Chapter 5

The clicking intensified, a nightmarish chorus echoing off the wet stone. The green eyes multiplied, swarming the darkness ahead like malevolent stars. Jade’s dagger felt puny, useless. The air thickened with the stench of damp fur and something metallic, like old blood.

Edward shoved her roughly behind him, pressing her back against the cold rock wall. "Stay close to the wall," he breathed, his voice taut with a fear that mirrored her own. "They hate light. Fire… your fire, Jade. Can you…?"

"I… I don’t know!" Panic clawed at her throat. The ember inside her felt cold, drowned by terror. The memory of the garden inferno was overwhelming, chaotic. *Control* was a foreign concept.

A Skitterling lunged. It was a blur of chitinous limbs and snapping jaws, low to the ground, scuttling with horrifying speed. Edward met it with a vicious downward stab of his dagger. The blade scraped off hard carapace with a sickening screech before finding a joint. The creature shrieked – a high-pitched, chittering sound – and recoiled, green ichor oozing. More surged forward, emboldened by the scent of injury.

Jade screamed, slashing wildly with her dagger as a smaller one scrabbled towards her boots. Her blade glanced off its armored back. Another darted past Edward’s guard, its barbed leg raking across his thigh. He snarled, kicking it away, but his movements were hampered by the narrow space.

"Jade! NOW!" Edward roared, parrying another lunge, his back pressed against hers. The press of bodies, the stench, the clicking – it was suffocating. The green eyes were everywhere.

Desperation overrode fear. Jade dropped her dagger. She squeezed her eyes shut, not trying to summon the inferno, but grasping for the *spark* that had ignited the wall, the desperate heat that had saved Edward in the crypt. She focused on the terror, the cold stone at her back, the weight of the ledger against her ribs – the proof of her father’s rot. She focused on the *need* for light, for survival.

It wasn't a roaring wall. It was a *pulse*.

A wave of searing heat erupted from her palms, not as flames, but as pure, concussive energy. It slammed outwards in a blinding white flash, accompanied by a deafening *CRACK* that shook the tunnel.

The effect was instantaneous and brutal. The closest Skitterlings were flung backwards, their chitinous bodies smashing against the far wall with sickening crunches. Others shrieked, their green eyes winking out as they recoiled, blinded and scorched. The clicking turned into a cacophony of pained shrieks and frantic scrabbling as they retreated into the deeper blackness, fleeing the sudden, painful light.

Silence descended, broken only by Jade’s ragged gasps and Edward’s pained breathing. The air reeked of ozone and burnt chitin. Faint, dying green glows marked the twitching forms of the creatures Jade’s pulse had struck directly.

Edward sagged against the wall, clutching his bleeding leg. He stared at Jade, his face pale in the fading afterglow of the energy burst, his eyes wide with a mixture of shock, awe, and lingering terror. "Well," he rasped, wiping ichor from his blade on his trousers. "That's… one way to do it."

Jade trembled violently, staring at her hands. They felt numb, tingling. She hadn't meant… she hadn't even known she *could* do *that*. The power felt less like a tool and more like a wild beast living inside her, lashing out in her panic. "Are you alright?" she managed, her voice hoarse.

"Scratched," Edward grunted, tearing a strip from his tunic to bind his leg. "You?"

"Alive," she whispered. The ledger felt heavier than ever. What other monstrous potential lay within her?

A new sound filtered through the ringing in their ears. Distant shouts. Barked orders. The metallic clang of pursuit echoing down the tunnel entrance they’d blocked.

"The Falcons," Edward hissed, urgency replacing pain. "Or Garrick. They heard that. We need to move. *Now.*" He pushed himself upright, wincing. "This cut runs deeper. There’s supposed to be an exit further in, near the old Galloway border watchtower."

Jade grabbed her fallen dagger, her hands still shaking. The darkness ahead, where the Skitterlings had fled, felt infinitely more threatening than the human pursuers behind. But staying meant capture or death. She nodded, steeling herself. "Lead the way."

They stumbled deeper into the suffocating blackness, leaving the carnage and the fading echoes of pursuit behind. The only light came from the faint, dying embers of the creatures Jade had destroyed, casting long, grotesque shadows that seemed to writhe on the wet stone walls. Every scrape, every drip of water, made them flinch, imagining green eyes gathering in the unseen depths. The smuggler’s cut was no longer just an escape route; it was the gullet of a beast, and they were walking deeper into its belly, the Ashmarked Princess and her cursed advisor, carrying fire and secrets into the heart of the dark. The path ahead promised only more teeth.

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