The Manticore’s Tail had never looked so ordinary.
That was precisely what Kaylor liked about it.
There were no floating islands above the roof. No dead gods under the floor. No portals opening behind the bar. No colossal dragon blocking the sun. The tables were made of wood and remained where carpenters had intended them to remain. Ale went into mugs instead of becoming part of an ancient ritual. Doors led to rooms rather than other planes.
After the Void, these seemed like remarkable achievements.
The people of Oxland had given them the inn after one of the occasions on which the heroes had saved the city. The exact number of such occasions had become difficult to remember without sounding boastful. The Manticore’s Tail had begun as gratitude and gradually become something stranger: headquarters, refuge, meeting hall, warehouse, home and occasionally the place from which they departed to prevent the world from ending again.
This time they had returned after doing exactly that.
Again.
Almost no one knew.
That was new.
They had defeated the Naked Goddess, prevented whatever ruin her return would have brought, died in the process, returned from death and defeated her again. Grazim had come back from wherever the dead waited long enough to fight beside them one final time.
Then five heroes had come home.
There were no parades.
No statues.
No frightened kings waiting at the gates.
Most of the people drinking in the common room had no idea how close the world had come to becoming something else entirely.
Fendor discovered that he preferred it that way.
He sat with one boot hooked around the leg of his chair and watched two merchants argue about the price of wool as though wool were the most consequential force currently operating in the realm.
One merchant slapped the table.
The other accused him of dishonesty.
Fendor drank.
“This is excellent.”
Kaylor looked across the table.
“The ale?”
“The problem.”
“What problem?”
“The wool.”
Kaylor stared at him.
Fendor gestured toward the merchants.
“They have been discussing wool for seven minutes.”
“Yes.”
“No one has died.”
“Yet.”
“No gods.”
“Not that we know of.”
“No one has opened a hole in reality.”
Kaylor considered the merchants.
“One of them looks capable of trying.”
Fendor smiled.
“There he is.”
Hexen rarely spent as much time inside the inn as the others.
His home stood outside.
That arrangement had become necessary after the enormous awakened oak he had adopted, cultivated or persuaded into domestic service—depending upon whom one asked—proved incompatible with doors. The tree rose beside the Manticore’s Tail like a piece of forest that had grown tired of waiting for civilization to come to it. Platforms nestled among enormous branches. Living wood shaped rooms where ordinary carpenters might have used walls. Smaller awakened plants wandered around its base with varying levels of helpfulness.
Hexen called it his grove.
Fendor called it the tree fort.
Hexen had stopped correcting him.
Isamu divided his time between the inn and wherever his feet took him. Kaylor found reasons to remain busy. Fendor had old responsibilities among people who had once decided that killing their king qualified him to become their king. None of them lived idle lives.
But idleness was not the same thing as peace.
For a little while, they had peace.
Nethnarel hated it.
Not the absence of danger.
She was not completely deranged.
She hated the ceiling.
Magic had always contained one.
The frustration had followed her for years, though only recently had she begun admitting what it was. Every spell promised power and then delivered rules. Distance. Duration. Components. Limits. The universe appeared perfectly comfortable allowing someone to tear open space, summon fire from nothing or reshape flesh into a dragon, provided it was done according to sufficiently irritating restrictions.
Nethnarel had become one of the most powerful sorcerers alive.
That was the problem.
She could feel what still lay beyond her.
There was more.
Not merely another spell she had not learned. Not some forgotten technique waiting in a wizard’s notebook. Something beneath the structure itself.
She could feel it every time wild magic broke its leash.
A deeper current.
Power before shape.
Possibility before someone decided what magic was permitted to become.
She wanted it.
Fendor discovered this because Nethnarel arrived at the Manticore’s Tail one afternoon carrying enough books to injure a mule.
She dropped the stack onto their table.
Ale jumped in the mugs.
Fendor looked at the books.
Then at her.
“No.”
Nethnarel sat.
“You don’t know what I’m asking.”
“You brought books.”
“Yes.”
“We have established the danger.”
Kaylor pulled the nearest volume toward him.
Its leather cover had once possessed writing. Time had reduced most of it to stains and shallow marks.
“Where did you get these?”
“The old library.”
Hexen, who had entered from the grove moments earlier, stopped behind a chair.
“The library.”
“Yes.”
“The one where we freed the Swarm Lord.”
“That one.”
Fendor closed his eyes.
“Wonderful.”
“The Swarm Lord is not there.”
“That sentence contains less reassurance than you think.”
Nethnarel ignored him.
“I went back because the collection predates almost anything else we’ve found. Half the books are useless, another quarter are religious arguments written by people with too much ink, and the rest look like they were deliberately hidden from anyone who enjoyed having eyesight.”
