Chapter 36: Quinn

Quinn wanted nothing more than to follow Wraith and Niamh up topside, he wanted to listen them bitch and moan about what an asshole he was.

He sighed and entered the cave he knew he wouldn’t be leaving. There was no way he could survive one daemon, by now there were probably more.

He shrugged and muttered “Fuck it” started down the passages of limestone gloom with the grim, efficient mindset of an executioner. He called the other to the fore. Fully merged now, his perceptions of the environment quadrupled. He followed the heartbeats of the remaining guards.

In the alcoves and side chambers, he found them: the daemon-tainted beings, their movements drugged and clumsy. When he came upon them and ended them, the fighting was less like combat and more like slaughter. The Dragon’s Razor hissed through the air, a silver blur that took their heads as if he were farmer scything his wheat for the threshing. They didn’t fight with skill; they simply surged forward with mindless compulsion, wielding whatever tool was at hand or, failing that, a rock.

He pressed deeper. The kill tally grew. Orcs, trolls, goblins, and even the high-born Sidhe—all reduced to the same shattered, weeping husks. Quinn carved a path through the “servants” until the thralls were gone. Only the architects remained.

Quinn paused at the threshold of the final chamber. The air was thick with the scent of ozone and the copper smell of blood. Faint bioluminescence clung to the walls, casting a sickly green pallor over a web of blood-painted sigils on the limestone floor.