The darkness was cold, as were the blue letters with her new quest━one she would be certain not to follow. Sigurd still hadn’t responded, and the chicken, well, it winked out, leaving Vel holding on to someone’s cold hand.

  Hadn’t he been sweating before? she thought.

  “Sigurd?” she asked again, moving towards him. She placed a hand on his arm, which felt just as cold. And hard. Like stone. As she tried to pry her hand free, she found it stuck. “Sigurd, something is wrong,” she tried, blinking as if at some point, all the blackness around her would shrink away, revealing the place they were in.

  It didn’t. No, its mask upon her eyes was unforgiving, like a blindness had overcome them. She patted further than Sigurd’s arm, finding his shoulder, then his chest, all solid like stone. Please, please, Sigurd, say something, she thought, feeling her heart pound in her chest.

  Her breath hitched at the sight of the chicken’s light returning, surrounded by fire, but not red. More . . . blue. Like the blue lettering in her vision, the one she tried to pointedly ignore, but everytime she did, they strobed.

  The chicken took a step towards her, and as it did, Vel took one back, pressed into the statuesque structure that should have been Sigurd, but . . . well, she didn’t know what held her hand now.

  With another step, the chicken pressed on, one in front of the other, slowly and methodically moving towards her. Velmira moved as far as Sigurd’s hold would allow, her arm pulling against his stony grip.

  “Let go of me,” she said, cringing as the chicken grew closer. “Sigurd! Please!” She whimpered when she felt his stony grip tighten, holding her in place.

  No, no, no! she screamed, the chicken speeding up. In a few more steps it would have her, and its black, voidless eyes would consume her, she knew it. That stare . . . like wrath incarnate. Vel yanked, once, twice, then three times, crying out until there was a snap. She stumbled back, Sigurd’s hand still holding hers, but his arm fell back into her lap as she hit the ground. It was heavy, but when she lifted it, she found it detached.

  Horror struck her hard in the chest, as if to compete with her racing heart. His . . . his arm . . . “Holy . . . gods!” she screeched, and jumped when she heard a crash, something akin to shattered glass, but the sound deeper. A stony shard hit Vel’s leg, barely visible in the blue light of the approaching chicken. There was an eye upon the shard, part of a brow, and part of Sigurd’s hair, curling in its overgrowth.

  Vel’s jaw dropped, hanging as she stared at it. He was . . . dead. Turned to stone and shattered into a million pieces. Trembling and pushing herself back, Vel turned her gaze to the chicken. It had done this to him, hadn’t it, and, and, and . . .

  “Amalia?” Vel asked, her voice shaky. “A-Aden?” she asked next, listening, hoping for any sound that would come. Nothing, silence save for her own voice and that voidless stare of the chicken. And the cold, oh, how it made her very bones shiver.

  The chicken stopped, allowing Vel a moment of desperation as she finally broke her hand free from Sigurd’s stony grip. The fingers snapped off, a sound escaping Vel, as if she’d somehow further defiled his broken corpse in order to free herself. Sigurd. A corpse; dead. A soft cry escaped Vel, tears escaping her eyes.

  “Amalia!” she called, and scrambled up to her feet, placing her eyes again back on the chicken. It didn’t move, just stared. Inching to the side, where she hoped to find Amalia and Aden, Vel felt the rubble of Sigurd’s remains beneath her feet, crunching. Each crackling was like a knife to her very soul, her shoes grinding over bits and pieces of her . . . her . . . family.

  I brought them here. I did this. I . . . I killed him, all in an attempt to save Edard. The tears spilled from her eyes like a waterfall did from a ledge. She could barely contain the sob that threatened to escape her, reaching out with a hand and waving it back and forth. For a long moment, she searched, knees growing weak at each crunch. Finally, her hand hit stone.

  Please, please just be a wall, he thought, her breath stuttering out of her. She ran her fingers over the stone. It rounded until it came to a round corner in the opposite direction, then peaked in a bulbous shape. A nose. Placing her other hand on the face she’d found, Vel explored it, finding soft features, even delicate eyelashes that broke off at her touch. Thin eyebrows, a small forehead, and flat hair, melding into the shoulders. Amalia.

  “No,” Vel said, closing her eyes, though it made no difference. Facing away from the chicken as she was, she’d been plunged in darkness. After a long moment, the heat of her face fighting the cold of the dark, she opened her eyes, then turned, looking at the chicken. It still stood in place, and its eyes glinted with a red color for a brief moment.

  A creak sounded behind Vel, and she gasped, reaching out to catch Amalia. Her hand swiped at air where the singer once was, and a crash echoed in the darkness. Rubble scattered with the grating sound of stone upon stone.

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  “No!” Vel screamed, dropping to her knees and patting at the ground until her hands found a foot, solid like stone, but clearly Amalia’s boot, broken at the ankle in jagged edges.

  She was gone too.

  Vel’s shoulders slumped, and she buried her face into her hands, wishing it was all just some sort of dream, one she would just wake up from any moment. “It can’t be . . .” she sobbed into her hands, can’t be real!

