Of course, the fight begins before Verity and Lena even finish going through the portal. The untrained always take a bit longer to make the transit— one part frame of mind, one part practice, and two parts adjusting to Delve weirdness. It's just a lot easier to notice on artificial portals, I suppose.

  I'm tempted to continue the baking metaphor, but there’s more important things to focus on. There's a handful of cy monsters prowling around the portal; their heavy, malleable bodies don't seem to be slowing them down. They circle, they stare, they growl at me with palpable, ear-scraping wetness.

  I grit my teeth and hiss, showing them my cws. Come, then. Let me tear you apart.

  The first to charge is the first to die. It leaps forward, its maw tearing to bare fangs of sharpened pottery—

  I sidestep, grab the small bear by the neck, twist, and rip the head clean off. Can I kick the body and hit another target with it? No, that'd put my back to the prey at my fnks for too long; might align with the girls' arrival, too.

  I toss the head aside with a snarl, letting the body spill water and greenish ooze into the gravel. It tumbles down to the ground with a wet thud, a monstrous puppet on cut strings.

  A blur in the corner of my eye, the thump-thump-sp cy against loose stone. I sweep for threats and find them: monsters at the fnks, with the ones in front lowering their bodies. Staggered movement, though, so there’s an opportunity; an order of actions comes together in my head. And then apart again in the span of a heartbeat, when I hear two heartbeats behind me. Eh. I need to get used to fighting in groups, don’t I.

  “Fnked! Watch your left!” I shout, and then spin on one heel. My boot crunches through the gravel, my tail curls in, and my shoulder rolls to carry just a little more force into my now-raised fist.

  All of that meets the blur of cy head-on with a wet, almost meaty thwack that shakes my bones. A wolf’s head presses its way into my fist, the sheer mass of its body carrying it forward—

  Right into my other fist, jabbed upward into a chest that caves with barely a wheeze. Stale water and rancid greenery burst from the cracks, and the monster drops to the ground. There’s little satisfaction in destroying something so... malleable. Nothing to savor, but nothing to distract, either. A burst of Wind is enough to banish the rank matter from my body, and I turn to my next target.

  I spare a gnce at Lena and Verity, too, just in case. Lena’s carving up a monster’s head, conducting bdes of Wind with one hand while the other clutches her tome. Verity caves in a head with her mace, a wash of Fire renders a second monster immobile. Not bad.

  I don’t dwell, though, and the remainder of my focus returns when I see two of the remaining monsters moving on me. I shift my stance, letting the Wind dance around my legs and flow through my calves; a little more range is needed for two at once, and my legs are plenty long enough to qualify.

  Bear on the left, something vaguely cat-shaped on the right. Right’s faster, so I pull my matching leg up, stick my tail out for bance, and the air cracks as I snap a kick up through the monster’s chin. It staggers back with a bent and boot-printed head, just as I switch legs and kick it again. A second crack of shorn air, and the monster’s head flips up as if on a hinge before falling to the ground.

  With space made, I sidestep the bear and reel my fist back for a proper punch—

  A whistle of air, a glimmering of green Wind that carves gouges from its hide, a shield of Sun that slices its head clean off. Behind it, Verity with a ferocious, hungry smile that vanishes the moment we lock eyes.

  “Nice shot, Lena!” Verity practically crows, standing up straight. “I think Ivy had it handled—”

  “I did have it handled, but more help means less risk,” I finish, crossing my arms. My heart had hardly wound up for the fight, and now it’s got to find a reasonable pace again. It takes me a moment to separate an odd burst of irritation from actual, reasonable thoughts, and I spend it shing my tail against the gravel. “Are your filter spells holding up?”

  I lean to the side, eyes on Lena. I can see a faint glimmer of green in the air around her, patternless and tracing a slightly wobbly sphere. She’s got her nose half in her tome, mumbling something about concentrations, but snaps up to look without much dey.

  “Oh! T-thank you, Verity, I like that variation a lot.” She nods, then pauses and furrows her brow. The glimmer around her brightens, dims, then winks out. “Um. Yes, it’s fine now. I had to pull in the radius though, I kept starting my wind bdes inside of it on accident.”

  “And mine is working well too!” Verity chimes in, and she taps a cw against the air. Red-orange light ripples outward, casting odd shadows across her features. “Fire’s tricky, but it’s good at sifting out impurities once you’ve given it the right directions."

  “She’s holding up alright, too,” Verity adds in a whisper, and I barely see her mouth move. I doubt any regur human could catch her words, soft as they are. “We’ll have to keep momentum though.”

  ...She is, isn’t she, and we will. Gods, I don’t want her panicking down here. I already feel like an old knot pulled too tight, fraying at each end and splitting in pces I can’t see.

