His hands, warped and withered into claws, flexed impotently for a heartbeat, then closed, tenderly, around her waist. Twilight clung to him and kissed with all her strength, spending herself entirely in that exchange, as though her existence would cease the instant she broke away.
The stillness stretched. They stood in the eye of a magical storm, the wrath of the Abyss raging about them, but neither looked away. Gestal's power faltered and faded, and they heard two dimly audible hisses echoing around them-hisses that became roars.
Liet pulled away from Twilight's lips then, and his blue eye shone like the rising sun in the sky after a storm at dawn, the green like the seas of the west. His flesh might have been blasted, his health stripped and torn away, but there was more love in those eyes than Twilight had ever known or dreamed. And when he reached up and caressed her face, his touch was soft despite his petrified skin.
Twilight knew she had saved him-that he was free of Gestal forever-that he understood, and more than that, accepted all. And for a heartbeat, all was perfect.
For a heartbeat.
His eyes shifted to confusion, then to pain. He looked at Twilight, his lips forming a question that would never come. He coughed, and blood splashed from his desiccated lips to strike Twilight's face. Then, with a sigh, he staggered and fell, his fingers whispering down her cheek and leaving a scarlet trail.
"Daltyrex," he murmured as he slumped to the floor. "Why?"
Twilight could not move her left hand, which had been touching his face, nor her right, until the man she had known alternately as Liet and Gestal lay crumpled at her feet.
Then, as though a bolt of lightning struck her, the elf raised her scarlet-drenched right hand. Holding Davoren's stiletto up to her face, she collapsed to her knees.
She smeared Liet's blood across her cheek and sobbed. Then she hurled the deadly blade aside, cradled his body in her arms, and wept into his chest.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
She sat there for a long time. Then, after what seemed days, or years, a shadow loomed at the door, making panting and wheezing sounds.
If the elf heard the shadow, she made no sign. She merely sat there, cradling her friend in silence. The blood had ceased to flow, and the places where it had drenched the elf's garments had hardened into a firm hold. They might have been bound together, she and the corpse, their blood and flesh and hearts linked.
Not that it would matter to the creature stalking her.
It was ravaged: battered, bruised, broken in arm, leg, and rib. A withered left arm, formerly muscular and sleek, flopped uselessly at its side. The cracked and poorly mended legs propelled it at a ponderous gait, half-limping, half-sliding. The once smooth body had been ruined beyond repair.
The thing loomed over Twilight where she sat, near the pit full of dying flames and beneath menacing, stained spikes. It reached for her shoulder with one arm.
"Gargan…" she murmured.
It growled low. She turned her head and looked up without comprehension.
"Kill you! Kill you, pretty elf!" the troll spat, showering the elf's face with ribbons of bile and spittle. His mad eyes streamed tears and blood in equal measure. The troll raised the splintered warhammer high in his spindly arm. "You no kill Tlork! Tlork kill you! Tlork kill you!"
A black blade burst from his chest and Tlork froze. For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then blood and acid leaked from the wound, hissing down to the ground, where they spattered only a thumb's breadth from the elf's bare feet. She seemed not to notice.
Then, without a word, Tlork stumbled back, wrenched away.
The troll gave a shriek as he went, his slowly reknitting limbs flailing on all sides, but to no avail. The blade ripped free and scythed about, cutting Tlork's torso in two. Over the edge the halved troll went, shrugged from the blade, into the twin pits of Demogorgon's throats. The troll screamed and roared and babbled all the way down, until the beast thudded to a rest, shaking the chamber. There he lay coughing and retching, impaled on a dozen man-high spikes.
Foxdaughter blinked up at her savior.
"Should not," said Gargan, fighting for breath, "gloat."
At the lip of the tunnel that led out of Demogorgon's depths, Twilight shut her eyes against the fearsome desert wind. Gargan, bruised and bleeding from dozens of wounds, limped at her side, his arm wrapped protectively around her slim shoulders. His face, despite a single eye that had swollen shut, shone with serenity, as always.
How Twilight envied that, and always would.
"You pause," the goliath said, looking away. "Come."
"Where?" Twilight asked softly, tonelessly.
"I do not know," said Gargan. "But we must go."
Twilight's eyes closed. "Ever onward," she whispered. "Ever away."
Even when they had climbed the stones and stood at the edge of the desert, with nothing around them for as far as they could see, the elf could still feel him-still taste his lips, sense his fingers tracing her spine, hear his loving whisper. Twilight wanted to struggle, to break away from Gargan's grasp and run back down that tunnel.
"You set him free, Foxdaughter," said Gargan, as he embraced her tightly.
Twilight bit her lip, uncertain.
"Why did you come for me?" She looked at him. "Your pattern? Your fate?"
Gargan shrugged. "You are the Fox."
Then he began to hum-a song of goliaths, she realized- and sing. His voice carried her away, far from darkness and blood, toward the distant, white horizon.
He put out his hand.
She smiled.
EPILOGUE
At the bottom of the deepest shaft, broken into thousands of pieces, impaled on dozens of gnarled spikes, the fiend-stitched troll slowly, painfully regenerated.
Yes, it would take days before the bits of torn, greenish flesh could find their way back to each other and grow together once more, but as Tlork lay neither in acid nor in flame, he would eventually be reborn. Only a few universes of pain awaited him in the meantime, but Tlork was used to it. With stoic, brute will, the troll would endure.
For when it was done, Tlork would find that gray-faced thing and his little elf pet and smash them both. Yes, that's what he would do.
If only he could remember what they looked like.
Standing at the top of that shaft, the new master watched the agonizing process, his thoughts dwelling upon this labyrinth built over the fallen Negarath-the halls Demogorgon blessed, the darkness in which vileness dwelt, the depths of madness.
"The Depths of Madness," he said, his voice no longer slurred from missing teeth-teeth that had regrown, thanks to his fiendish powers. "A fitting name, perhaps."
His crimson and black robes were torn, but his wounds had largely healed. His fingers had grown back, too. Even his hair, formerly wild and tangled beyond the hope of redress, lay slicked back about his temples, except for a few stubborn spikes that hung over his eyebrows. His hands ached, but they would function fully with time, thanks to the potions he had found in Gestal's chambers.
More important was the red-purple flame that brewed around his fist-a reminder of enduring power. The gift of a devil, bought at the price of a soul.
Davoren Hellsheart allowed a tiny smile to play across his gray face. He could still hear the brute Gargan and the cruel Twilight shuffling, leaving the Depths of Madness behind them for the desert. Well, he was rid of them; they had served their purpose by destroying not one, but both of the Depths' former masters.
"I don't need them," he said to himself. "I don't need anyone."