“Two sets of waves.” I start talking the moment my friends are through the portal, because Gods, I don't think I can bear more reassurance from them.

  I pause for a moment anyway, turning back to look. Curiosity burns in Lena’s eyes, twined with the fear I suspect all three of us carry. Verity’s lips are quirked in a spdash smile.

  No remarks about how fascinating the yer is. No jokes, no puns, no lightening the mood just yet; I turn back around before I can be tempted.

  The endless web spreads out before me, a mess of white towers spanned by erratically pced bridges of equally white something. Mushrooms, likely. No monsters, no bck smoke...

  “One's Delve downward, maybe two hundred marches physically,” I say, pointing in the direction of the curve, eyes tracing the fyed towers of whitish flesh. Shaking my head, I point one hundred and ten degrees clockwise from it with my other hand. “Other's that way, definitely further away. Two hundred and fifty, maybe? Three hundred? Bah.”

  “I see the dilemma.” Verity strides up next to me, bumping shoulders. “Definitely something that calls for a hug.”

  “Oh, Gods,” Lena sighs, her voice wavering. “Um, that's both multiplied by themselves, and then the result is... rooted. Um, Three hundred marches, maybe? I knew you were right, we have to pick, but...”

  “Three hundred seventy,” I correct absently, tail shing against the whitish web-bridge. With its new length and strength, it leaves satisfying gouges rather than boring dents. “You used the right angle math. We don't have time to walk most of a grand march, given the time we have left.”

  “About half an hour before we should start ascending,” Verity nods along, lips twitching into a grimace. “And you can't tell the difference between a potential rift and a Heart?”

  “Without a few days to study—” No, Ivy, focus on the problem. I cut myself off with a snarl and shake my head. “Can't. We'll go to the further one— never went that way originally. More likely to be a Heart and we don't go as deep.”

  “Ah, longer trip, but lower risk, right?” Lena says slowly, and I hear the rustle of parchment behind me. Her voice wavers and dips, fighting the currents of emotion and struggling for air. “Um, Gods, I have so many questions... once we're out, I mean. This yer looks, um, is there anything I should know? How do I bance on these web structures?”

  And there we are, thank the Gods. Must’ve been hard to bottle up that much curiosity for so long— and there’s some things to cover, really.

  “The only monster we saw was a rge spider that created a field of spores around itself. Fast, incredible reaction times, and it was a tricky fight. Bad at turning though.” Verity rattles everything off nearly mechanically, pacing around toward the bridge I’d pointed to earlier. “Stay in the center of the bridges. The slope is mild most of the time, but the bridges can wobble under big impacts.”

  She gestures down, down into the eye-bending depths. Pitch-dark, fractal, headache-inducing. “So, let’s not test our luck. Are you good with heights?”

  Dark. Hm. Something catches in my mind as the thought cycles through my head, something putting my tail against Lena’s boot can’t really distract from.

  Lena’s heart stumbles, and she takes a long, deep breath. “We don’t, um, have a choice, do we.”

  Silence, counted in three different heartbeats, punctuated by a low growl. What skin remains on my body curls back to bare yet more scales— we will survive this. I won't allow for the alternative.

  “Not really,” Verity admits, “But hey! We’re preparing. That’s a big help.”

  Hah.

  “No point in dwelling, is there?” I say drily, gesturing at the bridge pointing vaguely toward our destination. “Talk as we walk. Lena, if you need to be carried or helped, just call out. Verity, single file behind Lena, and your eyes are better than mine—”

  “I am a bird,” Verity muses, already moving behind me. “I'll keep watch.”

  “O-of course. Um, yes, let's go!”

  And we, well, go. We walk single file across the bridge, each step spawning a subtle tremor. It's not silence, not quite— I'm checking the depth and noting it for Verity, Lena asks the occasional question, and it all suffocates in heavy, musty air.

  We go deeper, just a bit. The bridges don't always go where we need them to, and that calls for lots of forward pnning.

  This particur one we find ourselves on requires jumping down from one bridge to the next. Not hard, and Verity holds Lena steady while I prepare to catch her if she falls, but it leaves us with a different silence, just for a moment.

  Lena, bless her, seizes the opportunity with both hands.

  “Everything I've read says the aAbstract... um. Delves happen when there’s a hole in the World,” she says aloud, and I spare a gnce long enough to see her flush red. “Sorry if this is a bad time, but the quiet is—”

  She stops suddenly. “Sorry.”