  “Good,” I say, sparing Verity a nod before I look back to Lena. She’s scratching her head, brow furrowed, and staring into... well, whatever passes for a sky on this yer. “Ready to move, Lena?”

  “Why is the sky here, um, normal? Like the real sky, I mean,” she says, then shakes her head. “It’s not some general concept like everything else, and it has clouds and... oh! Those are Earth crystals! Fascinating.”

  I look up at the sky, just to check. My senses tell me nothing, something I’d glossed over on my previous visits, so I cast my thoughts back into years of lessons. Divergent perception, alternate interpretation... hm. Well, partly, because we are in a Delve and Lena could die, steady breaths Ivy, get moving. Speaking of, “Let’s get moving first. Follow me.”

  Lena spares a gnce to a hunk of Earth crystal, lips pursed. “That’s a bit too big to use... Ah, of course!”

  I gesture in a direction, and they follow. The moment we settle into a steady march, Verity coughs. “So, back to the sky. I suppose Delves are just weird, to use Ivy’s words?”

  I spare a gnce behind me to look at Verity, just in time for her focus to swing back down from the sky. She winks at me before she starts to speak.

  “I’m just seeing Craumont’s sky too, actually. Or a sky, but it definitely looks real. I didn’t even notice that st time! Also, are we going away from the yer four portal on purpose?”

  “We did that on the, um, st yer too, didn’t we?” Lena adds, and I feel something hot bubble up in my chest. “For Hearts. And what’s— ah, I’ll wait. Sorry.”

  So many questions, as always, and it leaves irritation and schorly curiosity swirling inside of me. I pour my frustration into a satisfying thud of my tail against stone, wincing when I hear two heartbeats spike in concert. I wash it all down with that draught of curiosity, and chase that with a sip from my water fsk.

  “Thank you. And that’s three questions. Good ones, too.” I hold up three fingers, then pause and lower one. “No, two. In reverse order, Lena’s right, we’re looking to see if there’s hearts back this way before descending to the next yer. As for the sky?”

  I look up. Nothingness. If it’s affecting Verity, it’s not Magecraft that’s drawing the line... Hhm, did she ever talk about working with the abstract? No, I think. Observational? Yes. A test, then: skies look like the sky. I hold that thought in my mind, tail curling around my leg, and look up.

  Hanging above us are the pale-blues and shadowed cotton-wisps of Craumont’s sky. The pallor of autumn is already creeping into its hues, and my heart leaps for the Wind of nature— Gods, I’m going to spend all of tomorrow outside. Lena will recover in bed, because we will get out of here, and... please, Gods. Goddess, hear me.

  “It’s the abstraction of a sky,” I conclude, reaching for my Depth meter. I flip open the alchemical brass casing and watch the instrument spin, adding a touch of my own magic to encourage it. Five hundred-odd marches. “You’ll see what you expect to see, essentially. Moving on.”

  “Oh, fascinating!” Lena breathes. “So if I… hm.”

  “I learn something new every day!” Verity cheers, though I can hear the subtle strain in her two-toned voice. “Several somethings today, even. Not bad!”

  My tail uncurls, finding its way into one hand. We've slowed our pace because of this, or rather, they've slowed down, so I'm slowing down to match. We can't afford this. The knot draws tight, and its shape is now clear to me— a noose over our heads. Waiting for us to slip, to choke and die.

  “Um, yeah! It's, ah, it helps. Could I see something other than a sky? What are you seeing, Ivy?” Lena muses. Must she ramble? Must Verity encourage it?

  “Nothing. Doesn't matter,” I snap, heat building in my chest. “We need to get moving.”

  “S-sorry! I'm just... oh, Restoration...”

  “Ivy!” Verity's voice nces back. “We’re all stressed. Rushing won't fix anything.”

  “Rushing? If we don't keep a reasonable—” I bite back the rest of my answer, gripping my own tail tightly with one hand. Delving habits take over as I run a cwed thumb over my scales, professionalism rising above the soothing rhythms. “You're right, on both counts.”

  Bah, rushing will just exhaust Lena and put all three of us at risk. Had I been rushing, or was Verity just cautioning me? With that in mind, I stop and turn, pointing at Lena.

  “If you need rest, say so, clear? Verity and I are fighters, you're not,” I start, turning my pointing finger into a raised hand to stall Lena's words. “And too much strain will accelerate your Mageblood transformation. Be careful.”

  Lena holds my gaze, jaw set but trembling. “I— I'm sorry that I'm holding you back. I'll, I'll be careful.”

  A long-held breath hisses through my lips, snuck by a twinging heart. What do I even say to that? Do I comfort her? “Don't apologize. This wasn't your fault.”

  With that, I turn around. “Let's... get going. Keep an eye out for Hearts and monsters.”

