Abruptly, it's dark.

Behind you, the lights go down with a rhythmic boom, boom, boom. Your fingers linger on the touchpad where your necromancer's blood left a stain, and then you pull away, and keep walking. Behind you, a teenage boy, maybe fourteen, turns buries his sweaty face against the shoulder of his cavalier primary, a fourteen year old girl. This hurts you to look at. They were supposed to ship out on missions last year, they'd said. For all you'd dreamed of joining the Cohort by the time you were eight years old... maybe that's too young.

The Sanitiser corridor leads to the main artery. The lights behind you finally catch up, going off and leaving you and the teens in complete darkness. You hurriedly whip off your glasses and buzz with anxiety. This is wrong. Something here is wrong.

(behind you, the teenage girl whispers your wards aren't tripped, it's just the lights, don't freak out, you're good, there's nobody down here, to her necromancer)

And then, one of the lights behind you flickers back on. It throws the metal siding in front of you into sharp relief - there are words that were not there a second ago, written in fresh, red blood:

DEATH TO THE FOURTH HOUSE

And there's an explosion of activity. The necromancer behind you shrieks, blue and green lights flashing wildly as his cavalier tries to calm him down, but it's not enough. He takes off into the room ahead of you, terrified, and you don't have time to really register the biggest construct you've ever seen in your life. It's a skeleton - it fills the room, a nightmare, a squatting, vertiginous hulk, a nonsense of bones feathering into long, spidery legs, leaning back on them fearfully and daintily; trailing jellyfish stingers made up of millions and millions of teeth all set into each other like a jigsaw. It shivers its stingers, then stiffens all of them at once with a sound like a cracking whip. It cringes back just for a moment as the boy screams soundlessly at it, throwing his arms out and expending what you know to be some sort of necromancy in an attempt to dissolve the construct.

That, of all things, wakes you up. You grab your sword and you run in, smashing your fist into a stinger and ignoring the damage it tries to do to you, but there's so much of it, there's too much, and so you bellow at the top of your lungs: "Run! Don't fight it, RUN--"

But he doesn't run. It's one of the bravest and stupidest things you have ever fucking seen. He creates a vortex of blue-green fire, trying to suck the thing in, and it looks at him almost curiously for a second before fifty long straight spars of teeth spear him through, all at once.

You don't think. You charge. You grab the girl, who is screaming hard enough to tear her throat apart, and you run. You run.

(you realize later that what she was saying was fidelity! fidelity! fidelity!)

You slam the door behind you, getting away from the tendrils of bone, from the gore splattered across the room, and you lock it. The girl in your arms kicks and screams and weeps, makes guttural sounds, reduced to the sound of someone whose heart had broken forever, and you have no idea what to do, so you keep moving, because you have to - you have to keep one person safe. You have to keep her safe, so you have to get out of here. You go to a room that only you have the key to, and you put the girl down, and she curls up on a bed and shouts at you.

"You don't understand, Issac's cautious. Not reckless. He's not - he didn't - He was always so careful, he shouldn't have - I hated him when we were little, he wasn't at all what I wanted--"

You take it, and she dissolves into tears again. It's a Herculean struggle to get her to go lay down, to make her drink some water, to let her sleep. She needs sleep. She deserves the sleep, just for a second. You close your eyes, just for a second. You don't mean to fall asleep. It's only for fifteen minutes at the most.

When you open your eyes, and see the huge shafts of bone spearing through the girl's chest, thighs, shoulders, see her staring lifelessly at the ceiling, you don't understand what you're looking at.

"No, no, no, no, no, no --"

Oh. That's your own voice.