Run.
Even if it took everything he had, keep running.
Taihe's lungs felt like two burned-out bellows. Every breath brought searing, tearing pain. His throat tasted of blood, the taste spreading into his nose and making him gag with every inhale, but he dared not stop.
The corridor behind him blurred and twisted in the curtain of rain. Those ancient wooden pillars, those carved doors and windows, those paths he had walked countless times-all seemed to have become something uncertain, something that might swallow him at any moment. His feet struck the slippery flagstones. Several times he nearly fell, but each time he steadied himself and kept running.
His clothes were soaked through, clinging to him, cold and heavy. His hair hung over his forehead, rain dripping from its tips into his eyes and blurring his vision, but he dared not raise a hand to wipe it away. He feared that in the fraction of a second it took, that thing would catch him.
That monster.
The images of what had just happened replayed endlessly in Taihe's mind, as though someone had branded them onto his retinas with a red-hot iron. No matter how he blinked, shook his head, or tried to think of something else, they stubbornly, vividly replayed before his eyes, frame by frame.
He heard footsteps behind him.
They sounded one after another, like the steady, unhurried beat of a drum, yet that slowness filled him with despair.
Taihe trembled even harder.
Before fleeing, he had been a core member of Lantern, an elite personally promoted by Ogi Zenin, a respected sorcerer with a place in the Zenin Clan. He had a Cursed Technique, cursed energy, experience, his own pride and dignity. He had thought himself strong, thought he had risen high enough in the Zenin Clan,