Every Loop Costs a Friend

Chapter 8 - The Shape of Absence

Chapter 8 · 1,293 words

The tower's entrance was a gap in the black surface where the seamless material stopped and a passage opened into the sourceless gray light. Soren had forgotten how wrong it felt to stand at that threshold. The light didn't behave like light. It didn't cast shadows from the team's bodies. It simply illuminated, flat and even, as though the space inside the tower existed in a different relationship with the sun.

Eamon led the team through. Soren followed, his shield on his left arm, his short sword loose in its scabbard. The supply pack rode heavy on his shoulders. Standard load for a support Initiate.

Floor 1.

The corridor stretched ahead, its walls seamless black, its ceiling lost in the gray illumination. The silence was immediate. A physical thing. A pressure against the eardrums that made every footstep sound too loud. Soren remembered this. The sound-dampening. The way the tower absorbed noise until your own breathing felt like an intrusion.

He also remembered what lived in this silence.

"Standard formation," Eamon said. His voice was low, as though the silence demanded it. "Trell and Callis on point. Ashfall, you're on the left flank. Keep your eyes open."

Soren moved to the left flank. The position was different from the first run. Sabine had been on the left, and her absence had shifted the team's spacing. The gap where she should have been wasn't visible as a gap. It was absorbed into the formation, the other members closing around it without noticing.

But Soren noticed. Every time he glanced left, his eyes went to a space that should have held a woman with dark hair and a short sword and a wooden box under her bunk. The space was empty. The wall was seamless black.

He pushed forward, his attention split between the corridor ahead and the memory of what waited in it.

The first chamber opened to their left. A wide room with the same seamless walls and the same sourceless light. Soren's chest tightened. This was where it had happened last time. The entities had come from everywhere and nowhere, their attacks arriving without warning, without visible source, without sound.

"Clear," Trell said from the point position. He was scanning the room, his sword drawn, his body tense.

Soren watched the team's formation. Without Sabine, the left flank was thinner. Callis had shifted to cover more ground, but she was younger, less experienced. Her eyes were moving fast. Too fast, taking in everything and processing nothing.

*They're here. In this room. I can't see them. I can't hear them. But they're here.*

He took a step toward the left wall, angling his body to watch the space between Trell and Callis. His foreknowledge was a pressure behind his eyes. A map of a territory that might have shifted. The entities had been in this room last time. They would be in this room again. But their positions might not be the same.

"Ashfall, hold position," Eamon said. "Don't break formation."

Soren held. But his eyes kept moving. He watched the air. He watched the space between the team members. He watched for the clean-edged wounds that would appear without warning, the bodies that would fall without an enemy in sight.

They moved through the first chamber slowly. Eamon called position checks every twenty paces. The team's boots scraped against the black floor. The only sound in the tower's oppressive silence.

Nothing happened.

They reached the far wall of the chamber. A corridor continued ahead, turning left into darkness.

Soren's foreknowledge was a map of a place that had changed. Last time, the entities had been concentrated in the first chamber's center. He'd positioned himself accordingly, watching the middle of the room. But the team's formation was different now. Smaller. Compressed. And the tower.

The tower was not the same.

He felt it before he saw anything. A shift in the air pressure. A subtle change, the kind that comes in the moment before a storm breaks. The silence deepened. The tower's sound-dampening had increased by a fraction.

"Something's wrong," Soren said.

Eamon looked at him. "What?"

"The air. It changed."

Eamon paused. Tilted his head. Listened to nothing. "I don't—"

The tower cut Callis's scream short after the first syllable. The silence swallowed it, compressing it into a sharp, truncated noise that died in the air.

Callis fell. A line appeared across her throat. A clean edge, no width, as though the air itself had cut her. No blood at first. Then the blood, dark and sudden, pouring from a wound that had no visible source.

Trell spun, his sword swinging at nothing. His blade passed through empty air. "Where—what—"

"Form up!" Eamon shouted. "Back to back!"

Soren moved. He knew what was coming. He'd seen this before. The entities striking from directions that couldn't be identified, the team's weapons passing through empty air, the wounds appearing without cause. But the positions were wrong. Last time, the first attack had come from the right flank. This time, it had come from behind the team, from a direction Soren hadn't been watching.

The tower had changed.

Trell went down next. Something tore through his chest. He staggered, looked down at the wound, and fell. His gauntlets hit the black floor with a sound the silence almost swallowed.

Eamon was shouting orders at people who were already dying. The broad man from the assembly yard, an Initiate named Roth, collapsed without a sound, his legs folding under him as something severed his knees.

Soren's foreknowledge was useless. The map didn't match the territory. The entities were in different positions, moving in different patterns, responding to a team composition that the tower had adjusted for.

He backed toward the corridor. His shield was up, but the shield was useless. You couldn't block what you couldn't see, couldn't predict, couldn't locate.

The thin boy, Beck, was the last one standing besides Soren and Eamon. Beck was running. He made it four steps before he stopped, his body rigid, his mouth open in a silent scream. Then he fell forward, face-first, and didn't move.

Eamon turned to Soren. His face was pale. "Ashfall. Retreat. Go. Get out of the tower."

"What about—"

"That's an order. Go."

Soren didn't go. He couldn't. He'd already run from this once. Run and died anyway. The corridor behind them would have entities too. The tower's entrance was a mile of black corridors with things waiting in every one.

Eamon died standing up. His sword was still in his hand when his body went limp. No wound. No attack visible. He simply stopped being alive.

Soren was alone in the corridor.

He could hear his own breathing. The shield on his arm felt absurd. A circle of leather and iron against enemies that existed outside the reach of every sense he possessed.

He turned. Walked back the way they'd come. The first chamber was behind him, and the entities were in it, and he was walking toward them because there was nowhere else to go.

The wound appeared in his chest.

A cold line across his sternum. A sudden absence of sensation in his torso. A piece of him removed. His legs stopped working. The shield arm dropped. The short sword clattered on the black floor.

He fell.

The gray light above him was the same flat, sourceless illumination he'd seen on the first run. The ceiling was lost in it. The walls were seamless black. The silence pressed against his ears.

Dying was familiar. He'd already done that. He knew what it felt like. The cold, the fading, the narrowing of everything into a single point.

His last thought: *Who this time?*

The cold took him.

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