Gastropé got to his feet, slowly. Every breath was painful. Despite this, as soon as he got to his feet, he cast the strange variant of the Cool spell, in a clear straight forward manner that Jenn was able to follow. As he completed the spell, he seemed to relax and breathe easier. Jenn quickly followed suit. Almost at once, she felt like collapsing. Her body was surrounded by cool air. Actually the air wasn’t that incredibly cool, about like a hot summer day, but it was the best she could manage, given the outside heat. As it was, it felt incredible! She could breathe properly again. “Rupert!” she cried again. How would he survive this heat. She had to get the spell on him.
As she rapidly sucked in now cool air, she had time to notice that Gastropé was once again extremely pale and was staring fixedly behind her. She turned around. Obviously by this point her senses were completely out of whack. The sight of the towering fourth order demon behind her hardly phased her. She’d gotten used to it, almost. It however, was searching all over the room with its eyes, as if trying to locate something.
“Where the hell are we demon? What have you done with Rupert!” Jenn demanded.
The demon stopped looking around, and turned its baleful gaze upon her. Her insides withered at her gall. However, it simply smiled its evil, vicious grin at her, and seemed to leer right into her eyes, if that were possible. “Close, my dear, damn close. But actually you see, we... are in the Abyss.”
“The Abyss.” Jenn stated, “you’ve stolen my soul to the Abyss.” There, she’d said it. Intellectually, she knew it when she stepped through. Thus her determination to save Rupert. The demon’s saying it however, brought a new level of terror to her very being. Made it more terrifying real than she could have even imagined on the other side of the hole.
“Not just your soul, but as far as I can determine, your entire body. Because as I understand things, if I had just taken your soul, you’d be naked at the moment.” The demon answered almost mockingly it seemed.
Thoughts overwhelmed her being. All her childhood memories and training told her that good girls, like her, never got sent to the Abyss. Here she’d gone and willingly thrown herself in. How would they ever get out, even if she could find poor Rupert before he suffocated. There were rumors and legends among the students of spells capable of transporting people to the Abyss bodily. Old wives’ tales of maidens being abducted by demons to the Abyss, ran suddenly through her mind; no one took those seriously. It seemed like she should have. She’d find a way though, she’d brought Gastropé along for help. Even if they had to bargain with their souls to free the boy, she would.
Suddenly a thought struck her, demonstrating once again the incoherent nature of her thinking here.
“Nothing!” the demon answered her in a bass that nearly shook her to the bone. “That’s what I was looking around trying to determine a second ago.
“He definitely came through the hole and I saw him in the cave, through the hole. He isn’t here now though.” The demon almost, almost, sounded sincere. If, that were, such a thing was possible for a demon. She rigidly tried to hold herself calm. She glanced at Gastropé. He still seemed to be fixated on the demon, and didn’t take his eyes off it, even though it paid him no attention.
Jenn heard voices from the tunnel. They were indistinct at first. One of them seemed to belong, almost, to an old man, rather high pitched and crotchety. The other sounded like Rupert’s. There was also some sort of droning noise, kind of like a giant humming bird. “So how many masters have you had?” Rupert’s voice seemed to ask. Was Jenn delirious?
“Oh let’s see, 47, I think. It gets hard to tell after a while, they all start running together. The only one that really matters is the now one of course. The others are just worm food and memories. Well, except for Maurice. Maurice never got to be worm food. Was food though. Yep. Mighty tasty food at that.”