  “Of course!” Verity says, voice ced with far too much cheer. “And we'll bash any monsters. All of them, even.”

  “And, um!” Lena adds, stumbling over her words. “I'll keep working on that spell. I think, well, it'll make the cy monsters much easier to beat! Hopefully...”

  I'd like to say, I wish I could say our spirits were buoyed. Lifted up by good cheer after I dragged them further into the depths. It’d make me feel a bit better about it all, too.

  But I don’t much care for lying.

  It takes twenty minutes for us to catch even a whiff of a Heart— well, a ripple, really. Twenty minutes of terse conversation, unsatisfying prey and more of the bck smoke, all to the song and sounds of crunching gravel.

  Gods, it's not even me that finds it. No, it's Lena, with the depth meter I gave to her. Better for her to have it, after all, when I’m busy watching out for monsters.

  “Oh! Um, up two, down one, up two, down two....” Lena's voice bubbles with excitement, and when I finish ripping the monster's head off, I turn to look.

  Verity is leaning over, her chin practically on Lena's head. “Found a ripple?”

  “Found a ripple!” Lena nods energetically, nearly smming her head into Verity's jaw. Her nose twitches as we make eye contact, and she holds up the meter for me to see.

  She's a couple marches away, but my eyesight is more than adequate to confirm her observation. Two up, two down, two up, two down.

  “Not bad. I’ll start...” I trail off and frown. Opening myself up to the Delve seems like a quick way to make myself vomit, so: “Time to track it down. Mind handing the meter back?”

  “Could I—” Lena stops and blinks, cheeks tinging red. “Oh, I was about to say something ridiculous. Yes, here’s the meter!”

  “We can learn another time, Lena!” Verity swings around to the side, spinning so she keeps Lena in sight and bending over a bit in the process. “I know I’d like to learn a bit more, when we’re not... well, in this mess.”

  So much enthusiasm. I grit my teeth and take a breath, venting the spike of irritation out through my tailtip.

  “Sounds like that’s been decided for me,” I say drily, stepping around Verity to pluck the meter from Lena’s hands. “It’s not that complicated, though.”

  While Verity straightens, I put most of my focus on the depth meter, pacing in circles and waving my tail behind me. Thankfully, it doesn’t take long to determine our heading — a couple of degrees away from the side of the river.

  “How far away is it? You, um, did that in the forest, I think...” Lena hums, and parchment ruffles.

  “Can’t do much more than guess,” I offer with a shrug, then draw up the numbers in my head anyways. I know the curve these things follow, after all, and Hearts don’t vary terribly in source intensity. “Forty marches if we’re lucky.”

  So we walk, and walk, and the minutes trickle by. What life the riverbed held fades as we walk, its cy flesh parched and split open like bones scavenged for marrow. In their pce are more rifts of bck smoke, roiling up through the gaps and vanishing into the absent sky.

  We pass forty marches of physical distance. We’re not lucky, unsurprisingly.

  We reach sixty and stop to rest, given our depth is decreasing as we move. Not a long rest, just enough for tea, cold water, and maintenance on our filtering spells.

  Near eighty, though, I feel the tug. The lurch of a Delve’s downward curve, a half-stumble of the senses that marks a Heart’s immediate presence. I scan my surroundings, and... nothing. But it is here, I am sure of it!

  “Finally,” I hiss out, then clear my throat. “Felt the Heart. Shouldn’t be far from here.”

  “Shouldn’t be far... that’s a little vague for you, Ivy,” Verity replies immediately, and she’s right, of course.

  “Do you need the meter back?” Lena adds, and of all things I can feel my cheeks warming.

  “Yes to Verity, no to Lena,” I start, pausing to let out a growling sigh. “Give me a moment to narrow it down.”

  I close my eyes and drag my tail-tip through the gravel. The click of scale and stone is satisfying, as always. “Just got impatient.”

  Doing my best to ignore Verity’s giggle, I turn my focus inward. Sheathed in magic as I am, the Delve’s curvature is... hard to feel. Dulled. But hard is not impossible, and I begin to feel out the slope.

  A few steps this way, eyes open so I don’t fall, two steps closer to the river. No, I’m still sloped, maybe a little closer to...

  Bah, I’ve stepped through it twice now. Where is this damned thing? It had better not be buried in the gravel. Would that even count as ‘exposed’ according to the empirical ws of Delving?

  I step through a third time, and there! My cws catch on... something. A snag in the Delve, rather than something physical. It feels almost like a yer transition, but yer transitions don’t emit waves.

  Curiosity rises through the murk, and I turn to face the snag. Both cws rest on the impossible surface, ready to dig in. A spatial snarl, maybe, which I suppose could hold a Heart. Nothing else quite matches, and with this Delve behaving so oddly, one more oddity wouldn’t surprise me. Still, I hesitate. My training has nothing to say, and there’s not even a gut feeling to go off.

