Chapter 7 - The Pet

And then I was falling.

The pit swallowed me whole, darkness rushing past so fast it felt like being inhaled by something enormous and impatient. I hit bottom with a "whump" that knocked the wind clean out of me and left me gasping on my back like a fish tossed on a dock. Enough force to send pain shooting up my spine, not enough to kill me, which I immediately decided to feel grateful about even as my ribs screamed at me.

Above, Malkor's laughter filtered down like poisoned honey, bouncing off stone.

"Enjoy your new accommodations, thief," his voice carried from what seemed like miles up. "My pet has been... hungry."

Well, shit.

I groaned, rolling onto my side and grabbing for ribs that hurt but held. The fall should have split me open. I was stripped to my undershirt and trousers, no weapons, no armor, no enchanted brooch. Malkor's guards had been thorough bastards about that, taking everything before they tossed me in. I had my wits, my mouth, and absolutely nothing else. The classic Samuel Thornwood situation.

"Fuck me sideways with a rusty dagger," I muttered.

I pushed up to sitting. That's when I registered what I was sitting on.

My hands sank in. Past the knuckles, past the wrist, sinking into something that gave like overstuffed moss but felt like flesh: warm, faintly slick, with a gelatinous resistance that stopped me a few inches down. I recoiled. The surface closed behind my hands with a slow, wet sound, leaving no trace I'd been there.

"What the actual hell?"

I'd sunk two or three inches on impact. The impact crater had already filled back in around me, the surface rising up past my ankles, holding my boots in place like soft mud. I got that out of the way immediately: tried to stand, got up about halfway, sank again when the surface shifted under my weight. The second attempt got me vertical. My feet went in to mid-shin with each step, floor rising and releasing in slow pulses.

The darkness was absolute. The kind that swallows light before it has a chance to apologize. I couldn't see my hand in front of my face. But I could feel: the floor had the springiness of a well-stuffed feather mattress, and whatever I was standing on kept moving, slow and deliberate, the weight of a sleeping giant's breath.

The air was warm and carrying something sweet, thick in the back of the throat. Alive in a way air wasn't supposed to be. I filed that away and kept moving, arms out, taking small careful steps. Every footfall sank an inch or two, the surface accepting my weight and releasing it with a faint, intimate sound.

My fingers found a wall. Same material: fleshy, smooth, a slow give under my fingertips that filled back in when I pulled away. I ran my hands along it feeling for edges, for stone, for anything to get my bearings. My palm found a deep recess and warm air flowed against it in long, regular intervals.

Breathing.

I snatched my hand back.

"Malkor said something about a pet," I whispered. "Please tell me I'm not inside the fucking pet."

The heartbeat answered. It came up through my feet first: deep, massive, slow, the kind of rhythm that belongs to something very old. The whole surface I was standing on pulsed with it, a single rolling wave that moved from under my heels to under my toes and passed on. Then everything shifted. A slow adjustment, the casual repositioning of something enormous in its sleep. I went down on my ass.

"Think, Sam," I said. "Use your other senses. What would Mistress Ashara say?"

She'd say I was an idiot for getting caught. After that: your eyes are useless, use the rest of you.

The pulsing picked up. The warmth in the air thickened. Movement in the darkness, a change in pressure I registered in my skin rather than saw with my eyes. Something massive was stirring, and I'd apparently been sitting on it this whole time.

"Hello?" I called out.

I regretted it immediately. What kind of idiot announces himself to unknown terrors in the dark? This kind, apparently. I own that entirely.

The movement stilled. In the silence that followed, I had the distinct sensation of being noticed. Something in this darkness had turned its attention my way, slow and curious, the way a cat looks at something unexpected in the corner of its room.

A cold bead of sweat tracked down between my shoulder blades.

I was not trapped in a pit. I was trapped with something.

And it was awake.

*

Something slick and cool slid across my bare forearm and I scrambled backward, ass sliding on the spongy surface, heart punching at my ribs hard enough to bruise from the inside.

