The Kindest Thing in the Dungeon

The thing has your ankle and it is not in a hurry.

That's the part your body understands before your mind does — that it isn't rushing, that it has you, that the slow steady haul toward the gap in the floor is a thing it has done a hundred times and expects to finish. Your lantern is thirty feet back and still rolling. The grit is taking skin off your palms. You get a hand on a ridge of stone and it tears loose and your fingernails go with it and the gap is close enough now that you can feel the cold coming up out of it—

—and then the corridor goes gold.

Light, swinging wild, throwing everything into lurching shadow, and under it the sound of boots, and the boots are not slowing down.

The impact goes through the floor and into your teeth.

Something shrieks — high, wet, outraged — and the weight on your leg is gone, and you are hauling yourself backward through the grit on your elbows with your heart slamming so hard you can't hear.

He lands between you and the gap. Rises out of the crouch already turning, already swinging, and the second one comes apart against the wall before it finishes leaving the dark.

Steam coming off his shoulders in the cold. Blood on the gauntlet that is very obviously not his.

He doesn't look at you. He's looking past the wreck at his feet, into the black.

"Three! Four—"

The floor shifts. Something underneath the corridor is moving and there is a lot of it.

"Five, six — there's a nest under here! I've been saying so for a year and nobody—"

A shape comes fast from his left. He puts it down without breaking the sentence. Doesn't finish the sentence either.

"Don't crawl! You'll go straight in the gap — stay where you are!"

The shrieking is coming from everywhere now, doubling back off the stone, and your leg will not take weight, and the cold from the gap is at your back, and something long and grey is unfolding out of the dark eight feet away.

He plants his boot, braces, and throws his hand back toward you without turning his head.

"NOW! GRAB MY HAND!"