The entrance is an arch formed from the drooping boughs of two trees entwined. Rather than a door, branches like those of a willow droop over the opening, begging to be pushed aside and entry granted.

  The bleeding from my shoulder has stopped, leaving only a bloodstained shirt and a ache that I know will flare once we enter battle once more.

  “So that’s it then?” Heric stands with his hand braced on his hips as he examines the final portal. “The boss is beyond this doorway.”

  “Probably. It might be hiding, though, so don’t be fooled if you can’t see it when you go inside.”

  “Right. The architects wouldn’t want to make this easy, would they?”

  I shrug off my pack, wincing at the pain of pulled muscles, and place it down against the leftmost trunk of the arch. There’s nothing inside that will help me in the battle, except…my fingers brush against Aviela’s delicate clawed gauntlets. I glance up at Heric. He doesn’t see me look. I push them back down below everything else and tug free the very last bite of jerky that I’ve saved.

  I sit back against my pack; it’s become a habit. It’s more comfortable, sure, but I began doing it as a mimicry of Aviela and I’ve never found it in me to stop. How many times did she sit outside a boss room for a last rest before the finale?

  “There’s no shame in turning back, Papa.” I tear of a small hunk of the meat and chew. It’s been stored long enough that it’s an effort of will to make it through. He looks down at me, his dark eyes unreadable, and frowns.

  “You’ve not eaten these last few days, have you?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t need to eat as much now.” I shrug. “Besides, I didn’t think you’d want to see it.”

  “So you chose now to be the moment of revelation?”

  “I’m tired and nervous. I needed something.”

  He takes in a deep breath and sighs. “Right. It would be foolish to rush in, wouldn’t it?” He plods over to the wall and taps against the wood with a dull thunk. The architects answer more slowly than usual but it is still only a few moments before an obelisk appears, grinding from the wood like a knot suddenly growing.

  Full and satisfied, he walks back to me and slides down the wall until he’s beside me. He pulls his knees up to his chest and wraps his arms around them, vulnerable for the first time since he emerged from his cocoon and embraced his powers.

  “What’s it like?”

  “The meat? Savoury, I guess. It varies from monster to monster. This one is a bit sweeter since I cured it. Learned how from the cocoon.”

  He’s quiet for a while then reaches out a hand. “May I try?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Quick, Pik, before I change my mind.”

  I break off a small piece no larger then the tip of my small finger and place it into the palm of his hand. He observes it for a time as though it is a curiosity. Then, without ceremony, he puts it into his mouth and chews.

  His face contorts, his eye twitches, his lip curls back. Heric spits the meat onto the ground and rubs his tongue over the back of his hand. He leaps to his feet with a splutter and rushes to the obelisk to rinse his mouth, over and over until the taste is banished.

  “Blazing sun, Pik. How can you eat that? It was the most foul thing I’ve ever tasted!”

  I place another small piece onto my extended tongue and make a show of retracting it into my mouth to chew. I smile at Heric’s horrified face and chuckle. “I didn’t think you’d like it, but that’s a bit of a reaction.”

  “I’m speaking no word of a lie when I say that was awful. Truly and wholly awful.”

  “Good to know I shouldn’t offer anyone else a bite of my monsters then.”

  “You must be built of sterner stuff than I if you can stomach that meat. Urgh.”

  He settles for a while into a kind of restless trance. I allow my meal to sink into my stomach, take some water to even myself out, and perform the ritual of observance that I’ve come to treasure. Aviela wanted me to look inwards, it was part of the path of advancement and now it is habit. I feel my breath and my blood, my bones and muscles, the heat of my skin and the tastes on my tongue. Every part of me and each its own part of the whole that makes me up. I understand myself.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  For the first time, though, I look more closely at a part of me that I hadn’t considered. When Heric had transformed into a Marked, there was a brightness at the heart of him that pulsed with his heart and reached beyond his skin. I know without being told as much that this is what separates me from a mark of my own. Another sense. Beyond the many that I already have with my physical body, sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, balance, the knowing of my self in relation to all other parts of myself. There are so many small senses and yet this one is missing.

  I search with all I can to find that final pulse that will mean that I progress beyond my mortal limits to something more. I can’t find it. No matter how I slow my heart or steady my breathing, there is a void of understanding. I can’t reach out to touch something I can’t perceive.

  I give up with a frustrated grunt and rise to my feet. I smack my palms onto my thighs and declare. “That’s enough waiting around, don’t you think Papa Heric? How about we kill a boss, what say you?”

  “I say it is high time that I show you my mettle, young man.”

  It is with a nod now that I pick my pack up, brush aside the curtain, and step inside the boss room.

  The room twinkles with the cast light of many tiny slugs; the walls are interwoven trunks, braided and beautiful, the ceiling is a blanket of dangling, delicate flowers. Beneath our feet the floor is soft with petals; thousands upon thousands of flower petals in hues that take my breath as their own.