The darkness changed.

A dim pink glow pulsed through the floor beneath me. Faint as embers, faded, came back brighter on the next throb of that heartbeat. With each pulse the glow built, rolling outward through whatever I was standing on, and for the first time I could see shapes. The walls weren't stone. They were flesh: smooth, glistening, ridged with pale veins carrying that pink light like lanterns seen through fog.

And the tentacle. Thick as my forearm, hovering in the air where it had touched me, the pink light pulsing through it in slow waves. I could only make out its outline but that was enough to confirm every terrible suspicion.

"Nice tentacle monster," I whispered, my voice landing somewhere between steady and absolutely not. "Good... whatever the hell you are. Please don't eat me. I probably taste terrible. Too much ale, not enough vegetables, I've been told. Multiple times. By multiple people."

The tentacle hung in the air. Patient. Neither advancing nor retreating, just hovering there like it had time, which it probably did.

My options: run, on a floor like a sleeping giant's belly, in light I could barely see past my own nose? Fight, with what, my sparkling wit and empty hands? The guards had stripped me of everything. I didn't have so much as a fingernail file.

That left diplomacy. Which had not historically been my strong suit.

The tentacle moved again. Slower this time, deliberate, drifting sideways through the pink-lit air. Curious. Nothing about it said "about to eat me." It said something closer to "hm."

"Alright," I said. "Let's try something monumentally stupid."

I extended my hand, palm up, slow enough that whatever this thing was could see it coming. Ready to pull back at the first sign of danger. What was I doing? Offering my hand to a creature in a blood warlock's murder pit in the dark. Sure. Normal day for Samuel Thornwood.

"Felix is never going to believe this," I muttered. "If I survive to tell him."

The tentacle hesitated. Then, with a gentleness that made my breath catch somewhere in my chest, it touched my outstretched palm.

The contact hit like plunging into cold water on a hot day. My breath locked up.

Curiosity. Surprise. Recognition of difference.

Thoughts that weren't mine bloomed in my head. Impressions, emotions, sensation rendered in vivid clarity that had nothing to do with my own brain. I gasped, nearly broke the contact, but something kept my hand steady.

"What the fuck," I breathed.

A wash of longing rolled through me. The ache of going years without hearing another voice, without a single touch that wasn't a fist or a blade. I recognized it the way you recognize a smell from childhood. Instantly, in the gut.

"You can understand me?" I asked aloud, though I sensed speaking wasn't necessary.

Warmth flooded through the connection. Recognition. The feeling of being noticed after a very long time in the dark. And threaded through it: surprise. I was different from the others.

"I'm still pretty fucking scared, for the record."

A ripple of warmth moved through the connection. Amusement, or the closest thing to it. The tentacle wrapped gently around my wrist. Holding steady, not gripping.

More came. Through the pink-lit gloom, two more appendages drifted out and moved around me in wide, easy arcs, each one carrying that bioluminescent pulse. I'd expected teeth, crushing force, darkness swallowing me whole. Instead I got curiosity and patience and a hand wrapped around my wrist like something precious.

The floor was warmer now. I noticed that. My weight had been settling since I landed, sinking by degrees so gradual I'd missed it. The surface rose around my calves where I stood, not trapping me, just: there. Present. The heartbeat under my feet was steady and enormous and had been there since I hit bottom.

"What are you?" I asked.

Instead of an answer, I got a flood: ancient water, abyssal depths, solitude that stretched until it lost meaning. Capture. Confinement. And woven through all of it, Malkor, younger but no less cruel, performing bindings.

"He imprisoned you," I whispered. "You're not from here at all."

Heaviness pressed into my chest. Cycles beyond counting.

"And the others he sends down here? The thieves and rogues?" I asked, already not liking the answer.

Raw emotion came back: disgust, defense, terror, the flash of screaming in the dark. They had attacked first. Every single one.

