CHAPTER 237: DEVOURING LIGHT

Zirel stood upright, a victory in itself. The stabbing pain in his chest was now just a memory, replaced by a strange sensitivity, as if his ribs had become fragile glass. He could breathe, walk, even attempt a swift movement without the world tipping into white agony. But the fatigue was still there, visceral, hollowing out his face and weighing down his limbs. A healing, yes, but not a restoration. He was a tool hastily repaired, functional but marked by the break.

The others were in a much worse state. Armin stumbled with every step, his arm still useless and painful, clutched against him. Inès, pale and sweating with fever, clenched her teeth to avoid screaming with every movement of her pierced shoulder. They moved forward; that was all that mattered. Maggie and Elisa remained at the head of this procession of wounded, a silent, tense bulwark against the darkness.

Their progress was slow, methodical, exhausting. Maggie had taken out a piece of charcoal and an oiled parchment from her gear, and she sketched lines, noting junctions, chambers, and peculiarities of the rock. Mapping their retreat was a matter of survival, the only way to avoid circling endlessly in this stone maze until hunger or madness finished them.

The breaks were brief truces where silence reigned supreme. They crouched against the cold walls, chewing strips of dried meat and swallowing small sips of stagnant water. No one spoke. Eyes avoided Elisa. The spectacle of her power, and the "gift" given to Zirel, had carved an invisible chasm. They now saw her as something both necessary and terrifying, an ally to be distrusted.

And during these pauses, while Maggie stood guard and the others sank into a dazed stupor, Elisa trained.

She would move slightly apart, sitting cross-legged, hands resting on her knees. The lead spheres orbited slowly, silently, around her fingers. She closed her eyes, and all that was visible was the faint green glow filtering beneath her closed eyelids.

Until now, she had only used telekinesis. Brute force. Push, strike, hold. A hammer. But she felt there was more. Much more. Psychokinesis was an ocean of which she had only skimmed the surface.

She started with what she knew. She would levitate a small pebble, make it dance in the air, accelerate, decelerate, spin. It was easy, almost instinctive. Then she tried to *feel* the pebble. Not with her fingers, but with her *mind*. What was its texture? Its density? Its exact weight? She sought to perceive the infinitesimal cracks on its surface, the minute variations in temperature.

One day, while stopped in a small alcove, she concentrated on the piece of dried meat she held. Instead of simply bringing it to her mouth, she tried to feel its structure. And suddenly, a wave of information reached her, weak, distorted. The toughness of the fibers, the faint imprint of salt, the extinguished life of the beast it came from. It was just an impression, blurry and swift as lightning, but it was new. It was rudimentary telepathy, not with a mind, but with *matter*.

Another time, she stared at the flickering flame of their oil lamp. She didn’t try to extinguish or fan it by force. No. She tried to *understand* its heat. To feel the thermal energy radiating from it. Her concentration stretched to the extreme, a dull headache blooming behind her eyes. And for a fraction of a second, she had the impression of *holding* the heat in her palm, like an invisible sphere, before it escaped her, elusive.

She failed, again and again. Frustration gripped her, mixed with a nervous excitement. She was at the threshold of a new world, a world of perceptions and manipulations far subtler than simply moving objects. Sensing weakness in rock to predict a collapse. Perceiving a creature’s intention before it attacked. Influencing heat, electricity, perhaps even the currents of vital energy... as she had done intuitively to heal Inès.

Each attempt drained her a little more. Sweat beaded on her forehead, and her hands trembled. Maggie watched her from the corner of her eye, her gaze impassive but heavy with unspoken concern. She saw the price of these exercises.

They resumed their march, slower, more heavily than ever. The tunnel sloped gently downward, the air growing colder, more humid. The silence was broken only by the sound of their footsteps and the ragged breath of the wounded.

Suddenly, Elisa stopped, one hand raised. Her lead spheres vibrated, emitting a sharp hum.

"Stop," she whispered.

Everyone froze. Even Zirel held his breath.

"What is it?" growled Maggie, her halberd already in position.

Elisa closed her eyes, her face tense with the effort of concentration.

"I don’t think it’s a creature..." she murmured. "But the rock. It’s... weeping."

She opened her eyes, her golden gaze filled with a new kind of terror, not facing a monster, but facing the unknown of her own power.

"There’s a immense void behind this wall. And something... something cold and sinister sleeping within it. We must turn back."

---

Zirel was the first to break the heavy silence. A dry snicker, devoid of any real amusement, rumbled in his throat.

"The rock *weeps*?" he sneered, his sharp eyes scanning the smooth, apparently solid wall. "Perhaps you pushed a bit too hard in your little exercises, Elisa. Sounds like the ravings of a feverish mind." He made to move forward, throwing a glance at Maggie. "It’s probably just another tunnel. A natural chimney. The wind makes strange noises, that’s all."

