The bloody sack hits the ground between Balazia and them with a wet thud.

  "For the Faceless," Balazia said, turning and walking away. "It won't last long, but should prolong its sanity."

  "You know about Nourishment, then." Agare's words were placid and clear. "Another secret you tortured out of my comrade, I assume?"

  "There is no need to force the obvious out of the weak," he said, patting the elongated leather wrapping he now hoisted over his shoulder. "Don't dawdle. Twenty minutes I promised you, and not one more."

  Dawdling had not been her plan, she was just shocked at the sudden turn of fortune. Once the surprise waned off, suspicion took its place, bringing her to a crouch right besides Agare. "S-should we trust him? I literally haven't seen him once without Menoux close by."

  Agare's gaze, through whichever lens he saw the world, was completely consumed by the bag, now sat flat before them. "Trust? No, not trust, but we need to take what we can get. I... need you to give me that bag, Holly."

  She picked it on a ginger pinch, holding it at arms length as if it could pump back to life at any moment. Of course, it remained as it inert as it had in Balazia's hand, but the freshness of it pierced through the general stank of the Guts, juicy and delicious if not for its dubious origin. Swallowing dry, she asked: "A-Agare, what is Nourishment? I think I heard you talking about it before, when that weird Faceless appeared to us."

  "I don't have a good excuse for you." he said. "If you want to look, I can't stop you."

  The temptation was there, to open the bag and to go far beyond the offered. Saliva was already building beneath her tongue, soon to pour out of whatever little lip she had.

  Shaking her head, she tossed the package at Agare's Mark. From the shape, the softness, how it bled and deformed under its own weight, it didn't leave much to the imagination in the first place. She tried not to think on the poor unfortunate it had been harvested from, through which methods it had been taken.

  Not that she had the grounds to judge, anyway. A glance out her gates, not at their expectant enemy but the "Nourishment" she knew had been severed specially for her sake, and her stomach quivered.

  "... Thank you," Agare's whispers were almost too soft for her. "I don't like it any more than you did, but we should move on now. Remember, everything we can get."

  She nodded, lifting and hugging him to her bosom as she followed Balazia. The hallway outside was much as she remembered, though she hadn't caught much in way of details as she got washed by Menoux. The long corridor had several rows of symmetrical cells, all but one empty, tipped at both ends by tunnels its few dim torches did not dare touch.

  "You must know that poisons don't work on the Faceless, so I hope this isn't some pitiful attempt at doing your Heir's bidding." Agare said.

  "This is for you." Balazia threw the wrapped limb from his shoulders, the deafening thud that was inevitably to come avoided by a timely catch from her. "It should help you make it all the way to the end. This mountain may be young, but it is not naive."

  "W-wait, why are you even helping us? How are you expecting us to do what you say when we don't even know what you're planning?" she said.

  "Our goals aligned, and the time for subterfuge came to an end. Simple as." Balazia shrugged. "I have far more to benefit from you finding your way to the surface than dying here, however far from me gainsaying your animal. Feel free to stay here and wait for the Greatest's mercy."

  Neither of them had anything to say to that. Getting the message, Balazia pointed to the far end of the hall, opposite the entrance Menoux always took.

  "That way leads towards the soft layers of the mountain innards, and these pens were built with them in mind. It's a labyrinth filled with parasites and noxious substances, where even the light hungers for the flesh of the living and the chances of survival are practically null. Should you survive, however, being found by the Greatest becomes an inevitability"

  "A trap, in other words," Agare said. "And also our only way out, I suppose."

  "Exactly." Balazia did not miss a beat. "You would perish cutting your way through my people, the Greatest would not give you the chance to try. Your only exits will all be found through the soft layers of the mountain, impossible to reach for us Dashi but just feasible for one such as a Lake Child."

  She wondered if the name was a deliberate attempt at hostility. After witnessing days, weeks, of her torment surely he knew it rubbed her wrong? She couldn't let him have her this easily, but hiding the reflexive signs of her upset was always difficult. "Well, what are you waiting for then? Didn't you say we only had twenty minutes? Tell us where it is!"

  Balazia nodded. "You will follow a straight path until you discover a round chamber with a great salience at the center, then take the upper right path from where you entered. Markings were attempted, time likely erased them, do not rely on their presence to locate yourself. You will repeat the process four times until you reach a valley we call the Gouge."

  "A-a valley, inside the Guts? Are you crazy?!"

