The voices came after the scream.

  Not instead of it. With it, underneath it, using the scream as a channel the way water used a crack, finding the opening the sound had made in the barriers between what Aris's mind contained and what it was not supposed to contain.

  They spoke clearly.

  That was the worst part. Not noise, not static, not the confused signal of a dungeon ailment running interference on perception. Clear voices, specific voices, some of them with the quality of voices he recognized without being able to pce, and they said things that had the shape and grammar of thoughts he had never thought and that arrived in his mind with the specificity of thoughts he was thinking now.

  Burn it.

  Not the dungeon. He knew that immediately and the knowing didn't help.

  The church. The wood is old. The people are worthless.

  "No," Aris said, to the wall he was holding.

  Edric is sleeping. He sleeps deeply. You know which room.

  "Stop," he said.

  His breathing was wrong. The mechanism of it had broken its rhythm, the inhale arriving before the exhale had finished, the body running the process at the wrong speed and finding the wrong result each time.

  You could leave. Just leave. Climb out and never come back. Leave Colette here. Leave Regis. You don't know Regis. You owe Regis nothing. Leave the dungeon and the church and the clinic and the sword that isn't yours and—

  "Stop."

  He pressed his hands against his ears and the voices didn't care about his hands, they weren't coming through his ears, they were coming through the gap the scream had opened in him, the gap between what he was and what the scream had temporarily made of what he was, and his hands on his ears accomplished nothing except give him something to do with his hands.

  His knees found the floor.

  He didn't decide to kneel. The floor came up to meet him the way floors came up to meet people whose legs had made a uniteral decision, and he was kneeling in the chamber with the crystal light coming from the corners and doing something wrong with the shadows because the shadows were moving now, not with the movement of light but with the movement of things that had shapes and the shapes were not shadows.

  You're nothing.

  The voice that said this was his own voice.

  You're a level one clinic healer from the lower district with someone else's sword and a dead patient on your conscience. You carried her off and you treated her sigil and she left anyway. She left. They will all leave and abandon you. You're nothing more than a—

  "Stop."

  —you'll kneel in this chamber and you'll stay here and the dungeon will take you the way it takes everything that stays too long and Edric will wait by the dungeon gate to find your dead body—

  He heard Regis.

  Through the voices, through the scream still vibrating in every surface, through the shadows moving wrong in the corners, he heard the sound of Regis against the wall.

  Thunk. Thunk.

  The impact of a skull against stone.

  Something in Aris that the voices had not reached, something below the level of thought, the thing that had been going into the clinic every morning since he was ten years old and had never once decided not to, responded to that sound.

  Something is wrong.

  Not the voices. His own voice, the actual one, coming from somewhere below the gap the scream had opened, and it said what it always said when it said anything at all.

  Something is wrong and it needs to be addressed.

  Void was barely there.

  The form had lost coherence, the dark silhouette translucent, the mask face visible but faint, the Eido's passive absorption running at maximum output against the scream's psychic component and finding maximum output insufficient and continuing anyway, the mana behind it draining with the speed of a system running beyond its capacity.

  Aris looked at it.

  The barely-there form of the thing he had named in an orphanage.

  "Void, please stop the voices," he said.

  It was a request, the specific request of asking someone else to save them, even though that person is themselves.

  Void tried expanding it's reach, seeking to cover Aris's body to filter the parasitic mana causing the voices, but Aris could feel the spectral form fading away.

  Aris turned his head and found Colette on the floor with her hands over her ears and her face doing what it was doing and he filed this and turned further and found Regis against the wall and the wall was receiving the impact of his skull with the patient indifference of stone and Regis was saying something in the continuous low stream that wasn't nguage anymore.

  He needed to stand up.

  He tried standing up.

  The chamber moved, or his perception of the chamber moved, the geometry of it shifting slightly in the way that geometry shifted when the system perceiving it was running at degraded capacity, the walls at slightly wrong angles, the floor's surface less certain than floor surfaces were supposed to be.

  He put one foot under him.

  Then the other.

  He was standing.

  Come on, said his own voice, from below the gap. I'm losing it.

  The wall exploded inward.

  Not from an impact, not from a creature charging through it, from below, the blue-bck stone of the chamber's far wall fracturing upward from the floor in a vertical line that propagated toward the ceiling in under a second, the fracture opening, the pieces of wall driven inward by the force of whatever was on the other side and the other side was dark.

  Genuinely dark, the darkness below Floor 12 looking through the gap with the quality of darkness that had depth rather than simply absence, and from that darkness something extended.

  Purple.

