The spear was still missing its point.
Three fragments lay in Kaylor’s hands, fitted closely enough together that there was no longer any question what they had been. The ancient mosaic beneath the mountain temple had lied only through incompleteness. The weapon that shattered when the Naked Goddess fell had not been a staff.
It had been a spear.
Or something close enough that the distinction no longer mattered.
Beneath the heroes, the great symbol carved into the floor of the Void had awakened almost entirely. Liquid mithril filled the circular design and the branching shape below it, flowing through grooves cut into the stone long before anyone alive remembered the crater’s purpose. Only one section remained dark: a narrow point extending beyond the rest.
A spearhead.
Fendor stared at it.
“Of course.”
Nethnarel looked at him.
“What?”
“We found three pieces.”
“Yes.”
“Fought three sets of horrible things.”
“Yes.”
“And now it tells us there is another piece.”
Kaylor secured the fragments.
“That appears to be what it says.”
Fendor nodded solemnly. “I dislike interactive architecture.”
Hexen crouched beside the glowing design. The liquid metal did not spill beyond the grooves despite the uneven floor. It moved with the slow certainty of mercury directed by invisible purpose, bright enough to reflect from the shallow water surrounding them.
“Three pieces made the shaft,” he said.
Isamu was no longer looking at the floor.
He was looking up.
That saved them several seconds.
Perhaps nothing more.
But several seconds in the Void had repeatedly become the difference between surviving and becoming part of the scenery.
The cavern had never been truly dark. Far overhead, through the enormous vertical wound that formed the upper crater, a distant column of natural light descended into the underground chamber. It was weak at this depth, dispersed by mist and distance, but it had always been there—a pale reminder that somewhere impossibly far above them the ordinary world still existed.
Isamu saw it disappear.
Not fade.
Disappear.
The beam of daylight vanished as though a door had closed across the sky.
His head snapped upward.
Something was between them and the opening.
Something very large.
“Above us.”
The others looked.
At first there was nothing to understand.
Only darkness where light had been.
Then the darkness moved.
Fendor forgot whatever he had been about to say.
A curve appeared high overhead.
Metallic.
Pale.
Vast.
Another followed.
Scale.
Not stone.
The heroes had fought the lesser creatures only hours earlier. Mithril dragons circling through the upper cavern, fast and vicious, breathing streams of metallic shards sharp enough to leave wounds that refused to close. Dangerous creatures.
Real dragons.
This was the same thing only in the way a pond was the same thing as an ocean.
Nethnarel whispered, “Oh.”
The dragon from the mosaic had not been exaggerated.
If anything, the ancient artist had lacked sufficient wall.
The great metallic creature descended through the shaft of the Void, filling so much of it that the world above became visible only in thin lines around its wings. Its scales reflected the sparse light with a cold sheen unlike silver, iron or anything properly mortal. The head alone was larger than some of the monsters the heroes had fought as entire battles. Horns swept backward along a skull built on the scale of siege engines. Wings shifted against the crater walls and sent loose stone cascading downward.
The little mithril dragons had been children beside it.
Perhaps literally.
No one wanted to investigate the genealogy.
Kaylor drew Final Word.
Fendor looked at him.
“That's your response?”
Kaylor stared upward.
“What would you prefer?”
“A significantly larger sword.”
The dragon inhaled.
Isamu moved first.
His body reacted before thought finished telling him what he had seen.
“MOVE!”
The breath came down.
Not fire.
Not frost.
Not lightning.
Mithril.
Thousands upon thousands of metallic shards erupted from the dragon’s jaws in a descending storm. The smaller dragons had breathed narrow streams of spikes.
This was a continent of knives.
The cavern became white.
Nethnarel threw herself sideways.
Hexen moved.
Fendor raised his shield out of instinct despite knowing perfectly well that shields had limits.
Kaylor tried to clear the center.
Isamu vanished from where he had stood.
The storm hit.
Stone ceased being stone.
The shallow water exploded into vapor and spray. Stalagmites that had survived ten thousand years disappeared beneath the blast. The floor shattered in dozens of places at once.
