There are precious few vents in the library to let in air, placed on the floor at regular intervals as there is no ceiling for them to be attached to instead. But she can't see the one that should be behind her. She can't see the edges of tarnished brass which should be reflecting even the dimmest lights from the main aisle, and she can't hear the grate of the old grimy fans that are only there to pretend that the airflow in this school run on physics rather than magic. She can't even hear the rustle and scrape of pages shifting, of magical tomes winking into and out of existence in the background, as if even the books are holding their breaths.

It's too dark for her to see much of anything, but if she strains her hearing, holds her breath, focuses away from the fighting noises in the main room, she can hear... breathing. Multiple people, breathing softly and darkly and heavily.

It's too dark for her to see much of anything, because the lights overhead are out completely, but Scorpius's next spell-burst comes, another flash of light brighter than any the library usually has, and then she can see it, half a dozen human eyes watching her, more mouths than that gasping for air and moving in silent pleading, pieces of people scattered over the translucent, glossy slime that's pulling itself through the vent slowly, ponderously. Inexorably.

It can see her, too.

Oh. Oh no. Oh no, no, no, no, no. No wonder the mals ran. No wonder they're falling all over themselves to get into a reading room filled with wizards. There are some mals where learning about them increases your chances of survival. Where it's useful to know if the thing chasing you is resistant to fire, or will regrow bits if you chop them off, or how it'll try to come at you so you know how to dodge.

This is not one of those.

Yvette takes a step backwards, away from the horror that is known to the wizarding world as a maw-mouth. The horrible thing that eats all other horrible things, wizards and mals alike. When it arrives, enclaves don't fight it, or drive it off, or do anything particularly clever. There is usually not enough available power to have much chance at any of that. They close the doors and they hunker down and they pray, they pray that it goes somewhere else and eats something else, anything else. Because, realistically, that's all they can do. They can hope it goes for someone else. The practical advice for students is similar, but even less hopeful. If you have a choice between something awful and a maw-mouth, you pick the something else. It doesn't matter what it is or how horribly it'll kill you, if it'll use your still living body as a nest for its eggs or if you'll be slowly eaten alive or if you'll be torn apart. Whatever horrible fate awaits you from the something awful? It's better.

Because you really, really don't want to be the thing a maw-mouth grabs. You don't want to be the thing that it eats. All of those eyes? All of those mouths? They are from its victims. And, as far as the greatest magical minds with the most resources of the biggest enclaves can figure out? Each and every one of those victims is still alive. Still suffering. Their flesh and body were painfully unspooled like the threads in cloth until they're the same slime as makes up the rest of the maw-mouth. Until they've just made the damn thing bigger, more powerful with their pain and body and extended suffering. As written in the Journal of Maleficaria Studies, it was discovered that even long-digested victims of a maw-mouth can respond to a communications spell. All the response offered was screaming. Those mouths would probably still be screaming now, if they hadn't been exhausted into silence from the unending torment.

She continues backing up, terrified. If something ambushes her, she really wouldn't mind. But nothing would ambush her, not here. Not when this horror of horrors that gives the other horrors nightmares at night is so close. She really was the biggest goddamned dumbass in all the world, to not just listen to the fucking library.

The light from Scorpius's spell behind her goes out, and it's dark again. Then there's another spell, a long firecracker burst of bright greens and blues, and the maw-mouth is still there. It blinks at her with many of its eyes in disconcerting asynchronicity, browns and blues and green, most of them glazed and unfocused, a couple staring directly at her with horror and pain and revulsion, but only for a little bit, as the eyes and mouths slowly glide just under the surface of the creature, away from each other and disappearing back into it, new ones emerging to replace the ones that disappear. It doesn't do anything to her, though, other than stare, as it keeps flowing up and out of the vent. The lines of the grating aren't wide enough for these body parts to pull through, but the slime doesn't need to make sense according to physics.

Yeah, it seems like it’s having itself a time, cramming its way through a tiny, tiny air vent. There’s never been a maw-mouth loose in the school itself. Graduation hall, sure, but the school itself? Never. She would have read about it, people would have talked about it. It would have been well known, if it ever happened. Maw-mouths aren’t exactly ambush predators. All of the screaming and the thrashing as the victims are slowly taken apart is extremely noticeable. It just doesn’t matter, because there isn’t any realistic way to stop them. Slow them down is more reasonable, buy time for others to get away.