  Distractions. Questions, thoughts that might slow us down.

  Minutes, bleeding away, but Lena's managed to take me back in time. Not bad.

  “Don't be,” I say anyway, tail waving behind me. I thump it, draining just a bit of tension from my body. “Go on.”

  Verity chimes in, chirping in a way that doesn’t quite scratch my ears. “Ivy, we need to climb up ten or so marches at this next tower. I’m all ears, Lena.”

  I take a moment to pick out the bridge Verity was talking about, leaving the harder thinking for trawling over my admittedly limited understanding of the aAbstract.

  Rope, then? Maybe a sticking spell? I know I can just jump it or climb with my cws, but I have two other people to pn around.

  “Oh,” Lena mumbles. Her voice brightens. “Yes, um. So, if you can go into the Delve from one hole in the world, what happens if you come out a different hole?”

  Verity chuckles musically. “Now that is a cssic bit of theory! And completely over my head, too. Ivy?”

  “Cssical, not cssic, and it gives me headaches,” I grouse, rifling around in my bag for a rope. Why exactly did I let Verity repack it? It's tidy, but it’s her tidy, not mine. “Worried about us coming up in a different spot?”

  “Ah... yes, actually! O-or maybe hoping, if there’s a problem...” Lena trails off. “Though, Winston and Elizabeth have probably taken control again up there. How do we know where we’ll, um, come out, if our original portal or hole is closed?”

  The sort of questions my parents asked, once upon a time. I’d studied it for years, wondering if maybe, maybe, my awful parents had found another way out.

  “You come out in the same spot you entered from, unless a Delveway is involved, because the gap between the Delve and the World is thinnest there,” I answer, and aha! She put the rope at the far side of the bag, in that nook where I can’t see it properly. Bah. “And Delveways take dozens of Hearts to move even a few marches in the World. The amount of energy it takes to change the exit is just too high, essentially.”

  “Fascinating.” Lena breathes.

  “Oh, this feels weird,” Verity mumbles, “Let’s keep focused, girls, okay?”

  Hah. “Right. Thanks, Verity.”

  “Any time!” And there’s one of those smiles that threatens to burn my eyes.

  “Right! Climbing. Um. For the rope, I can use a sticking spell instead, I think?”

  I drop the rope into the bag with a sigh, though I really shouldn't be surprised. “Waste of magic. I'll carry you, then. Or Verity.”

  “But—” Lena stops herself. “Alright. Just, ah, don't strain yourself? If you can avoid it.”

  Or I might hurt my soul further, is what goes unsaid. The thought rankles, prodding at me like a particurly persistent mosquito. I stop my tail halfway through a thump, holding it just above the bridge, and sigh once more. “Verity, then, if she can make the jump with you.”

  “Unless you secretly carry boulders or lead around, I think I can manage,” Verity says lightly. “Though, speaking of managing, Ivy— how far down are we? What is our depth?”

  “Eight hundred, give or take,” I say, then take out the depth meter to check. We should be retively ft with the previous yer; there’s a bit of curve to this, and more than expected, but... not much overall. Once the meter settles, I blink.

  And blink again.

  “Eight hundred and forty,” I correct myself. How did I not notice that, exactly? “Guess I’m a bit off.”

  Small words for a gap in my senses. Have I really slipped so much, tugged down by bruises and hours of Delving? The disquiet of mounting mistakes id pin, of a could-have-been disaster, of a knife barely a hair from the heart.

  Doesn’t stop us from moving, though. Halfway across this bridge, maybe halfway to our goal.

  “Is—”

  “I thought something was off,” Verity says, her voice easily gliding over Lena’s. “Eh, maybe felt. Was the curve steep enough for that drop, Ivy? Sorry, Lena.”

  “Shouldn’t be,” I growl out, checking the meter again. Eight hundred and forty two, more or less. “I would have felt it. I should have felt it, if the curve changed like that.”

  But how did I miss it? Can I—

  Ah. Of course. It’s near impossible to feel depth changes when there’s the damned fingers clinging to me. Too much sensation to filter through... but now that I know it’s happening?

  I twist my will, unfurling my magic to create a space between it and the core of my soul. The rotting sensations don’t fade, and it’s extra strain, but now I can feel the Delve’s strange fluctuations.

