The first signs of danger were on the inside of the large church doors. Scratches, starting at the bottom and going upwards, getting progressively less dense and less bloody towards the top. At the bottom of the door the wood could barely be seen through the thick layer of dried blood. There were no bodies however, not until they reached the statuary.

  Each religious sect has their own way of decorating a statuary, which can contain any amount of statues of any amount of different deities the maker chooses. In this case, there were three statues. The Church of Alen had a few different rules regarding the statuaries in their buildings of worship, the first – and most important one – was that the statue of Alen always had to be the biggest and placed in the centre of the room. This statue was rather hastily made, but adorned with enough gold and silver to buy every house in the town multiple times over. The second rule was that every other statue in the room had to be facing Alen’s likeness. On the north and south sides of the room there was one statue each, depicting two children of his. I myself and not one of his children by the way. In fact, I was one of Artoris’s very first children, which makes Alen my uncle.

  The two statues depicted Borban and Baros – full-brothers, their mother being the Lady of the Skies, Litentia – two gods from different pantheonic generations. Quick sidenote, we sometimes speak of ‘generations’ in the divine sense more of what wave of godly births a deity belongs to, not how many generations they are from the very first. The three pantheonic generations are: the Pantheon of Creation, the Pantheon of Change, and the Pantheon of Civilisation. As you can imagine, each pantheon has more gods than the first and more specific domains. For example, Alen is the Lord of Light and Life, the Embodiment of Chaos. He is a member – some would say the founding member – of the Pantheon of Creation. Then you have Borban, the Lord of Prosperity, who is a member of the Pantheon of Change, and last is Baros, the Lord of Medicine and Health – one of the newer members of the Pantheon of Civilisation, together with his three brothers and single sister. Quintuplets, am I right?

  Talking about quintuplets, a pair of five infected dropped down from the church ceiling and landed on the statue of Alen as our group of heroes walked into the room. Their sudden impact shook the statues foundations so much that it started to fall, heading directly for Aly. Fortunately, Aerean’s quick thinking and the staff that consequently smashes into Aly’s side saved her from the falling statue of my dear uncle. The five infected immediately started attacking Aerean, judging her to be the biggest threat. Randan proceeded to prove them wrong by taking one of the pieces of wood that had fallen from the ceiling and bashing all their skulls in with it. Aerean helped with her staff, but Randan had the advantage by attacking them from behind. Meanwhile Elion had helped Aly back to her feet.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Doing great, thanks.” He noticed she wouldn’t make eye contact with him. Something was off, but she didn’t seem to notice it herself. He was pretty sure the whole jealousy thing had been taken care of, but there was also the matter of him revealing he was a demigod. The others hadn’t known him for long – Tallioth and Aerean no more than twelve hours – but him and Aly had been friends for years. Now he hadn’t known until recently, but perhaps the fact that he withheld information from her despite their years-long friendship could be what felt wrong between them now.

  Alas, there was no time to dwell on it as the sounds of fighting had alerted the infected crawling around in the backrooms of the church. Some of these infected looked strange, almost like they were more decayed than the others. Although logic would suggest these infected should be easier to take down, in practice they were a lot sturdier and stronger. The Abyss having taken full control over their muscles, their bodily functions had been mostly replaced by magical processes. No muscles were actually contracting when they ran or tried to claw at someone, it was all magic. As Elion would soon realise, this was a kind of magic that could be absorbed.

  Completely by accident – a lucky accident truth be told – one of the decayed infected that was oozing black liquid managed to approach Elion from behind. Unable to fire an arrow and too far away from the others to be helped, Elion desperately hit the creature with the side of his bow in an effort to knock it back. The creature immediately fell apart, the flesh and bones no longer being held together by the Abyssal magic that had consumed them, and one of the symbols flashed a bright gold.

  Yes, gold. Not black, not purple, not grey. It flashed a bright, beautiful, orangey gold. For the magic that had infected the dead and refused to let them rest peacefully came not from the Abyss that had consumed the body itself. It came from the priests and their futile efforts to save the villagers. The Necromancy spell was absorbed by Elion’s bow, leading the infected to fall apart and the black ooze to seep down into the catacombs below.

  Now before you get any strange ideas of how noble these priests must have been to try and help the poor populace of the village, wait a few minutes until you find out what happened in the end and how the village actually ended up like it did. I assure you any notion you have of their noble and courageous nature will be swiftly taken care of. By which I mean it will be taken into the alley out back and swiftly stabbed to death.

