A biological sound came through the fracture before it reached the air, low and pressurized, rising from within in a repeated pulse, each one a little nearer than the last.

Beorn noticed that in the half-second before he finished realizing that the crack above the table had widened to sixteen inches.

He stood. The head wound made itself know as blood rushed back under the weight of standing, and the stone floor went briefly unsteady beneath him. He held the wall for two seconds, then let go.

"Where’s my pistol?" he said.

Aestrith had already found it. She held it out without speaking.

He took it and moved for the passage entrance, and she waited for him to go through first. He was still checking the far wall of the room.

Near the floor, behind where the hostile Sinbound had stood through the whole confrontation, there was a hole in the stone. Old dressed stone around it, cut and fitted as the rest of the room’s construction. Low enough that a person would have to crawl.

He looked at it for the two seconds, then went up and stepped through the false-shelving passage without stopping.

The library had taken the shockwave’s upward force. Books had fallen from shelves and the plaster above the window had a new crack running vertically from sill to cornice.

When Beorn came through the passage, Harr glanced at the head wound in one look and called up a field medic.

Godric’s report took four seconds. There was no movement from any confirmed exit, no sign of Coss or anyone through any position the militia had.

The passage below was the only exit they had not watched. Beorn heard that and did not answer it. Something else was pushing through the hidden room in repeated pulses, each one more stronger than the last.

"Set up a barricade," he said to Harr. "Now. Everything you can move."

He pointed at the leaning shelf and the desk. He told Harr where to place the front rank, soldiers with flintlock pistols at the lip of the passage entrance, soldiers with swords behind them, and where Aestrith should stand, behind the formation and against the far wall.

She did not argue. Her exhaustion had not cleared from the effort of the last encounter, and her feet were still set with the wide balance of someone managing a body that was not quite where it should be.

Beorn took position to the right of the passage entrance, against the wall, where he could watch the opening and the blockade at the same time. He had his pistol, and that was about it.

The barricade went up quickly. The shelf unit was shoved across the passage entrance, the desk driven against it, the militia tightening into place behind.

While they worked, a crack opened at the top of the staircase passage, in the stone itself, a vertical fracture running upward from the passage lip. Harr saw it and kept moving.

By the time the barricade was set up, the sounds from below had multiplied.

Their movement through the stone passage below had an eerie rhythm, the weight shifting between impacts in a way nothing native to this world could replicate. 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

The first one pushed through the passage opening.

Its body had the mass of a large man but was wider through the torso, the surface pale and wet-looking, thin enough through the skin in a way they could see stains pressed outward as it moved, masses of material forcing against the interior of the membrane, not in any way that matched bones or organs.

The membrane at the torso’s widest point gleamed under the library lamplight, and where the limbs came off the torso, some at shoulder positions, two lower at the midline, one below the midline on the left side, the flesh bunched and stretched with the motion.

Each limb had three or four bends capable of independent direction. The sound it made coming through the passage had been the low biological pressure heard through the floor.

When it pushed through, it made a second sound, guttural and wet, forced through muscle not built for speech.

The front rank fired. Seven pistols at four feet, the combined crack filling the library and hammering against the stone walls.

The iron balls opened holes in the membrane surface, each one tearing through thin outer layer and the mass beneath. Fluid came out that was not quite blood, darker, thicker, with a texture visible even at that distance.

The first creature fell forward and hit the barricade dead. But a second was already in the passage before the first had finished falling.

This one was heavier through the torso. The membrane was darker, the density beneath it more obvious from the stains pressing outward as it moved. It drove itself onto the barricade before any pistol had finished reloading.

Its limbs, six of them by Beorn’s count, found the top of the shelf and the desk and gripped both, each limb pulling in a different direction at once.

Harr drove his sword through the upper front of the creature’s body.

The blade went in through the membrane there, and the creature pulled back from the barricade with the reaction of something hit somewhere that mattered.

Harr followed it and drove the blade into the same place a second time, deeper, and the creature went down with the sword still in it, its limbs drawing in toward the torso.

The third came through while Harr was pulling his sword free.

It came faster than the first two. Where the first had been slow and the second had pressed forward with urgency, this one used all its limbs together, four on the wall and two on the floor, hauling itself through the passage at a speed that closed the distance to the barricade before the nearest soldier had fully raised his pistol.

The soldier fired from below the creature’s midline as it came over the barricade, the shot going upward through the underside of the torso. The membrane tore along the underside and fluid ran down onto the soldier’s arm.

The creature’s momentum carried it fully over the barricade, and it landed on the soldier beneath it.

Two militia soldiers pulled it off him before it could use its limbs effectively in the enclosed space, one taking each side. One drove his sword through the creature’s midsection from the back, the blade entering the membrane and finding the mass beneath.

The other struck the the same way Harr had struck the second. The creature stopped responding at the midsection hit, but its limbs did not fully stop moving for several seconds after.

The fourth was at the barricade.

It had come through the passage while the third was being dragged off the soldier, and it had hit the shelf with enough force to shove the barricade back six inches from where the militia had set it.

The front rank held position with their weight against the desk. The creature’s limbs were over and around the top of the shelf ,the deformed fingers finding contact on the wood and on the arms of the soldiers nearest the barricade.

One soldier was locked around his wrist, gripping, the multiple small fingers pulling in different directions at once. He was losing his grip on his sword with that hand.

From the passage below the fourth creature, the guttural sounds kept coming. More than one. Coming up.