The Exorcist Doctor

Thirty minutes passed as Vivi danced and danced along the Endless Masquerade, and her calves were definitely starting to ache.

Gael, unfortunately, was having the time of his life. He’d learned just enough of the steps to avoid trampling her feet now, and somehow that’d given him the confidence of a man born with music in his bones. Every time a server slid past them with a tray, he accepted something: wine. Little sugared meats. A black pastry filled with glowing cream. Another glass of wine. Some tiny vegetable thing skewered on a silver toothpick. More wine. By the time Vivi guided him through their seventieth pass beneath the moth chandelier’s wandering light, he was basically eating a full meal and dancing at the same time.

“Ye shuld eat sommething tuh,” he said, mouth half-full as he took another glass off passing tray. “Naht hungry?”

“Not really,” she muttered back.

“Shame.”

She wanted to tell him to stop because dancing while eating wasn’t good for his body, but she had to save her breath. Her attention had stayed fixed on the ant-masked lady up on the lower balcony for the entire past half an hour, which meant the moment the lady straightened and looked as though she’d spotted something down in the crowd, Vivi noticed.

The lady left the balcony.

“She’s moving,” Vivi whispered.

“Who?” Gael said, mid-chew.

“The lady. The collaborator.”

“Oh.” He finished what had to be his eighteenth glass of wine, spun the glass onto another server’s tray as they passed by, and blinked in the lady’s direction. “Uh, right. Let’s go then. Lead the way.”

Vivi tightened her grip on his hand and adjusted their path towards one of the staircases along the wall. Simply walking against the current of the crowd would’ve made them obvious, so they danced their way through instead, turning, capering, and sliding between dozens of laughing and chattering pairs with as much grace as she could force into Gael’s limbs.

As they neared the stairs, she risked a glance over her shoulder. Cara and Fergal were still visible across the ballroom, though Cara still seemed to be quietly scolding Fergal through a clumsy turn. Evelyn and Liorin were still there too, bickering and arguing while moving with enough enthusiasm to make several older guests frown at them. But Maeve and Jin were gone—most likely, they’d already gone upstairs already to search for the laboratory.

Please be safe, Jin.

But Jin would probably scowl if he knew she prayed for him. Gael tugged her lightly back into focus.

“Eyes forward, Spider. Crush on your own time.”

Her ears warmed. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You were thinking very loudly.”

They followed the masked lady up the stairs and into a corridor where the music softened, but hadn’t vanished yet. Even here, outside of the main ballroom, the Endless Masquerade continued. Dancers filled the corridors. Smaller rooms opened along the walls, each with their own guests, their own private negotiations, and their own little orbit of laughter and poison. The lady ahead moved as though she belonged to the music itself, twirling alone without looking strange and passing lightly between couples.

Vivi and Gael followed the same way.

“She’s… following that guy, I think,” Vivi whispered, dipping her head at a flushed, drunken man in a lavish coat, who was dancing by himself a few couples in front of the lady. “Wherever he’s dancing towards, she’s also heading.”

“You sure?”

“I… don’t know?”

So they followed and followed, and it wasn’t until a mere ten seconds after Vivi made her claim that she started to notice a change in the lady’s dance. The lady, having drifted closer to the drunken man, started to take clumsier steps. One wrong turn, two off-rhythm steps, and then a soft stumble that was so obviously faked—and then the lady bumped into the man.

The man laughed, catching her elbow. She laughed too, her head dipping just enough to seem bashful. Before long, the two strangers locked hands to begin dancing as a pair, and it was like they’d been together all along.

“Damn.” Gael whistled. “Good eye.”

While Vivi felt her ears warming again, the lady started speaking to the man in a hushed voice. It was impossible to make out what they were talking about from this distance—and with a chattering, noisy crowd between them—but when the man started grinning and the lady returned it with a sweet smile, even Vivi, who considered herself relatively sheltered, could guess what it was the lady just offered.

Before long, the two of them danced at a faster pace through the corridor, and it was obvious the lady was leading the man.

The two of them followed.

