Desperation is now driving his limbs, forcing him like a rat through a maze to seek a way out. The labyrinth however, has changed, the walls twisted where they shouldn’t be, the floor uneven, the ceilings too low as he struggles through crawl-spaces and hidden alleys. Within his head, maddening voices in impossible tongues whisper and howl and cry and coax, crippling him until he is screaming as he drags himself through the dark, sinking to his knees in shaking torment.
He does not know if he will die here, lying prone, in the stench of his own tortured suffering, but he can go no further.
The Knife of Nails is pulled from his unresisting grip, and a sharp pain tears through his arm – metal boring into flesh - as the Stranger whispers fervent words the Hunter does not understand. Blessings or prayers or echoes of the Thousand, it is all just another note of screaming madness until, at the very last, within the convulsive throes of a body unable to comprehend its own actions, his vision sharpens and focuses on a shade of white in the gloom.
The creature he hunted through the maze, crouches beyond, beckoning his eye and cleaving through the roiling agony with a trace of waif-like motion, mirroring the gesticulations of the Stranger’s thread-flayed fingers.
There is power there.
Whose, is unclear, but they have the same eyes.