  As the thought trails off, Lena puts that same question into words: “But would you have, um. Would you have sensed the change in pressure?” She pauses. “Would it have hurt your soul, maybe?”

  “No,” I grimace, shaking my head. “I don’t usually feel much pressure until a grand march, and we’re still under that.”

  “But why is it doing that?” I can practically hear Lena’s furrowed brow just from the tone.

  “Delves are weird,” I force a snort, tapping my tail on the bridge before curling it around in front of me. My cws rake against the scales soothingly, anchoring my thoughts properly. “The gradient for Delves isn’t always continuous, so a sudden drop is concerning but not out of the ordinary. Standard procedure says to monitor the situation and retreat, but we can’t retreat.”

  Hm. I check the meter again. Eight hundred and forty six. Seven. The newly refreshed sensation in my gut agrees with that. Could that—

  In the distance, a sound:

  Tik.

  Tik tik tik tik.

  My musings come to a roaring halt, shoved to the side and tumbling off the tracks. I wheel around, hand raised to call for a stop, eyes sweeping across the endless horizon.

  “Verity—”

  “Ivy—”

  “Ah—”

  Everyone starts and stops speaking at once. Two heartbeats pick up, Lena's more than Verity's.

  “I'll go,” I growl out, tail still clutched in one hand. “I heard a spider, Verity. Likely distant, I could barely hear it. You?”

  “A spider? Like we were talking about before?” Lena practically squeaks. “Oh, Gods, um...”

  “Now?” Verity spins around, head pivoting just a bit too far for a human. Yellow eyes scythe across me, cutting across the endless expanse. “Your hearing is better than mine, then. But my eyesight?”

  She turns away. A Sun shield flickers into being on her arm, and the other hand strays to her mace. Her voice is steady, but the tone underneath wavers. “And we don’t have the time to fight it, do we? I see signs at a hundred-odd marches— no, there it is. Time to get moving.”

  I bite back a snarl. We should stand and fight, something in me hisses, tear its limbs and shatter its body, but Verity is right. We need the Heart, and we need to go, and without getting more injured along the way.

  ... Especially if I'm wrong, and that's a rift instead of a Heart. Goddess, grant me strength.

  Verity turns full circle, and her eyes meet mine. Lena's facing me too, searching for... something. Answers. Guidance, maybe.

  “I can— um, have ranged spells,” Lena says, “Verity, maybe I can throw spells while you carry me?”

  Verity raises an eyebrow. “It’s worth trying.”

  Taking a shot, I nod. “Let's go. Quickly. I'll lead, Verity, watch as best you can. Lena, focus on the body— the legs are too fast.”

  Lena starts to speak, but it turns into a squeak when Verity scoops her up. The Sun shield flickers out of her hand and onto her back, stretching out to cover more of her body.

  Hopefully, she'll be able to keep up.

  My legs tense, my heart leaps to a thundering pace, and I begin to sprint. I cannot savor the wind streaming through my hair, nor the feeling of power thrumming through me; my focus splits between the ripples of the Delve, the space I must cross, and the heartbeats of the women behind me.

  A path is charted and followed; I leap with snarl, cws digging into the tower's soft flesh, and unch up onto the bridge above. Curve around the side, bolt across, pause to check— Verity's cleared the jump. I can see the spider now, and there is no mistaking the tik tik tack of scurrying limbs.

  The Heart is closer now. Maybe a hundred marches to go. How do we deal with the spider when it arrives? Circle around? Make my prey suffer? Bah.

  I devour the distance to the next tower, leaning forward into each stride and letting my tail bance it out. My cws sink deep into the whitish bridge, my tail swings, and I leap down to the next bridge. Verity's further behind, boots flickering with Sun— she says something to Lena, something drowned in the roar of blood through my ears.

  I don't need magic to move quickly, not with my body changed this much. Without Wind to soften the impact, every move sends a pulse of force through me, yanking joints and straining muscles.

  We draw closer and closer to the Heart, leaping from bridge to bridge. I leave gouges in my wake, Verity marks her passage with bckened ground. Arcs of green Wind whip through the air—

  Tik tik tik tik.

  The monster draws near. Time ticks away, the fingers creep across my body; I push it all aside. I’ve Delved for years, I can manage.

  As I leap my way up a pilr, I catch a glimpse of our pursuer. The spider, with a shell of blossoming decay and ruptured fungal sacs, skittering its way across the bridges with ease. Lena's Wind gouges its abdomen as I watch, but it doesn't even flinch. There's no numbers to run. No calcutions to fudge, no gut instincts to lean on.