But Maggie wasn’t even looking at him. Her eyes were fixed on Elisa, on the sudden pallor of her face, on the faint tremor of her hands. She saw the sweat beading at her temples. This wasn’t madness. It was the raw exhaustion of a power pushed too far, and the terror of what it had touched.

"Shut it, Zirel," she growled, without even bothering to turn her head towards him. Her voice was low, taut as a cable. "Elisa?"

Elisa shook her head, as if to dispel an inner voice. Her spheres were now whirling at an alarming speed, emitting a high-pitched whine that grated on the nerves.

"It’s not the wind," she whispered, eyes wide, staring at the stone wall. "It’s an... echo. A memory. The stone remembers being hollowed out. And it remembers what was sealed inside. Something... passive. Asleep. But so old that its mere slumber weighs on the world." She finally turned to Maggie, her expression pleading. "If we breach this wall, if we disturb it... it won’t be like the tunnel beast. It won’t be a fight. It will be an end."

A shiver ran through the group. Even Zirel fell silent, his cynicism momentarily extinguished by the absolute conviction in the young woman’s voice. Inès wrapped her good arm around her torso, shivering. Armin muttered something unintelligible, his eyes searching the shadows with renewed paranoia.

Maggie studied the wall, then Elisa’s face. She had learned to trust her own instinct, her strength. But this... this was different. This was the realm of the invisible, the intangible. Elisa’s realm.

"Alright," she said finally, in the space of a heartbeat. The word seemed to cost her. Turning back went against all her instincts. "We turn back. We find another way."

The tension in Elisa’s shoulders eased imperceptibly, but the fear didn’t leave her eyes.

The journey back was slow torture. Each step took them further from the potential exit and deeper into the unknown labyrinth. Morale, already at its lowest, sank further. They walked for what felt like an eternity, until they found a fork they had neglected before, a narrow, low passage that sloped upward slightly.

The air here was even colder, and a new smell mingled with it: a metallic, acrid scent, like ozone after a storm, but sharper, more ancient.

Elisa stopped short, shuddering from head to toe.

"What is that smell?" murmured Inès, her face tense.

Before Elisa could answer, the oil lamps flickered. The flame of the one Maggie held snuffed out as if sucked away, plunging her side of the gallery into total darkness. Only the glow of Elisa’s spheres, which had begun to pulse with an anxious green light, now illuminated their faces, turned spectral.

In the darkness, a scratching sound began. It wasn’t the heavy scraping of the tunnel beast. It was a small, multiple noise, like thousands of tiny claws or mandibles working on the stone. It came from everywhere at once: the ceiling, the walls, the floor beneath their feet.

Zirel drew his dagger, his eyes gleaming dangerously in the green gloom. "What the..."

A small black shape fell from the ceiling and landed with a soft thud on Inès’s shoulder. She let out a stifled cry, brushing it away with a frantic gesture. The thing – a sort of beetle the size of a fist, with a metallic black carapace and long, vibrating antennae – smashed against the wall and instantly righted itself, emitting a sharp screech.

Then another fell. And another.

The ceiling seemed to come alive, covered in these insects that detached themselves one after another, their carapaces gleaming sinisterly in the spheres’ light. They didn’t attack. They simply fell on them, clung to their clothes, crawled up their legs with an icy persistence.

"Get it off me!" screamed Inès, panicked, trying to dislodge one from her injured arm.

Maggie brought her halberd down on a group advancing towards them, reducing them to a black, viscous pulp. But for every insect crushed, ten more seemed to appear, falling from the shadows like a living rain.

Elisa, her heart pounding, raised her hands. Her telekinesis was useless here; there were too many, they were too small, too scattered. Panic began to grip her. She felt their tiny minds, not hostile, but... curious. Hungry for something else. Hungry for the energy radiating from her.

Suddenly, one got too close to her lead spheres. There was a bluish spark, a dry crackle, and the beetle was thrown backward, charred.

Elisa blinked. *Electricity*. The static energy that always surrounded her spheres when she spun them at high speed.

Without thinking, she focused all her will. The spheres stilled, then began to spin on their axes at an incredible speed, becoming two vibrating, grayish halos. The whine became a strident buzz, and the air around them charged with ozone.

Then, she released the energy.

A dull, invisible electrostatic discharge exploded around her, like a deafening silence propagating in a circular wave.

The result was immediate. The beetles were swept away like straw, hurled against the walls and ceiling where they stuck for a moment, convulsing, before falling inert to the ground. The scratching ceased abruptly, replaced by a deathly silence and the smell of burnt flesh and ozone.

The lamp light, freed from the strange presence, returned as abruptly as it had left.

The group stood motionless, panting, covered in black dust and small, charred bodies. They looked at Elisa, standing at the center of the ring of destruction, the spheres still spinning at full speed, her eyes shining with a feverish, frightened gleam.

Even Maggie looked at her, astonished, as if she hadn’t seen the end of her surprises with her friend who had just discovered a new facet of her power. And while the others saw a lifesaving demonstration of strength, she felt within herself only a terrifying void, and the fear of what she was becoming.