"Elara… run… please…" The broken whisper, torn from Caius's mouth, reverberated through the thick, blood-red air, a feeble, tormented echo of the man she loved, a frantic plea that shattered the last lingering threads of her inner turmoil, her fierce resolve to stay and fight at war with the primal need to survive. His vacant eyes, for that fleeting, precious instant, flashed with a spark of the smouldering, uncompromising love she so very well understood, a pleading, a silent offering on her account.
The invisible wall that had confined her dissolved into shimmering, spectral fragments of wicked red light, dispersing off across the dense, alien air, leaving her vulnerable and defenceless, the whole, crushing weight of the ancient power's invisible eye pressing down on her like an endless physical burden. The dark, looming form that stepped silently out of the seething rift did not move, its presence casting an incalculable, ancient chill, a force which appeared older and more absolute even than the abyss itself, an oppressive atmosphere of inescapable doom.
All prime instincts screamed to Elara to obey Caius's broken command, to flee from this horrible, alien place, to escape the stifling clutch of this unimaginable, ancient monstrosity. But the heartless agony of leaving him there, still stuck and empty in the void's insidious clutches, was a torment that she could not endure, a searing pain that rent at her very soul.
Torn apart by the overpowering, unwavering love she had for Caius and the annihilating, suffocating terror that threatened to consume her, Elara's heart broke into a million blurred, painful shards. And in that horrific pain, an unyielding, burning fire of determination firmed, strengthening her will as steel. She would not leave Caius behind, consigning him to this appalling fate. Rather, she would run to him to find a way, any way, to break the void's suffocating hold and to somehow, in spite of it all, claim him back for herself.
A final, desperate look at Caius's still, hollow form, a promise sworn in the grief-wracked eyes that brimmed with tears, Elara turned and ran with mad abandon. She didn't know where she was going in this strange, alien universe and had no nebulous conception of a strategy, but only the abject, reflexive necessity to put as much distance as possible between herself and the immediate, smothering presence of the old power to have any hope at all to regroup and counter the crushing darkness.
Her erratic energy pulsed through her arteries, charged and unyielding power driving her forward on the smooth, irregular obsidian surface. The silent, hooded figures presented to her receding figure their red-glowing carvings pounding ominously, their unseen eyes like chains. The ancient voice echoed in the vacant corridors of her mind, no longer resonating with triumphant assurance but with cold, disdainful annoyance that caused her to shiver. "Futile, little spark. Your efforts are for nothing."
But Elara roughly brushed aside the chilling voice, her entire focus directed toward one single desperate goal: to get as distant as she could be from the looming, dark figure that threatened to crush her at the rim of the whirling tear. The alien landscape, a strange texture of projecting angles and impossibly stretched shadows, became vague around her as she sprinted with every ounce of strength she possessed, the unnatural, angular structures becoming dangerous obstacles to her desperate bid for survival.
Behind her, she could sense the old power stirring, a slow, deliberate movement that was eloquent of complete assurance, of a patient hunter toying with its insignificant prey. The very atmosphere grew heavy and cold under its oppressive weight, a stifling heaviness that could slow her down, rob her of breath.
She risked a frightened, momentary look back over her shoulder. The giant form had begun to pursue, its dark shape gliding smoothly across the alien terrain with an unnatural, silent pace, its unseen eye still fixed intently on her fleeing figure, a cold certainty in its slow, deliberate step.
Elara pushed her tormented form ahead, lungs burnt by each torturous gulp of air, muscles crying protest in a pain so acute she could only perceive through the hope-thudding adrenaline for some respite. She required cover, some means of breaking the constant, crushing barrage of the ancient magic, for a brief moment.
Before her, in the twisted shadows, she glimpsed a tight cluster of the taller obsidian buildings, their angular facades casting deep, concealing shadows that provided a temporary respite from the suffocating crimson light. She turned sharply toward them, hoping to lose herself in their maze-like, disorienting forms, to be a shadow among shadows.
As she entered the comparative gloom of the obsidian maze, the malevolent red light of the carvings diminished a little, a brief, welcome respite from its overwhelming brilliance. The void's mournful dirge was stronger here, a constant, chilling hum that thrummed through the earth under her feet, a physical reminder of the otherworldly nature of this captivity.
