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"You ready kid? We get through this last test and then we're free to leave."
Cahara grinned, masking his own nerves with a carefully practiced smile as he ruffled the girl's hair. She looked past him at the open maw and brought her doll up to her chest, covering it's eyes with her finger - D'arce covered the girl's face with her hands during a particularly scary guard encounter one time, and the girl has been imitating her ever since. Cahara wondered what happened to her. She was probably dead. He decided not to dwell on questions he didn't want the answers to.
He sat down on the floor, patted the spot beside him, and the girl followed suit.
"I don't think I've actually told you what's going to happen when we leave, have I?" He asked. She shook her head slowly.
"Well, when we leave we'll go back to a place named Rondon where I used to live. We'll go together to meet Celeste. She's the woman I love, and we're having a baby soon. That's why I took the job that had me come down here, actually, to find expensive things so that I can make a good life for me and her and baby, and now you too. I'll sell everything, I'll save her - right, I forgot to mention that. Her boss isn't very nice and makes her do work that she doesn't enjoy. I'll save her, and buy us a nice house, and you can choose a name for yourself and you can have your own room."
The girl's eyes widened and she looked around, as if she was expecting Cahara to be talking to some other little girl. He chuckled.
"We'll get you a bed and lots of nice clothes and you'll be able to have a warm bath every night, and me and Celeste will take you to the puppet show and the park and you'll have three hot meals a day, every day, for the rest of your life."
Cahara put his arm around her and she shuffled into him, and he felt a pang in his chest as he was reminded again of just how thin she was.
"When Celeste has the baby, they'll call her Mama and me Papa, because those are special names that people use for their parents. If you want, you can call us those names as well, but you don't have to."
The girl nodded, rested her weight against his side and yawned.
"You know, resting sounds like a really good idea. You're a very smart kid, you know that?"
She smiled. It was a small curve of her lips, tentative and hesitant, as if she was afraid that getting to excited would ruin their delicate balance. With everything she'd gone through, he couldn't blame her for being hesitant to believe in a better future. Still, seeing her hesitate to believe in him hurt a little. The thought of her life thus far made his heart twist for a second before he steelsd it into resolve. He was going to get him and the girl out of here. He'll save Celeste, his baby will be born into a loving home, and he'll sleep with the love of his life at his side and both of his children safely in their beds. He'll probably be jumpy and off, and some part of him will still be left here at the catacombs, but Celeste will understand. She's good like that.
He thought about arriving home from a mercenary job to Celeste, baby cooing in her arms, and the girl with whatever name she'd choose to call herself by, smiling and running to greet him with no fear of making too much noise in case it attracted some monster in the shadows.
Cahara, father of two. Now wasn't that a novel thought? One kid calling him dad was exciting enough.
All he had to do now is make it through the rest of the depths. And then he'll go home and finish that contract.
He sat there, thinking about introducing Celeste to the girl and bringing her home and seeing her smile, toothy and unrestricted by fear for the first time. The thought of it all somehow relaxed him despite it all.
When his daughter woke, they walked into the mouth of the god, hand in hand.
They walked and walked and walked.
Then she stopped. Went ahead of him, as if something was calling out to her. And then she turned to look at him, and his heart dropped into the pit of his stomach as her face twisted into a look of terror-…
And then she started contorting. She shrieked and wailed as her bones tied themselves into knots. If not for the paralysing fear, Cahara would've vomited there and then, but he was frozen in place, muscles locked, unable to breathe. Then, all at once, he could move again. His legs buckled as he fell to the floor before he scrambled up, trying to reach for the girl. She hit out at him, using her whole body to try and tip him off balance. She screamed as she did it, a sound of raw unbridled agony. She was doing this against her will.
There was no possible return from this. With a heart heavier than tungsten and arms that felt like lead, he readied his weapon.
"I'm going to make it stop, okay? It'll only hurt a little. I'll make the pain go away. Everything will be alright."
He went for her throat. He tried to put her out of her misery over and over and over, until she was unrecognisable. An imposing tower of a thing. He could almost convince himself that his daughter was already gone, except for when the thing noticed the dagger and the doll, and then as he sliced at her she met his eyes and didn't resist and he knew that it was undeniably her. She was still in there. There was nothing he could do.
He takes longer and longer to get up each time he falls, until he can't bring himself to get up at all. How long has he bleeding on the floor for? He curls into himself, trying to minimise the damage. The freshest corpse on a mountain of carcasses. He will die and be left indistinguishable from the other bodies.
Celeste will never find out what happened. She will never get closure, never be able to say goodbye, never find the money to get out of the brothel, never meet her daughter. Never have a daughter to meet. He'll never hear his baby's first words or see their first steps or hold them in his arms.
"The God Of Fear And Hunger Acknowledges Your Pain."
As his life slips away, he imagines it again - the family portrait he planned to commission from an artist to commemorate the girl officially beginning to feel at home with him and the rest of her new family. Cahara smiling, Celeste at his side with the baby in her arms, and the girl in between the two of them, rosy cheeked and unafraid.
He sees it all. Feels it all. The firm handshake of the contractor after fulfilling his duty, the rich men clamouring for his treasures, his hand on the girl's shoulder as he introduced her to Celeste, his baby in his arms. Opening the door of his beautiful house to find two children running at him. He stands up, still hugging them both, his face going from a wild grin to something more tender as he meets his wife's eyes. Walking down the street with his wife's hand in his and one of his children's on the other.
Cahara dies without fanfare, and in a rickety crib shoved into the corner of the spare room of a brothel in Rondon, a baby with their father's eyes begins to wail.