Her opponent was downed for the moment. She looked back the way my flashlight shone, and when she saw what I was shining at, she screamed, “RUN!”

“What? What is it?” But she was already running, stopping only to grab at my shoulder and haul at my jacket. Indigo was retreating, too, more slowly than Lantern-Eyes. The surviving manikins, all bloodied, gathered in a line of pale corpse-figures snarling after us. And then one by one they seemed to notice the thing down the hall, and they went still and quiet, backing away.

I didn’t know what triggered it. If I was honest, it was probably me; Lantern-Eyes and Indigo were both warriors, light on their feet. I was, at absolute best, an amateur linguist. Or I could blame it on the manikins—it’s always nice to have a convenient monster around to take the blame. But regardless, one of us made some sound we shouldn’t have, or moved some way that wasn’t wise, because the stony rolling mass stopped rolling, went very still.

And then slender yellow tendrils shot out of the mass, shooting towards walls, ceiling, floor, crawling along the surface they landed on, moving with incredible speed directly towards us.

It reached the manikins first—they were nearer. My flashlight beam saw a tendril of yellow land on pale dead flesh, and start to sizzle. The manikin shrieked, a high and piercing sound I wouldn’t have thought it capable of making, and tried to run or roll away but the tendril was spreading over its skin like water through a cloth. Wherever it touched, the flesh sizzled.

The hallway was live with shrieking, the manikins were running or falling, skin melting, being dragged in towards that still mass of stone, and the yellow tendrils were coming down the hall towards us.

Lantern-Eyes yanked on my jacket again. “Run, Sean!” she shouted, and I hadn’t even realized I’d stopped, staring in horror. Indigo was still between me and the monsters, his sword out and his shoulders set.

A tendril shot out from the mass of stone and Indigo swiped his sword through the air, slicing it in half. When the severed piece hit the ground it spilled a clear gel that hissed upon contact with the metal.

Even running, the tendrils had almost caught up to us. I stomped on one that had slid past Indigo, lightning-fast, to reach me. It popped underneath my boot. Lantern-Eyes slammed her club against the ground to crush a particularly thick branch of yellow tendrils before it could reach her feet.

I shone my flashlight back the way we had come and saw that yellow threads covered the ceiling, the walls, the floor. They were dripping down, quivering. The slow-rolling rock down at the end of the hall rolled towards us again with bones carried along in its bulk. Where the manikins had been, there was nothing but sizzling yellow masses, dripping a dark liquid onto the floor, smelling like melted fat.

“Move,” Indigo told me, and then swiped his blade over my head. I ducked as severed tendrils rained down on me.