He may have been the first down the stairs, but it was Kirsty who stood in front of him now, trying to peer in without being seen. She felt Joey's hand on her shoulder, and was vaguely aware of words being whispered between them, but she wasn't listening, too concerned for the two who had disappeared with Angelique. That horrible sound - what had she done to them?
There were words being spoken. It was the woman's voice - but she did not sound like a woman. Instead her voice had the same ethereal quality as the Prince's did, that same echo, but it was too far to the other end. Kirsty had felt disgust the first time she'd experienced his dimension, but in the face of this she was repulsed. Her hands flew to her ears, she found it too awful to bear, and she tried desperately to find anything in the dark.
It was Terri she spotted first - lying on the ground, the basement too dark to see her face properly. A lump formed in her throat. She tugged on Joey's sleeve.
"Oh, no," Joey whispered, and Kirsty nodded. Another shape finally became clear, sitting next to Terri. Kirsty swallowed - she knew that long blonde hair anywhere, even in the blues and blacks of the shadows in what felt less like a basement and more like an underworld.
"Look," the Prince said, "in her hands." She looked back at Tiffany and squinted. At first she couldn't see anything, and briefly wondered how he could in such pitch darkness. She leaned in a little closer, and as Tiffany's hands turned she saw a faint and all too familiar twinkle of darkened gold. The horrid prayer concluded, and the box crackled blue.
Kirsty started to sprint forward, but two hands caught her arms and pulled her back. She looked first at the Prince, before realizing he only had one hand on her; she turned to Joey and saw her holding the other. They looked to each other and exchanged a brief and terse nod.
"What are you doing?" She said, keeping her voice down even as panic threatened to swallow her. "Tiffany's in danger!"
"As you will be if we expose ourselves without strategy." The Prince was keeping his voice down as well, and sounded strange without his usual reverberations. He looked back at Tiffany, then her surroundings. "That prayer she was speaking, and these structures... they could possibly form a larger and more permanent Lament Configuration." Electricity sparked from Tiffany's hands outward, and Kirsty saw familiar patterns suddenly light up on the walls. They flickered like lighting before disappearing again. "Without somebody to maintain it, however..."
"...However?" Joey did not sound confident, and Kirsty looked up at the Prince with concern.
"There is no promise it will remain stable. She could cause a collapse." His expression turned grim. "I do not know what could happen to either of our worlds, and I do not wish to."
"So what do we do?" Kirsty looked back to Tiffany, feeling tears sting at the corners of her eyes. Before anyone could answer, though, something truly terrible cut through the silence - a voice that was not a woman's, not a man's, too terrible to be of anything on this Earth.
"Cenobite," it snarled so deep that Kirsty felt the word twist into her core, "I know you are here. Reveal yourself." Kirsty and Joey looked to the Prince, and he looked back at them.
"Be careful," he said, "and no tears, please. We will find a way." He turned away.
But Kirsty did let the tears fall as she felt Joey squeeze her hand, and they watched him step into the shadows, where Angelique's hellish grasp waited for him.
"You are foolish," the Princess snarled as she watched the Cenobite step into view, "to try and come back to me now." She could see the scratches in his leather, the slight lean in his gait, and it did bring the smallest touch of satisfaction to know that she had hurt him. He stood tall and stern, hands clasped behind his back, head held too high for one who should have been festering in defeat. "Perhaps those nails have dug into your brain." She laughed at that, though he did not respond. Something was wrong with his eyes, but she could not have cared less about that. "It is too late to stop my return," she continued, "or to have any chance of ruling by my side. It's a shame, really, you would have made such a fun toy."
Around them the room shifted - the mechanisms responding to their heart, their origin, feeling it move and changing in turn. She heard the click of metal sliding into metal and grinned, watching as the designs around them shifted in turn. The room contorted with the box, pieces slotting in and out of each other, slow and overwhelming in their movement. She observed them a moment longer before turning to the Cenobite, the witness to her reclamation of the Labyrinth's throne.
He did not respond, or react, or even change his expression. She snarled again.
"Well? Say something, Cenobite!"
"You are making a mistake," he said, "if you try to open the gates now, do you think they will stay open?" He took a step forward, and she readied her claw - oh, how she'd ached to tear something apart for the sheer enjoyment of it, how she'd missed the feeling of flesh coming apart from flesh. "Were you not going to use Merchant, Angelique? How can you take control of a world that has already been ruined?"
"That is not my name! If the door tears this world apart, so be it! I will build my empire on its ruins!" Two of the walls fell and the ground beneath them shook; her grin stretched across her face, and the Prince's expression changed oh-so-slightly in response. "Oh, poor Cenobite Prince," she cooed, "have you never seen a true creation of the Labyrinth?" She stepped forward, and he didn't move despite the look in his eye. She felt him pull back ad she tilted his chin up with a claw. "So used to the watered-down, diluted forms of your Age... an age of weakness. The Labyrinth's children have fallen, replaced with mere echoes of what they once were. Even you are more human than a true creation of Leviathan."
"Stop this," he said, his gaze holding hers, "take the box and open it yourself. I have made my own mistakes - we shall both face our judgement before there is any chance of the Age having a proper ruler." beneath the structures the walls were tearing - the door was so close now she could almost hear the Labyrinth's song.
"Oh, you shall face judgement," she said, a laugh echoing in her open chest, "I shall see to it personally."
And as if to answer her wish the final click sounded, and the walls around them shifted in turn, rising above the ceiling, and began to change. She smiled.
"The door," she said, looking at the Prince who watched in stone silence, "is opening. It is time for the new Age to begin." She turned to face the girl, the summoner of her new era.
There were four girls kneeling on the floor.
