Chapter twenty-one
Phu-Si-YantongTorchlight blazed orange down the slimed walls of the pit, and reflected like a sunset of Earth from the stagnant water pools at the bottom. The suffocating heat and dampness wrapped around my falling body. Steam gushed coiling. Head over heels, spinning arms and legs, I fell. I hit.
The torch went flame first into the water and was instantly extinguished.
The breath was knocked out of me and it was vitally necessary to blink away the phantasmal afterimages of the torchlight, to see in the ghastly corpse-light, to see the syatra, to see and dodge.
The first tentacle wriggled across a mud patch as I staggered up, treading through the hot water upon a thick crust of bones, human bones. Piles of skulls formed lodgments, thighbones terraces, vertebrae, scat