  "You will see. Once you reach the Gouge, ascend the right cliff immediately, then continue left. Count four tunnels, and take the last. After that..." Balazia stopped, helmeted face looking down in search for answers among the scarred stone of her battles against his master. "After that, good luck, I have never been there."

  It took her several seconds to register what their surprise cohort had actually said, who by the time had already turned around, ready to leave them to their fates. "W-wait a second! You can't just say good luck and leave, what do you mean you have never been there?! Can't you at least tell us another one?"

  At least Balazia turned to face her before responding. "All the others I know or have heard off are either distant, difficult to find, or both. The Greatest will be on your track before you reach any of them, and if you haven't understood it yet: you will not lose the Greatest inside his own Domain. You will die."

  "S-still-"

  "We should go," Agare said.

  "W-what? I mean, how are we even going to find our away out with just that?" she said.

  "If I wished you harmed, the easiest way would be to forget you," Balazia said, a glint under the shade of his visor fixed on her. "The longer you live, the higher are my chances, any attempts to sabotage you would mean sabotaging myself."

  "T-that doesn't make that much sense."

  "Holly." Agare said, "Let him go. We have to make our escape as soon as possible."

  "Listen to the Faceless." Balazia said, not sparing her comrade a glance before turning his back to them. "Twenty minutes. That's how long I can keep him occupied. The moment he looks, he will know where you are so long as you remain inside his Domain. When that moment comes, I suggest you be as close to the outside as possible."

  With no further delays, he left without the least ceremony. With no further options, she turned to her own exit. To her left, a shadow stirred: silent and still since its failure to reach them through the bars, the lost Faceless followed them with them with its mane of tendrils.

  "We can't trust him, but I guess we're still heading down?" She asked, watching them as she walked away.

  "It's not him I am trusting." Agare said, much to her confusion. "You haven't been using your skills to their full here."

  "I-I mean, you want me to use my Will?" Like the incandescent light of a candle blown back to life, she finally connected his plan together, and immediately found its most fatal flaw. "Except, this place really hurts, Agare. Even when I touch something by accident, it burns."

  "It's the only thing we can rely on now. I... won't be of much help from this point onwards."

  With careful consideration, she unwound the protective, blissfully compact cocoon of hands from herself, accidental contact already giving her acidic prickles. Agare was right, no matter how desperately she wished he wasn't.

  No time to lose, she took off running.

  When she was younger, recently transformed and introduced to her room, she had struggled to imagine what the mountainous guts actually looked like.

  Elder Seneschal's warnings had been dire. She had never got the full history of the mines, assuming he had known, but his stories about monsters from the depths had done their job and guaranteed she didn't try messing with it too often. Curiosity would eventually win over fear, however, and she began to wonder what her massive, gruesomely named companion was like. Was it a giant inside her walls, a real pile of entrails coiling itself around the mountain's pith, a mother to horrors just looking for some peace?

  Perhaps, each was different from the other. Perhaps, each had their own personality. Hers remained dormant for most of the year, until what she now realized were likely the periods God was most active, and thankfully found her existence as interesting as a mite in its scalp.

  That had been a mercy. So was the fact she hadn't awoken to the rough of her existence until she was far past ever returning to her room.

  Scrambling through the dark, the world physically rejected her.

  A heat as intense as the day Lesser Hollow burned stalked her across the halls, clouds of stagnant odor waiting at every junction to eat through her skin, while swarms of pests so thick they could take form rose from their undefinable piles of foul slush around her legs to gnaw at everything they could reach. Every touch flared like an infection, first out then inside, unceasing, no matter the distance she crossed.

  At least, for all the mountain itself tried to stomp her out, other creatures seemed to have little interest in hunting them, indescribable shapes and moans shambling out of her path at the slightest prodding of her Will. Only a few stuck to her surroundings, things of the faintest light and patience, things that spoke to her of rot and unending hunger, better left alone.

  The way was nowhere as straightforward as Balazia's description had suggested. What was straight ahead at bifurcations that stuck to each other like conjoined trunks? Was upper right a direction, or the arterial path literally above the one she was about to take? She did, at least, find the chambers he had described alright, smooth pits where the surprisingly soft ground of the soft layers, softer than the softest soil in the Hollows, had given out to septic smelling pools around their twitching cores.

  Moist narrow passage after moist narrow passage, no different than a procession of tight throats if not for the sudden jagged traps of raw ores bursting from the fleshy walls like broken bones, and she was about to start feeling digested when she emerged somewhere completely different.

