In the Underworld

In the Underworld
She hit the cavern floor with bone-jarring force, aggravating her injuries so her bones screamed. In her hand, the spear fractured.
She felt it happen before she saw it, the familiar weight and hum of it simply stopped, the rings fizzled away in faint residue of light that had vanished.
For a long moment she did nothing but stare at where it had been.
Then she pressed her hand flat to the stone and tried to call it back, tried to reach for the same source she always reached for, and felt her own hands shaking against the ground.
"No," she said, to the empty cavern and to herself. "No, absolutely not, there is too much happening right now for this."
She tried again. The phantom of the spear's tip appeared in her palm, a pale impression of a weapon. It flickered for three seconds and went out.
The humming started at the cavern's edges, growing closer.
Fuck. Another Hall. Another trap.
They came in from the shadows first, formless shapes resolving into the clustered, swaying motion of a figure with too many eyes.
Another appeared. And another. Soon, the cavern was full of them.
A voice came from somewhere deeper in the dark, under the humming, carrying the register she recognized with a cold lurch in her chest.
It sounded like Malrik.
Not entirely. The voice carried something beneath it that Malrik's voice had never had, a resonance that was older than he was, the particular quality of the Choir's most ancient expressions using whatever instrument was available to them.
"End of the line," the voice said, and the satisfaction in it was genuine. "The Reckoning, at last, in the dark where she belongs. Where they all end up eventually. Doomed to fail. Doomed to die."
She responded by driving a crystal dagger through the nearest mawless, the blade forming from almost nothing in her hand and purifying on contact, which bought her space for exactly as long as it took two more to fill the gap.
She kept fighting. She drew dagger after dagger from whatever she could spare, the smaller spells more sustainable in a way the spear was not right now, and she moved through the cavern ripping and cutting, but she could feel the difference between this and what she was capable of when everything was working, the gap between what she had available and what the situation actually required was widening with each strike. 
Time. 
She needed more of it.
The Choir was not trying to kill her quickly. It was trying to wear her down until she couldn't maintain even the small spells.
The wall hit her shoulder before she saw it coming, the Choir's swarming force drove her back faster than she could manage to dodge, and then her back was against the stone and something that was not entirely physical was battering against her armor in sustained waves, the Choir's older members pressed in from the dark behind the initiates.
She lost her footing and slipped down into a thick pool of water. 
It was cold, immediately, shockingly cold, nothing like the underground rivers she'd swum in before, cold in the underworld way that went straight through every layer of protection and settled into the marrow. The current caught her before she'd tried to swim, dragging her sideways and slamming her against the stone. 
A laugh bubbled up within the water. She fought the grip on her, pushing to the bottom. She braced and pushed and slowed herself to a stop in the water with her lungs screaming for air and the cold still working through her.
Something was in the water with her.
She sensed a vast and formless presence that the current moved around rather than through, something the underworld waters kept their distance from. She kept her own distance and held herself still. The creature passed without engaging her, and she filed that away.
Then, the thee water started to burn like ice on bare skin, then like poison or fire.
The Choir's waters were corrosive to anything not part of the Choir. 
She let the current take her, not tugging unnatually but flowing down and away from the burning. The current knew where it was going. The underworld's waters moved toward gates the way living waters moved toward the sea, and a gate was exactly what she needed.
The Choir couldn’t pass through through easily, and they couldn’t find them on their own.
She passed through the gate and washed up onto ground that was not the cavern floor. She sucked in deep cold breaths and shivered.
The shore of the underworld was familiar in the way that difficult places became familiar after repeated exposure, the dark terrain recognizable, the shifting landscape settled under her feet. She dragged herself clear of the water's edge and sat for a moment on the dark shore, feeling the burn in her skin ease as she moved out of the current's reach.
She assessed herself. Battered. Reserves low. Spear broken.
Still running out of time.
She looked at the dark terrain spreading around her and identified the direction of the nearest gate, which she believed, based on the pull she could feel through her connection to the Grove. The Grove's gate would take her exactly where she needed to be, and the route between here and there was navigable if she moved quickly and carefully.
She started climbing.
The Irongrave part of her yanked her attention sideways before she'd gone three steps.
The familiar dead-heart stillness of something following her through the dark. Not ambient spirits but Choir and corrupted spirits in the underworld. The Irongrave instinct told her to look closer, and when she did the cold clarity that followed was not the ordinary kind.
The creatures were following her, likely to use her to find a gate and then fight to get through it.
The creatures on either side of the divide seeme d to have the same thought.
If she led them to the Grove's gate, she led them to the Grove itself, and the Reckoning had not come this far to end with the Choir flowing in through the same door she did.
She stopped climbing and turned.
The dark around her was not quiet. She could feel them out there, the density of the Choir's presence pressing at the edges of her awareness, vast and patient and entirely certain that she had no real options remaining but to lead them to where they wanted to go.
The problem was that they were likely right. She had to get back If she had any hope of taking out that vroth.
She couldn't fight the Choir in numbers in the underworld without her spear. She couldn't use the Grove gate without leading them through. She couldn't find another gate quickly enough without losing time.
She needed an ally.
The underworld was not a place where allies just appeared, and the last time she had been here she had been moving too fast for anything but the most focused survival.