  “Please,” she shook her head, the loss of both Sigurd and Amalia agonizingly heavy in her chest and sickening in her stomach. A part of her wanted to just keel over, let all the contents of her stomach escape her, as if that would help relieve the pain, but it didn’t come. Instead, it sat, festering. All she could do was sob. Sob and hope that Aden was somehow still alive.

  He would have said something by now, a little voice told her, sitting at the back of her head. It was her own voice, the one that made her doubt herself. It was the same one that reminded her that she was just a little girl, or that she was in over her head. Or how many times it had dragged her down for the deaths of others. She’d killed a man, out on the sea, for the very first time. She had come to terms with needing to do things like that, so had it plagued her still?

  She killed a knight, and she would have killed more, even knowing that voice would plague her, the one she buried deep down. Constantly digging and burying, constantly saying it was her or them, and then choosing herself.

  Or choosing Edard, she thought, her tears numb now, their sound like a patter against the broken pieces of Amalia below her. By choosing Edard, she’d chosen to put so many lives at risk, many of which were already lost outside the temple. And now, inside as well.

  Amalia and Sigurd were gone, and the hope that Vel held out for Aden dwindled like a fire smoldered by water. She pushed herself up to shaky feet, dropping her hands from her face and reaching out to touch more stone. The crown of Aden’s head, then down to his sunken eyes, open and wide. She imagined the fear he must have felt, whatever it was that consumed him before he turned to stone.

  “My friends, my family . . .” Vel said, her voice hoarse and soft. She closed her eyes as Aden’s face fled her hand with a familiar creaking and crash. She hadn’t pushed him. No one did. Rather, he just fell and shattered. “It can’t be real. This can’t be real!”

  Velmira whipped around, and while she told herself that she wouldn’t cry anymore, the tears still fled her, and the ache still pounded in her chest like an unforgiving battering ram. She faced the chicken, its stare voidless, yet threatening. It must have done this, it and its eerie flames. Its ugly face and that vile stare! It. Did. This!

  Relinquishing a loud, guttural cry, Vel screamed at the beast, the sound echoing back at her, and the ground rumbling until it stiffened. No, she stiffened. Her joints tightened, and she could feel them grind as she tried to place one foot in front of the other. They slowed, forcing her arm to freeze in the air before her as she held her hand out towards the chicken. One [fireball], just one.

  Her body grew cold, heat leaving her and moving towards her hand, and . . . then it was just gone. No fire. Nothing. Instead, the cold persisted, biting at her toes, then the rest of her feet. It climbed, moving to her ankles and creeping up her skin. Biting, oh, it was so biting, and once it had bitten a part of her, that part was gone, frozen in place.

  Vel didn’t need to reach down to know what was happening, not that she could, nor did she need to see it. She closed her eyes, shutting out the chicken from her sight as more tears left her. They fell, and instead of water hitting stone, she heard something hard hit the ground, almost as if her very tears were turning to pebbles as they fell.

  The biting, however, with her eyes closed, has stopped at her knees. She no longer looked at the leering chicken. Was that it? All she had to do? But she couldn’t keep her eyes closed forever. Maybe if I just didn’t look at it, she thought, and opened her eyes.

  A pair of voidless eyes stared straight into hers, floating in the air directly before her. Vel let out a scream, and tilted back, hearing a crack just beneath her. She felt pain surge through both of her legs, and she cried out when she hit the uneven stone littered ground. The stones dug into her back, almost stabbing into her, and she laid her head back.

  The blue light fell, indicating to her that the chicken had dropped to the ground. Without giving it much thought, she looked towards it, and saw her feet, standing upright on either side of it, stony and broken and the knees.

  “Help . . .” she prayed, and looked down at her legs. Stubs. Bloodless and broken. The stone crept up over her thighs, then touched her hips. She wasn’t looking at the beast, and still she turned to stone. So, she laid back, closing her eyes, hoping for the spread to end, and for the cold to stop consuming her.

  It did, leaving Vel to . . . to do what? she thought, each agonizing moment stretching on. There was nothing she could do. Her magic hadn’t worked, perhaps consumed by the darkness. Her friends were dead, and . . . Edard might not even be alive. What if all of this was for nothing? she thought. The lives lost . . . It’s my fault. She shouldered the pain and responsibility, feeling it heavy on her heart.

  If Sigurd were here, what would he say? she wondered, and sobbed out when that little voice in the back of her head reminded her that he wasn’t here. He was dead. He couldn’t tell her a thing because he was dead and it was all. Her. Fault.

  Unable to shoulder the agony anymore, Vel opened her eyes, staring up at the chicken that now stood directly over her head, leering down at her with those voidless eyes, alight by blue flames. A freeze swept over Vel’s body, nearly instantaneous as her stomach froze, limiting how much she could breathe. With each shallow breath, she gazed up into that void, feeling her fingers freeze. Wrists, shoulders, chest . . . She stopped breathing entirely, completely restricted. Her mouth hung open, trying to gasp for breath, and eventually, that froze, never allowing any air to come in in the first place.

  The blue light faded as her nose froze, clogging her nostrils. She even felt her hair freeze at the roots, all closing into her eyes. Darkness moved over them, gradually blackening out the fiery blue chicken until there was nothing left.

  Nothing left . . . of her.