The deeper they moved, the harder it became for Vivi to keep track of where they were. Corridors bent right four times in a row, but they didn’t end up where they started. Rooms opened and closed around them. Staircases appeared in places that made no architectural sense. The music shifted with every turn, sometimes muffled by thick curtains, sometimes bright again as they passed smaller dance chambers, but one thing that was for sure was that the guests were thinning gradually, and so was the laughter.

The lady guided the drunken man into a quieter wing, and when they finally spun into a relatively quiet corridor, she reached behind her dress.

Vivi and Gael were just around the corner, and the man was mid-speech when the lady drove a small syringe into his neck with a sharp tick. Then the man’s upper body went limp almost instantly—but his legs kept moving. His feet continued the dance. He slumped against the lady’s hold, head drooping beside her shoulder, yet his lower body stepped and twirled, obedient to whatever chemical horror now governed him.

The lady adjusted her grip smoothly, smiling through her mask as she continued guiding him along the hall.

Nobody around them noticed the man was out.

“Saintess,” Vivi whispered. Her heart was thumping in her chest. “What’d she just stab him with?”

Gael’s head tilted. “Oh. I know that. It’s the marionette draught.”

“The what?”

“I’ve used it before. It’s pretty gnarly stuff.”

“What could you have possibly used something like that on before?”

“You don’t wanna know.”

That, Vivi decided, meant she absolutely didn’t want to know, so they kept following the lady instead. Down and deeper into the building they went, and soon the corridors narrowed and darkened enough that only a few wall candles remained to ward off the dark. The lady and her half-conscious captive were dancing alone now. They’d somehow managed to spin their way into the rarest corridor in the entire building—one devoid of any other guests—so Gael pulled Vivi behind a corner as the lady started looking around, as though checking for any observers.

Once she felt she wasn’t being followed, she stopped right next to a section of wall that looked entirely ordinary, and tugged one of the candle sconces.

The candle dipped like a lever.

With a soft mechanical groan, the section of the wall rotated inward. The lady dragged the limp man through the hidden opening, still moving with a dancer’s ease, and a moment later the wall rotated closed again, leaving nothing but candlelight and carved paneling behind.

For a few seconds, neither Vivi nor Gael moved.

Then Gael grinned.

“... Welp,” he said. “We’ve got it.”

Their dancing finally stopped. Relief hit Vivi’s legs so suddenly she almost wobbled, but they hurried forward quietly, not wanting to get spotted by other patrons. Once they did, Gael quickly reached the candle sconce and yanked it, revealing the rotating hidden wall again.

No hesitation. Gael slipped in first, and—fearing being left behind—Vivi dipped in with him just as the wall closed behind them with a low rumble.

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For a second, there was nothing but darkness.

“That was easy,” Gael said cheerily. “Let’s go—”

“I can’t see,” Vivi whispered.

Silence.

Then he said, “Oh. Right. You don’t have night-vision lenses.”

Something clicked at his side, and a pale white glow bloomed from the gloom lantern clipped near his hip. The light spread weakly but steadily, revealing a narrow stairwell descending before them in a spiral.

“…Creepy,” she whispered.

“Very,” he agreed, sounding delighted. “It’s excellent mood, though.”

They began descending. The stairs were narrow enough that Vivi had to keep one hand near the wall and her dress gathered slightly in the other. Gael’s pale lanternlight flickered over damp stone, exposing old scratches, patches of mildew, and the occasional rusted seam where metal braces had been fitted into the structure for stability. It was obvious the people who built this passage weren’t the same people who built the building outside, so she listened for footsteps below, for voices, or just for any signs of the masked lady and the man she was kidnapping.

But there was nothing once again.

Either the stairs went very deep, or the lady had moved far faster than someone dragging a limp man should’ve been able to move.

Vivi kept count of how far down they travelled at first. Ten steps. Twenty. Thirty. Then she lost track when the spiral tightened and her nerves began pressing her thoughts together. Even the muffled music from the Endless Masquerade faded above them until it became less sound than memory.

“By my count, we’ve already gone deeper than the ground floor,” Gael muttered. “Wanna make bets on how deep this actually goes?”