She is succeeding at putting distance between herself and it. Probably she should start screaming or something, but she just can’t seem to remember how. What’s her plan, run to the reading room to hole up with the others, hope that it’ll find eating a pack of well armed and entrenched baby wizards too unpalatable? Compared to what, what else is present for it to go after—

—except it could have grabbed her already, couldn’t it. She basically walked right over it. If it wanted a meal, it would have had one. All it’d have to do is reach up a tendril and touch her skin and that would have been it.

And it didn’t do that. Why would that be? Because then she’d scream, and presumably give the game away, and it’d lose out on a delicious feast in favor of some crummy sandwich.

So what does it want instead?

When maw-mouths have a choice, they don't eat a single person at a time. Their one weakness, if you can call it that, is that they need to sit still to digest their meals. Now, a single person can be digested reasonably quickly, as such things go; the only reason it'd pass her up is if it thought—to the extent these creatures can "think" as opposed to merely chase after any sources of mana they can perceive—that the time it'd need to spend digesting her wouldn't be worth it, because it could use that time to get something that it wouldn't be able to get otherwise.

The maw-mouth sighs, or some of its mouths do, and pulls the last bits of itself out through the vent. It spends a couple of seconds perfectly still (other than the passive internal movements of its eyes and mouths), and then it starts moving—away from her. And once it does move, it does so with shocking speed, at least for its bulk. This one isn't as huge as the two maw-mouths who have made the graduation hall their home—the only mals to have ever been given individual names, Patience and Fortitude—but even so, you would not have expected it to be able to roll over itself with such haste as it goes down the aisle. Down the aisle towards the stairway that goes down from the library to the freshman dorm, where all the youngest kids would be holed up in their rooms.

Well, not all of them. Just the loners, the losers, the ones who don't have an enclave or enough friends to be able to claim anywhere decent in the reading rooms of the library proper, the ones who have to do homework and build mana on their own. The ones who are now just like Yvette was, once upon a time, before she found her desk.

And to think, when she was a freshman, she was happy about the short trip.

She feels sick. There’s nothing she can do, right? No reasonable thing. All her bravado about being strong and powerful are just words in air and with just as much substance. The best, the best, she could do, is slow it down to give others time to run. By throwing herself into it, and accepting that eternal future of suffering. So that maybe, just maybe, the freshmen could try to get away. So that maybe the calculus of who lives and who dies (or wishes desperately to die) comes out in favor of more people living. Triage, cold and simple.

But that’s still just a maybe. Not a guarantee. The smart thing, the reasonable thing, is to just run. Save herself, warn her allies, maybe attempt to, to, what. Wait until the maw-mouth is good and settled and then try to rip that section of the dorm from the school? Barring that unlikely plan, wait until four years pass, and the maw-mouth is shuffled down to graduation hall?

That would be dooming children to an eternity of suffering, of course. Little babies who were just ripped from their lives and their homes and dumped into this mock-Darwinian nightmare. And she’s older, and more experienced, and more powerful, and she’s not an adult yet but damn it, she agrees with the logic that puts the senior dorms on the bottom. She agrees that it’s the duty of those with power to protect those without.

This is the stupidest thing she’ll ever do, and she’ll regret it for the rest of her very long, very unpleasant life.

She gulps a breath, and then she runs after it.

When the maw-mouth moves, it doesn't leave a trail. Some slimes do, but not this one. It doesn't even leave dust behind, wiping the floor clean on its way towards and down the stairwell. The dim light coming from there briefly reflects off its glossy surface, creating an iridescent effect that would be almost pretty if it weren't for the human body parts gliding right underneath it, giving it the impression of a very macabre work of art.

It pours itself through the opening and quickly vanishes down the stairs and into the freshman hall landing, where it will park itself and then slowly extend tentacles down towards the doors of the rooms, stretching through the cracks under the doors, and by then it'll be too late. No matter how much the rooms' occupants scream and beg and plead, no one will come to rescue them, no one will even try, because by now everyone knows that you don't leave the safety of your room to investigate screaming and even if anyone did everyone knows better. The maw-mouth will be able to take its sweet, sweet time, and it won't even need to open the doors, digesting the students right where they are and then pulling its limbs back in once it's done and ready for the next entry on the corridor-shaped menu. At least its future victims will have advance warning, so that they can choose to die some other way instead—by trying to room with another student, perhaps, if anyone is foolish enough to try to shelter them, or just by giving up and using some other way to escape, like a knife or some alchemical concoction that'll kill them quickly and painlessly.