Isamu took the seat beside her.
“You found something.”
Nethnarel’s expression changed.
That was answer enough.
“Yes.”
Hexen sat.
Kaylor leaned closer.
Fendor sighed and moved his ale farther from the books.
Nethnarel opened the oldest volume.
The pages had darkened almost to brown. Some were brittle enough that breathing too hard over them seemed irresponsible. Lines of cramped script ran across the surviving portions in several languages. Other sections had been written in characters none of them recognized.
A small shape emerged from between two books.
Gygax climbed onto the table.
The mouse had proved far more useful in the library than anyone had expected. He navigated ruined shelves and narrow spaces that defeated larger searchers, disappearing into forgotten corners and returning with scraps of parchment, bindings and occasionally information that should not reasonably have fit inside a creature of his size.
Fendor looked at him.
“You helped.”
Gygax cleaned one whisker.
Nethnarel nodded.
“He is an excellent librarian.”
“He is a mouse.”
“Both things can be true.”
Gygax disappeared into the stack again.
Nethnarel turned several pages.
“I found references to a civilization that existed before our understanding of magic.”
Kaylor frowned.
“Before magic?”
“No. Before what we know as magic.”
That distinction silenced them.
Nethnarel put one finger against a damaged line.
“The surviving text says their system was different. More powerful, according to the writer. Not stronger versions of the same spells. Different.”
Hexen leaned over the book.
“How different?”
“I don’t know.”
“You went all the way back there and read half-dead books for how long?”
“Long enough.”
“And you don’t know?”
“That is why we are having this conversation.”
Fendor picked up his ale.
“I was happier with wool.”
Nethnarel ignored him.
“The civilization had a name.”
She took a scrap of parchment and wrote five letters.
“Oslan,” Isamu said.
Nethnarel nodded.
“The source spelled it out.”
Kaylor studied the name as though it might attack.
“Never heard of it.”
“Neither had I.”
“That’s unusual,” Hexen said.
“Extremely.”
Nethnarel opened another book.
This one was worse.
A large section of its pages had fused together, and the surviving image stretched across two cracked sheets. Most of the drawing had been lost. Enough remained.
Three mountains.
Not ordinary peaks.
Each rose in steep, immense walls toward a broad summit. Upon each summit, faint lines suggested towers, roads and walls.
Cities.
Fendor leaned forward despite himself.
“Those are on top?”
“Yes.”
“All three?”
“Yes.”
Kaylor traced the shape of one mountain without touching the page.
“How high?”
“The drawing doesn’t say.”
“And where?”
“That,” Nethnarel said, “is the problem.”
There was no coastline.
No compass.
No recognizable kingdom.
Only three mountains standing together and the fading suggestion of three cities above the world.
Hexen sat back.
“So you found an ancient civilization with impossible magic in an unknown location.”
“Yes.”
Fendor pointed at him.
“Do not encourage her.”
“I was summarizing.”
“You sounded interested.”
“I am interested.”
“Traitor.”
Nethnarel smiled.
“We can look.”
Kaylor raised one eyebrow.
“With what?”
Hexen was already considering the problem.
“Scrying.”
Nethnarel looked at him.
“We don’t know anyone there.”
“We know the name.”
“We have a drawing.”
“And we have you.”
Fendor frowned.
“How does having Neth help?”
“If the magic explodes, it may recognize her.”
Nethnarel stared at him.
“That was almost insulting.”
“Almost.”
They moved the books from the common room.
There were limits to how much ancient forbidden magical experimentation an inn deserved.
The upper room they used for planning had seen maps of kingdoms, demon bargains, dragon routes, missing villages and enough questionable decisions to make the table itself morally suspect. Nethnarel laid the drawing at its center.
Hexen prepared the spell.
Scrying was normally an act of pursuit.
A person.
A place known well enough to find again.
Something connected to the caster by knowledge, possession or memory.
This time they had almost none of those things.
A name.
A ruined picture.
A civilization dead long before their own histories began.
Hexen concentrated anyway.
Nethnarel stood beside him and supplied everything she had translated.
Oslan.
Three mountains.
Three cities.
Magic unlike modern magic.
Ancient enough that the authors themselves treated it as something already nearly forgotten.
At first there was nothing.
Hexen’s awareness stretched outward.
Across distance.
Across possibility.
The spell searched for a place neither caster nor magic fully understood.
Then something looked back.
Hexen stopped breathing.
The contact lasted perhaps a heartbeat.
A figure existed somewhere in the darkness.
Shadowed.
No face he could distinguish. No race. No sex. No details upon which ordinary memory could fasten.
Only presence.
Something associated with magic itself.
Not a wizard.
