He could see it. Past the Skeleton Prince. Past all of the shattered bones, the stone coffins, and the settling dust. He could still see it.

Amber. The kind that made the dark around it feel further away than it was.

The torchlight barely reached down here. The shadows were thickest on this side.

That was all he could see for a moment.

'Buddy, count'

His eyes dropped to the floor beside him. Looking for anything to use. Anything to throw.

Near his foot, a piece of skull knocked loose from the wall. The curve of a cranium on one side. A rough break on the other where it had separated.

He picked it up.

Light. Dry. More husk than bone.

He pressed it against his wounded forearm.

Cold for half a second. Then warm. His blood soaked into the porous surface fast, the chalky white turning to rust, then dark.

The pressure sent a sick throb up his arm. His forearm muscle twitched under the bone involuntarily. The fragment jumped in his grip.

He pulled it away. Turned it once, finding the balance point. Flat side against his palm.

The blood on the surface was tacky against his skin.

Then he started to move. He went low and moved along the wall, close to the floor. His clean arm trailing as he balanced.

His wounded arm was tucked against his chest, the skull fragment clenched in his fist. The torn sleeve hung heavy against it, soaked through and clinging. Every time he shifted his arm, he could feel the fabric pull against his shirt, the two wet surfaces dragging against each other.

His fingers passed over hollows in the wall where skulls used to be. Empty cavities in the mortar, knocked free by shockwaves. Like missing teeth in a jaw.

Behind him, blood drops on the stone floor. Faint taps. Arrhythmic. Each one a small marker he couldn't take back.

He checked his trail.

The prints his hand left on the stone were getting lighter. The blood on his sleeve had dried at the edges. He could feel it stiffening, the fabric going from wet to tacky to something closer to crust.

The wound was clotting.

He looked at the Prince. The crimson pulse in its chest had slowed. Still facing away. But the head was moving now, scanning, not locked.

He had the skull fragment in his left hand. Rough break on one edge.

'Now, while it's still scanning.'

He pressed the broken edge into the gash and dragged.

The sound it made, wet and tearing, arrived before the pain did. Half a second later and his vision went white at the corners.

He clamped his jaw shut and forced the sound out through his nose instead.

He held it flat against the stone and let it pool. Four seconds. Five.

Then he took the sodden sleeve, folded it tight over the wound, and pressed his elbow to his ribs to hold the pressure.

He looked up.

The Prince's skull turned toward where the blood had just pooled.

He kept moving.

The pool was still drawing it.

He could tell from the pulse. The crimson light in the Prince's chest had deepened, that slow throb becoming something more fixed, more anchored. Locked onto the blood he'd left on the floor rather than the blood still moving through him.

His hand found the wall and he crawled along it, fingertips dragging stone, keeping his movements small and even. Each shift pulled the sleeve against the wound, a dull drag that spiked every time his arm bent or shifted. His left arm stayed tucked in close, the skull fragment still in his grip. The torn sleeve over his forearm was holding, doing its job badly but well enough. The wound still weeping but not freely, the heat of it contained, the sleeve gone dark and stiff against his skin.

The amber glow was closer now. Still there. He could see the texture of it, the way it bent around the edge of the doorway ahead of him and softened the floor just past the threshold. Twenty feet. Maybe twenty-five.

The skull walls whispered without pausing. They had never stopped. He just kept forgetting they were doing it, and then remembering again.

He moved through a gap between two broken coffin slabs, stepping over a sprawl of scattered teeth and loose vertebrae. One of them shifted under his boot. He stopped. Waited.

The Prince didn't turn.

He exhaled through his nose, slow and controlled, and kept going.

'Almost.'

Then the crimson pulse changed.

Not dramatically. There was no lurch, no sudden brightness. Just a shift in its rhythm. The slow-locked throb going still for a beat, then picking back up faster. Lighter. Searching instead of anchored.

He'd moved too far from the pool. The Prince would feel that.

He watched the Prince's skull begin to turn. Not toward him yet. Scanning, the red sparks passing across the room in a slow arc. But the arc was narrowing. The sword had already dropped, swinging loose at the creature's side, the tip of it tracing a shallow groove into the floor as it dragged.

He was still twenty feet from the doorway. Maybe more. The room between him and it was open, nothing left to hide behind. The last cover was behind him.

He looked down at his left hand. The skull fragment. The rough-broken edge dark with his blood, the porous surface saturated through.

He looked at the Prince.

The skull had stopped scanning. It was still. The crimson pulse steadied, then quickened.

'It's me again.'

He transferred the fragment to his right hand. Shifted his weight back onto his heels. Arm cocked from a crouch, no height to work with, the arc already dead before he threw.

He threw anyway.

The fragment left his hand too low, the geometry of it wrong from the start. It skipped off the floor ten feet short of the Prince, nowhere near the far wall, and clattered into the dark on the left side of the chamber.

He ran.

The Prince swung before the skull skipped. No tilt of the skull to examine where it had gone, no pause. The sword came horizontal, sweeping the left half of the room in a single automatic cut.

The shockwave threw him into the wall. His right side took it. Shoulder, ribs, face. The skulls bit, broken edges opening across his cheek and collarbone and arm. His knees hit stone a second later. He crumpled, hitting the floor hard.

The Prince had never made a sound before. Not once. The silence had been its whole register.

Three voices from one throat. Each one a half-beat behind the last, like an echo that hadn't caught up yet. The skull walls picked it up instantly, ran it back through a thousand empty sockets until the whole chamber was a single note of it.

He tried to move. His body didn't let him.

He rolled onto his hands and pushed himself up.

He found the amber glow with his eyes.

It was still there. Flickering in the aftershock, the flame bending sideways, bending back. Alive.

He was on his feet. His right side lit up from shoulder to hip. Something grinding in his ribs. He threw himself forward anyway.

Fifteen feet.

The Prince's scream was still cycling through the chamber walls. The skulls kept feeding it back to themselves, layer over layer, and the sound had lost any shape it might have had and become something purely physical, a pressure that lived in the back of his teeth and the base of his skull.

Then another swing came.

He didn't see it. He felt the pressure drop on his left side and he dropped, threw himself right and low, and the shockwave passed over him close enough that it took the heat off his skin for a moment and replaced it with nothing, just cold.

He hit the floor again. Skidded. His wrapped arm dragged along the stone and the bandage caught on something and the wound under it opened again in one clean pull.

Ten feet.

He got back up and pushed forward.

He couldn't feel his left arm from the elbow down. The wrap was still there, he could see it, but his fingers weren't responding, just absence where they should be.

Seven feet.

He was still on the floor.

His right knee hit stone and he pushed off it. His vision was doing something at the edges. Not darkness. More like the room was leaning, the floor tilting at an angle it didn't have, the amber light smearing slightly left of where he knew the door was.

He aimed for the light.

Four feet.

The Prince screamed again. Not the same scream. Something higher this time, more open, like the first had been an accident and this one was deliberate.

He heard the sword lift. Stone scraping as it swung back.

Not enough time. He ran anyway.

Two feet.

He threw himself through the doorway.

The shockwave hit the wall where he'd been.

The scream hit stone. Came through muffled now, on the other side.

He kept moving.