It's a horrible choice to give them, an awful impossible one that no one should ever have to make. Still, it's better than not having the choice at all.

Is this a worthy altar to sacrifice her entire self on? All her hopes and dreams, her ambitions? The people she's connected with? Her mother, who sacrificed pieces of her soul to keep her only daughter alive? Nkoyo, noble soul wrapped in a cloak of pragmatism, risking her life by refusing to abandon her friends, and who was actually just beginning to like her? Liu, the maleficer whose careful and logical and measured use of malia, never ever on humans, still giving up pieces from herself all the same, who reminds her so much of her mother? Scorpius, hero of all and friend of none, traumatized into never making connections, terrified to lose someone again? Does she really want to do that to him again, for him to know that the second person he tried to befriend threw herself into a damned maw-mouth, and will be suffering forevermore? Alexei, the stupid and brilliant artificer who should really just have agreed when she'd tried to warn him that she's a shitty person to be in an alliance with? Even when really, he should pick someone else, anyone else? Should accept the lifeline London is offering him and sail off into the sunset to build wonder and beauty into this wretched world? How can she do that to him, agree to fight for his life and her own to get out of this shitty place, with you until the end, and then just. Throw it all away?

For some freshmen she doesn't even know?

Well. Maybe, maybe not. All anyone really gets to do in here is take gambles, anyway. She'll likely never find out.

But she does know that she doesn't want a world where people only protect themselves, their in-group, fall to the ever persistent tribalism that's plagued humanity since they were climbing in trees. She wants them to be better, which means she wants to be better, which means...

Putting her mana where her mouth is. Or she's just a damned hypocrite like all the rest of them.

And so if she is doing this, this incredibly stupid thing to give this monster of monsters brief indigestion, then, well. At the very least she is going to be the most absolute indigestible bitch that this fucking thing has ever seen.

She takes off her satchel, and she sets it carefully against the nearby wall. It's still got Liu's homework in it, after all. And the book that... she'll probably never get the chance to read. Sorry, book. At least she got you out of the library, and didn't take you into a maw-mouth.

The crystal around her neck is already connected to her stash, all carefully gathered and budgeted with the relentless efficiency of someone whose life depends on it. She has over a dozen spells to kill a room full of people, but they'll all hit harder if she makes it inside the thing. Just standing out here and flinging death spells until her mana was empty wouldn't slow it down much at all. She puts up a shield. It won't be enough, it won't last forever or let her escape from its grasp, but it'll buy her time before it can manage to start unspooling her. Time enough to get very, very far into this thing, so that each and every single one of the horrible murderous spells this fucking school gives her will hurt as much as possible. Buy as much time for someone else as possible.

Before she has time for any further thought, before she has time to hesitate and flinch and flee, she steps into its waiting grasp.

It looks almost confused, as it sees her dashing towards it. One of its mouths lets out a non-word, a "nyeg" just before she collides with it, but given that she wants to be eaten so badly it's definitely going to help her. A millisecond before she's made contact it makes contact with her first, two tentacles emerging from its mass with startling speed again, wrapping themselves around her and pulling.

And then she's in.

The feeling is horrible: something big and sweaty and slimy, something grabbing her too tight and hugging her, clinging to her like some stalking admirer that finally got their hands on her, breathing loudly and heavily into her ears, gasping and whimpering and whispering more non-words. But it's worse than a hug, it's worse than clinging, because once she's inside she's inside; this creature that wants to just open her up like a clam and get to the tasty gooey innards, lick her clean and make her come undone, is all around her, in every direction, looking and feeling like it stretches on for miles and miles as far as she can see. And it's not just physical, it's a magic creature, and even more than the feeling against her skin—disgusting and revolting and horrifying even through her shields—she can feel its intent, its insatiable hunger for her. It wants her, it wants her to be a part of it, it's almost ecstatic in its desire to possess her, to use her, to consume her.

Inside, it's not just eyes and mouths. It's intestines, it's pieces of lungs and brains and skin, it's everything that makes up a person in eternal suspension and flux inside this monstrosity. She can feel something like those dead algae that occasionally cling to your ankles in the ocean by the beach the day after a storm, except it's veins, capilaries, a web lightly trailing against her skin before it vanishes in the endless mass. She can see a finger, a single finger floating just one foot in front of her, its nail painted red and chipped. There's a clump of hair, over there, still attached to a piece of skull, lying on the floor just to her left.

