"Shit!" The word tore from Cel's throat as the ground vanished beneath him.
For one suspended heartbeat, he hung over the void.
Then gravity took him.
Above him, the maw yawned wide - concentric rows of teeth closing toward him like a trap sprung perfectly. The creature had erupted from below, swallowing upward, and he was falling straight into its gullet.
Cel's legs kicked against empty air, finding nothing.
The maw snapped shut.
Darkness swallowed the crimson sky. The teeth missed him - barely - their serrated edges scraping past inches from his skin. But the creature had him, trapped in the suffocating confines of its throat.
The walls contracted immediately. Heat pressed in from all sides, thick with the stench of decay and something acidic that burned his nostrils.
His body still rotated from the momentum of his fall. The inner wall rushed toward him through the blackness. Silent Moon remained in his hand, angled forward by chance rather than design.
He drove it in with everything he had.
The steel met flesh and stuck. Cel drove his weight behind it, feeling layers of tissue resist and tear as the blade sank arm-deep into the wall. Warm blood sprayed across his face, his chest, coating him in black ichor.
The creature didn't react. No shriek. No spasm. The walls continued their steady contraction, indifferent to steel embedded in them. He might as well have pricked it with a needle.
Then the creature moved.
It plunged downward with violent force, diving into the earth like water. Cel's body whipped back and forth as the creature twisted and writhed, tearing through rock and packed earth in its descent.
His grip on Silent Moon's hilt was the only thing keeping him from being dragged deeper into the throat. His arms screamed, shoulders threatening to tear from their sockets as his body swung wild with each thrashing movement. The weapon held firm, anchored in flesh, but his fingers were slipping on blood-slick silk.
Something cracked against his ribs - sharp, sudden, stealing his breath.
Debris poured through the open maw. Stone fragments, ash, chunks of earth torn free by the creature's passage, all funneling down this living tunnel in a deadly stream.
He twisted away, pressing himself against the slick inner wall, trying to predict trajectories he couldn't see. But the blackness turned every impact into surprise, every dodge into desperate guesswork.
Stone cracked against his shoulder. Another caught his hip—
His left hand tore free.
The world lurched as his body swung out into open space, held only by his right hand wrapped around the hilt. The shoulder screamed.
Panic detonated through him like wildfire. His arm was failing. One more violent twist and he'd lose his grip entirely—
His left hand shot up again, fingers wrapping over his right in a death grip. Both hands locked on the hilt, knuckles white with strain. But it wasn't enough. The blood, the thrashing, the angle - he was still slipping.
'Frostmark.' The thought came like lightning.
He didn't hesitate.
Cold exploded through his left palm.
Ice erupted from his left palm, racing over his right hand and sealing it to the hilt in a crystalline death grip.
Frostbite hit instantly - a searing, vicious cold that punched the breath from his lungs. The pain spread up his wrist in waves of agony worse than any blade, any flame. Like winter itself was devouring him from the inside out, eating through muscle and bone alike.
Then something massive struck his skull.
White light exploded behind his eyes. The world spun, tilted, shattered.
His consciousness fled.
***
Eventually, pain dragged him back.
Not the sharp agony of an open wound, but a dull, throbbing ache that pulsed through his skull in time with his heartbeat. Each throb sent fresh waves of nausea through his stomach.
Cel's awareness returned in fragments. First the pain. Then the darkness - so complete it might as well have been solid. Then the smell - rot,acid and something else, something organic that made him want to retch.
His body hung loose, suspended by his right arm stretched overhead. Blood had dried on his face in a crusted mask, pulling tight against his skin with every small movement. His right hand felt... wrong. Not painful. Not cold. Just absent, as if it had been severed at the wrist.
Panic flared. He tried to flex his fingers.
Nothing.
Numb. Dead. Frozen to the hilt.
He tried his left hand. His fingers responded, flexing weakly against empty air.
Relief flooded through him. At least one hand still worked.
He blinked, but the darkness remained absolute. No crimson sky. No ash-covered wasteland. Just black so complete it pressed against his eyeballs like a physical weight. The air was thick, heavy with moisture that clung to his skin.
Memory crashed back in vivid detail. The collapsing ground. The maw snapping shut. Silent Moon plunged deep into yielding flesh. The creature diving into earth. Debris striking him until—
Understanding followed a heartbeat later, and with it came something very familiar.
Rage.
'Fucking worm.'
He'd thought himself lucky when the creature passed after devouring the fleeing one. Thought he'd simply gone unnoticed.
But this thing had seen him perfectly. It had simply been patient. Watching. Waiting. Playing dead while he stood there distracted by its first kill, lowering his guard, thinking himself safe. Then it had struck with perfect precision.
