Loren tumbled onto the cold, smooth floor of the upper platform, hitting the stone hard. Disoriented and gasping, he scrambled frantically on his hands and knees, turning back toward the pale fissure just in time to see it snap shut.
He lunged, his fingers clawing uselessly at the empty air.
"Erika..."
The name squeezed from his constricted throat, barely a whisper. He didn't dare speak louder. He didn't dare make a sound.
Because Quinn was still here.
Loren froze on the floor, his chest heaving, his wide, bloodshot eyes locked onto the far side of the platform. Quinn stood at the edge of the railing, his back to Loren. He was casually lighting a cigarette. The brief flare of the match illuminated the Sorcerer's sharp profile—a profile of absolute, terrifying indifference.
Loren's hands shook so violently he couldn't even clench them into fists. A hysterical scream built up in his lungs—You left him down there! You monster!—but the sheer, paralyzing terror of the man standing a few feet away kept his mouth clamped shut. He was a coward. He knew it.
Quinn didn't turn around. He took a long, slow drag. The smoke coiled upward into the gloom of the Tower's peak, a silent testament to the Sorcerer's utter disregard for the lives he had just casually rearranged.
He stubbed out the cigarette, raised a hand, and parted the air. Another pale fissure unfolded. Quinn stepped into it and vanished.
The tear sealed. Absolute silence reclaimed the platform.
Only then did the breath Loren had been holding tear its way out of his lungs in a ragged, pathetic sob. He slid down the cold wall, curling into himself.
Erika was on the other side. Alone. Trapped with that screeching, metal nightmare.
The thought settled in Loren's gut like a block of rotting ice, making him violently nauseous. He dug his trembling fingers into his own scalp, pulling at his hair. If Erika dies...
He choked on the thought. He couldn't afford to break here. If he completely lost his mind, he was as good as dead in this Tower anyway.
Protocol. I need the Protocol.
Loren forced his legs to cross. He forced his spine straight. Shoulders down. Chin tucked. It was the starting posture of the Sanctum's basic meditation—a routine drilled into him since childhood to maintain absolute mental purity.
He closed his eyes. Darkness swallowed his vision.
Inhale — four counts. Hold — one. Exhale — six.
The first cycle failed instantly. The air caught in his throat. His heartbeat was a frantic drum, completely detached from the trained parameters.
He bit his lip hard enough to draw blood and restarted.
Second cycle. Inhale— The phantom scent of ozone, rotting paper, and fresh blood invaded his nostrils. The image of the Golem's spinning blade-wheel flashed violently behind his eyelids.
His breath shattered. He gagged, his eyes snapping open.
He ruthlessly suppressed the panic, tearing the image from his thoughts with desperate violence. Focus. Find the anchor.
He directed all his attention to the back of his right hand. Quinn had given him a temporary 'transit authority' for the inventory. There should have been a residual warmth, a faint echo of the Tower's magic he could latch onto to force the door open again.
Nothing. No light. No heat. No response.
The Tower was dead silent, utterly severed from his pathetic, untrained mind.
Time lost all meaning. He sat there, a trembling, broken boy trying to use the rigid prayers of a false god to calm the terror instilled by a real monster. Every attempt at perception was invaded by the horrific screech of metal and Erika's desperate, bleeding face.
Then—just as his spine began to slump in total, crushing defeat—
The air in the corridor shivered.
It was so faint it could have been a hallucination born of oxygen deprivation. Loren's breath froze in his chest. He snapped his eyes open.
On the otherwise seamless, cold wall of the platform, a tiny, distorted speck of pale light was struggling into existence.
It lacked Quinn's effortless, godlike stability. This light was violently forcing its way through the fabric of space, warping the air around it with a sickening, high-pitched hum. The glow flickered erratically, tearing at the shadows, constantly on the verge of collapsing.
Loren's heart slammed against his ribs. Erika.
It had to be. Whatever the boy was doing down there in the dark, he had somehow torn a thread back to the upper levels.
Loren scrambled to his feet, stumbling forward. He reached out, his mind screaming prayers to a Sanctum he no longer believed in, trying to use his own meager will to stabilize the tear.
The fissure expanded with agonizing, violent slowness. It writhed and contracted, pushing forward like the final, bloody convulsions of a dying animal. From a speck, to the size of a fist, to a jagged, unstable tear barely large enough for a human body.
Its edges thrashed wildly, threatening to snap shut and decapitate anything that tried to cross.
Loren stood before it. The pale, sickly light washed over his pale face.
The paralyzing chill returned, seizing his ankles like iron shackles. What if it's too late? What if he stepped through only to find silence, and Erika's mangled corpse spread across the scrapyard floor? What if the Golem was waiting right on the other side?
He was a noble. He had never been a fighter. Stepping into that unstable, screaming tear was statistical suicide.
But the silence on this empty platform was worse. Being the last one left alive in the dark was worse.
Loren didn't consciously make the decision. He just couldn't bear the crushing weight of his own cowardice for one more second.
He closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and threw his body forward into the violent, warping light.
The fissure convulsed sickeningly as it swallowed him. It flickered once, expending its last stolen energy, and then violently collapsed inward, vanishing from the stone wall without a single trace.
The platform returned to absolute, dead silence. As though the frantic struggle between terror and desperate loyalty had never occurred at all.