  Valley, though, was perhaps a bit of an exaggeration to her touch, but it was hard to tell as besides the pain the entire Guts stifled her in a way not unlike Marquise's Manor. The Gouge was, much as its name suggested, a grand fissure with a notably coarse and scraggly bottom like scar tissue, like the Guts had been gashed open by a colossal knife at some point, leaving a wound so deep her Will could not grasp its top.

  "Agareeee." she panted through melted lungs and gummy blood. It felt like she had been running for weeks. "Everything hurts."

  "Soon," His voice was distant, unfocused. "Now, we need up."

  "Are you alright?" she asked.

  "Alright. Let's go."

  Except, there was a problem.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  The walls itself was fine. She was no longer the invincible climber she had been at eight, but they seemed solid enough to her kicks, built—grown—with a small ridging that reminded her of gums with the cheek pulled taut, providing just enough footing for a smooth ascension.

  She could not, however, climb with both her hands occupied.

  Which of the two objects she was carrying should be dropped was obvious, but the moment the idea crossed her mind she felt a strange, shameful pang of regret at leaving what she knew once belonged to another transformed creature just like her.

  Even now, the comparison made her deeply alienated. The memories of chewy bicep and rich ulna, for however long her half consciousness had remained to enjoy them, did not, could not, conjured the image of same sort of impossible monstrosity, of a person that might have gone through the same pains as her and whose destiny had been infinitely crueler.

  She remembered the way her father spoke about her sister, her Elder, her comrades. Savage conquerors, backstabbing animals, infants. It still made her blood boil. Part of her wanted a connection, wanted to relate and suffer together in the misery that brought them to that cell, one dead and one living, but the other wandered, was that the way somebody forced to live in hiding, for their safety and of their loved ones?

  That sounded to her ears like the language of God.

  "Holly!" Agare's cry made her jump. "We need to go. Now."

  "S-sorry," she said, shaking herself out of her revelry. She couldn't afford to let stray thoughts slow her, not this far along.

  And no matter how ill at ease it made her, she couldn't bring herself to leave Balazia's "gift" either. Not when it had saved her life, not when she was already feeling the burdens off the mountain's fury, when Menoux could notice their escape any time now.

  She hated herself for the line she was about to cross just as much as she did for how eager it made her, but she laid both Agare and the leather wrapped limb down, gently, before hooking a claw behind a knot of thin rope and slicing through. Four times, and she unwrapped the package.

  The moment the limb was revealed to the air it sizzled as if roasting, the concentration of malodour growing in their surroundings as if called by the pure smell. The arm was longer than hers, more muscular, bearing the same rough stone claws as the previous one she devoured, and she was certain that, devoid of life or Will to defend itself, it wouldn't be long before it was eaten down to nothing.

  With no small amount of trepidation, she lifted the upper arm to her mouth, and bit down.

  To have it so close her tongue could touch it yet being forbidden from gorging herself full was a wondrous sort of torture. Starvation haze cleared, was that the taste of life? Like a million Ring Flowers crushed down to one spindly member, refreshment replaced with a power so strong it could remake her whole. No, her plan was already crumbling down, there was no chance she could make it out of here without losing control, not with that miraculous blood rendering her teeth numb.

  She needed to be fast. Grabbing Agare, hugging him to her bust without the least care for his tendrils, she rushed to climb the walls of the Gouge. As expected, the ascent was simple, made even easier by her limber body and stronger fingers. The only problem, she realized, was that she had underestimated the sheer size of the cliff, but that was a minor adjustment to her expectations; she wasn't tired, and if none of her foes so far hadn't killed her, she doubted the fall would.

  A minute or several later, and her hand found the edge of the cliff. Agare's tendrils had driven themselves at her collarbones like burrowleeches at first, until they turned their aim at the severed limb she carried, giving voice to another ugly instinct she didn't knew she had, one that wished to seriously fight them off her prey.

  And it was in that precarious situation, hurt and annoyed and with both legs dangling off the abyss was that the Buzz struck in full force.

  A whimper forced itself out of her throat. She made into a cowering animal, tail firmly tucked between its legs as hackles raise in a vain attempt to intimidate the predator watching from beyond the brush. One second was all it took for her to lose her faculties, her ability to walk or even place herself within the pitch black environment.

  "A God of flesh, a god of power, a god of all things buried beneath, did you truly believe yourself capable of absconding from the adoring eyes of such a magnificent being?" her own voice greeted her, deep inside her Will. "And to steal something that no longer belongs to you by right of conquest? This sin, my precious divine excreta, is one you will be paying for a very long time."