  The tentacle was the width of the passage they'd walked through and it moved with the specific direction of something that had already chosen its targets, crossing the chamber floor in one motion, and it found Regis first, the grip closing around him with the completeness of something built for grip, and then it found Colette, a second extension following the first, and both of them left the floor simultaneously.

  "No," Aris said.

  Void appeared at full output.

  Not the translucent degraded form of a moment ago. The full dark silhouette, the mask face clear, the Eido burning through reserves it no longer had with the specific commitment of a system that had decided the reserves were not the relevant consideration.

  Gravity pulled.

  He directed it at the tentacle, at Colette's weight within the tentacle's grip, the same force that had moved rock formations and Stonebacks and the wall above the White Rabbit's nest, everything he had left behind it.

  The tentacle didn't move.

  The force hit it and distributed across its surface and the tentacle continued its withdrawal toward the gap in the wall with Regis and Colette and the Gravity trailing behind it like something attached to something that had decided the attachment was irrelevant.

  "COLETTE—"

  She was conscious. Her eyes found him over the tentacle's grip and her face had something in it that was not fear, that was worse than fear, the expression of a person who has understood what is happening and has assessed the situation correctly and has found the assessment unacceptable.

  "I'm sorry—"

  The gap took them.

  The tentacle withdrew into the darkness below Floor 12 and Colette and Regis went with it and the darkness received them and the darkness did not return them and the gap in the wall showed nothing but the depth of what was below.

  The walls broke.

  All of them simultaneously, the chamber's remaining three walls fracturing along lines that had been prepared, the blue-bck stone coming apart in sections, and through each new gap the darkness came in, and from the darkness the tentacles came in, purple and massive and moving with the directed purpose of something that had a complete awareness of the space and everything in it.

  Aris stood in the center of what had been the chamber.

  Void above him, barely visible, the mana behind it at the bottom of what was avaible, the passive absorption against the scream's psychic component the only thing between his current cognition and whatever the scream wanted his cognition to become.

  The tentacles moved around him.

  Not toward him yet. Around him, the chamber's geometry reorganizing around the creature's extensions, the stone floor cracking under the weight of what was pressing through from below.

  He looked at the gaps.

  He looked at the darkness through the gaps.

  And then the darkness moved.

  Not the tentacles. The darkness itself, receding, pulled back by the presence of what was behind it, the way darkness receded when something produced light except this was the opposite, the darkness receding because what was behind it was so much more of itself that the foreground darkness became context rather than content.

  The eye appeared.

  Single. Massive. The size of—

  There was no reference that helped. The eye was the size of a building and that description was insufficient the way that descriptions of things outside avaible categories were insufficient because the category didn't exist to anchor the description to.

  It looked at him.

  The pupil found him with the specific directed quality of an eye that had chosen what it was looking at and was looking at it completely, and the eye was not angry and it was not malicious and it was not anything that the vocabury of emotion covered, and the looking of it produced in Aris the sensation of being known in a way that knowing usually required time and proximity and this had neither.

  It simply looked at him.

  Bck mana moved around the creature's body, the liquid of it flowing in channels that propelled the mass with the ease of something that had been moving through deep dungeon spaces since before the dungeon had floors above it, and the eye continued looking and the tentacles continued moving and the scream continued its work on the gap in his awareness.

  You see, said the voice that was his own voice. You see what it is.

  He saw what it was.

  A tentacle found him.

  The grip closed and the floor was gone and the darkness was everywhere and Void flickered and held and flickered and he looked up through the gap in the floor that was widening as the stone came apart, the dungeon's Floor 12 crumbling into the abyss below it, and he saw—

  Light.

  White.

  Aerial's light, cutting through the corridor's darkness above the gap, the silver armored form and the white sword and the white hair and she was moving at the speed that level five moved when it had decided that speed was the only avaible variable and all of it was being spent now.

  She saw him.

  He saw her see him.

  "ARIS—"

  Her voice through the scream, through the gap the scream had made, through the voices and the hallucinations and the darkness and the eye looking at him from below, her voice arrived with the specific crity of something that was real in the way that the voices were not real, and she was at the gap's edge with the light sword raised and the grey eyes finding him in the darkness below and the expression on her face was—

  The tentacle pulled.

  The stone gave way.

  The gap closed above him and Elysse was on the other side of it standing at the edge of where the floor had been with the light falling from Aerial in every direction and the st thing he saw before the darkness took the image was her standing there.

  The sword still raised.

  The grey eyes still finding him.

  Her voice still present in the air where he had been.

  Then the darkness was total and the scream was everywhere and Aris went somewhere that was not the dungeon and not the surface and not anywhere he had a name for.

  On the other side of the colpsed floor, Elysse stood at the edge.

  The light from Aerial fell into the gap and found nothing.

  She stood there for a long time.