Cel's hand froze mid-thrust, blade still buried in the tooth's socket.
Another tremor. The walls around him contracted slightly, muscle tensing beneath slick tissue.
'Shit.'
It was waking up.
He wrenched Silent Moon free and scanned the darkness, mind racing. The plan he'd formulated while carving teeth - what to do if the creature woke - crystallized with sudden urgency.
The nearest empty socket gaped perhaps three steps away, a hollow wound in the creature's flesh where he'd torn free a tooth. Dark. Deep enough to wedge himself in.
Cel dismissed Silent Moon with a thought. The blade dissolved into moonlight threads that unraveled and vanished, plunging him into absolute darkness. His left hand shot out, fingers finding the slick floor, using touch alone to orient himself.
Three steps. He counted them in his mind as he scrambled forward on hands and knees.
The floor bucked beneath him.
With purposeful motion, the creature surged forward. Cel's body pitched sideways as the throat tilted at a steep angle.
His fingers found the socket's edge.
Without hesitation, he pulled himself up and into the hollow wound. Wet flesh yielded around him as he squeezed into the space where bone had once anchored. The socket was deeper than expected - he had to wedge himself in completely, pressing his back against one side while his knees dug into the other.
Barely enough room. But enough.
The walls contracted around him.
Pressure built from all sides as the creature's muscles tensed, squeezing the socket closed like a fist. The meat pressed against his chest, his shoulders, his skull - not crushing, but confining. Holding him in place with suffocating firmness.
Cel forced himself to breathe slowly through his nose. Unease clawed at the edges of his thoughts, but he shoved it down.
'Why did it wake?'
Had it finally noticed the missing teeth? Felt the wounds in its jaw and realized something was wrong?
Or was this unrelated? Had it simply finished digesting its previous meal and decided to hunt again?
The creature dove.
The motion was immediate and violent - a massive lunge that sent Cel's stomach lurching. His body compressed further into the socket as momentum pressed him backward, the flesh around him flexing and shifting with each powerful movement.
Through stone. Through earth. The same terrifying descent he'd experienced before, except now he wasn't dangling by a frozen hand.
The teeth he'd carved free tumbled past his hiding spot. Their weight was insignificant to the creature, but Cel heard them clattering down the throat like massive dice thrown by something vast and indifferent.
Debris began to flow - stone fragments, packed earth , ash torn loose by the creature's passage through the Ashlands. All of it funneled through the open maw in a deadly stream, whistling past the socket where Cel pressed himself as flat as possible.
A chunk of stone struck the tooth next to his hiding spot with a crack that made his ears ring. Another grazed the socket's edge, so close he felt the displaced air against his face.
But he was safe.
Hidden in this hollow he'd created, protected by the very flesh he'd wounded.
The creature twisted violently, spiraling through some obstacle. Cel's world became pure sensation - pressure from all sides, the sickening lurch of his stomach as gravity lost meaning, the thunder of debris cascading through the throat around him.
His ribs ached where the socket walls compressed them. His left hand throbbed where the hilt's friction had worn through skin. Even breathing required conscious effort as the confining space limited how deeply his lungs could expand.
But compared to hanging by a frozen hand while debris battered his skull?
This was luxury.
Time stretched. The journey felt endless - the creature diving deeper, then leveling out, then diving again in patterns Cel couldn't predict or understand.
His mind drifted to the question he'd been avoiding.
'What happens when it surfaces?'
The creature would open its mouth eventually. To breathe. To hunt. To do whatever massive predators did when they emerged from their lairs.
And when that happened, he'd have his chance.
The gap he'd carved was wide enough now. Not comfortable, not safe - but passable. He could squeeze through those remaining teeth if he was careful. If he was fast.
If luck favored him for once in this cursed realm.
But should he try?
He could stay. Carve out more teeth - another ten, maybe twenty. Make the gap wider, safer. Or use the time differently. Master the strength he couldn't yet control. Learn to wield Silent Moon properly.
The thought had its appeal.
As crazy as it sounded, he had everything here. Meat from the walls whenever hunger struck. Ice from Frostmark whenever thirst clawed at him. Safety from every possible threat that prowled the Ashlands above.
He could wait. Survive. Endure until... what?
'Until I perfect my technique? Until the worm dies of old age? Until I go mad from living in darkness?'
No.
His jaw clenched.
He hadn't survived a year of torture, hadn't endured the crystal maze's horrors, hadn't destroyed his own reflection and died beneath the moon - all just to rot away hiding in a worm's mouth.
The creature had given him shelter, yes.
But this wasn't living.
This was another kind of prison. Darker than the cell. Wetter than the cultists' stone floors. But a prison nonetheless.
And he was done with prisons.
When the creature surfaced, he would run. Escape through the gap he'd carved with his own blood and blade. Take his chances with whatever waited in the Ashlands rather than rot in this living tomb.
