[It’s occurring to Aubrey that that, if she’d been asked about dying out of nowhere like that, she would’ve been more than a little concerned. Venat is a saint.]

I’m not… sure what there is to say. [But there’s a lot. Soft dog fluff around her hand is grounding, somehow.] We fell. We woke up in a room, and this crystal was just… draining our life forces, I guess.

[She sounds too casual in her own ears, distant as it is. Detached, maybe. There’s no point letting the horror sink in, not when it…]

For a while there, I… [Her hand stops moving. It closes loosely around the longer fur by Argos’s neck, feeling his warmth and pulse.]

I almost wanted to surrender.