"If you cut her off, I'll cut you," she snarls. 

Her sister flinches.

"If it's draining that means she hasn't been eaten yet, she's still fighting."

"It's a matter of time," she says, and - "Xunyu, she won't want you to follow her in. She won't want you to throw everything at a lost cause. Get away - and - we'll scry her. We'll use mom's spells."

It's not an offer to get Chengsu out. That's not possible. But their mother had scried her brother, once, the one consumed by the mawmouth - found him still screaming - and cast a killing spell through the scry.

It worked, though not well enough to kill the entire mawmouth. Not well enough to save her from having to go in.

She taught her children the trick, all the same.

One of the Londoners is close enough to hear.

"New York is right," she says in idiomatic Mandarin. "She is still fighting. Leave her sharer on, long enough for us to finish evacuating the library. London will help cover the cost."

Deep breath. (Her hold on her sister is almost a hug, really.)

"You have a deal."

"New York as well," Daniella chimes in. "She's saving us all."

Soft, quiet sob.

She squeezes her sister -

And then lets her go, and turns to the evacuation.

Daniella's talents aren't really in the organizational area, she'll quickly bully her enclavemates into going along with London's indie then...

The scream came from that aisle there. It's dark, but she has fire. She can light it up and keep a watch. She snakes a trail of fire down the middle between the shelves until-

Oh god.

It's squirming.

And heaving, and bubbling, and trying to lurchingly roll over the death at its center, trying to reach into the reading room for more food - and the little snack on the stairs ran down and out of its reach and now all the snacks down the stairs are escaping, and so are the snacks on this level -

It is, in fact, pretty disgusting, but at least it's struggling, not moving as quickly as the textbook says it can. Once it finishes crushing this particular case of indigestion, though, it's probably going to move fast at them. 

Or, well. 

It'd like to. 

And then

it bursts

APART.

Luthien let go of Chengsu, at some point. Stepped out of the shield. 

She didn't get far. She's standing maybe a single step away, facing now towards the reading room - towards where the bulk of the thing had dragged itself, blank hungry gaze fixed on the crumbling gore as it chars and dissolves in the face of El's wild bursts of lightning - on a dark thing like a bead, or an embryo, or a person crushed into the fetal position - 

She kneels down, and touches it, and it too dissolves.

She's covered in viscera, the same gore currently coating the outside of Chengsu's shield. It's soaked into her clothes, her hair, it seems her very skin. 

She doesn't actually look much like the Luthien Daniella knows. Not right now. Not like this. 

Chengsu has her eyes closed and is breathing very deliberately. She doesn't react as El lets go of her hand to go hug Luthien.

They killed it.

"They killed it," Daniella says, her voice a ghost of its usual self. "They killed it," she repeats, gaining strength. "Hey! HEY!" she calls over her shoulder, "THEY KILLED IT!"

The sea of gore is becoming a river, fed by waterfalls off the empty shelves - the books all fled when the fight started - and the library is really, really not designed to handle this much death, this much of a cleanup. There's no overhead sprinklers. So the floor slopes a little, and the gore begins draining down vents and into the stairwell and spreading out towards the reading room. It's messy and terrible and very, very visibly a mawmouth's worth of death. There's still eyes and mouths floating in it, blinking and mouthing things voicelessly before they finally realize they, too, have been killed. 

Xunyu doesn't seem to care as she plunges into the river, towards Chengsu - 

And Luthien's empty gaze turns first to Daniella and then to Xunyu as she approaches.

She doesn't seem to recognize either. Nor does she react to El's arms around her. But her tongue is darting out to her bloody lips, showing too-sharp teeth - and there's a cold calculation in her gaze, a feeling of hunger and danger in the air - 

Oh no this must have been why she wasn't supposed to fight-

"Lu," El whispers directly into her ear. "Lu, it's over. Come back. Come back to me, Lu." This is what the collar's for, this is why they made it, El needs to use it she needs to pull on that connection with the mana she has left-

The incantation is the same as the one they sealed it with - a soft gentle song -

And after a long, terrifying moment, Lu starts singing along, and then blinks rapidly, and then starts crying - 

And then throws up, her own little waterfall of gore.

"It's all right," El soothes. "It's all right, I've got you."