  We won't make it.

  That is something I can do the arithmetic on. A simple pn with simple outcomes. I draw the meter from my pocket, slow my pace, and allow Verity to catch up to me just as we break line of sight with the monster.

  “Lena, take the meter,” I start, once I’m sure I have their attention. “Verity, if you can, drop the protections and try to sense the Heart. I’ll stall the monster, and join up once you’ve got it.”

  “But—”

  “Aren’t you hurt, Ivy?” Lena’s voice rises over Verity’s, and the worry ced within makes my heart ache. Well-founded worry, but I’m hardly fragile. Still, I keep pace with them; Lena hasn’t stuck a hand out and Verity’s looking at me oddly.

  “I am,” I admit with a grunt, heaving myself up a bridge. My tail adds weight, and my fully changed form gives me the strength to blow right past that. “Doesn’t matter. I’ll just dodge it and bait it away before coming back.”

  Tik tik tik tik.

  Closer now. Two bridges away at most. Not quite in leaping distance.

  “Absolutely not,” Verity’s voice cuts through, and I nearly stumble under the force of it. I do snarl, though.

  “Ivy, your soul is cracked, and we would be fools to take our best tracker away from the search. I’ll stall the monster.”

  Heat bubbles up, and the growl in my gut seethes its way out between grit teeth. No, who else could do this properly? They can handle the Heart just fine, but the monster needs—

  “She’s right.” Lena’s voice is as soft as it is damning.

  I bite back a curse, smming my tail into the bridge. I can’t even hold her gaze, not with all the running. Are we even close to the Heart? Gods, not nearly close enough to render this moot.

  “Ivy, if you die, we all die,” Verity snaps right back, eyes fshing from yellow to a blinding white. “Swallow your damned lordly pride. You take Lena and go, now.”

  I’m halfway through putting together a response when I realize I am being gred at by, and pnning to argue with, a padin. A padin eleven years older than me, no less.

  My pride.

  My pride.

  Not so long ago, I walked into a Delve unprepared because of it. Pride is why Dongbaek escaped, and returned to seal us all in this Delve.

  What kind of Delver am I, to keep arguing in the face of my own failures? What kind of person am I?

  I nod curtly. “You’re right. Be safe, Verity.”

  We slow to a stop, just for a moment. Long enough for me to dip down and gather Lena in my arms, leaving the Depth meter in Lena’s hands. Better than taking time to stick it back in its pocket, and easier to read.

  I do give Verity a jar of healing salve, though. Just in case.

  Verity’s eyes do not glitter so much as gleam, like a bde in the dark. “Let’s see if I can kill it before you get back, hm? I have to look good for the dies.”

  “N-not you too,” Lena chokes out a giggle, and the weight of her body in my arms is... comforting. Touch always is, but she doesn’t have to nestle into me like that. Gods, I’ll need to think about all that when I get out of here. She takes a shuddering breath. “And, um, good luck, Verity. Be safe.”

  “As safe as I can be.” Verity winks, but her heart isn’t in it. She looks back, sighs, and jogs away with a mace in one hand and a shield in the other. “Same goes for you two.”

  Lena says something to Verity, something I don’t quite catch. The bitter draft of Verity’s words still lingers in the back of my throat, and despite what she said, I can’t quite swallow it. Pride? Taking the harder task is just practical, isn’t it? I’ve got years of experience Delving, years of working alone to...

  Hah. I’ll just have to choke on it, won’t I? No time for this kind of stewing. Lena is light in my arms, I can hear the Wind humming at her fingertips, and it takes everything I have to not look back when I hear the csh of shield against shell.

  “Keep focus on the abdomen, as long as you can,” I mutter, tracing our route to the Heart’s estimated location. My hands curl around her hip and side, holding her tight, and I prepare to jump. “Jumping; might be a bit jarring.”

  There is no magic to it. My instincts twitch at the thought, reaching out for an eager Wind, but I quash them. Muscles bunch and coil, tension builds, and I leap. The bridge shudders below me, and a shift of my tail is more than enough to adjust our flight.

  Goddess, watch over your padin.

  We draw ever closer to the Heart.

  I draw closer, inevitably, to the realization that Verity was right. Here and now, where every moment counts, triangution and Verity’s untrained senses would have spelled our doom.