Fendor felt the first wave strike.
There was no meaningful sense of individual impacts. Too many arrived together. Armor screamed. The shield in his hand became an object whose only purpose was to prove how inadequate enchanted metal could be.
He went down.
Nethnarel was caught in the same storm.
Her fiery wings vanished inside the white violence.
For an instant she remained visible as a black-red silhouette against the metallic rain.
Then she was gone.
Not fallen.
Gone.
Hexen endured more than either of them should have been capable of enduring. The strength of the Heroes’ Feast still lived inside him, and the druid had survived attacks from gods, dragons, demons and things for which the word monster had been an act of politeness.
The breath still nearly killed him.
He hit the ground hard.
Somewhere through the roar, someone shouted.
Kaylor.
Or perhaps Fendor.
It was impossible to tell.
Isamu alone moved through the storm as though the attack had merely made the air crowded.
He saw the pattern an instant before impact. His body folded through spaces that should not have existed, leaping between descending lines of mithril, turning sideways as a spike large enough to impale a horse passed through the place his chest had occupied.
The breath erased the ground around him.
Isamu emerged untouched.
He stopped.
Looked around.
That was when he realized some of the others were no longer there.
“Kaylor!”
A dragonborn shape remained.
Barely.
Kaylor staggered upright through metallic debris.
Hexen still moved.
The others—
Isamu could not see them.
No bodies.
No blood where bodies should have been.
Nothing.
There was no time to understand.
The dragon descended.
The sheer scale of it changed the cavern.
Wings drove hurricanes through the stalactites. Water raced outward in sheets. Every loose object skittered away from the impact of moving air.
The enormous mithril head entered the cavern proper.
Two ancient eyes opened.
They had seen those eyes before.
Not directly.
Painted into the mosaic behind the Gathering’s altar.
Watching from the Void.
Waiting.
The last guardian had spent his life watching a temple.
Perhaps something had spent even longer watching this place.
The dragon looked down at the survivors.
Fendor’s voice came weakly from somewhere behind broken stone.
“Run.”
Hexen turned.
Fendor was still there after all, half buried and bleeding, his armor torn open in places that enchanted armor was not supposed to tear.
The elf looked directly at the druid.
“Run.”
Hexen understood.
For once, no argument.
He became stone.
Human flesh thickened and darkened. Clothing and equipment merged into an enormous body of living rock. Arms became massive slabs. Feet sank into the shattered cavern floor.
Earth Elemental.
Hexen dropped.
Not onto the ground.
Into it.
Stone opened around him as though it were water. The elemental body disappeared beneath the cavern floor, burrowing through solid rock toward any place that was not beneath the dragon.
It was an excellent plan.
The dragon followed.
Hexen felt the vibration first.
Then the impossible realization.
Something that large should not have been able to burrow.
The earth disagreed.
Behind him, the dragon entered the stone.
Not the entire body at once. It did not need to. The ancient creature drove through the rock as though the mountain were loose soil. Claws shattered formations that had survived the original impact of a goddess. Its immense body forced a passage through the earth.
Hexen accelerated.
The dragon came after him.
Fendor saw the creature vanish partly beneath the floor.
He stared.
“That is cheating.”
Kaylor looked toward him.
“We are past rules.”
The dragon erupted from the stone again.
Hexen barely cleared the first strike.
The second found him.
Living rock broke.
A huge section of the Earth Elemental’s shoulder disappeared beneath a claw.
Hexen remained intact.
Barely.
Isamu was already running.
Not away forever.
Away now.
There was a distinction.
He crossed the cavern in seconds, weaving between stalagmites and the ruins of old wreckage. A large stone formation offered cover.
Isamu put it between himself and the dragon.
Then looked around its edge.
He had fought things larger than himself almost continuously since waking in a mine with no useful memory of how his life had become this strange.
Giants.
Dragons.
The Swarm.
A living mountain.
Beholders.
Gods, nearly.
Scale had stopped frightening him.
This did.