The decision settled over him like armor.
Not because escape was safe. Not because his odds were good.
But because his father still drew breath. Because Darian still wore the family crest. Because his mother still pretended she'd been helpless. Because the cultists still walked free. Every moment spent cowering in this living tomb was another moment they lived unpunished for what they did.
The thought was unbearable.
His fingers curled against the socket's flesh, nails digging in slightly.
'I'm coming for you. All of you.'
The creature's movement began to change. The diving motion shifted to something more horizontal. Leveling out.
Rising.
Cel's heart hammered against his ribs. His entire body tensed despite the confining space.
The ascent felt different - smoother, more controlled. Not the violent plunge he'd experienced before. Just the steady rise of something ancient and assured.
Muscles coiled tighter with each passing moment. His left hand flexed, testing his grip despite having nothing to hold. His legs pressed harder against the socket walls, ready to push off the instant freedom appeared.
The pressure around him shifted as the throat angled upward more steeply.
Then they broke through.
Cel felt it through the flesh surrounding him - the massive jaw unhinging, circular muscles relaxing their death grip. Faint light filtered through the gaps between teeth, growing brighter as the opening widened.
Silver light.
Moonlight.
The realization struck him a heartbeat before the sensation did.
Something ignited in his chest - not burning, not painful, but spreading. Like liquid lightning replacing blood in his veins. The exhaustion that had been pressing down on him lifted, simply gone, as if someone had cut the strings of a puppet and replaced them with something that didn't break.
His muscles didn't feel stronger. They felt eager. Ready. Like they'd been sleeping and had just woken hungry.
Lunar Vigor.
The moon was nearly full.
Cel's lips pulled back from his teeth in a feral grin.
The maw yawned wider - light flooding in, bright enough now that he could see the throat's ribbed walls, the remaining teeth like pillars framing the exit to freedom.
And in the center of it all, something fell through the opening.
Fast. Thrashing. Screaming.
A smaller creature - stone-like skin and too-long arms - tumbled into the maw in a tangle of limbs. Its eyeless head whipped side to side, needle teeth flexing in panic as it realized where it had landed.
The maw snapped shut.
Darkness slammed back down like a fist. The silver moonlight vanished behind rows of teeth, leaving only the faintest ghostly glow filtering through the gaps.
Cel froze in his socket, heart hammering, every muscle still coiled to spring—
A wet tearing sound, the scrape of claws on flesh, then a shriek - high and piercing, metal dragged across bone.
Through the dying light, Cel glimpsed movement - a silhouette thrashing wildly. One of its grotesquely long arms was torn away, spinning through the air before disappearing into the stomach below.
But instead of sliding down with it, the creature caught itself.
Its remaining claws sank deep into the throat's walls - into the gap where Cel had carved away the teeth.
If those teeth had still been there, the creature would have been shredded. Ground between hundreds of interlocking bone pillars as it tumbled toward the stomach - just like the other creature before.
But Cel had removed the grinder.
Created a gap wide enough to slip through.
It shrieked again, louder, and began tearing at the flesh that held it - ripping, clawing, destroying everything within reach in blind animal panic.
Blood sprayed. The throat convulsed.
Cel pressed himself deeper into the socket as the violence exploded around him.
He couldn't summon Silent Moon. The socket squeezed too tight - there wasn't room to wield a blade. His arms were pinned. His legs compressed.
And even if he could fight—
The worm's entire body shuddered.
Massive. Violent.
The pain from the smaller creature's claws had finally registered. The predator that had swallowed stone and earth without reaction, that hadn't even noticed twenty missing teeth, was writhing from wounds carved into its inner flesh.
The throat contracted. Expanded. Contracted again in peristaltic waves that tried to force the prey deeper, to crush it, to end the assault.
But the creature held fast, shrieking and tearing with renewed frenzy.
Cel's world became chaos. He was thrown against one side of the socket, then the other, as the worm thrashed.
The smaller creature's violence echoed through the darkness in layers of sound - shrieks, wet tearing, the grind of claws on flesh.
Fighting now would be suicide. Blind. Squeezed. While two creatures battled around him.
So Cel did the only thing he could.
He held on. Pressed himself into the socket's flesh. Made himself small, still, invisible.
And waited.
The worm's movement changed.
Rising again.
Fast.
The throat tilted sharply as the creature rocketed upward. Acceleration hammered through Cel's body. The smaller creature shrieked, claws tearing frantically at flesh.
Then they broke through.
The maw flew open.
Silver moonlight flooded in like a waterfall, so bright after the darkness that Cel's eyes watered. The night sky stretched above, stars scattered across black, and that nearly-full moon hanging like a pearl.
But he barely registered it.
Because the air had changed.
Heat rolled up from below - thick, chemical, wrong. The kind of heat that didn't come from fire but from something older. Something that dissolved rather than burned.
Red light ignited in the depths of the worm's throat.