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The door giving way was certainly surprising in a relative sense. Doorways did not typically do that sort of thing, but other than the oddness, Lawr saw no danger in continuing, or at least he saw no reason why turning back and never knowing would be a superior choice to following whatever it was that wanted to lead them onwards. He did not consult Taym as to whether it would be prudent to move forward or to leave a guard on watch, instead simply headed into the dim tunnel, fishing out a flashlight from his pockets to cast a slim red beam of light across the ground in front of them as they went.

Now and again he'd find himself testing the air, trying to deduce how long the air had been trapped here, how stale it was, how old. Butch did not enjoy the dark, his hackles were up and he felt as if the ghost canine was smothering him, clinging close, too close to every thought, making it difficult to think clearly. He made a definite effort to stay close to Taym if the other man joined him.

He did not speak, cautious of startling anything that might lurk beyond them in the darkness.

Lawr turned reflexively in the darkness at the contact, though he did not flinch. He stared at the blackness for a moment before he even brought the light around to see what the other man wanted. Too far with no plan. Wasn't that life itself though? No one had ever given him a guidebook and perhaps there was something bitter in him at that fact.

He shook his head in return and made no motion to head back to the exit. "Are you afraid?" he mouthed with the faint edge of a smile.

Part of him thought back to the call of the fluttering moths. Come and see. Well he'd come a very very long way, and he very much wanted to see.

"I am not." he said, his voice a mere whisper. And it was the truth, he did not know fear, even when Butch, as now was uncertain and shaken, his barometer for danger. He shrugged his bony shoulders. It was only reckless if one did not feel prepared, they would never be prepared for what lay in this desert, what ultimately did it matter if they went on now or later?

He spoke in the tunnel, his voice a hushed whisper. "You can go back if you wish. I am going onwards."

Lawr gave Taym a blank look. "Or what precisely? Boy, if you want to start a fight here in the dark, be my guest, perhaps the noise will attract whatever it is that actually lives down here and save us both the trouble."

He did not change the tone of his voice or his expression as he distantly added. "Concern yourself less with posturing and chest beating, I have no time at all for it or orders. Run if you must."

He'd left him with disgust, and for a while his fear had been displaced by the more immediate fear of having his back to Lawrence in any way. It didn't last long: blocked by the dead end where an exit should have been, Taym stood very still, and he twisted Fiona's ring around and around his finger, back and forth, back and forth, before he turned back and tried to weigh whether his outlook was better or worse for having been separated from his mission partner. It did not, he decided, much matter, and he thought about Leona Tavish and resisted the urge to summon his weapon.

(She waited: she was poised, she had a hoof uplifted, she was pricked ears and hollow searching eyes, tense and ready and restless and bloodthirsty and unafraid.)

He'd drafted a text while he was smoking and waiting for Lawrence to join him, and a few absent flicks of his fingers queued it up in less than the space of a second before the phone went back into his pocket. Maybe it would never get sent. He'd tried, anyway. The whispers shifted around him, the softest of echos brushing the walls in ways that they ought not to, and he had no way to go but where the corridor opened, and so, shaking, he did, looking for the beam of a flashlight.

With the darkness, the whispers grew louder. Touching the walls mean feeling hundreds of small, small bodies moving across them, covering your hand, climbing over you.

Within minutes the tunnel where Lawr stood turned into a sort of crosspath. The path behind him was the one Taym traveled back down. The path ahead narrowed but remained clear enough to pass through. To both his right and his left, paths opened.

He'd tried to keep the light off, unwilling to draw more attention than was necessary, but feeling his way along the walls was instantly dismissed. He shook the unseen insects off his fingers and stopped to collect himself, to steady his breathing--he'd nearly yelped; he'd stifled it--and then, with a sense of signing his own death warrant, he pulled out his own flashlight and switched it on, and he tried, tried, not to shine it on the walls, and he braced himself, remembering with misplaced vividness the cloud of June-bugs and moth's wings around a porch light when he'd stepped outside for a covert smoke ten, eleven years ago.

He did not move, either forward or backward: he waited and he listened for Lawrence, suddenly feeling like he'd not only been put into the labyrinth, but that they'd let a couple of feral dogs in right behind him.

(Worse: he'd let them in himself.)