Not because it was merely enormous.
Because he understood what the first breath had done.
It had not been an attack intended to wound them.
It had been an attack for which survival was the unusual outcome.
The dragon shifted toward Kaylor.
Kaylor looked up.
There were sensible choices available.
That had never been his defining strength.
He moved toward it.
Fendor saw.
“Kaylor.”
The dragonborn kept going.
“Kaylor!”
“I know.”
He did.
That was why he went.
Final Word shone in his hands.
A weapon once carried by generations of guardians. Corrupted at the temple. Cleansed when the Gathering broke. A divine blade that had somehow found its way into the Void with them.
Not the spear.
Not the weapon the mosaic said could kill the Naked Goddess.
Still a weapon.
Still in Kaylor’s hands.
The dragon came down.
Kaylor charged beneath it.
His attack landed.
The blade struck mithril scale with a sound like a temple bell breaking.
The dragon noticed.
That was not the same as being hurt.
A claw came down.
Kaylor blocked.
The force drove him knee-deep into broken stone.
Another strike tore across him.
He remained standing.
One more would not leave that option.
Fendor drew the Oathbow.
He had no oath left in him worth speaking aloud.
He fired anyway.
The arrow struck.
Then another.
The dragon’s scale turned the shafts away with contemptuous sparks.
Fendor laughed once.
There was nothing funny in it.
“Fine.”
He reached for the Vorpal Longsword.
Distance made the gesture ridiculous.
He did it anyway.
The great mithril head turned.
Another breath had not yet gathered.
That was all the time they had.
Nethnarel appeared again.
Not from the cavern.
From somewhere else.
For her, there had been a moment after the breath struck when pain ended so suddenly she had mistaken the absence for death.
Then she was standing somewhere impossible.
She had seen no path between.
No spell carrying her.
No portal.
One instant the Void had existed.
The next it had not.
But only for her.
Some part of her was aware that the others still fought.
That awareness was not vision.
Not hearing.
Something else.
A thread left behind.
Enough that she knew what was happening.
Enough that she knew they would join her.
The knowledge should have terrified her.
Instead, she was furious.
Back in the Void, another survivor was driven to the edge of death.
One hit remained between breath and oblivion.
Blood continued running from wounds that would not close.
Someone tried to stand.
Someone else shouted for one last attack.
They were not surrendering.
That mattered to them even when nothing else did.
Hexen abandoned the hope that the earth would save him and came back toward the fight, stone body forcing upward through the cavern floor.
The dragon met him.
A claw struck.
Rock burst from Hexen’s chest.
Another hit followed.
The elemental form staggered.
Kaylor tried to intercept.
The dragon shifted again.
There was too much of it.
Every defensive choice left another side exposed.
Every attack reached only a fraction of its body.
The creature had been waiting in the Void for an age.
It had not been waiting for a fair fight.
Nethnarel found one last possibility.
Banishment.
If steel could not kill it, perhaps distance could.
If the creature belonged somewhere else, perhaps magic could force it home. Even if it was native to this world, the spell might remove it for a precious minute.
A minute was enough for heroes who had built careers from bad ideas and six-second opportunities.
Her magic reached from the edge of wherever death had placed her—
Or perhaps this happened before she disappeared.
Later, none of them would be capable of establishing the order.
The Void was already coming apart around memory.
Nethnarel shaped the spell.
“Go.”
The magic struck the dragon.
For one impossible heartbeat, the creature blurred.
Hope appeared.
Then the dragon resisted.
The spell broke.
Nethnarel closed her eyes.
“Of course.”
The dragon inhaled again.
Isamu emerged from cover.
There was nowhere left worth running.
If this was the end, he would not spend it behind a rock.
He crossed the water toward the others.
Fendor raised his sword.
Kaylor barely stood.
Hexen dragged an Earth Elemental body through shattered stone.
Nethnarel had spent the last of one desperate answer.
Five heroes.
No Grazim.
No Leonidas.
No army.
No divine rescue waiting visibly above them.
The dragon filled the cavern.
