Rem lowered himself to sit against the tunnel wall, letting his back take some of the weight off his legs. He unclenched his hands and found they were still trembling. He brought forth the runes that described his Aspect and Attributes.
He focused, and the runes appeared to him in a foreign language that he didn't know, and yet somehow understood.
'Just like i thought, nothing spectacular.'
***
Name: Rem.
True Name: —
Rank: Aspirant.
Soul Core: Dormant.
Memories: —
Echoes: —
Attributes: [Faint instinct]
Aspect: [Unbidden Alarm]
Aspect Description: [Knowledge is a fragile thing, and clarity rarer still. In the narrow space between one heartbeat and the next, the fog occasionally lifts, and for a moment, everything makes perfect, terrible sense.]
Rem stared at the runes a moment longer, then called forth the description for his one and only Attribute. A shimmering script rose to meet him.
[Faint Instinct] Attribute Description: " A shiver down the spine before the blade falls, a wrongness in the air a breath before it turns to violence. Such warnings are seldom clear, not always true. Yet even the doubtful learn to heed them..."
One Attribute, Rem thought. Nothing unusual, as far as he could tell, which was in its own way, exactly what he'd expected. He hadn't come in here hoping for something extraordinary. He'd come in hoping to survive whatever nightmare the spell had thrown him into.
He let the runes disappear and pushed himself back to his feet.
The walls, once he actually studied them, killed any hope of climbing back out the way they'd fallen in. Smooth stone, curving upward into the hole they'd dropped through, with nothing to offer a handhold along the way.
"We're not climbing out of this," Rem said.
Valdo, still sitting, tilted his head back to follow the wall upward and grimaced. "No. We're definitely not."
Their conversation didn't get much further than that before something answered for them, a wet, heavy sound, somewhere off to their left. Rem was on his feet with his sword half-drawn before he'd consciously decided to move.
A cloud of dust rolled out from where the impact had landed, and out of it came blood, spattering wide across the stone. Something small rolled out of the dust and came to a stop near Rem's boot. He look down. An eye stared back up at him, and his stomach turned over on itself.
Valdo was already up, sword loose in his hand, eyes tracking toward the gaping hole above them.
"Bodies are going to keep falling as long as the fighting keep going up there," he said quietly. "We stay here, sooner or later one of them might just land of top of us instead."
Rem kept his eyes off the body and shook his head once, a small motion, but not small enough that Valdo would miss it.
Above ground the war carried on in muffled bursts, the occasional detonation, incoherent shouts filtering down through however many feet of stone stood between them and it. But when the sounds didn't make it through, the silence had a different weight to it. Eerie, in a way that made the hair rise on the back of Rem's neck for no reason.
Then an explosion rolled through somehwere deep in the tunnel, and a gust of compressed air and dust came tearing past them, stopping Rem and Valdo mid-step.
They moved carefully, sticking close to the tunnel walls. More than once they passed beneath holes torn straight through the ground overhead, sunlight bleeding down in dust-choked shafts, and beneath each one, without fail, bodies. Some looked like they'd died on impact. Others had clearly survived the fall, only to bleed out slowly afterward, long smears marking where they'd dragged themselves before giving up. A few trails looked weird, as if something had pushed the bodies. That's when Rem realized, looking at how smooth and rounded the tunnel walls were, was probably exactly what had happened.
Whatever caused those distant explosions did more than just make noise. it was shaping these tunnels one blast at a time, grinding every edge down into this same cone-smooth curve, bodies and all.
Rem tried not to look too long at any of them. Valdo, for his part, occasionally stepped over the ones in his way without so much as glancing down.
The tunnels branched constantly, splitting and rejoining in ways that made it obvious, fairly quickly, that a person could lose themselves down here permanently if they weren't familiar with them. Valdo seemed to be keeping some kind of mental thread of the path they'd taken.
They turned into another passage, and four people were already sitting across from the entrance.
Three of them were on their feet in an instant, weapons drawn, pointed at Rem and Valdo before either of them had finished processing the shapes in the dark. Valdo mirrored the motion on Reflex, blade raised, and for one second nobody said anything at all.
That's when Rem suddenly screamed.
"STOP FOR A SECOND!"
Rem's own voice surprised him, sharper than he'd meant it, but it landed. Every weapon in the tunnel held its position instead of closing the distance.
Rem understood the reality of the nightmare. These people weren't real, their lives, their deaths, weren't supposed to matter to him. But he was sick of watching.
And underneath that, something else, an instinct he couldn't name, only feel, was telling him that fighting here was a mistake he'd regret.
Beside him, Valdo went very still, and Rem caught the sideways glance thrown his way, maybe it was doubt, Rem couldn't be sure. Whatever Roeselle usually did in a moment like this, it apparently wasn't this.
the three strangers didn't relax, but they didn't advance either. They looked as thrown off as Valdo did, two unblooded wandering into their tunnel unannounced was one thing, but for them to hesitate, instead of attacking on sight was apparently not a scenario any of them had prepared for.