And throughout all of that, a torrent of mana filters through her crystal and into her shields. It must, to hold this horror of horrors off, to protect her from immediately and painfully dissolving without ever, ever dying. It's a maleficarium, and like every other mal what it wants most is mana, and unlike every other mal there is nothing it can't break, nothing it can't eat. Her shields are buying her time and nothing more.

The books were right. Anything else is better than this, much less being like this forever. It's just touching the wrapped plastic around the delicious treat inside, and it's already the worst thing she could possibly imagine. It'll be so, so much worse when her shield comes down. It's normal to scream when a maw-mouth grabs you, and she understands why. She wants to. She just... doesn't. Can't. The only response she can muster is a gasp of horror, as she's drawn within, and then a whimper, from what feels like the depths of her soul.

It's not like anyone can help her now, though, is it. And there is a response inside her at this, this thing, wanting to possess her, wanting to take her apart, wanting to reduce her to her component parts and use the convenient bits of her while all the rest of her screams and screams and screams. She is an instrument of destruction and death, of inflicting pain and fear. Since she was a child, she has been suppressing the urge to indulge. Sure, sometimes when she's attacked by maleficaria, she can indulge a little, but it has always been carefully controlled. Don't use too much mana, don't break anything that shouldn't be broken, play support to the great big hero that gains mana from the monsters. Always, always, always. Carefully measured, carefully proportional, carefully managed. Safe, safe, safe.

At this moment in time? She doesn't care if she's being safe. She doesn't care if she breaks the whole world. Fuck the world, if it has this thing in it. It can all be destroyed and be ashes and everyone can be dead and that'll be better because they won't be suffering like this.

The very first major killing spell that she ever learned is the simplest she knows. It's also the most deadly. But, careful little Yvette of the past, naive little child, she who did not know what it was like to be inside this thing, never used it. Never wanted to use it, wanted to burn it out of her head so she'd never even have the option, but never could. Even if she thought that it was very elegant, it was too dangerous, it was too easy. Three little words, a careless flick of the wrist, and those before you died. 'À la mort,' it goes. 'To the death' it means. Like a duel, or a marriage. See? Very elegant. But of course, there is a lot of trouble in flicking a wrist carelessly, in desiring to end something and saying you'll die to end it and meaning it. In being careless with it. The best spells are often paradoxes. How can you be careless with your own life? How can you want something dead so much that you will use the La Main de la Mort, and cast it carelessly, and not particularly mind which outcome you'll get?

She has her answer. The words are sweet on her tongue, and there's no concern about which outcome is 'better' or 'worse.' There is just the joy of knowing whichever side of the coin comes up, she wins. Of finally, finally getting to let loose, and just do her level best to end everything.

If you get the mental state wrong, that spell kills you. If you get the wrist flick wrong, that spell kills you. But is she even flicking her wrist, barely able to move through this thing's space-distorting molasses? It doesn't matter, at least not when it's Yvette, because it's all in the intent. The flick of the wrist is just a crutch, really, a reminder of how little you care. How little she cares. And in her paradox, in her indifference between dying and killing, she kills.

But that makes it worse. The horrible masses around her, barely-alive in the first place, lose what little hold on life they still have on their pretense at life. It putrefies, the remains of the person closest to her, years-maybe-decades of decay catching up with it in the matter of seconds. One of the eyes right in front of her, staring at her, blinks in relief before it dissolves.

That was one person. How many people is this thing made out of? How many times can Yvette cast that spell?

She doesn't know how many times she can cast it. She doesn't even know how many times she does cast it. It just happens, over and over, as fast as she can say the words and flick her wrist. It's as easily as breathing, and with near as much relief. The joy of killing, of causing this thing to die, is the only nice thing in this hell that she's thrown herself. Yes, good, end it. End it all. Tear this wretched thing down and apart until there's nothing left. Until all this monstrosity that lies before her is dead and gone. As much death as she can manage before she, too, is gone.

The only way to kill a maw-mouth is by killing its core, and it's only been successfully done three times in history. Each time it was done it took an entire circle of wizards, every single time, with most of them outside feeding shedloads of mana into the shields of the ones inside so they can reach that core. And maw-mouths are, in fact, a lot bigger on the inside; you walk and walk and walk and you've moved five inches sidereal, all the while suffering through the worst hell possible to visit on a human being—other than actually being eaten and then digested forever. You get an entire circle of wizards, most of whom stay outside the maw-mouth feeding mana into the ones going in, and then the ones going in spend hours, maybe even days, walking and walking and walking, until they reach the core. And then it's not like the core itself is vulnerable, either; killing it is as difficult as killing any of the individual pieces that make this mal up, if not more.

