The first glimpse Elena was able to see of the events in the clearing were a well-dressed man and a scarred gnome toppling into a yawning pit. The second thing she noticed was the horror of their companion, who was strangely enough dressed in a… poncho? The entire scene reeked of the same sort of horrifying feeling Elena could remember so clearly from Drassington it was as if she was still in the city that night. The air stunk of warm iron, crawling with the ethereal wailing of an infant no one could see. For a moment, Elena, Carlos, and Jim collectively stopped, watching the pitiful sight of the lonesome figure in the poncho collapse at the edge of the pit.

Elena held her hand out to steady her fellow heroes and stealthily approached the person by the pit. It was a concerning sight, for sure, as even from where she crept closer, Elena could clearly see that the person was closely eying the size of the pit. Perhaps it was in an attempt to gauge if the fall into the pit would be lethal, or if the man and the gnome could be seen at the bottom. Either way, the sheer focus of the person in the poncho was so absolute that it didn't notice Elena’s movements until the very moment the hero put her armored hand on their shoulder.

At once a burst of movement came from under the poncho. The person, who was revealed as a young girl as soon as she turned around, was grasping a small belt knife which she used to lunge towards Elena with a scream of rage and sheer hopelessness. A metallic clang rang out as Elena casually blocked the knife on the back of her gauntlet, sweeping the weapon aside to grasp the girl’s arm. The girl gasped in pain and shock at the grip which would surely bruise, but Elena forced her attention back.

“Listen, and listen closely. I have many questions for you, and if I’m right about what you’ve done there will be reckoning. But, that’ll have to wait. Why are you here, next to this pit? Why does the air smell of blood and filth? Who were those two that fell in the pit?” Elena barked out curtly while she restrained herself from harming the primary suspect of Bill’s injuries.

Silence followed Elena’s urgent line of questioning, but just as Elena was preparing to give the girl a hefty backhand with her gauntleted fist, the girl in the poncho spoke with a rusty, disused voice filled with bitterness.

“We were running…” She muttered, almost as if she was terrified of uttering any sort of words, but then the girl coughed and continued. “We… we saw the man in the suit throwing… people… in the pit. We tried to sneak away, but he saw us. And now… and now…”

Her voice shuddered heavily, and she took a deep breath.

“I’m alone again.”

Elena stared at the girl as she tried to make sense of the rather sparse explanation. Throwing people in the pit? Where did the people come from? The nearest village is pretty far away. Is that ‘man in the suit’ responsible for my men disappearing? But why throw them in the pit? Elena shook her head in frustration and handed off the girl to Jim, who took the girl’s skin and bone wrist with a conflicted expression on his face.

“So what now?” Carlos questioned as he kneeled over the pit. “I can’t see any sort of end to this pit, it almost seems like the pit goes on forever. But, if I really, really listen for it, I think I can hear something… slithering? Down at the bottom. Some sort of fleshy sound.”

There must be something at the bottom of the pit. Something important, it wouldn’t make sense to dump people down there otherwise. If the bottom of the pit can’t be seen, then there’s no way the men survived the fall, so it can’t be a simple pit to hold people. And the smell… it would take a crazy amount of fresh bodies to make the smell of blood strong enough that we could smell it up here. Probably would take enough that we would be able to see a few from where we stand at the lip, the top layer of the pile at least.

Eventually Elena answered Carlos’s question. “I don’t like this, not at all. It could be some sort of depraved creation of that ‘man in the suit’, but if not… Carlos, send as much water down there as possible. Drown whatever is slithering down there.”

Carlos looked at Elena, and upon seeing she was serious, motioned for Elena, Jim, and the girl to back away before centering his attention on the pit. For a moment all was silent, until Carlos’s murmurings gradually became audible. Bit by bit the moisture in the air increased, until the entire clearing had become hazy through a film of water. Then, with a great shout of effort, Carlos sent the water in the clearing, along with a large amount of water in the air Elena hadn’t even noticed before, roaring into the pit in a merciless torrent. On and on the water fell, and each time the water filling the clearing appeared to be depleting, even more water came to replace it. The trees nearby withered, the grass turned brown, the clouds in the sky disappeared one by one. For a moment it almost seemed to even Elena that all the water in the entire world was going to be sent towards the pit.

Eventually the amount of water in the pit became so great that Elena could begin to see a it rising in the pit itself. But then, the torrent of water dissipated into nothingness, accompanied by a faint groan coming from Carlos.

“Out of gas alrea-“ Elena turned towards Carlos with a raised eyebrow, and then gasped as she saw a fleshy tendril almost too small to see with the naked eye sprouting from the ground to pierce Carlos’s stomach. He let out another faint groan as Jim’s golden fist smashed forwards to rip the flesh root straight from the ground, where it separated from with a horrible snap-crunching sound Elena could feel in her teeth. The ground shook slightly, and shook once more, intensifying just the same as the infantile bawling shook the air.

Then, over the pit, the air itself split to reveal a single, fleshy arm. It was covered with rotting boils that grew from nothing to burst in a shower of pus to reform in a horrifying cycle, that growing and bursting like flowers blooming in timelapse. With a gentle, feeling taps of its fingers the arm lightly crawled over the lip of the pit. Every second Elena looked at the arm she knew, yet was completely unable to put into words, how wrong it was. The wrongness was maddening, a feeling that raged through her mind as she tried to comprehend how the fleshy appendage, one that appeared to be normal one moment, was covered in cracked, dry skin the next, and then shed it all to be covered in shiny new skin, was something that could exist at all.

Her mind barely even noticed the girl in the poncho, now freed from Jim’s slackened grip, writhing on the ground screaming while clutching her bloodied ears. As she wailed in pain there on the parched earth several tiny, mouselike rats fled from her ears, being none too picky about tearing through fleshy bits that were in the way.