The eastern corridor was longer than I remembered.
Or maybe it just felt longer because I was stomping through it like a woman on the edge of a very justified breakdown, my loose hair catching on every jagged bit of stone that the dragon fire had exposed, while the Lord of the Under Realm trailed behind me at the pace of someone who had literally all of eternity and wasn't afraid to use it.
"You're doing the thing again," Malphas observed from somewhere over my left shoulder.
"What thing?"
"The thing where you walk like you're personally offended by the concept of distance."
I stopped mid-stride, turned, and fixed him with a look that had made grown men in the capital's court excuse themselves to "check on urgent matters" with suspicious haste. "There are dragons outside.