Not simply another creature using power.
A point of control.
A source, perhaps.
Hexen had always understood magic as something that existed everywhere. Druids felt it in the world. Sorcerers carried it inside themselves. Clerics drew upon divinity. Wizards learned how to persuade reality with sufficient notation.
This felt like discovering that all rivers eventually passed beneath the same bridge.
The shadowed figure turned.
It looked directly at him.
Hexen tore himself free.
The spell almost collapsed.
Nethnarel caught his shoulder.
“What?”
He did not answer.
Not yet.
The vision changed before it ended.
Three mountains filled his mind.
The same three.
Not ruined.
Alive.
Their slopes were impossibly steep, great columns of stone rising from lush country. Green spread across the summits.
Cities stood there.
Whole cities.
Towers caught sunlight.
Bridges connected structures that should not have been built at such heights.
Something moved through the air.
Not birds.
Ships.
Great vessels sailing above the mountaintops with nothing beneath them.
Then the image vanished.
Hexen opened his eyes.
For several seconds he did not speak.
Fendor waited.
That was how Kaylor knew the situation was serious.
Nethnarel still held Hexen’s shoulder.
“What did you see?”
Hexen looked at her.
“It noticed me.”
The room became very still.
“What did?”
“I don’t know.”
“An Oslan?”
“I don’t know.”
“A god?”
“I don’t know.”
Fendor sighed.
“We are accumulating those answers.”
Hexen rubbed one hand across his face.
“It felt connected to magic.”
Nethnarel’s interest sharpened rather than retreating.
Kaylor noticed.
“So we stop.”
She looked at him.
“What?”
“Something you don’t understand noticed Hexen while he was looking for an ancient civilization that disappeared before history.”
“Yes.”
“And your response is that you want to know more.”
“Yes.”
Kaylor stared at her.
Nethnarel spread her hands.
“What answer did you expect?”
Fendor nodded toward Kaylor.
“She does have you there.”
Hexen pointed toward the drawing.
“I saw the mountains.”
That changed the conversation.
Nethnarel turned.
“The same ones?”
“Yes.”
“The cities?”
“Yes.”
“Ruins?”
“No.”
Hexen paused.
“They were alive.”
He described them.
Green summits.
Cities.
Airships.
An image not of what remained now, but what had once been.
Isamu had listened without speaking.
Now he took the old continental map from the shelf.
It had come into their possession through Gildan, one of the broad maps of the known land that had become increasingly necessary as their definition of nearby expanded from villages to kingdoms to other planes.
He spread it across the table.
The others gathered around.
Nothing on the map carried the name Oslan.
No cities occupied three neighboring mountains.
Most of the obvious ranges were wrong.
Then Isamu stopped.
Far to the northwest lay a desolate region rendered with little confidence by the cartographer. The coast had broken there. Dry land faded into a partially drowned waste. Three enormous plateau-like mountains stood close together near the edge of it.
Isamu put one finger on the map.
“There.”
Nethnarel leaned closer.
Kaylor compared the map with the ancient drawing.
Three mountains.
Three broad summits.
Close enough that a person standing far away might have drawn all of them in one view.
Fendor looked between the two.
“Those?”
Isamu nodded.
“I remember them from the map.”
Hexen examined the surrounding region.
“There are no cities.”
“Not now.”
Nethnarel’s voice had gone quiet.
Isamu continued studying the map.
“There are stories about this place.”
Kaylor looked at him.
“What kind?”
“Old ones.”
“Useful old?”
“No.”
Fendor nodded.
“Of course.”
Isamu tapped the region.
“A devastation. Something ancient. Older than most of the histories we know. The stories don’t agree on what happened, only that destruction came from somewhere around here.”
Nethnarel stared at the three mountains.
Her books had already told them that Oslan predated the magical civilization they understood.
Now the map told them something had happened where its cities should have been.
The image Hexen had seen showed what the region had once been.
The modern map showed what remained.
Fendor looked at Nethnarel.
“No.”
She looked back.
“You are coming.”
“I know.”
“That was easy.”
“I have learned that saying no only delays packing.”
Kaylor studied the distance between Oxland and the mountains.
“How far?”
Hexen measured against the scale.
“Far.”
“Helpful.”
“With Wind Walk?”
Hexen considered.
“Days.”
Fendor finished his ale.
“Of course.”
They left soon after.
There were preparations, although considerably fewer than there would have been years earlier. The heroes no longer needed to debate whether rope might someday prove useful. Their possessions included objects capable of violating space, summoning creatures, reshaping bodies, opening other worlds and turning modest disagreements into regional events.
Travel had become easier.
The world had not become smaller.
Hexen transformed them into racing forms of mist and wind, and the five heroes left Oxland behind.
