Chapter 132: THE LIGHT-EATER

Ten steps down, the last trace of light vanished.

Aiden stopped. He couldn’t see the wall beside him, his hands, or the ground under his boots.

"Nyx?"

No answer.

Aiden put one hand against the stone and descended. The passage sloped beneath his boots. Cold water ran over the rock and soaked through one side of his coat.

The sheep were still lined up on both sides of the passage. Aiden couldn’t see them anymore, but he could hear them breathing.

He kept his hand on the wall and continued.

Blind in a hole with possessed sheep. Great start to a horror story. Marsh won’t believe it. He’ll believe I kept going even less.

The air grew colder as he descended. It smelled of wet stone and standing water.

The sheep’s breathing stayed close on both sides, never breaking, never speeding up or falling behind, until Aiden could no longer tell how many of them were there.

They had let Nyx pass. They were letting him pass too. He kept one hand on his knife anyway.

The ground disappeared beneath his next step. Aiden caught himself against the wall, then lowered one foot until it found stone below.

Something scratched against him.

Damn this place.

He almost swung his knife as small claws climbed his side. Then he recognized the familiar grip and the weight settling on his shoulder.

"Miasma? How?"

Green light pulsed from Miasma’s spines, spreading a few steps ahead. For the first time since entering the passage, Aiden could see where he was going.

Miasma looked at him, pointed ahead, and made a soft noise.

"You were already here?" He scowled.

He’d last seen her above, between him and the others. Then Nyx had entered the dark and Cinder had charged after it. Everyone had watched Cinder.

Miasma had simply followed Nyx while nobody was looking. But why could she enter? And why couldn’t Cinder?

He shook his head, pushing the question aside.

Find Nyx first. Understand later.

"You’re the most reliable lamp. Coming from a lamplighter, it means something, I promise."

Miasma’s spines settled, and she gave a small, satisfied lift of her head.

They continued.

The passage narrowed until Aiden had to turn sideways. Miasma’s green light touched both walls. Then the light changed.

The glow no longer spread evenly around them. Every green thread bent toward the passage ahead.

Miasma raised her spines. Her light grew stronger. It still bent in the same direction.

"You’re seeing that too."

Something farther down is pulling it in.

There was only one path between the rows of sheep. Nyx had gone straight toward whatever was pulling the light.

The passage ended at a stone wall split by a crack barely wider than his shoulder. Miasma’s light disappeared into the opening.

He looked through the narrow crack. The light survived between the stones for about two steps, then faded into the darkness on the other side.

Aiden lifted Miasma to the crack. "Go in first. I’m right behind you."

As Miasma pushed through the stone, Aiden stepped into the shadow at the fissure’s edge.

He emerged three feet on the other side and caught himself against the wall.

Miasma came onto his shoulder and flicked his back.

"Right, I should have said I’d be in front of you. My bad."

The chamber opened around them, but Miasma’s glow never reached far enough to show its full shape. It caught wet stone under Aiden’s boots and patches of wall before the darkness swallowed the rest.

There was no firelight here, no pale glow from the fen above. Only Miasma’s green light survived, and even that was being pulled toward the center, bending around something there to form a thin green crown.

A crystal.

It rose from a shelf of stone and reached almost to Aiden’s chest. Its surface swallowed every trace of Miasma’s light that touched it. The whole crystal looked like a solid mass of shadow.

Aiden brought up Perception.

Miasma burned green on his shoulder. Thin silver motes floated through the wet stone beneath his feet and along the walls.

The crystal itself showed nothing at all.

Nyx stood at its base. Beside the crystal’s mass of darkness, the puppy looked tiny.

"Nyx."

Its pale eyes turned toward him.

"There you are."

Miasma’s light normally gave Nyx a clear edge. Black body. Green light behind it. Here, that edge had started to blur with the surrounding darkness.

Aiden frowned.

"Nyx?"

It turned back toward the crystal. Then it lifted one foreleg and pushed its paw into the black surface.

Aiden lunged forward.

"Nyx!"

