As he watched in horror, Isaac saw the slake-moth pull Shadrach upright. Shadrach’s eyes rolled. He was concussed and in pain, coated in blood.

He began to slide down the wall again. The slake-moth spread his arms wide and then, so fast that it was completed before Isaac realized it had started, it thrust at him with two of its long, jagged claws, slamming them through Shadrach’s wrists and into the brick and concrete behind them, physically pinning him to the wall.

Shadrach and Isaac cried out together.

With its two bone-spears wedged in place, the moth reached out with its quasi-human hands and coaxed at Shadrach’s eyes. Isaac moaned at him to beware, but the big warrior was confused and in agony, and desperately looking around to see what it was that hurt him so.

Instead, he saw the slake-moth’s wings.

He quietened suddenly, and the slake-moth, its back still smouldering and cracking with the heat from the construct’s attack, leaned forward to feed.

Isaac looked away. He turned his head carefully, so that he would not see that probing tongue suck the sentience from Shadrach’s brain. Isaac swallowed and began to walk slowly across the room, towards the hole and the tunnel. His legs shook and he clenched his jaw. His only hope was to leave. That way, he might survive.

He was careful to ignore the slobbering, sucking noises, the liquid grunts of pleasure and the drip-drip-drip of saliva or blood that came from behind him. Isaac made his careful way towards the only exit in the room.

As he neared it, he saw the end of the metal pipe that attached to his helmet still lying undisturbed by the wall. He breathed a prayer. His mental essence was still leaking into the room. The slake-moth must know that there was another sentient being in there with it. The closer Isaac came to the tunnel, the closer he would be to the pipe’s outlet. It would no longer be misleading about his location.

And yet, and yet, it seemed that he was lucky. The slake-moth was so intent on drinking its fill and, judging by the sounds of ripping tissue, of wreaking revenge on poor Shadrach’s wracked body, that it was paying no attention to the terrified presence behind it. Isaac was able to walk on, past it, away, right to the lip of the burrow.

But there, as he stood poised, ready to drop quietly into the dark where the construct still waited and creep his way out into the dome and away from this nightmare nest, he felt a trembling beneath his feet.

He looked down.

The sound of frantic clawing feet was skittering through the tunnel towards him. He stepped back, utterly aghast. He felt the brickwork tremble deep inside.