  Risk could be the death of us, after all.

  We need the Heart, though. Time ticks away, sands in a cracked hourgss.

  “Did you find something?” Verity says softly. I spare a gnce; she’s moved much closer, with Lena not far behind.

  “It should be right here,” I say aloud. Dripping magic into my cws, I tug. The snag widens, the waves grow stronger. “I think it’s folded out of reality a bit. Let me...”

  A wisp of bck smoke dribbles through the gap. Then a trickle, a stream, the seam tears wider, ying bare what lies beyond—

  Move move move MOVE

  The moment between heartbeats stretches, pulled taut between Wind and Lightning. I lurch to the side, shoving Verity and Lena away with one hand each. Verity’s form crackles with Fire and Sun, her hand snaps out to grasp my own...

  The seam rips open, smoke clings to my body, and a lipless maw into the Abstract swallows me whole.

  In the case of bodily exposure to the Abstract, whether through non-solidified Delve or portal leakage, some part of me murmurs, somehow audible over the thundering of my own heart. Vacate the area as soon as possible. Should you fall in...

  I cannot fall through nothing. I am already there, suspended in my own regrets. I couldn’t have known.

  I wish I’d known.

  Columns of prismatic light churn, writhing with ancient cogs and twitching to the beat of a thousand pistons. The roots of a grand tree, bloated with life, dividing and splitting and blooming in a thousand pces only to colpse and begin again. Bck not-flesh, shot with gold, a wicked wound from above that reaches for the abyss. Beneath it all, endless voices, endless thoughts that lurk as beasts in the waves.

  A tendril of smoke slips from my leg, vanishing into the absence.

  I should’ve known it wasn’t a Heart. I couldn’t have known it wasn’t a Heart, and even then, holes into the Abstract don’t pull people.

  Do not call for help.

  My body begins to burn. I am drowned, choked in impossibility; parched soil crumbling before the flood. My scales spread, my cws lengthen, I push my magic up against the tide and fill myself with everything I have. Lightning crackles, a searing violet stark against abstraction, dancing with Wind that stirs air from void. Scales crack and re-form, but the Abstract still bites at what lies beneath. Flesh peels away, muscle tears, and bone cracks.

  Directions are meaningless. There is only the flow, pouring toward the wound I'd fallen from, and my cws sinking into its flow. I need something to hold, I must perceive and comprehend—

  Do not attempt to comprehend more than is absolutely necessary to escape.

  PAIN

  Agony seeks to make a puppet of me, a thousand knives raked over my form and buried deep in my skull. I cannot stop my back from arching, I barely resist the molten strings tugging on my arms. My tail thrashes, wrapping around my legs and holding them firmly in pce.

  But it will not break me. It did once, and never again.

  Lightning flows under my command, eager to shape the impossible, arcing from blood-soaked cws and bone id bare. I cling to that hold, flesh mending and scales toughening in resistance to oblivion.

  The Abstract plucks at my form like a crow in carrion, magic grows it back. Skin becomes scale, muscles tighten, fangs lengthen. My tail thickens, it stretches and breaks and fans its way through the impossible.

  Seek the help of a trained healer immediately.

  I open my mouth. All that comes out is blood, leaked from ruptured gums and a bitten tongue. I'd ugh, but then I'd choke on my own blood. There’s no help for me, only two fellow prisoners in the Delve.

  So I climb for them; climb on rungs of nothing, comprehended by a bleeding mind and held fast by my Lightning. My magic gutters, but I will not fade. Not now. The Hearts at my side leap to my command, oozing their tar-like magic to fill the gaps left by my own. It is a vile sensation, but one that dulls the pain.

  Just one foot and one cw after the other. Up, up towards a point of gilded light.

  A cw slips. The rung flickers. I curse with a pointed tongue, hiss my fury into the uncaring void, and keep going. I slip again, and again, and again, stumbling as my limbs fail me and forcing them back anyways.

  Ahead of me now is a spreading rift of golden light, the destination of the flow I’ve followed. It ripples of Delve magic, rather than raw abstraction, humming in tune with the Hearts. Closer, closer, each pull of an arm or push of a leg sending waves of agony through my body.

  “Ivy!”

  Verity’s voice echoes through the Abstract, imposed rather than heard. An arm bursts through the rift, cd in silver and wreathed in Sun. It extends a taloned hand toward me, fringes crumbling and healing in fshes of Fire.

  I reach out, and something in my shoulder cracks. I push through the pain, pushing up and up until I can csp my arm with hers.

  The st thing I feel before my consciousness fades is gravel beneath my scales. The st thing I see is Craumont’s sky.

  Origami_Narwhal