La Main de la Mort doesn't work on literally everything. Psychic-class mals, for instance, which mostly don't exist in the first place, are immune. But a maw-mouth isn't a psychic-class mal, and everything other than those will just die. Another wizard might be able to protect themself, maybe, if they have enough advance warning and can prepare contingencies against the most powerful of killing spells. But the individual pieces of a monster made out of people who all want to die, who are all begging to be released from their eternal torment?

They die. They die and die and die, they die in droves, La Main de la Mort doesn't cost that much mana (relatively speaking) but there are so, so, so many people. They're probably grateful, to the extent they can feel anything other than pain.

And then suddenly, between one moment and the next, the entire thing breaks apart over her head and slithers down all around her into an enormous puddle of rapidly putrefying gore.

The disorientation of having nothing more to kill causes her to stop her mantra of death. She stares in utter confusion as it... falls to pieces in chunks and rivulets around her shield. It's dead? How, how can it be dead?? How can she possibly have killed it? How is this a thing that could have happened??

After a long pause of bewilderment, she flicks her wrist. It's the same sort of motion of the spell she'd been casting, but it's got a different meaning, and a different word, "Partez!" This flings away her shield, and all of the gore covering it, in a great burst, all apart and all at once. That wasn't a proper spell, or if it was it was one she'd just made, but it felt like a thing she should be able to do with the shield of her own creation. One last act of destruction, that leaves her entirely clean from the mess she's made.

Then she's left in a little... clean spot on the floor. Surrounded on all sides by the remains of all that she's undone. Her hair's come undone, too, from where she'd tied it up, somewhere in the running and the being eaten and the killing. She notes, pointlessly, that she has absolutely no idea where the associated hairtie went. Damn, those things are hard to come by.

When she's sufficiently reoriented herself, she finds that she's barely two steps past where the maw-mouth had originally grabbed her. There's a thing left on the floor a few feet ahead, something that looks like the human version of a deboned chicken, in fetal position. It only stays like that for a few seconds before it bursts and dissolves into sludge. Nearly the whole hallway is drenched in blood and rotting viscera, far too much of it to properly go down the periodically-placed drains along the length of the floor.

Until, that is, the sprayers in the ceiling automatically kick in, loudly. The water must have some alchemical concoction in it, as it manages to drain away the remaining bits that had been choking the drains up, and in a few more seconds Yvette finds herself drenched and alone in the empty hallway, with no evidence whatsoever of what just happened.

As if it all just. Never happened. But for the way she’s drenched, and how she feels like she’ll never, ever be clean again.

She considers her available options, then very deliberately loses her lunch in the direction of the nearest drain. This important task complete, she then proceeds to collapse into a heap on the floor.

"Yvette?" calls Scorpius's voice from upstairs, his footsteps loud in the sudden peace and quiet. "Please tell me you went downstairs, please tell me you're okay—oh thank God," he says once he's climbed down enough to spot her there. "I'd seen you go into the stacks and there were—"

But then he notices the state she's in and stops himself short. "...what happened?" he says, skipping down the remaining steps two at a time and crossing the distance to her in two seconds. He doesn't—quite—touch her, but he's hovering a bit and looking around for, for whatever must've...

The only reply she manages is a manic laugh that doesn’t… sound okay. At all.

She buries her face in her hands, and lets out a choked sob that sounds like another attempt at a laugh.

Okay um um um. "I'm going to try to help you back to your room. Okay? Stop me if you'd rather I not do that." And if she doesn't object he'll try to carry her, bridal-style.

"Mnnh," she objects, shrinking away from him. Look, it's, it's. She doesn't want to be touched right now, okay. There had been so much touching. It was all bad touching. She wants there to be no touching for the foreseeable future. She wants, wants to claw her own skin off and burn the memories out of her skull or cast the La Main de la Mort and see if that somehow makes the world better again. Probably not, but hey, it worked once, right?

He doesn't touch her, then, but he looks miserable. "Please tell me how I can help." Because he is not leaving her alone here in this state, she would be a banquet. "Would, would a floating spell help?" He still hasn't deposited most of the mana he got from fighting the library mals (so if Yvette pays attention she might notice that there's a tiny amount of eldritch light shining through his eyes and his clothes may be swaying a bit in nonexistent wind) because he wasn't sure there wouldn't be more mals to fight, he can definitely splurge a bit for this.