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More silence. “Your benefactor,” she says. “He must have been a very generous being.”

Ryon grits his teeth. “I assure you, he is not worthy of any praise,” he says darkly. “He was merely loyal to the memory of my father. Not to me.”

“Even so,” she says. “A generous Glacian indeed. I knew them to be the opposite. Brutes.”

Quite, Ryon thinks. He has a hundred memories of a hundred bodies snapped and shoved and hauled from the pool. “They regarded themselves so highly they could no longer see the difference between themselves and gods,” Ryon intones. “You were very lucky to escape their cruelty.”

Yennes doesn’t respond. Ryon can hear her walking alongside him, see the golden reflection of fire in her eyes, but he cannot discern her expression, her thoughts.

“Who flew you to the bottom of the Chasm?” he asks abruptly, tired of having this one thing unanswered. “You said you did not know the Glacians to be a generous breed, yet it must have been a pure-blooded brute who offered you an escape into this pit. I watched a hundred or more soulless humans fall into it. No amount of iskra could bring one back,” Ryon waits until she gathers the courage to look at him squarely. Her face a mere shadow. “Who was it?” he asks.

Yennes takes a deep breath. “I did not know their names, Ryon,” she says. “Only that their pool could not have me and that there was at least one Glacian among them still human enough to see me to the bottom of this hole.” She utters this last with a mixture of venom and trepidation. “And even imbued with iskra, I barely survived it.”

Ryon considers her words for a moment. “What did you encounter, here in the Chasm?” He is sure his efforts will be wasted. Dawsyn and he had both questioned Yennes on what they might find here in the world’s middle before they’d left Terrsaw, but the woman barely uttered an intelligible word. She had clammed up, her lips pursed and trembling. Her hands had clenched and unclenched, giving way to whatever anxiety lied within her.

Horrible things,she’d said.Bodiless beasts.That was all Ryon had interpreted amongst the quiet muttering. Yennes had a tendency of retreating inward, speaking to herself in hushed murmurs. She did so now, mouthing what could have been answers or spells for all Ryon knew.

“Yennes?” he says to redraw her attention. “Yennes.”

“Death,” she says. “Death and Dyvolsh.” Then she says no more, for she has doubled over, her body spasming with racking coughs that erupt from something dark and insidious within.

Hesitantly, Ryon stops alongside her. He allows others near him to pass by. He places a wary hand on her shoulder to support her, lest she teeter face-first to the craggy ground.

Her muscles jump beneath his hand, spurred into action by that which consumes her. Consumes many of them. Even now, Ryon hears Yennes’ expulsions echoed by ten others, twenty. An unending melody that only seems to grow more frenetic as time passes. An insidious crescendo. Somewhere down the path, Dawsyn likely joins the chorus.

Ryon had lain awake the night before as Dawsyn coughed in her sleep, her breaths choked and disjointed. And yet still she had not woken, touched by that unnatural slumber of the other humans. Trapped in sleep, not roused even by their own gasps for air.

“Dawsyn is hearing voices,” Ryon says, though he remains reluctant to offer this confidence to Yennes. “Is that what you mean, when you say Dyvolsh is here?”

Yennes straightens. Wipes her mouth. Whatever her expression, Ryon cannot see it. She does not answer him.

“Do you hear them, Yennes? The voices? Answer this much, please.”

“Mother help me,” she mumbles, the words hardly discernible. “I heareverywhisper.” Then, she stoops once more, the resounding hacks erupting from her chest.

“Damn it,” Ryon growls, grabbing her shoulders as she begins to fall. “It is this sickness. It must be. It addles the mind.”

“N-no,” Yennes splutters, more vehement than Ryon has ever heard her. “The voices belong to the Chasm.”

“How could you possibly know?”

“Because they are no different to those I outran when I was last here. And they have haunted me since.”

He can feel it vibrating from her, that marrow-deep knowledge. He feels her muscles coiled beneath his touch, as though she resists some deep-seated instinct to flee.

And yet she has not.

“Why did you come?” he asks her, and this time his voice is softer. Whatever misgivings he may have, he cannot ignore her sacrifice, her courage.

She turns toward him, and though her features are shrouded in shadow, Ryon is sure he is being searched, measured.

“There are things here that I could not simply turn my back on,” she says.

With a fortifying breath, Yennes passes the torch back to Ryon. “I’m afraid I may topple should I try to journey with it.”

Ryon nods to her as she walks onward, disappearing into the folds of darkness.

And Ryon is left with a faint glimmer of hope.