As Ink whipped around the room at storm speeds, Elach noted that he’d chosen the wrong incantation. Storm drain wasn’t quite what he was expecting, and since the entire three pages were all written in gibberish Elach had no idea what he was calling upon himself until the ink started to move. Now he was huddled up against the inkskipper’s corpse, hunched over the book so that it wouldn’t get stained by the flying ink as he flipped to the page that contained empty reign. This incantation was only half a page long, written in fairly large print that looked to be brushed on instead of pressed, and Elach was relieved that he wouldn’t have to restart a dozen times just because he’d apparently pronounced ‘drizzeit’ wrong.

He spoke the words but no sound left his mouth, like the slab underneath the book was stealing them away to help power empty reign. A huge blob of ink splattered against his back as he spoke, ink dripping over his shoulders to fall into a growing puddle around the slab. Elach held back a frustrated grunt to finish the incantation, another blob striking his upper arm and soaking his hair and chin, then another driving into his side with far too much force, and one last blob sneaking through the tiny gap he couldn’t close and splattering the page to illegibility as Elach silently spoke the last word.

Nothing happened. And for a moment, Elach was terrified that he’d misspoke or paused for too long when one of the ink blobs struck him. But there was absolutely nothing happening. Absolutely nothing.

Elach tentatively raised his head, looking around in confusion. The ink had frozen in midair like bubbles trapped in amber, creating what Elach assumed a snapshot of an upside down whirlpool looked like. A cone of ink rose up from a wide bottom to a point near the ceiling, small spaces between blobs letting the odd ray of light through and giving the room an ominous feeling. He tried to stand up but something resisted; the larger blobs of ink were holding him in place thanks to the empty reign. It wasn’t difficult to break the empty reign’s hold on the ink, but it still stuck to him like tar instead of dripping to the ground like it should have; making his body feel like it was pushing through water wherever the ink coated him.

But what was an annoyance for him was a prison for the book. Elach managed to slide the slab out from under it, the ink melting away like hot butter wherever it touched, but the book stayed stuck in midair even with nothing under it. He rubbed the tablet all over himself to get as much of the ink as he could off, but the ink sticking to the book was impervious to the tablet’s effects, so he left it where it lay. If he needed it later, he would come back for it.

The dais was now completely free of ink, and Elach had a staircase down to the ground where the reverse whirlpool started. And just beyond the whirlpool’s edge, gleaming through small cracks in the black, Elach saw the outlines of two doors. The one on the left glowed a soft silver like the inkskipper’s plates, and the one on the right burned with the same intense white that the ink had while it transformed. Elach used the slab to wipe away the ink and shield his eyes from the white door, barely noticing a third door set into the floor. This one was dark gold, tarnished from what looked like years of neglect and dotted with ink stains so that the gold barely showed through.

He kneeled down and grasped onto the handle of the tarnished door, pulling with all his strength. The seal let out a wet slurping noise as he slowly pulled it apart, something sticky and black coming up with the hatch. The door flung open with a woosh of air being drawn down into a perfectly black void, a ladder descending down a single rung before disappearing. Elach laid down on his stomach and felt along the walls, cold steel meeting his fingers where the ladder continued down even though he couldn’t see it. Elach slowly lowered himself down into the hole, darkness overtaking him as he made his way downward.

After a handful of minutes, the bottom rung gave way to solid ground. The space around him was still void of light, and Elach felt for ground underneath his feet before each and every step he took to make sure he didn’t fall into a bottomless hole. He held out the slab to try and see by the dim light it emitted, but it seemed confined to the slab itself. He couldn’t even see his hand holding it, just a black void covering the slab where his hand should have been. After a very tense few minutes Elach ran his toe into a wall, muttering a soft ouch even though it didn’t actually hurt. He placed a hand on the wall and felt for anything, pushing through something warm and slick until he felt cold steel.

Elach brought his hand up to his face to get a better look, chuckling to himself as he remembered where he was. A tentative sniff at the stuff on his hand reminded him of the raw gelatin he used to make gummy candy, and the texture was like the slurry before he poured it into molds but far cooler. When he pressed his thumb and pointer finger together and tried to pull them apart there was some resistance, and he imagined a long string of a clear substance stretching between them until it sagged under the strain of its own weight.

Elach grabbed the slab with his other hand and pressed it to the wall, and the darkness bled away in a small circle to reveal steel coated in a translucent milky white substance. The floor had no goop on it, but a pattern of white lines decorated what little he could see and shot off towards the ladder. Elach pried the slab off the wall once he was certain nothing was going to happen and placed it on the ground, the same dome of vision popping up as it made contact with the cold steel.