She leaned against the icy, unrelentingly smooth face of the great obsidian tower, her ragged breathing gasped as she sought to catch it, her heart beating a frantic, frightened rhythm in expectation. The ancient power was still present, a cold, flesh-crawling weight hanging in the air, a cold that crept into her bones, but the gut-wrenching, crushing force was gone, leaving the faint glimmer of false hope.
"Clever, little key," the voice of old repeated in the vacant corridors of her mind, its tone imbued now with an undertone of a cold laugh, a hunter sensing a fleeting glimmer of cleverness in its about-to-be-consumed victim. "But you cannot escape fate, little spark. Your fate is linked to mine."
Suddenly, the obsidian building directly behind her stirred to life in the same wicked, blood-red light. Exquisite, gruesome carvings, hidden away in deep shadows, blazed with bare, foul power, and the very air seemed to build with invisible, unsteady power, a quiet trap closing in.
She was caught, trapped in a red snare.
Before she was able to respond, tendrils of unadulterated scarlet energy explosively leapt from the throbbing carvings, snapping viciously at her in terror-struck speed and deadliness, such as living lashes of unadulterated, burning force. Elara screamed with shock and pain, twisting and leaping wildly away from the mortal blows, her own wild force flashing defensively, a desperate safeguard against the unpreventable.
The tendrils were incredibly swift and relentless in pursuing her, their scorching caress incising blistering trails over her skin where they touched. One struck full-on at her arm, searing pain wracking its way through her flesh. She had a chilling certainty that she was not going to be able to outdistance them in this confined space forever.
Desperation, searing and intense, fuelling her unbalanced energy. With a raw howl of defiance, she unleashed a wild, unbridled spurt of raw red energy, shattering the obsidian structure behind her into a lethal shower of serrated shrapnel. The raw intensity of the destructive explosion thrust her ahead through space, propelling her out of the immediate area of the deadly light tendrils.
She crashed hard onto the mercilessly cold ground, her body aching with a multitude of new pains, her breath squeezed from her lungs, but she had won herself a precious few agonising seconds. Hopping wildly to her feet, careless of the searing pain, she continued running blindly, deeper into the bewildering maze of giant obsidian structures, her only guide the desperate need to live.
Behind her, she felt the relentless approach of the ancient power, no longer toying with her like a captive animal. Its rhythm was faster now, its presence a strangling, suffocating wave of pure cold that threatened to extinguish the very fire within her.
Behind her, in the shifting shadows, she saw a gulf deep and wide, a dreadful mouth of white, darkless hollowness that seemed to stretch down into an unguessable, endless void. It was a foul barrier, a raw wound in the texture of this strange world, but it might also be her last forlorn hope for freedom.
With no hesitation, Elara ran toward the edge, the crushing power of the ancients closing in behind her by degrees. When she reached the broken edge of the void, she did not stop, did not glance over her shoulder at the awful pursuit. With a desperate, anguish-filled scream, she launched herself into the apparent infinity of the dark.
The bottom never arrived. Elara plummeted into the cold, dark nothingness, the void's icy chill enfolding her once more like a shroud. The ancient voice thundered for the last time in the echoing void, with a numbing, absolute certainty that echoed deep within her heart: "You cannot escape me, little key. Your fate is sealed."
But as she fell through the lightless void, a faint whisper, stronger and clearer this time, a familiar cadence that sent a jolt of desperate hope through her terror, echoed from the inky blackness below: "Elara! My love! I'm here! Hold on!"
As Elara plunges toward the seemingly endless void, Caius' friendly, charismatic whisper of comfort comes from the void below, and a warm, dim illumination, the colour of their shared energy of chaos, blazes to life far beneath her and burns brighter at impossible speed as she drops, illuminating not the glacial, empty hollowness of the nothing, but a seething, recognisable tunnel of gold and red and a battered, bruised but unmistakably alive Caius extending a hand toward her through the churning energy. But waiting in the wings, coalescing out of the very texture of the shadows, a dark, looming shape begins to form, its unseen, centuries-old eyes fixed steadfastly upon them both, its stealthy movement promising some ghastly reconciliation.