But the stairs ended before Vivi could answer. One moment, the spiral passage was squeezing them down through damp stone and stale darkness—and in the next, it opened into a hall so vast that Vivi nearly forgot the threat chasing her nerves.

She stopped at the final step, one hand still gripping her gathered dress, and stared.

... Whoa.

A catacomb hall stretched before them, dimly lit by candles set inside hundreds of skulls mounted along the walls. Their flames trembled in hundreds of hollow eye sockets, casting a cold gold light across stone pillars, high arches, dozens of floors, and row upon row of coffins stacked into the walls like bricks in a cathedral for the dead. The ceiling soared overhead, disappearing into shadow before any light could reach it. It almost looked too large to exist beneath a ballroom—too solemn and too old-looking—but her throat tightened when she noticed something about the architecture.

“It’s like…the Larval Crypts,” she whispered. “The great catacombs of Vharnveil.”

Gael angled his gloom lantern higher, lenses glinting as he looked around. “You’ve been?”

“Just once. My parents took me and my siblings there when I was younger to pay our respects to our grandparents.” Her gaze moved along the coffins, unease gathering beneath her ribs. “The architecture here is… really similar.”

“Well, I’m not surprised.” Gael shrugged. “Bleakhearth’s always been Vharnveil’s gutter-born mirror. Whoever built this place probably saw Vharnveil’s catacombs and thought ‘yes, but what if we added worse lighting and more crime upstairs?’”

That might’ve made her smile a little, but as she looked to one of the nearest coffins by their side, she felt that something about it was… wrong.

So she stepped closer to the coffin, drawn by a glint in its lid. Unlike the ancient stone coffins she remembered from Vharnveil, this one had a glass panel set into the front. Dust filmed the golden edges, but the center had been wiped clean enough to see through.

Inside lay a man who was unconscious, but very much not dead, and her vision pulsed red the moment she laid eyes on him.

She recoiled, hand flying to her mouth. “Gael.”

But Gael had already noticed as well. His head turned slowly, his lenses sweeping across the walls, across the stacked coffins, and across the plentiful glass lids with skull candles and shadowed alcoves giving the catacombs a haunted look.

Red pulse after red pulse. Coffins upon coffins, each one holding a dormant Myrmur Host.

Vivi’s stomach dropped.

Then a nervous woman’s voice came from somewhere ahead.

“... What are you two doing here?”

Then a nervous woman’s voice came from somewhere ahead. Both of them whirled towards the far end of the catacomb hall. When they saw nothing there—the floor stretching empty between endless pillars and coffins—their eyes naturally went up.

Above them, perched on a dangling chandelier, stood the masked lady.

Though, she no longer looked composed.

Upstairs, she’d been all careful grace and predatory calm. Down here, beneath the bones and coffins, she was twitching and shivering as though something inside her skin kept pulling strings too hard. One hand worried at her dress sleeve. Her shoulders jerked at uneven intervals. Even from this distance, Vivi could tell her posture had changed as well—from confident and beautiful to hunched, feverish, and too sharp around the edges. That healthy elegance had completely fallen away like stage makeup washed off by sweat.

Was she given a drug, too, so she could hide the symptoms until she could drag her kidnapped people down here?

Because there was no doubt about it now: the people lying in those coffins were all artificial turned into Myrmur Hosts.

The lady bit at one of her nails, mask dipping toward them. “No, no, no, this… uh, this won’t do. He’ll be mad at me if he learns I let people in here.” Her voice trembled, then lifted into an anxious plea as she pointed at the stairs behind them. “Please leave?”

Gael stared up at her. “No.”

The lady flinched. “Please? Please, please, please?”

“Just get off that chandelier first,” Gael said cheerily, waving her down casually. “Let’s talk.”

“No. No, I… I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“You look evil.”

“Well, I get that a lot.”

“If I come down, you’ll… you’ll definitely beat me up, right?”

“Drat,” he whispered. “How did she know?”

Before Vivi could interject, the lady spread both her arms and jerked her head so far back—and so quickly—that Vivi heard the crack in her spine.