  On to more pressing matters. It took Elion a few seconds to figure it out, but once he realised that some – if not most – of the infected were already dead and being kept alive by magic, he started tapping one after another with the tip of his bow. He had to shoot an arrow into the ground with every tap to release the spell and allow another to be stored, but it was worth it nonetheless. Soon, the most threatening infected had been dealt with. Which left only the weaker ones for Randan, Aly, and Aerean to knock down. Elion shot a few arrows, but due to the relatively small size of the room he had very little space to manoeuvre and that made shooting accurately rather challenging. Still, it didn’t take long before infected stopped seeping out into the statuary.

  It was time for them to go down into the catacombs. Finding the entrance took some time and effort, but they eventually managed to find the stone stairs leading down into the darkness. At this point, Aly started feeling incredibly weak and frail. She had been struggling to keep the influence of the Abyss out for hours now, and it looked like she was about to fail – especially if she got much closer to the core below.

  “I don’t think I can go down there,” she said, beads of sweat dripping down her pale face. It was the first time that Elion had seen her grey skin grow noticeably pale. He noted that it made her look like a dehydrated corpse, which he had seen sketches of in one of his father’s books.

  “You should stay here, gather your strength and be ready to defend yourself,” Aerean said, putting a hand on Aly’s shoulder for comfort.

  “I bet the catacombs are plenty echoey, we should be able to hear ya if you yell loudly enough. Let’s hope that also goes the other way around, maybe we can use ya as back-up,” Randan said, his accent fully back in action.

  Aly simply nodded and allowed Aerean to gently guide her down to the floor, where she dragged herself against the wall and nodded off.

  “Guys,” Aerean turned to the other two. “I don’t think we can leave her here alone,” she said.

  Elion looked at his best friend, seeing her chest move up and down with the shallow breaths she had to do her best for, a dagger barely held in her hand.

  “I agree,” he said. “But who can we miss? If whatever is down there even approaches the strength of that hag we encountered in the farmhouse we’ll be lucky if we can defeat it with the three of us, let alone only two of us.” Randan nodded, vividly remembering the ferocious nature with which the hag fought. He would never acknowledge it, but if Elion hadn’t done what he did when he did it he might not have survived. He would have ‘died’, whatever that meant for a member of his species. Nothing good he imagined.

  “You two should head in,” Randan said. Somewhere inside of him, there was a persistent voice that kept warning him he would die if he went in there. In truth, it was most likely the traumatic experience of nearly dying in his fight against the hag that was the source of this voice. Nevertheless, he insisted.

  “Let’s be honest,” he started, “If worst comes to worst and Tallioth barges in here ready to gouge out me and Aly’s eyes then I’m the only one physically strong enough to throw the bastard down those stairs and hopefully redirect him. Besides, I’m tired. I don’t feel like going down into a death maze right now. You should go, you’ll be fine. Especially you.” he pointed to Elion. “You should stop underestimating yourself lad, really. In all my years of fighting, I have never seen a marksman improve as fast as you have. Lad, you’re a demigod for crying out loud! The only thing that yer missing is the confidence of one, so work on that.” On that note, he nudged Elion and Aerean towards the stairs while he sat down next to Aly, his dagger held firmly in hand and his eyes pointed at the door.

  As Elion walked down the stairs – for some reason unbeknownst to him – he started seeing small white strands float around in his peripheral vision. Sometimes they connected, stretching from wall to wall, but most just floated around. Although he didn’t understand at the moment, what Elion saw here was his own power manifesting in the background. Magically, Abyssal energy was very close to the origins of his inherent magic, as both the Abyss and his Tether originate from the force of Order. As Elion was a step further along in unleashing his divine power now than back when they were in the farmhouse he could start to see the tethers manifest themselves in the presence of a lot of Abyssal energy. There’s a lot of complicated magical science behind the different types of energy and how inherent magical abilities can manifest, but I won’t bore you with the details just yet.

  At the bottom of the stairs they were given a choice, either go left or right. On both sides were narrow hallways with graves lining the walls. Elion had never actually seen a catacomb complex before, only heard of them. Aerean had been in the catacombs of her home realm before, which were completely different and far more spacious than these were.