  She’s doing well enough, I can tell; the thumps and crashes of her battle are easily audible.

  “Are you... um,” Lena pauses, breathing hitching. “Ivy, you’re growling. Ah, are you alright?”

  “No,” I snarl, because Gods, what an absurd question. “Nothing is alright about this, Lena, but venting like this keeps me focused.”

  The ripples are a little more to the right, now. I’ll have to adjust, maybe take a slightly different route. I can feel the Delve’s fabric, too; we’re dropping a bit faster than expected, again. Either the Delve is shifting, or something is sinking. Guess I’ll have to keep an even closer eye. Pnning... helps, really. Keeps me from stewing on the thousands of ways Lena could end up dead. We’re so close, now.

  Lena sighs, pressing further into my arms. “I’m, um. I’m the same, Ivy.”

  Good, I don’t say, because I have at least a modicum of sense. Instead, then, “Nothing wrong with that. Not now, at least.”

  “But we’ll get out of here,” she continues, though I feel her voice more than hear it. She’s pushed up against my armor, head nestled against my pauldron. Can’t be comfortable, but she’s just not fast enough to consider walking. “We still have, um, ten minutes to find the Heart, right? Something like that.”

  A counter bubbles up, and I swallow it. Down goes wounded pride and bitter thoughts, chased by a hint of misery. Ten minutes to find out if I’d picked right, or if Lena’s getting out of here with a mutited soul.

  When something warm rushes to fill the void, I gather the feeling up and hold it tight. We’ll get out of here, she said, with the certainty of a novice. But it’s a shred of optimism, and I’ll—

  Ah, directional change on the waves. Based on the sudden swing, we must be damn close, which is exactly what I’d been angling for.

  I skid to a halt, tail fring out. Wind leaps to answer my call, a glimmering sheen of green light that soaks the rest of our momentum.

  “That’s nine minutes back,” I correct her, crouching down so she can slip free from my arms. “Keep your eyes out for more monsters. Heart should be somewhere on this bridge.”

  Lena is left gawping in a way I can best compare to a fish. Maybe an owl, with how wide her eyes are. “A-already?”

  “You’re the one that said we’d get out of here,” I say, as lightly as I can manage. Goddess, please...

  Dread still stirs as I pace along the bridge, narrowing down the Heart’s location. Could be a rift, yes. But it could not be, and the sooner we get back to Verity, the better. Hard to be comfortable when I’m not fighting the monster.

  “And we will!” Lena insists. “I mean, um, it’s hard to be scared for so long. I-I might as well try being hopeful. The Restoration blessed me, so. Ah, that must mean he thinks we’ll prevail, right?”

  Crouching down once more, I trace the ripples with an outstretched hand. Not here, a little to the left, there!

  My hand plunges through the bridge, into the thick and sticky ooze that fills it. That same ooze bleeds from the wound, spreading as I push my arm deeper and deeper. Adamantine, please. Let this be a Heart, let this not be Lena’s death or my own. She deserves better than the fate my parents made for themselves.

  Deeper and deeper, as our depth increases. There’s no mistaking it now.

  “Nine hundred marches. Wow, um, that’s deeper than I expected!”

  Deeper than is possible, my mind corrects. Beyond the physical sinking feeling, I’m putting together the pieces. Another extremely rare, nigh-impossible situation, one the Guild didn’t know much about either.

  “Shake the meter a bit,” I suggest, absently running through the procedures for fixing Depth meters. Maybe I’m wrong; I was wrong earlier, I’ve been wrong about far too much. So... “Let it settle and tell me the number again. Might be out of calibration, if we’re lucky.”

  Ooze works its way into my scales. Nothing, in comparison to the fingers prodding at my very soul. I’m up to my elbow, then halfway up my forearm—

  Something in my gut lurches.

  “There. Nine hundred and ten marches,” Lena murmurs. Her voice grows shrill as she continues, “Nine hundred and twelve. Fifteen. T-twenty, twenty f-five... I-Ivy!?”

  My cws wrap around a Heart, and I pull.

  When the Heart comes free, a tendril of bck smoke comes with it. More follow, creeping from the wound like blind insects, writhing and roiling. The curve of the Delve dips around them, and I take a hasty step back.

  As I’d feared, it’s not just a strange curving of the Delve.

  The whole yer is getting dragged down.

  Origami_Narwhal