A young man, who looked close to Rem's own age, brown hair hanging loose to his shoulders, a face marked with old and new scars alike, studied Rem for a long moment before he spoke.
"What then?" His tone was flat, edged with something close to mockery. "You want us to hug it out? Old friends reunited?"
Rem ignored the sarcasm. He could feel Valdo's eyes on him, could guess at the questions behind them, and chose to set them aside for later. " A truce. For now. We get out of these tunnels alive, then we go our separate ways."
The leader laughed, short and humorless. "So you can rejoin your army and get back to your senseless slaughter? No thanks. We were born in this realm and we know these tunnels, warmonger. We won't need your help to make it back up there."
"And your friend over there," Valdo cut in before Rem could answer, nodding toward the fourth member of the group, sitting against the wall, clearly injured, unable to stand, "doesn't look like he will make it up with you. Three against two isn't good odds when you are carrying dead weight."
Rem hadn't expected Valdo to interject and back him so quickly. Rem had noticed the way Valdo spoke of the church. Not with reverence, but more like shame and contempt. Whatever Valdo and Roeselle were hiding, it was not small matter.
The leader's jaw tightened. " So what if he can't stand. We were ready to die the day you wretches invaded our realm. That hasn't changed."
The tension in the tunnel climbed higher. Rem felt his hand drift closer to his sword without deciding to move it there, and the silence that followed had a texture to it, thick and sour, the kind that only breaks one of two ways.
It broke a third way instead.
A second explosion rolled through the tunnels, just as strong as the last one, the gust of wind that followed staggering everyone standing.
When it settled, two more figures stood in the tunnel mouth to Rem's left.
"Well spoken, warrior." The voice was a woman's, amused, carrying an edge that didn't match the words at all. "Truly. Very well spoken. You and your friends deserve to die in battle for it, even the useless one on the ground."
She stepped forward, flanked by a man who dwarfed her in size, a bloodied warhammer resting against one shoulder, fresh blood still dripping from its blunt face. He stood still beside her, like an unmovable wall.
Both of them wore the same scavenged, mismatched gear as Rem and Valdo did, whatever could be looted and made to fit. Both had shaved their heads down to bare scalp, faces the only thing left uncovered. The woman's eyes had a bright, unsettling quality to them that Rem didn't like the look of at all. The big man's face showed nothing whatsoever.
They crossed the remaining distance and planted themselves in front of the trio, weapons raised, and the woman's attention swept sideways, briefly, to land on Rem and Valdo.
"As for you two." Her voice dropped, disgust threading through it now. "You bring shame on all of us. Offered the honor of dying in battle, and you choose peace instead." she said the word peace like it tasted bad in her mouth.
"Scram," the big man said. His voice was low and rough, the first word he'd spoken. "Or you are next."
The three strangers across from them had gone rigid, and Rem understood why. The math had just gotten much worse for them. It wasn't two fanatics against three anymore. It was two against three, with two more unknowns standing behind them. Their odds of survival had just plummeted to zero.
A single mote of dust, drifted in the shaft of light overhead, and seemed to slow, then stop entirely in front of his eyes.
Everything sharpened at once. The wet gleam of the hammer's head. the shaking hands of the injured man on the ground, the crazy smile spreading across the woman's face. And lastly, Valdo's gaze, already fixed on him, waiting.
It felt as though he stood there for minutes, turning the moment over from every angle. In truth, less than a second had passed by the time the dust mote resumed its fall, and by then, Rem already knew exactly what he had to do.
He didn't say anything. He simply looked at Valdo, then flicked his eyes toward the man with the hammer.
Valdos answering laugh was quiet, almost soundless, a grin splitting his face wide open. Twin daggers appeared from somewhere Rem hadn't clocked them being hidden, and Valdo closed the distance in a blur, burying both blades into the man's nape before he'd finished exhaling his last word.
in the same instant, Rem's sword came around and caught the woman across the back of the neck with everything he had behind it.
She dropped without making a sound, then hit the ground with a dull thud, her neck bent at an angle.
Rem heard a voice, flat, toneless, arriving from nowhere and everywhere at once, surface in the back of Rem's mind.
[You have slain a dormant human. Name unknown.]
The big man's knees gave out, his hips buckling beneath him, and he crumpled to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut, landing with a heavy thud
The three strangers stood frozen, weapons still raised, staring at what had just happened in front of them.
Valdo wiped his daggers clean against the man's cloak, unhurried, and slid them back out of sight.
"So," he said, glancing toward the boy with the scarred face, an easy smile back in place like nothing had happened. "Changed your mind about the truce yet?"