Nyx’s leg had disappeared into the crystal. It wasn’t trapped. It wasn’t struggling. It pushed farther in.

Aiden reached for it.

Nyx looked back at him. Its pale eyes were calm. They said: trust.

"You’re doing that on purpose." He stopped himself.

Nyx turned away again.

Aiden lowered his hand, but he stayed close.

"If that thing eats your leg, I’m shattering it."

Miasma waved her tail in front of them, ready to act on the threat.

Nyx pushed farther into the crystal. Soon, only its pale eyes remained distinct from the black surface.

Aiden’s stomach tightened.

"Are you all right?"

One pale eye moved toward him. Still calm.

Then Nyx closed it.

The crystal changed.

Miasma’s glow pulled harder toward it, stretching across the chamber before vanishing against the black surface.

The crystal’s edge shrank as Nyx’s body became a little clearer. Each change was slight, but together they were enough for Aiden to notice.

Behind him, the sheep stopped breathing. All of them, at once.

The passage went silent while Nyx kept feeding, and the sudden absence of that almost-sheep rhythm raised the hair on Aiden’s arms.

The silence held, but Nyx kept eating as if nothing had changed.

"You dragged us all the way out here for food."

He relaxed. At least Nyx was safe.

Nyx opened one eye and gave him its smug expression, while Miasma tapped one spine against his neck.

"Don’t encourage it. I’m sure we could have found another dark crystal buried under a fen full of possessed sheep, somewhere the roads stay where you left them, the ground behaves itself, and none of the sheep stare at us in the dark."

Miasma ignored him.

"Yeah... I guess we wouldn’t find something so ridiculous anywhere else."

A voice came from behind him.

"You wouldn’t, at least not from any place unclaimed by the Church."

The keeper walked out of the darkness beside the crystal.

He hadn’t heard her arrive. He hadn’t seen her enter. She was simply there.

"How long have you been standing there?"

"Long enough."

The keeper looked past him to Nyx, half-lost against the crystal.

"Voidglass," she said. "And before you ask, I still don’t know what Nyx is. I know this stone. It forms where darkness stays untouched long enough, and most of it never moves."

Her eyes stayed on Nyx as the puppy continued feeding.

"Sometimes, though, something made from the same darkness starts moving. Sometimes it even hatches." She nodded toward the crystal. "Your beast and that stone are made from the same thing. One of them learned to walk."

Aiden looked between Nyx and the shrinking edge of the crystal. The answer should have sounded impossible. After everything the fen had done since they arrived, it barely did.

"The fen recognized Nyx."

"The fen recognized the same darkness in Nyx. That’s why the sheep let it pass. That’s why the fen kept drawing it here."

The keeper stepped closer and caught Aiden’s sleeve. When she spoke again, the amusement was gone.

"The problem is that this crystal isn’t a secret."

Aiden’s attention snapped back to the crystal.

"Neither is the fen," she continued. "The Church knows Voidglass. They use stones like this to contain things, and they knew this chamber was here long before you claimed the place."

Sixty years of Church visits. The grey cloak at the registry. Temple scrip in the porter’s hand. Someone opening the territory file before Aiden had even known the place existed.

"They weren’t just watching the fen," Aiden said. "They were watching this."

The keeper’s voice lowered. "Yes. The Church thinks this stone is asleep. Nyx just woke it. When that happens, a bell rings."

Aiden stared at her.

"It’s already rung."

"The second Nyx reached inside."

Aiden rubbed a hand over his face. "Who comes?"

"The Church’s reader for this fen." The keeper folded her arms. "Don’t expect her to run. She’ll come when she’s ready, certain she already knows what she’ll find."

Nyx kept eating through all of it. The green crown around the crystal had drawn tighter, leaving more of the puppy visible where the black stone had been.

"And if she’s wrong?"

The keeper looked at Nyx, almost invisible inside something the Church used for containment.

"People who spend their lives being right are rarely prepared for that."

Aiden didn’t particularly enjoy being the lesson.

He looked back at Nyx, almost lost inside the shrinking crystal.

He had brought the pack across a country to close one door behind them.

And you found another one to eat.