  Arms and legs trembling, she realized she could no longer place herself and forgot to which direction the whole she had just climbed laid. Crawling even one step forward felt like jumping over a roaring fire.

  "Exilirating, these hunting grounds, aren't they? It's the challenge. Few are the places capable of hating us so." She continued to herself. "There are no exits to be found here, dear. But don't surrender! I am coming, and I much prefer the taste of struggling prey."

  Anger. Terror. Madness. She wasn't even sure if she had ever woken up, rather than be lured to an obscene nightmare not entirely build by her own imagination. Perhaps this was another work from the thing that always wore Hazel's face, a lesson within a lesson, of which moral she had no clue.

  Something clicked inside her mind. That Thing had said something curious, which she had ignored at first but made for a strange logic.

  Menoux had looked at her from the inside since the beginning.

  Didn't she know?

  Taking a deep breath down here was an obvious mistake, but she needed everything she could get right now. She had not forgotten the way she tore herself apart diving in out of panic, and losing her cool here would probably mean much worse, no matter how pressing time was.

  A thousand Will arms converged together into a spear head, not a quarter as adroit as she had hoped to make it, slowly driving itself into her own Will body, giving her the sensation of splaying skin to ripping as she failed to handle the sheer mass. It rebounded physically, a goring horn tearing through her stomach that could neither be found nor removed, forcing her to bite down until her teeth tore her "gift" to the bone, a large chunk of flesh opportunistically seized by her throat.

  The surge of energy seized her still and flooded her Will in an unstoppable rush. It was pain, and it was power, everything she needed to boldly take the plunge into her own innards. She caught herself smiling.

  This was Asha, wasn't it? And Merurgy, and something deeper, unfathomable. Unseen and misplaced, never at her eyes reach yet everpresent. This was... herself, at the level she most liked to ignore, displayed as the walls of a labyrinth where up and down did not exist anymore than left or right. All was a branching of one, yet not.

  And in this abstract labyrinth, slithered a parasite.

  Grasping, picking, examining that impossible place was a task far too complex for her mind. Reflex guided her fingers, pieces becoming a million complex mechanisms she had no time or intention of deciphering. One touch could mean unmaking herself at a level she would never recover, no matter how much of her kin she ate, and so she forced herself to be shallow and careful.

  Here was her, here was her home, her own personal domain, not inviolable but unconquerable. If Menoux wanted to find purchase, it would need to be out of sight, out of mind.

  That's how she found him in the end. Something as imperfect as her, as he so often put, wouldn't know how to navigate her any better than herself.

  What she saw was hard to describe. It was like a vestigial tendon at first, lending elasticity and strength to certain muscles, until she noted the way it branched itself to other mechanisms. Then, in her mind, it took the shape of a tapeworm, constricting her abdominal walls, intent on a bizarre reversal of function: it gave strength rather than digest it, feeding the parts in a melding so fine she struggle to see where she ended and he began.

  "Clever girl." The Pale Worm came alive, and once more did her voice greet her. "It took me decades to master this level of insight, yet what is experience in the face of the divine?"

  "You can't be here, this isn't possible!" She tried to protest, knowing she was betraying the certainty of her own instincts. "This is me, not you!"

  "Do you know what lays beneath us? At the basal layer of the One Body?

  "There lays Priga."

  Like breathing for the first time after a lifetime of drowning. Like pulling a stake out of her joint after years of limping. It had been there all along, waiting to be acknowledge, and the relief of remembering what she had never known was a balm for the soul.

  Of course. It all made sense now. Priga was all.

  "If Priga is all, than all is Priga, and all is all," Menoux said. "In those circumstances, who are you, and who am I, if not one another?"

  Of course. Priga was all, all was Priga, she was him, he was her. All very logical.

  But her feelings could give nary a care for the logic of it. The idea of being this deeply enmeshed with a monster such as Menoux gave her the creeps, and so the moment the knowledge spread across her, everything that pertained to her existence down to her most subconcious regions rejected him.

  Right from the start, however, she knew removing him wouldn't be easy. Like a leech with a thousand mouths, and a deafening cackle, counting its victories before they laid at hand. "Incredible! And oh so precious. Do you think I was going to just give up? Your life is my property, and I don't relinquish my property so easily."

  "I want you out of here, and that's what I'll get!" The feeling of talking to herself was incredibly unintuitive. Despite everything, Menoux actions didn't feel any different from a muscular spams. "I'm out of here, and I don't want you bothering me anymore."

