Shaken by the mutant horror that the scholar had become, Tiren felt her way out of the library with the aid of the swordlight. It was the kind of sword that would certainly have a name, but with no way of knowing what that was she simply thought of it as the sword.
When she found an exit, it was a narrow corridor, even narrower than the one she had come from. She held the sword aloft and tried to avoid brushing against the black walls. They seemed to reach inwards, to try to grab her with insubstantial tendrils of shadow.
She thought about the monks she had killed. How much of them was human? How much of the Speaker had been? Surely more than these men. He spent his time outside this black labyrinth, for one thing.
However much humanity remained in these silent figures, they stood in her way, and Tiren felt no remorse for cutting them down.
Something compelled her to look at the sword in her hand. Perhaps there would be some clue to the name, an engraving or a rune. She lowered it and studied the blade. It was smooth, polished-bright, as if it had never been so much as looked at askew. It clearly had minor miraculous properties to cut so well and take not so much as a nick on its edge. She looked at the red eye on the hilt, a reflective staring-glass with a small dark pupil.
“I’ll call you Miracle,” she whispered to the sword. That felt better. She raised Miracle above her head and continued down the dark, silent hallway to uncertain future.

Blood was dripping down the walls. It was the first time she had seen anything change the uniform smooth surface, and for a second she didn’t know what she was looking at.
There was more of it than there could have been if there had been one killing here, or even two or three. It seemed to be emanating from the walls themselves. Tiren touched a finger into the dull red waterfall and tasted the liquid. She was shocked by how sweet the stuff was, and without thinking she did it again. She ran her tongue over her teeth, looking for any left over, feeling the sharp edge below and above.
She suddenly became aware of how long it had been since she had had anything to drink. Her knees trembled. She looked up and down the hallway, and scooped a handful of the sticky crimson to her lips. She relished the texture of it as it passed over her lips and through her bared teeth, and swallowed with a quivering breath and a sensation that she felt in her entire body, a glow, as though she had swallowed some of the very light that Miracle bathed her in.
A noise down the hall made her spin, her senses heightened by the rush of blood flowing through her body. She raised Miracle and sneered. Whatever came towards her, she would see it dead.
Whether the blood had altered her vision, cleared it, she didn’t know, but something seemed different about the sword. Its light was no longer the brilliant white it had been. The colour it had taken on was a nameless, luminous hue that seemed to penetrate even further than the light had before. It must be drawing from my strength, thought Tiren. The sense of renewal she felt was remarkable. Her eyes were sharper, her focus clearer.
She felt that she could destroy anything that stood in her path now.

There was what looked like a clay vessel standing in the corner of the next bend, a tall amphora filled with indeterminate liquid. She sniffed it, and recoiled. The stuff had a thick, ugly scent like tar. Somehow, Miracle told her that it was important. It had no voice, only a feeling. She held her hand over the pot and steeled herself to take the plunge.
The bright un-light of Miracle told her that there was a better way. She pulled her hand away sharply and swung the glowing blade.
Nightmares spilled out of the shattered black clay in liquid form, heavy and shapeless and oppressive, and rose up high to the ceiling. An evil, fanged mouth resolved itself into the liquid for a second, and then the whole thing collapsed in on itself, harmless as nightmares were. In the pool of nameless nothing that was left behind, a small, bright gemstone gleamed. It was clean and perfectly-cut and white as pure snow, and seemed to light itself from within.
Tiren picked it up and put it in the nearly-empty coin pouch at her waist. She looked at the hand that was before her. The skin seemed to have taken on a strange, prickly texture. As if spines or horns were trying to emerge from beneath. She rubbed the back of her other hand, and it felt normal. She tried to switch hands, to hold Miracle on her left for a while, and found she could not.
Miracle’s un-light didn’t shine behind the crossguard, so she opened her coinpurse and let the gemstone shine on her sword-hand, and gasped. Where her fingers had been distinct, clasped around the leather grip of the weapon, the flesh had bubbled and flowed like molten metal to wrap and merge with the sword. She twisted her wrist and felt the bones warp around the silver core, and felt her stomach lurch. The changes the scholar spoke of were coming. They had arrived.

The Abbot was standing at an altar, and he wasn’t. Tiren could both see him and not see him, and she knew not whether her eyes played tricks on her or her mind did. The phantom turned around, and from inside his chest came a corridor of brilliant light.
Tiren raised her sword, now acutely aware of the flux her body was undergoing second to second. She was taller than she had been only hours ago, her head scraping along the ceiling of the small tunnel that she had come down to this chapel of horror, light spilling down in a violet shaft through an unseen window. The Phantom Abbot had been utterly consumed by the radiance within him now and the white glow spread out from him and absorbed the walls and the ceiling too, until nothing remained of the material world at all and he himself had vanished, without moving or changing in any way, into the brilliant whiteness.
Tiren squinted against the light, unbearable to her gloom-adjusted eyes, and tried to make out her surroundings. The white walls beside her enclosed tightly, while another behind her ensured her only way out was forward, into the Abbot’s luminous inner landscape.
A wailing, inhuman noise met her ears as she proceeded, Miracle at the ready to strike, and she tensed strange muscles that mutated in her arm even as she realised they were there. She felt strong – more than that, powerful. She was becoming more, just like the scholar had said.
Suddenly from around a corner she could hardly perceive a dark figure emerged, clad in shadowy robes. The mask he wore was twisted and tarnished, a cruel and inhuman expression warping its face. The thing lurched towards her, and she kicked it back, undaunted, and struck at it with her sword. The glowing blade slashed a wound in the shadow thing and as it reeled she reached out and grabbed the mask, which was hot to the touch.
Not caring, not noticing the heat that burned her skin, Tiren hooked her fingers into the empty hollow sockets and pulled hard. The shadow sent out tendrils to try and keep its protection, but she had Miracle at her side still, and these were easily dispatched. The mask came away in her hand, and cracked down the middle as the heat drained away suddenly.
Without its mask, the shadow’s core was exposed – a black, beating heart. Tiren closed her hand around it, and felt the uncanny power that was feeding it from a strange world where the sun itself had died long ago. She screamed in pain and horror at the insane reality she had exposed herself to, and lashed out with the Miracle.
Her hand fell to the floor, severed as easily as cutting through a ribbon, the black heart still clutched in its fingers, still beating.
She plunged Miracle straight through the heart, through her own severed palm, and through into the floor below, screaming now in rage mixed with the pain, and it exploded.

Tiren woke up in the bunk she had fallen asleep in with a start. She checked herself, and found that she was still human, still had the full complement of arms, legs she was born with. It was silent, and she was alone, and it was dark outside. She felt a sting in her leg, and looked at the pouch of herbs in her bandage.
“God,” she whispered. “I don’t want to know what these freaks put in you.”
She threw the herbs away, and decided she had better go before anyone tried to give her anything worse.

She walked for hours before she realised it wasn’t getting any lighter.