Souldancer (Soul Cycle Book 2) by Brian Niemeier

heart was racing. He tried calming himself with deep, slow breaths and noticed an unusual musty odor. “Do you smell that?” He whispered. “What is it?”
    “No idea,” said Nahel. “I noticed it about ten minutes ago. The air's getting damp, too.”
    “How can you tell time in here?” Xander asked.
    Nahel smiled. “I count my steps.”
    “Listen!” Damus hissed, gesturing for the party to halt. “What you smell can’t be as disturbing as what I hear!”
    Xander listened. At first he heard only the receding echoes of his friends’ footsteps, but soon he detected another, almost ambient, sound. The strange susurrus seemed to emanate from everywhere at once, like the rattling breath of the tunnel itself.
    “I can’t place it,” Damus said. “What do you make of this, Nahel?”
    “Not much. I’ve heard it off and on for a while now. Thought it was an underground stream at first.”
    “It is like rocks tumbling in swift water,” said Xander, “but it’s flowing over the walls.”
    “Nahel!” Arcanadeus said. “Shine your light on the wall.”
    Nahel’s tiny lamp floated to one side, leaving the travelers in darkness. Xander held his breath until the light reached the wall. The others’ cries muffled his.
    A writhing swarm of freakishly large insects covered the wall. As if acting with one mind, the vermiform mass recoiled at the touch of the light. Fist-sized compound eyes glittered, and serrated mandibles gnashed in anger.
    Nahel’s light traversed the tunnel’s arc. The walls and ceiling writhed with dog-sized insects. A rattling hiss reverberated through the underground.
    Fleeing the light, the vermin closed in. One of them slashed Damus’ arm with its scythe-like forelimb. He answered by running his rapier through the beast’s mottled head. Xander felt a rush of primal satisfaction at the insect’s death, but his glee faded as the swarm flowed toward them from all sides.
    And then day came where it never had before.
    “Run!” Arcanadeus cried from within the blazing yellow light. “I can’t sustain the Working for long!”
    Xander plunged into a nightmare of vague rioting shapes and blinding light. Time seemed to slow in proportion to his desperation. He imagined running through the scabrous throat of a diseased giant that shuddered as if coughing. He didn’t care whether or not it was gravel crunching beneath his feet.
    The all-encompassing darkness returned, accompanied by a measureless sense of despair, for the clicking and chirping of the tunnel’s denizens came ever louder from behind.
    As Xander’s flash-burned eyes grew used to the dark, a faint white point appeared. “This way!” he shouted. Pushing his aching lungs and legs to the edge of endurance, he fled toward the light and hoped that his friends followed.

9
    Xander and his friends sat gasping for breath on the sandy ledge. He would have kept running, but exhaustion eclipsed his primal dread of many-eyed creeping things. He looked back at the tunnel’s black mouth. Nothing stirred. An uneasy quiet settled over the hillside.
    Squinting in the harsh light, Xander surveyed the lands beyond the lost road. The hill sloped down into a desert valley ringed by jagged mountains the color of singed oak—a giant basin where still, stifling hot air pooled.
    Nearby, Nahel sat tending Damus’ lacerated arm. The Light Gen saw he was being watched and glowered back. “I’ll be sure to note your sphere’s charming wildlife in my report.”
    “The desert never held such horrors,” Xander said. “Did the Guild set them as guards?”
    Arcanadeus raised his cowled head. “The Cataclysm was more than the end of an age. It has wrought a new creation on the burned foundations of the old. Mithgar endured much death, but there is also new life—or the return of life so ancient that the tale of its age is written only in stone.”
    Damus rubbed the bloody sleeve of his once fine shirt with a handkerchief. “If the Cataclysm spawned