“Come,” she whispered. “I’m cold.”

Strands of pinkish-purple flesh immediately burst from beneath her skin.

Vivi stumbled back a step, breath catching. The strands didn’t explode outward in the huge, monstrous bloom she’d come to expect from Blight-Class transformations. Instead, they slipped out like living ribbons, wrapping around the lady’s limbs, torso, throat, and mask with a sickening tenderness. Layer after layer formed around her, shaping armor instead of a hulking second body. Chitin hardened over flesh. Segmented plates locked into place. Four lean arms unfolded from her sides, and when the ant-like Blight-Class Myrmur eventually covered her completely, Vivi couldn’t say it’d swallowed her.

Neither could Gael, who looked at the lady with just as much surprise.

“Huh,” he muttered. “That’s the first time I’ve seen a Myrmur answering its Host’s command.”

And it was also the first time Vivi had seen a human-sized Blight-Class Myrmur.

The ant-like Myrmur crouched atop the chandelier, now more red ant than woman, and flames quickly ignited across its entire body. They crawled across its arms and shoulders without burning the flesh beneath, turning it into a living bonfire, and with a flick of one clawed hand, it scattered more embers across the catacombs.

Embers struck the unlit braziers lining the hall, and more fire bloomed as the catacomb came alive in violent orange light.

Glass shattered everywhere. Coffins burst open in a cascade of shrieks. Warbling waves of pinkish-purple flesh spilled out of them and manifested externally, forming more ant-like Myrmurs with normal height but terrible poise. Each of them had four arms, red-black chitin, and twitching mandibles hidden behind human faces. Their snarls and screeches multiplied, echoing through the catacomb until Vivi could barely hear her own breath.

All Blight-Class Myrmurs.

There are… twenty of them? Thirty?

Gael grimaced, which was how Vivi knew the situation had become truly horrible.

“It seems our man has been up to no good with Myrmur experiments down here,” he mumbled. “He’s managed to create this many low-rank Blight-Class Myrmurs?”

And while the ant-like Myrmurs dropped from coffin shelves, unfolded from broken glass, crawled along walls, and spread across the hall to slowly surround the two of them, Gael reached back to adjust a valve on his Vile Canister.

“Vivi,” he said.

Her throat was dry. “Y-Yes?”

“Go upstairs to help out your man. He’s probably fighting something as well with my dearest wife, and he’ll need your blood.”

“But… what about you?”

“I’ve so got this.”

“That’s thirty Blight-Class Myrmurs—”

“Yeah, and I’m pretty tired already. Go.”

Vivi hesitated for only a little longer.

Then she turned and ran.

Her shoes struck the spiral steps in sharp, uneven beats as she fled upward, gathering her dress in both hands so it wouldn’t drag and trip her. The catacomb’s cold breath seemed to follow her, clinging to her skin even as she climbed. Behind and beneath her, the first clash of violence broke open—chitin striking stone, something cracking, something shrieking, someone laughing—and the sounds chased her up the stairwell like a living thing.

That masked lady was controlling the Myrmur, wasn’t she?

The Host spoke, and the Myrmur obeyed. That’s now how it’s supposed to work.

What’s going on down here?

What are they doing?

But more importantly, what was she doing?

Running away again?

… Is this really all I’m going to do?

Her chest heaved. Her hands trembled around the fabric of her dress. She was afraid. Of course she was afraid. Only an idiot wouldn’t be afraid after seeing a small army of Blight-Class Myrmurs bloom out of coffins in a secret catacomb beneath a never-ending dance. If she could have her way, she’d run straight back to the ballroom, look for the exit, and go somewhere bright—somewhere high, somewhere Vharnish and clean where monsters stayed in distant reports instead of reaching for her with chitined hands.

But she couldn’t shake Gael’s voice out of her head as she ran.

Act confident and you’ll be confident.

Act confident.

Act. Confident.

Everything else could show up late.

So she clenched her jaw, forced her trembling shoulders back even as she ran, and tried to make her breath steadier than it felt.

I’m… I’m coming, Jin.