  In the centre of the room sits a woman. In most ways she looks as a woman might; her hair flows shimmering gold across shoulders, her body follows the same lithe lines of a woman who’s traveled and moved. But where her hair touches is not supple flesh, it is polished wood. Dark mahogany with grains and knots smoothed and covered. Her face too is wrong. She has no eyes, no mouth, no nose. It is a plate of hardened wood from pointed chin to the line of her hair.

  Heric stalks inside and past me. His darkness falls from him like a shroud, his feet crush the delicate petals with each step but he doesn’t notice the beauty around him. I shiver. He’s conjured blades about his forearms and brings them up to ready.

  I drop my pack and grasp my spear, following behind Heric, close enough to support him but far back enough that the attack of the boss will fall onto the Marked before me. It’s sense, not cowardice.

  As we reach within ten paces of the monster, she rises. She unfolds smoothly until she is standing on her tiptoes with her arms down and out at her sides, the palms facing down towards the petals.

  “What’s it doing?” Heric growls.

  “Be ready for an attack.”

  Heric doesn’t wait for the creature to lash out, he closes the final distance in an instant and slashes both arms down and across his body. The boss moves back, swaying away from him like a reed in the breeze. He swipes again and again, his movements blisteringly fast and yet they touch nothing but air.

  The room grows darker by the moment. Heric’s darkness is falling from him in waves now. I’m close enough that I’m cloaked by it, navigating by the false light of my new eye as it paints the boss and he in hues of blue. It’s my eye that sees what is coming before I can register it.

  “Get back!” I cry out too late.

  The boss hasn’t been idly drifting away from us, her hands were not facing nothing. A stream of petals slams into Heric from each side and he howls. They are not soft nor delicate. I hop back far enough that I am grazed by the stream but I hiss in pain as the razor sharp petals slice through my skin.

  Heric weathers the storm, his Marked skin harder than mine and his will stronger. His darkness is mixed into his blood now; each step he takes is a pool of black and red that sucks in light into its dizzying depths.

  He moves faster and faster still until, finally, he catches the creature. Not a slice of his blade by a swiftly grasping hand that takes her wrist and pulls her into a brutal slam of his forehead into hers.

  The boss makes no sound but Heric grunts with pain and more blood as his skin splits. I take my chance; with the boss bound to Heric I dart in with the tip of my spear and jab into what I think will be the soft part under her arm. There’s no softness. Every inch of her is wood fortified like steel. My spear chips of a sliver of her armour and I dance back as her face snaps towards me.

  My world tilts. I was so focused on the boss that I didn’t notice the dangling vine that has reached down and grasped me by my ankle. I’m upside down and looking at the floor quicker than I can think. I’d have died in that moment had the creature been able to free itself; it is only by the grace and determination of Heric holding onto her that I survive long enough to cut myself loose with my meat knife.

  I hit the ground with a thud but don’t linger. I’m back up and moving, making myself a more difficult target to strike. Heric has forced her back to the far wall. Each step he takes is bloody violence. There’s no finesse in what he does; he has no training or experience beyond the few monsters we killed on our descent, so he is standing with the boss, weathering her storms of petals and whipping vines and beating and beating and beating until her armour cracks and splinters.

  His darkness is absolute now. The light of the slugs is a memory; the whole room is darker than the deepest null cycle. I move by the lines of my eye and close on the boss. Heric is slower now than he was, no one can take the kind of damage he is enduring without consequence. Even as he tears one of her arms from her body at the shoulder, she drives a spike of wood through his foot to pin him to the ground.

  Heric grunts and pulls himself free, but he’s slowed. She darts away and throws a hurricane of slicing petals at him. He raises his arms to protect his face and she turns; her dash has taken her to within striking distance of me and I am ready.

  I thrust my spear into the open tangle of flesh that used to be her shoulder. With all my Heightened strength I push and lever and lift until she leaves the floor, trapped on my spear tip as my back strains with the effort.

  “Quick!” I call out to Heric as the boss writhes. She’ll free herself soon. She would have, anyway, if Heric hadn’t bulled forward with a snarl and slammed the edge of his bladed forearm into her abdomen. She isn’t able to raise a proper defence in that moment and it bites deep. It cracks through her armour and comes free with the sucking squelch of ichor.

  Another blow follows and she breaks in half. I stumble back as her weight reduces; I almost toss her torso still pinned with my spear.

  Heric prowls forward and strikes at what remains. Again. Again. Again. Until I can bear hearing the wet thunks no more.

  “Stop. Heric, stop. It’s done. We’ve won.”

  He turns on me. I can’t see his face in the pitch darkness but the lines that my eye traces capture the heat of his breath and the crunched snarl. For a moment I’m afraid of him, more than I was of the boss that now lies broken.