"They fought you. And you defended yourself."

Affirmation. A grim sense of inevitability with regret threaded through it.

"Why am I different?"

Another wave: my heartbeat when I landed. My voice in the dark. My willingness to reach out. The creature had recognized something in me, some particular flavor of idiot that it had apparently been waiting for.

My cheeks went warm. "I mean, I'm no saint. Ask anyone in Ashbourne. Especially the florist's daughter."

The tentacle pulsed around my wrist. A second one drifted in and settled across my shoulder, slow and warm, its weight arriving with a question mark built in. I tensed. It stilled. I exhaled. It stayed there, a gentle pressure across the back of my shoulders, not moving, just resting.

I let it.

"How many tentacles do you have anyway?" I asked, because that was apparently the question on my mind and I had zero impulse control. "Asking for no particular reason."

The answer came as a concept: many. Varied. Different shapes for different purposes. A hand opening and closing. A wave rolling out to meet sand.

"Greeting tentacles," I said. "Nice. Where I come from, buying someone a drink first is customary. But I'm flexible."

Warmth that felt like laughter. The creature's mind pressed into mine more comfortably now, the initial shock of contact smoothing into something I was getting used to.

"So you're stuck down here," I said, getting back to practical matters. "Malkor uses you to dispose of his problems."

The answer hit in the body. Shoulders tightening, jaw clenching, a pressure building behind my eyes that had nothing to do with me. Walls closing in. Centuries of it. And underneath, a hatred so patient it had fossilized.

I exhaled hard. Yeah. I got it.

The air was sweet and thick in the throat and had been since I landed. Warm and alive in a way that air wasn't supposed to be. I'd stopped noticing it around the ten-minute mark. Just: the air. Fine.

"Do you have a name?" I asked.

The response was layered: names were a surface-dwelling concept, unnecessary for something that communicated through direct mental exchange. But alongside that, a yearning for one. For being recognized as something individual, specific, itself and not just Malkor's pit.

"Well, I need something to call you," I said. "I can't keep thinking 'tentacle monster' forever. That's undignified. For both of us."

A pulse of warmth. Then an image formed in my mind: the play of light through deep water, a particular rippling pattern that was distinctive and personal.

"Is that you?" I asked. "Your name?"

Affirmation. Identity. Self.

The image sat in my mind, warm water moving in a specific way. I sat down. The surface took my weight and I sank to mid-thigh, the flesh closing around my legs warm and steady, and I settled into it because standing was work and this was somehow not alarming anymore. The tentacle at my wrist stayed. The one on my shoulder adjusted but didn't leave.

"I'm not sure I can pronounce that," I admitted. "How about Ripple? Since that's what I'm seeing."

The tentacle around my wrist squeezed. Acceptance. Something like relief beneath it, quiet and enormous.

"I'm Samuel," I offered. "Though most people call me Sam."

My name came back through the connection wrapped in the creature's perception: the guy who made jokes while scared witless, who stuck his hand out in the dark. A loud, twitchy thing that smelled like sweat and bad decisions and had apparently decided to be brave about it.

"That's me," I said. "Professional idiot, at your service."

The floor beneath me was a live thing with a pulse and a heartbeat and a name, and I was sitting waist-deep in it. I mean, I'd figured that out when I first pressed my hands in and they didn't touch stone. The longer I sat, the more obvious it was. The chamber walls, the floor, the fleshy surfaces I'd been pressing my hands against in the dark: all Ripple. I wasn't in a pit with a creature. The creature was the pit.

"Holy shit," I said quietly. "You're huge."

Pride rolled through the connection, and beneath it, regret. Ripple had been larger once, before the binding, before centuries of confinement in this stone box.

A fourth tentacle drifted in and came to rest against my calf under the surface. Warm, faint pressure through my trouser leg. I felt it and filed it away.

"How long have you been here?" I asked.