  “Do you feel anything? Maybe some kind of sign as to where the core could be?” Aerean asked him, not feeling anything of the sort herself.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “Not really. I think we just decide at random. Most of these corridors will wind up crossing each other again anyway. I doubt it matters much where we go to first. Maybe we’ll find something once we get deeper into it,” Elion said.

  They decided to go left. Apart from the sounds of water dripping down from the ceiling and the musky odour that attacked both their senses of smell neither of them felt anything at first. They continued on carefully, Aerean in front with her staff ready to pounce on anything that moved unexpectedly and Elion behind her, an arrow ready but not drawn back. As they moved along, Elion started to notice the tethers became clearer. They no longer disappeared when he tried to look at them, and they became more plentiful. He could see that they tied everything together. There was not an object that was untethered. He himself had tethers reaching from his chest out towards the walls and the floor, and towards Aerean in front of him. He started studying them, the way they looked and the way they moved as he moved through the corridors.

  He noticed that every solid object had its tethers originating in the same place, the exact middle. Where at first he had thought they came out of his chest, they actually came from lower – more around his midsection. The heavier an object, the thicker the tethers that connected it to the objects around it. His tether tied to the ground was thicker than Aerean’s tether. The tether that connected them both started as a thicker strand on his side and gradually thinned out as it came closer to her. It took him a while longer to realise that as they went deeper into the catacombs, the tethers grew more noticeable and plentiful.

  “Aerean, wait,” he said. Aerean stopped and turned around, a questioning look on her face.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “I think I know how we can find the core.” He explained how he had first seen the tethers in a dream, and how they appeared when they started going down into the catacombs. Then he told her about how they appeared to grow stronger as they went deeper into the catacombs, almost as if his own powers grew stronger.

  “Do you think that means we’re getting closer to the core? It could just be a coincidence,” she said. Aerean had met demigods before, but Elion was a very special case. Most demigods had an ego problem, but even the ones she’d met would have had to admit that compared to Elion their own potential was nothing.

  Most demigods were descendants of second or third generation deities. Elion was the only one she had ever heard of that came from a member of the first generation, let alone Artoris himself. Although Alen and Artoris were said to be matched fairly evenly, most acknowledged that when it came to magical power Artoris was the superior deity. All except for the Church of Alen of course. Artoris barely had any allies during their war, yet still managed to fight Alen on even footing for centuries. It should be noted that I was impartial during the war. I already knew how it would end and I didn’t feel like playing a part in it at the time. My impartial behaviour was then considered treason by Alen after he won, and I was punished anyway. He… is not one of my favourite family members. Still, I try to be objective.

  “It must mean something!” Elion said, his voice echoing through the catacombs. In the distance, unbeknownst to either of them at the time, a consciousness awoke from a deep slumber.

  Elion was frustrated, the narrowness of the catacombs gnawing at his mind. With the tethers constantly in his eyesight he felt even more constricted. They faded whenever he walked through them, but it still felt like he was making his way through an obstacle course. He could feel his heart starting to race, the walls felt like they were closing in on him. His knees felt weak and he fell to the ground.

  Elion had never been very fond of narrow spaces. The reason why had slipped his mind, but ever since he saw that memory of his childhood outburst he had the gnawing feeling it had something to do with the basement. He had been stuck in the catacombs for too long, he knew it. Something was going to happen. He could feel the walls starting to collapse. They would bury him, either killing him instantly or trapping him until he slowly suffocated to death.

  Elion sat on the floor, his knees pulled up to his face and his breathing erratic. Aerean was on her knees beside him, she tried to calm him down. Her care only made things worse. Elion’s panic grew relentlessly. He felt like he couldn’t breathe, like he couldn’t hear anything. He grew deaf to Aerean’s caring words, deaf to her comforting whispers. He just wanted to get out. He needed to escape, to get out of these narrow hallways. This place of death would be his tomb if he didn’t. He knew it.

  Elion pushed everything away.

  Aerean flew back, stabilising herself just in time to avoid hitting her head on the stone floor. The walls shuddered, skeletons smashing in the walls and shattering on impact. The stones underneath him cracked, the ceiling above him only shook a little bit. It could have been much worse.