For seven days they crossed the continent.
They moved faster than caravans, horses or most birds could imagine. Forests passed beneath them in hours. Rivers became silver lines and vanished behind. Hills flattened into distance. Settlements appeared and disappeared before anyone below could properly wonder what had crossed the sky.
Nothing challenged them.
That, too, was new.
There had been a time when every road seemed to contain something hungry.
Now most things with reasonable instincts watched the rushing shapes pass and chose different ambitions.
Fendor found the experience strangely insulting.
“No giants.”
The words emerged poorly while moving as living wind.
Isamu’s answer was not much clearer.
“Good.”
“No dragons.”
“Good.”
“No demons.”
“Good.”
Fendor considered.
“I think we’ve become boring.”
Nethnarel drifted closer.
“Give it time.”
The land changed beneath them.
Green faded.
Rivers became scarce.
The terrain broke into dry expanses that looked wounded rather than naturally arid. To the west, old coastlines disappeared beneath the sea. In places the water had invaded miles inland, leaving isolated stone ridges and pale dead ground behind.
Then the mountains appeared.
Even from a distance they were wrong.
Not peaks in the familiar sense.
Walls.
Three colossal masses of stone rising abruptly from the ruined country, their sides so steep they might have been cut from the world rather than formed by it. The smallest stood nearly ten thousand feet high. The others climbed higher.
Their summits were broad.
Flat enough for cities.
Nethnarel stared.
There were no cities visible from below.
No airships.
No green crowns.
Only stone.
Whatever had happened to Oslan had happened thoroughly.
They stopped before reaching the first mountain.
For all their power, the heroes had learned at least one lesson worth preserving:
Sometimes it was useful to sleep before entering the ancient dead civilization.
They made camp a short distance from the base as evening settled across the wasteland.
Fendor looked around at the stones.
“No inn.”
“There is an inn,” Hexen said.
“Days away.”
“Yes.”
“That makes it functionally fictional.”
Hexen began preparing Heroes’ Feast.
Fendor watched the magic form.
“You know, eventually someone is going to write songs about us and leave out how much of our success depends on eating before doing something stupid.”
Nethnarel sat on a rock.
“That would be inaccurate.”
“History usually is.”
The feast appeared without incident.
Warm food.
Drink.
The impossible abundance of magic in the middle of a dead landscape.
They ate beneath the shadow of Oslan’s mountains.
Nothing attacked during the night.
No shadowed controller of magic appeared.
No forgotten civilization descended from the plateau.
No god announced that they had violated some ancient boundary.
Morning found them rested.
The first mountain rose directly above them.
Kaylor summoned his Pegasus.
Fendor and Isamu prepared the flying carpet.
Nethnarel needed no assistance.
Hexen could become nearly anything that solved the problem.
They began climbing.
For the first several thousand feet, nothing happened.
The ground fell away.
The ruined country spread beneath them.
Wind strengthened against the cliffs.
Six thousand feet.
Seven.
The mountain kept rising.
At approximately eight thousand, Fendor felt the carpet shift beneath him.
He looked down.
The enchanted fabric bucked.
Not from wind.
Its magic weakened.
The carpet drifted sideways.
Isamu adjusted immediately.
Fendor seized the edge.
“That is new.”
The carpet dropped.
Only several feet.
Enough.
Fendor’s expression changed.
“Down.”
He forced the carpet lower.
For a moment it resisted him in the wrong direction, its enchantment responding sluggishly as though every command had to cross some widening distance before reaching the magic that made flight possible.
They descended.
A few hundred feet.
The carpet steadied.
Fendor stopped it.
Then cautiously climbed again.
The same threshold approached.
The same instability returned.
He descended once more.
Nethnarel hovered nearby.
“What happened?”
“The carpet doesn’t want to go higher.”
Kaylor circled on the Pegasus.
“Broken?”
“No.”
Hexen rose beside them.
“Magic.”
No one joked.
Below eight thousand feet, the carpet obeyed.
Above it, the enchantment began to fail.
Kaylor looked upward.
Two thousand feet of nearly vertical stone remained before the first plateau.
Nethnarel stared at the cliff.
At the dead summit above it.
At the place where a civilization supposedly wielding magic far beyond their own had once built a city in the sky.
Something inside her shifted.
Not fear.
Vindication.
She had gone looking for proof that magic did not have to work the way they understood it.
The first proof was that theirs had stopped working.
Fendor looked at her.
“Please do not smile.”
“I’m not smiling.”
“You are absolutely smiling.”
Nethnarel looked up toward Oslan.
Far above, mist had begun gathering along the edge of the plateau.
“Different magic,” she said.
The carpet faltered again.
And the mountain waited.