Cel's jaw clenched so hard his teeth ached.
He'd been deceived. Made to believe the rules were different than they were. That he was somehow invisible to these creatures. And he'd believed it - because he'd wanted to believe it. Because it would have made survival so much easier.
'Stupid.'
The fury settled in his chest like hot coals, steady and sustaining. Good. He'd need that anger. Need it to get through what came next.
The creature had stopped moving now - settled deep beneath the earth, probably digesting its first meal while waiting for its second to die in its gut.
Cel hung there in the suffocating darkness, trying to orient himself. His body dangled loose, arms stretched toward what he assumed was up. Gravity pulled at his legs, his torso, everything pointing down into the black.
He was alive. The ice hadn't broken.
Frostmark had saved him. The fragile frost that shattered from a single punch had actually held where his strength would have failed. It had kept him anchored while debris battered his skull unconscious, kept him from sliding into the digestive acids waiting below.
The irony was bitter.
Not even Unbroken Succession would have saved him here. That divine gift required moonlight to reach his corpse during a full moon. But buried in the gullet of a creature deep beneath the earth? The moon's light would never be able to touch his remains.
The disappointing, pathetic authority he'd written off as a joke had been the only thing standing between him and permanent death.
His throat tightened. He didn't know whether to feel grateful or furious.
A faint, rhythmic sound vibrated through the flesh around him. The creature's breathing, perhaps. Or its heartbeat.
He couldn't stay here. Hanging blind in the creature's gullet while frostbite ate through his hand.
The way his body hung - arms overhead, legs pointing down - meant the creature had to be horizontal, stretched out like a snake at rest. Which meant he wasn't dangling over a void. There was ground below. Somewhere.
Cel braced himself, then wrenched Silent Moon free from the flesh.
The blade tore loose with a wet, sucking sound. His stomach lurched as gravity took him.
He dropped through the darkness. Two seconds. Three. Long enough for panic to claw at his chest before—
His body slammed into yielding flesh with a wet thud that drove the air from his lungs. Not ground. Not stone. The soft, slick floor of the creature's throat cushioned his fall.
Cel lay there gasping, his frozen hand still locked around Silent Moon's hilt. The blade lay across his chest, free of the wall but bound to him by ice. Four crescent phases glowed along its length, piercing the darkness with soft white radiance. The glow painted his immediate surroundings in ghostly relief - ribbed walls glistening with mucus, organic ridges pulsing with the creature's rhythm.
Cel braced the hilt against the ground and slammed his left fist into the ice encasing his right hand.
The first blow skidded off at an angle, pain jolting up his wrist. He repositioned, aimed better.
The second punch landed square - the frost shattered with a sharp crack, fragments scattering across the floor.
Yet his right hand remained numb. Dead weight at the end of his wrist. He tried to flex his fingers - nothing. The frostbite had gone too deep.
Cel grabbed Silent Moon with his other hand and pushed himself upright, testing his weight carefully.
He needed to find a way out.
Going deeper would accomplish nothing. The creature's digestive system waited that way. Even if the acid didn't kill him, he'd simply be trapped in an even worse position.
Carving his way through the flesh was impossible. Those obsidian-hard plates he'd glimpsed covered the creature's exterior - armor that had probably turned aside a thousand claws and fangs. He doubted Silent Moon could pierce them.
That left the mouth.
But the maw had snapped shut when it swallowed him. He'd felt it close like a trap, and he couldn't possibly force it open. And even if he managed that miracle, how far down had the creature dived? How much earth lay between him and the surface?
His mind turned to Selina. He could enter his soul. Ask for guidance—
No.
If the creature moved again - and it would, eventually - he needed to be conscious. Needed to be ready to drive Silent Moon deep and hold on for another violent ride through stone and earth. Entering his soul now was suicide.
So he was trapped. Waiting in a living prison until the creature decided to surface.
His only chance came when it opened its mouth on its own. To hunt. To breathe. Whatever these things did.
But the teeth…
Cel's gaze swept across the throat again, and something white gleamed near. He squinted through the dim light.
A tooth. As tall as he was, maybe taller. Curved like a scimitar, serrated along its inner edge.
His stomach clenched. Getting past those teeth had been luck. Pure, stupid luck when the maw had snapped shut and missed him by inches. Trying to slip through them consciously, while the creature was active and aware?
The odds were worse.
Unless…
An idea struck. Cold. Brutal. Utterly insane.
What if the creature had no teeth?
A grin spread across his blood-crusted face, wild and malicious in the blade's ghostly light.
"You swallowed the wrong meal, bastard."