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“Oh,” Vur said. “I’m free.”

Sheryl turned her torso to the side. A red chain fell next to her, the metal panting in exhaustion. A pair of eyes blinked at her, and she blinked back. Sheryl rolled onto her bottom and sat up. “Do chains get tired?” she asked and poked the metal beside her.

Vur rolled off of the table and stretched his arms towards the sky, cracking sounds filling the dungeon’s cell. A black light was coming off of his chest, and tendrils extended out of it, crawling down his torso and limbs. Everywhere they touched, another piece of the chain would twitch and fall off. “I don’t know,” Vur said and shrugged. “But it looks like someone’s helping me. And since this light is black, it’s probably Grimmy.”

Sheryl scratched her face. “Black magic, cursed dragon, and the word help don’t really belong together.”

Vur looked around, ignoring Sheryl’s comment. “So this is the home Stella built inside of me, huh?” he asked. He squatted next to Stella and Zilphy and picked them up, holding them under his arms. The black tendrils of light were receding back into his chest, and he kicked aside the chain that tried to latch onto him. There were holes left in his body from where the chains had been, but they were healing at a visible rate. “Where is she?”

“She went outside to help Toothy fight against the invaders,” Zilphy said. “You go outside by going down that way, up the stairs, head to the left past the bathroom, then you make a right and go through the torture room, and then you go up another flight of stairs to the first floor. From there, the exit is obvious.”

“Got it,” Vur said.

“You’re not going to ask why there is a torture room?” Sheryl asked, her rocky eyebrows raised.

Vur glanced at the rock underneath his arm. “Why would I ask? Every castle needs a torture room.”

Sheryl stared into Vur’s eyes for a moment before looking away. “No wonder why Stella chose to live inside of you,” she said. She shook her head, which was her body, and sighed.

Once Vur stepped through the torture room and up the flight of stairs to the first floor, the sounds of battle floated faintly through the air. Vur furrowed his brow and turned his head to the side, pointing his ear towards the door leading out. “Do you hear cows?”

Sheryl cupped her hand over a rocky slit near her eyes. She waited a moment. “Nope,” she said. “I don’t hear any cows. I do hear people shouting though.”

“I hear them,” Zilphy said. “I can hear anything as long as a strand of wind connects me to it. Let’s see—someone’s screaming, ‘Not more cows!’ and a cow is mooing back in response. If it didn’t sound like people were dying, then this would actually be funny.” She chewed her lower lip. “That doesn’t mean it isn’t funny, but I feel bad for finding it amusing. Cows are so cute; I don’t understand how they’re killing people.”

“What about Stella?” Vur asked. “Can you hear her?”

Zilphy closed her eyes. “Hold on a second, it takes a while to filter through all the noise. Stella…, Stella…, Stella…, that’s not—oh! I hear her. She seems to be, oh.”

Vur’s eyes narrowed. “Oh what? What’s she saying?”

“She’s saying some very not-kid-friendly words that I daren’t repeat,” Zilphy said and swallowed. “But it sounds like she’s in trouble. You have to help her, Vur.” The wind elemental rolled her eyes up to look at her contractor. “Actually, do you have the ability to? Can you use magic right now?”

Vur lifted his hand and pointed a finger at the ceiling. A small flame sprang into life, hovering above his fingertip. “Yep,” he said. “Maybe the chains had anti-magic on them. I still feel really weak though. You two are heavy.”

“We’re rocks twice the size of your head, Vur,” Sheryl said. “It’d be weird if we weren’t heavy.”

Vur frowned. “But I should be able to lift that with ease?”

Zilphy clicked her tongue. “It makes sense though, doesn’t it? This isn’t your actual body,” she said. “You’re inside yourself. That means you’re not using your muscles to move. It’s probably some projection of your spirit. And since you’ve never trained inside of yourself before, it’s like you’re a newborn baby.”

Vur pouted as he walked outside the front door. “I thought my inner-self would be stronger,” he said. “Didn’t I absorb a lot of things to strengthen my soul?”

“Well, those things strengthened Toothy,” Zilphy said. “Um.” She pointed towards the right. “Go that way up the walls. You should be able to see the battlefield from there.”

Vur stared up at the castle walls. They towered way over him, seemingly stretching towards the sky. “Why are these walls so big? Stella’s so tiny. It doesn’t make sense.”

“She’s overcompensating for something,” Sheryl said. “But seriously, I think she wanted to make a space for Chompy to live comfortably, so he’d stay with her forever to guard her birthflower.”

“How did she build them?” Vur asked and pressed his palm against the chunks of stone making up the wall.

Zilphy slipped out from underneath his arm and yelped as she fell to the ground. Thankfully, she caught herself with gusts of wind before she hit the hard surface. She shook her fist at Vur and waddled up the first step of the flight of stairs leading to the top of the wall. “Why don’t you ask her once you save her?”

Vur nodded and placed Sheryl down beside Zilphy. “You walk too. You’re heavy.”

The trio went up the stairs and continued going up and went up some more until they reached the top. Vur panted as he stumbled to the edge of the wall and sat down, resting his back against the stone rampart. “I should’ve stayed in the cell,” he said and shook his head. “Why am I so weak? It’s really like I’m a baby again.”

Sheryl turned around and stared down at the flight of stairs that looked as if they had no end. “What kind of baby could climb this flight of stairs?”

“Over there,” Zilphy said. She had hopped up onto the wall. “You can see Toothy getting his butt kicked. And you can see—oh, wow, those are some ugly cows. Cows can look like that?”

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