Pushing the slab with his foot so he could see, Elach made his way to the ladder. The return trip was far faster since he wasn’t worried about falling and dying, so within minutes Elach was staring down at Resthollow’s insignia directly under the bottom of the ladder. All the lines that originated from the wall congregated to a circle around the insignia, like a barrier protecting it from the rest of the room. Elach pushed the slab into the circle to see what would happen.

Something up above hissed shut as the insignia shone a dim white, the tablet breaking apart into a pile of white lined cubes. Elach picked one up and turned it around in his hand, studying the perfectly equal sides as the white slowly drained from the lines. He quickly placed it back down, hoping that he hadn’t just wasted one of the pieces, and the white stopped draining the moment it fell within the circle. But it didn’t start to refill itself, the portions that had become grey staying grey no matter how long Elach waited. So each little cube had limited time; that was good to know.

Weight slammed into Elach’s back and he crashed down into the insignia, scattering most of the cubes away as little pinpricks of light in the void. Elach gasped for breath as adrenaline coursed through him, and he felt at his back to see if he was dying. His hand came away warm and slick, but when he brought it to the light he saw that it wasn’t his blood. It was the same goop that was coating the walls of this place. Something stabbed into Elach’s calf and he screamed in pain, kicking with his other foot at the unseen thing that was sinking deeper into his muscle by the second. A wet splatter accompanied by a crunch and an ear piercing screech reverberated through the room as whatever was in Elach’s leg disconnected from the whole, and Elach yanked his feet into the circle to curl up into the fetal position. Elach waited in the circle, shaking with pain and adrenaline for whatever was out there to come into the light and end him, but nothing seemed to come. He waited for a few minutes, the sounds of wet slapping making him flinch, but still he remained unharmed.

Reaching down with probing fingers to touch at whatever was still grasping his calf, Elach let out a shuddering breath as he brushed against warm slickness followed by cool steel. What he thought were claws were actually sharpened steel finger bones coated in a layer of the goop that was on the wall, far longer than any person’s and engraved with long ridges of white. They reminded him of Hollow’s fingers, minus the goop of course, but if the thing out there was actually like Hollow he would be down one leg at the moment. He tried to pry the steel fingers out of their death grip, but it seemed that becoming disconnected from whatever the main body was had set the in this position. Hopefully not permanently, Elach thought to himself.

Elach unsteadily rose to his feet, preemptively wincing in pain as he put weight on his pierced leg, but surprisingly it didn’t hurt at all. Elach shook his leg out as he looked down at it, not even blood escaping into the goop through his wound. Elach turned his attention to the void all around him for a moment, shaking his head and turning to see the pinpricks of light still burning strong after all this time. Even from here he could make out that their white lines had decayed by maybe a fifth, taking far longer to decay than the one he’d held in his hand five or so minutes ago. They were putting off around as much light as Elach expected from the slower drain, so he had a little time before they became useless. Elach took a deep breath and bent down to pick up a cube, letting it’s glow solidify into a sphere around him before breaking into a sprint towards the nearest cube.

When he neared the first cube Elach bent down to slide it along the floor, getting it as close to the circle of safety as possible before moving on to the next one. He managed to slide around two-thirds of the cubes back near the circle before he needed to pick up one of the ones on the ground, using the fresh-ish cube to get the rest of it’s siblings near enough to the circle for him to reach them while he sat in the circle. Elach’s heart hammered in his chest as the cube’s light dimmed a dozen feet from the circle, snuffing out completely not a moment after he stepped into safety. The white lines cracked like hard, dry dirt as the light left the cube completely, but the unique pattern on the cube remained. Elach reached out with quick movements to get the other cubes back into the circle, and only once everything was dim and waiting did Elach take in a deep, slow breath.

“Alright. You can do this, Elach.” He said to himself as he slapped his hands against his cheeks. “What do you know right now, and how does that help you? First, there’s something out there that will kill you. It’s made out of steel and goop, but the steel is way weaker than it should be since I could break it with a few kicks. Second, these cubes shine a light that drives away those things. And they only have a set amount of light that drains faster if I’m holding them, with each of them having a semi-unique pattern carved into them. And.. the walls are coated in the same goop that the monster, or monsters I guess, were coated in.”

Elach nodded at his own appraisal, scanning the void of a room to no specific end. “Then I need to find something out there. Maybe there are a bunch of little holes I have to put the cubes in? Or sconces that need their lights?” Elach crouched over the pile of about a hundred little cubes and sighed, poking the dead one as he stalled going back out there. “Guess I’ll find out soon enough. Just like everything else.”