Fendor looked at the others.
He had imagined dying many times.
Usually he had been right about the enemy and wrong about the day.
This day had accumulated evidence.
“Anyone have anything clever?”
Isamu tightened his grip on the whip.
“No.”
Hexen looked upward.
“No.”
Kaylor raised Final Word.
“No.”
Nethnarel managed a tired smile.
“I tried.”
Fendor nodded.
“Good.”
The mithril storm came.
There were no miracles inside it.
Not the sort people normally meant by miracle.
Kaylor disappeared first—or perhaps Fendor did.
Hexen’s elemental body shattered.
Isamu ran directly into impossible violence because moving had always been the answer he trusted most.
Nethnarel felt the world tear away.
One by one, the Heroes of Oxland died.
Not metaphorically.
Not almost.
Not reduced to the edge and rescued by the last healing spell.
They died.
The Void, after everything, kept its promise.
Nothing entered.
Nothing returned.
The last sound was metal.
Then nothing.
Death was not dark.
That annoyed Fendor.
He had expected dark.
If existence intended to stop, darkness seemed professionally appropriate.
Instead there was light.
Not the light of the Void.
Not sunlight.
Something softer.
Color without source.
Fendor opened his eyes.
He was lying on stone.
That was also disappointing.
He sat up.
There was no blood on him.
No torn armor.
No dragon overhead.
No Void.
His hand went immediately to where the Vorpal Longsword should have been.
The weapon was there.
Of course it was.
Death apparently respected inventory.
“Fendor?”
Nethnarel.
He turned.
She was standing several yards away.
Alive was the wrong word.
Present.
Kaylor appeared beside her, staring at his hands as though expecting them to dissolve again.
Isamu stood farther away.
Hexen was himself once more.
Human.
Not an Earth Elemental.
All five of them.
Fendor rose slowly.
“Well.”
Nethnarel looked at him.
“You say that a lot when we're dead?”
“I don't have enough comparative experience.”
Kaylor looked around.
The place was familiar.
That realization arrived slowly enough to hurt.
Stone.
Open space.
A monument.
The shape of the land.
Not identical to memory.
Memory had never been reliable enough for identical.
But close.
Far too close.
Isamu turned in a slow circle.
“I know this place.”
They all did.
Before Auckland.
Before Craven.
Before Joraya.
Before the Shattered Mirror.
Before giants and libraries and the Lord of Swarms.
Before the temple beneath the ice.
Before the crossroads.
Before the Naked Goddess.
Before any of it.
They had awakened once in a place like this with their memories broken and a monument waiting for them.
The monument was here again.
Their monument.
Fendor walked toward it.
His steps slowed.
The stone figures belonged to an earlier version of them. Heroes carved before the people represented by those carvings fully understood who they were.
The beginning.
They had returned to the beginning.
Kaylor stopped.
Not because of the monument.
Someone stood near it.
Small.
Armored.
A holy symbol rested against his chest.
For a moment Kaylor could not understand what he was seeing because understanding required accepting something the world had taught him not to expect.
Nethnarel followed his gaze.
Her expression emptied.
Hexen went completely still.
Isamu said nothing.
Fendor’s hand dropped away from his sword.
The halfling looked exactly as memory had preserved him.
War-priest’s armor.
Familiar face.
The shape of the man who had remained after reincarnation changed everything else about him.
Grazim Von.
Dead Grazim.
He stood beside the monument.
He did not charge toward them.
Did not laugh.
Did not complain.
Did not offer some absurd observation about their most recent disaster.
He was simply there.
Kaylor said his name.
“Grazim?”
The cleric looked at them.
And for the first time since entering the Void, no one thought about the spear.
No one thought about the Naked Goddess.
No one thought about the dragon that had killed them.
The five heroes stood with the dead companion who should never have been waiting for them anywhere.
Behind Grazim rose the monument where their story had begun.
Ahead of them was nothing they understood.
They had gone into the Void looking for a weapon to kill a goddess.
They had found death instead.
And death had brought them home.