There’s a thwump of the air, and then something impossibly heavy smashes against my side, and my nerves cry out as I spiral head over heels in the air. Something serrated catches me by the leg and shakes me back and forth, my right hip joint coming loose and leaving the rest of my body to fall. I hit the ground with a piercing jolt of pain and a sickening thud, and with my remaining limbs I manage to sit up through the pulsing agony of the majority of my bones being broken. It’s a miracle my spine can still hold me at all.

“O-Okay!” I hold my hand up. “Okay, you can have that leg! That’s fine. Hated it anyway. Goes great with a side of dungeon dirt, I bet.”

A low, clicking growl moves through the earth, so deep and strong it buzzes the pebbles on the ground around my rapidly healing body.

“Listen! I understand that you’re angry!” I wince as my leg starts to grow back, the bones pushing out and the flesh realigning. “But what if I told you I could make the voice go away?”

The growl goes silent all of a sudden, the pebbles going still. Can it really understand me?

“The voice—the one in your head that forces you to do things,” I insist. “I can teach you to make it go away.”

There’s a dense moment of breathing—the valkerax’s heaviness and my own shallow panic. Nothing moves. Or if it does, I can’t see it.

I don’t know where in the afterlife Yorl the madman is, but it better be somewhere outside this godsdamn chamber. There’s a keening cry, the sound of an animal being tortured, and the ground shakes beneath me as the valkerax thrashes. I brace myself for it to attack me again, rip me apart, but the thrashing quiets eventually.

“The voice—” A voice like a furious ocean rumbles through the darkness, so loud and achingly old—like an ancient wood door creaking open and closed—that it drowns out my every thought, my every other sense. “The angry voice, the night voice, the eternal voice. The voice like a song never goes. Never flies away. Want to fly away, but it’s always laughing, deep inside. Spiders in an egg waiting to hatch.”

The words are near nonsense, but my breath catches. “You—you can understand me?”

The growl crescendos, and I hold up my arms like they’ll do any good against its thousands of fangs. Its serrated maw still haunts me most. I’m willing to bet dying in there would achieve at least number five on my most painful deaths list.

“I swear, I can teach you how to make that voice be quiet!” I shout.