  "You think you are in place to make demands? How cute? Don't worry, in just a few minutes, we can discuss this face to face."

  Knowing there was nothing else she could do, she retracted her Will from itself.

  In the world outside, she found herself bend over her waits on her knees, cold sweat encrusted forehead resting on the ground as she crushed Agare to her chest. At first, her limbs refused to move, frozen on the spot at the madness raging inside her mind. Priga was all, and Menoux was her, then she was-

  "I don't have the time for this. I don't have the time for this. I don't have the time for this! Up!" she chanted by the whispers. Priga was all, then Holly was her, and she was - "No, shut up and move!"

  "Holly," Agare said.

  "I know!"

  It took her too long to recover. Her Will felt as if she had been boiled alive, every bit of exposed skin howling in burning filth, the outer layers of the meat that once again saved her already melted to slurry, half their power whisked by the Guts.

  With one hand, she grasped the limb, tearing off the disgusting half digested ooze with her teeth and spitting it out, wasting no time to take off running. Her Thousand Arms flew, confused into incoherence, but all she needed was a vague idea of the way ahead, anything else was a deterrent.

  He was coming, it wouldn't be long. She counted one, two, three entrances, than a third again as she came across a deep cut into the wall, dead end around five paces in tricking her for a precious second. She ran, faster, feet tripping against every salience left in her way, gorging down what she could of her "gift" on the move.

  She bit down too hard, and severed the arm's remains fell down into the abyss. She didn't stop to look, not for a moment. Her efforts paid off, and right there, at the edges of her perception, a fourth tunnel, a wide and rounded bottom ramp, their exit.

  Here, Menoux found them.

  Or rather, she found him, a stampede of chittering feet announcing his arrival, yersterday's predators recognizing a superior and vanishing to all directions. In their wake, up came the Worm, a living bastion quivering its way up the cliff as if gliding, too smooth for something of that size and density.

  She dropped the flesh, and gave up on all pretense as she dropped to legs and arm for even a sliver of more speed. The window she got, as she slammed into the tunnel and immediately launched off, was of a split second as he thrust himself right behind, not a bit of momentum lost to his chase.

  "In the apex of the Old Empire!" His bellow rang inside her ears. "To take a life, be it a pet or a slave, from ones superiors was reason for public dismemberment! Would you dare tempt the law of the strong, Godling?!"

  She tried to pull her Will back, fearing a sudden strike, but he was so close, so quick, he was always at the edge of her perception. Her focus lost, she slipped, Will arms snapping forward too late to catch the dead end she nearly headed into, a dodge made out of desperation still leaving her in the draft of the arm that nearly crushed her.

  "Do you think you will survive the outside, still this ignorant? That you will survive your very comrades?!"

  She had no words to give, no routes to follow, all her thoughts turned towards escaping. She took the narrowest crevice she could find; Menoux burst his way through in an explosion of stone shrapnel, unbothered.

  Stone. The ground under her feet was no longer pliable. They weren't in the soft layers anymore!

  "Come into my arms, and I shall forgive you, Godling!" he laughed, the sound of rocs pulverized under palms not three paces back.

  "I don't need you to learn! Leave me alone!" she screamed. The path ahead squeezed to a crawl.

  "Words of an incompetent!" A swipe glanced the tips of her hairs. "Too late!"

  It would be.

  So she stopped running and pounced. A pound sent the entire cavern shaking as she hit the ground, not wasting time in creeping deeper into the hole. Her Will grasped for the toxic walls, as if they could help push her along, the dreadful sounds of nails scraping stone loose right behind a reminder she was not close to free.

  And then, nothing. The hole she had taken was so small she had to drag Agare on the ground to move, and even Menoux was no rat. At least, she couldn't feel his presence nearby.

  The cackle emerged on an echo seconds later, as she collapse with a relieved sigh. He wasn't following, if only for the moment.

  "Well done!" He said. "Nothing like a drop of life to show what we are missing, isn't that so? By your very own volition this time! The little time we spent together and you already grew so much."

  Her hair lashed agains stone, the sharp crack echoing in all directions. Pushing against the soreness of her muscles, she rose with Agare. Despite Menoux words, she knew the he wasn't close to done yet.

  "I will come looking for what is mine, Godling, and when I find it there better be nothing standing in my way. Unless, of course, you think yourself capable of earning it back! Either way, I'm eager to see how far you can run. Don't disappoint me now!"

  She was too tired to answer.

  Already searching for a way out, she took off.