The answer made my knees buckle. Good thing I was sitting down. The impressions hit me like a wave I couldn't stand up in: stone wearing smooth over centuries, roots growing and dying and growing again overhead, season after season blurring into one long gray smear with no end in sight. My brain tried to hold the scale of it and dropped it immediately.

"Fuck," I breathed. "That long?"

The longing was already bleeding through before I could form the question. Open water. Depth. Freedom. It ached like a missing limb.

I sat with that for a moment. The pulse came up through my whole body now, through my legs and hips and the backs of my hands where they rested on the warm, yielding surface. The tentacle at my wrist pulsed steady. The one on my shoulder was a warm weight I'd stopped noticing.

"I was sent here to steal something," I said. "A grimoire. Dark magic book. Important people want it." I paused. "Though now I'm thinking maybe they shouldn't have it."

Ripple's reaction hit before I finished the sentence. Revulsion. Pain.

"Yeah," I said quietly. "It sucks."

A nudge pressed against my thoughts. Curiosity shaped like a question: why had I come at all?

I thought about that. The coin, obviously. But there was more underneath it. Restlessness. A need to be more than the rogue from a small town who was good for a laugh and a tumble.

"Because I'm an idiot," I said. "And because sometimes I think I could be more than what everyone expects."

Something passed through the connection that hit me right in the sternum. Ripple knew what it meant to be seen as only one thing. In its case: a monster. A disposal mechanism. Property.

My eyes stung. I blinked hard, jaw going tight. No. Absolutely not. I was not going to cry in the belly of an ancient creature because it understood my feelings. That was a level of pathetic even I couldn't live down. I had a reputation to maintain. Somewhere. Vaguely.

"We're quite the pair, aren't we?" I said, scrubbing at my face with my free hand. "The fuck-up thief and the lonely tentacle monster, having a heart-to-heart in a blood warlock's dungeon."

Ripple's warmth rolled into mine and came back stronger. For a moment I forgot the warlock waiting above. I sat in the body of an ancient creature, surrounded by its slow pulse and its pink light and the warm weight of its limbs, and I felt less alone than I had in months.

I had, by this point, four tentacles on me and had stopped tracking when each one arrived. One at each wrist, one across my shoulders, one warm against my calf. They'd arrived so gradually and stayed so still that my brain had just absorbed them. They weren't a threat. That's all I had for it.

The tentacle at my wrist pulsed. Ripple was showing me something: pathways through stone, weak points in Malkor's binding spells, moments when the warlock's attention turned elsewhere. Escape routes. For both of us.

"You've been planning this," I said. "You needed someone who wouldn't attack you."

Fierce, immediate affirmation. Together it was possible. Alone it was just this.

My original plan had been simple: get in, deal with Malkor, get out. Nowhere in that plan had "befriend the being living in the warlock's basement and work together" appeared. This was messier. More complicated. Also the only version of this situation that was likely to end with me alive and out of this pit.

Leaving Ripple here wasn't something I was willing to do. I'd figured that out around the point those centuries of loneliness hit me and I recognized them, and I hadn't unfigured it since.

Besides. What kind of story would "I hid in a murder pit until the evil warlock got bored" make? Not one I'd tell at the Bent Spoon Inn, that's for sure.

"Alright, Ripple," I said. "I'll help you get out of this hellhole if you help me get out with my skin intact. Deal?"

Gratitude and hope flooded through the connection, so intense it knocked the air out of me. More tentacles came: across my back, at my forearms, a warm pressure settling around my shoulders from behind. The creature's version of wrapping its arms around someone and meaning it.

I sat there with tentacles draped over me like a coat, the pink light pulsing slow and steady through it all, and let myself be held. The pulse came through everything, steady as a second heartbeat. The musk in the air was thick and sweet and I'd stopped noticing it the way you stop noticing the smell of a room you've been in long enough.

Malkor had no idea what was coming for him.

And I sat in that warm, pulsing dark and breathed, and didn't move.