consuming even the glimmers of light that came from the surface.

The students were utterly alone.

 

* * *

 

“COME OUT, COME OUT, WHEREVER YOU ARE.”

It slithered sinuously like a massive eel between the pillars, wrapping its long, scaled body piece by piece, in search of the hiding students.

“I CAN SSSSMELL YOU...” It poked this way and that, making audible sniffs with its serpentine nostrils, forked tongue shooting out only to retract back in, a slimy sound everyone could hear but could not hope to scream.

“WHAT A PITY THAT YOU NOW KNOW THE TRUTH...

FOR IF YOUR LAST SIGHT WAS THAT OF THE MASTER OF THE WATERS,

YOUR SOULS WOULD HAVE TASTED ALL THE MORE DELICIOUS,

DEVOURED FULL OF ANGUISH AND REGRET.”

They could not cup their ears, only their mouths. The voice came through straight in their heads against their will, violating them.

And it dawned on everyone that this demonic creature was never Professor Thales. It’d only taken on his form to strike the horror of betrayal into their hearts, to fatten them, to make them pliable to their deaths. But to emulate the Master of the Waters so well, it must have spent a considerable time at Aeternitas in his impersonated form, perhaps since the year’s beginning... the moments of déjà vu that Elwin and others had experienced, of coming across Professor Thales more frequently than other professors in the hallways of the evening, must have been the demon parading as him.

All of this, including the duel to the death, must’ve been its own creation.

“TELL ME, ELWIN ERAMIR... HOW DO YOU FEEL?

HOW DO YOU FEEL,

TO HAVE FOUGHT URSUS THE SENTINEL,

TO CLAIM THE MEANING OF YOUR NAME,

KNOWING NOW THAT HERIZ SHALL DIE?”

The line skewered the kismets’ thoughts.

Did Alexander Heriz know that such a danger existed?

Is this why he was so adamant that Katherine return?

Because if he did... then Elwin did not save Katherine nor vouch her freedom. He instead sealed her doom along with him.

“IMAGINE THE LOOK UPON HIS FACE!

HOW HE SHALL CURSE YOU, ELWIN ERAMIR!”

The words wrung him inside out, and it did not help that the poison from Lucian’s obsidian blade, wherever he obtained it, had spread to Elwin’s chest and was threatening to spill into his heart. He felt faint, his hands clammy, his forehead dripping with icy sweat.

In the absence of options there was only one thing he could do. He promised everyone that no one would die here – well, no one but him.