  I personally witnessed Artoris use his powers once. With my Allsight I have seen it many time, but only once in person. He created his own world that time. Drawing on the shapeless chaos around him, forcing it to bow to his order. He shaped pure chaos into a world governed by order. If Elion had been at even a hundredth of his grandfather’s power, the catacombs and maybe the entirety of Hegrines would have crumbled.

  Fortunately, he was not, and the only victim of his panic attack was Aerean – who quickly dusted herself off and kneeled by his side again.

  “Elion,” she whispered. He could hear her again, he realised. “You’re okay,” she said.

  Elion put his head on her shoulder, slowly getting his breathing back under control.

  “Has anything like this happened before?”

  It took Elion a while to be able to produce words again. He had to admit – sadly – that it had happened before. The panic attack that is, not necessarily the magical outbursts. Now we know that those happened before, but that’s not what we are – nor they were – talking about at the moment.

  “They happen… sometimes. Mostly around people, sometimes after long weeks. Never just because of a narrow space however, that’s new.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us before?”

  “I thought I had outgrown them. It’s been a while, a very long time actually. Ever since I picked up my job as the town’s hunter I haven’t been forced to be around people as often. It helped a lot, but sometimes the pressure would get to me. I took breaks often enough to keep myself from breaking, but I think I just haven’t been able to do that lately,” he laughed softly, realising how pathetic he was being.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You must think it’s silly, panicking over the room being too small.” Aerean moved over so she could look him directly in the eyes.

  “Elion, you’re not being silly. I get what you mean. Sometimes emotions can overtake any rationale we have. It happens. I have been fortunate enough not to experience it myself, but I’ve seen people beat themselves up for it more than enough. I don’t want to see you going down the same path, alright? So come on, let’s go. And tell me when you feel like it might happen again.” Elion nodded, and grabbed Aerean’s hand to get back up. As soon as they turned around, they were greeted by a dark figure walking around the corner.

  “Ah, so you are the one whose panic I’ve been feasting on,” the figure said. Surprised, Aerean reached for her staff and gently shoved Elion back a few steps.

  “A stick, really?” the dark figure reached out its hand. It looked weird. His finger were thin and pale, more like bones than anything. His black cloak slid off slightly, revealing a dark skull with hollow eyes beneath it. The hollow eyes sparked with a small glint of gold as the creature pointed its bony finger at Elion and whispered.

  “May Death come unto thee.” Elion had never heard an incantation out loud before – let alone for that one time he’d commanded Aly to use her magic – but he could feel the power of the words hit him. He collapsed onto the ground, grabbing his chest. It felt like his heart was about to explode for a moment, before the pain instantly disappeared. Elion stood back up, brushed himself off, and moved in front of Aerean. The creature that had attacked him had no real face to speak of, but judging by its body language Elion surmised that it was surprised.

  “What?” it said. “Why didn’t that work?”

  “Confused?” Elion asked. “You critique my friend for using a stick and then try to attack me with nothing but a sentence?” His mind clearer now than before, he could see the tethers perfectly. Including the one that connected him with this skeletal assailant.

  “May De-” the skeletal sorcerer managed to get out before Elion smashed him into the wall. He had pulled on the tether between him and the skeleton while jumping into the air, launching himself towards the creature and subsequently using the force of his approach to smash its head into the wall. It crumbled to pieces, the light quite literally fading from its eyes.

  “Nicely done,” Aerean said as she approached from behind.

  “Thanks, but I doubt that was the only one.” Elion looked around, spotting the empty space in the wall he was looking for. “I think this one just woke up,” he said, pointing at the empty grave where piece of cloth were draped over the side.

  “That’s not good, is it?” Aerean asked.

  “Tell me, do you know the symbols for the seven main pillars of magic?” Elion asked her in return. She nodded.

  “What is that one? I have my suspicions but I’m not an expert.” He pointed at the marking on his bow that had lit up every time he touched one of the special infected with his bow in the statuary.

  “It’s necromancy, why? Was that what happened up in the church?” Elion nodded. Aerean’s eyes widened.

  “Really not good.” Elion shook his head, his confidence regained now that the situation called for it. He stashed away his bow and grabbed his hunting knife. In these tight corridors he wouldn’t be able to shoot any arrows before whoever was attacking him reached him anyway, so why bother trying. With his knife and his powers strengthened thanks to the Abyssal core nearby, he would at least be able to defend himself. He then turned to Aerean to confirm what she was thinking.

  “We have a necromancer on our hands.”