The second mountain tried to take their breath before it tried to kill them.
The circle around the lantern brightened, old Oslan geometry drawing itself across the ruined stone in lines too precise for anything that had survived fifteen thousand years of weather. Kaylor stepped through first because everyone had apparently accepted that this was his role in life.
Or lives.
There was no falling.
No tunnel of light.
No sensation of crossing distance.
One plateau vanished.
Another replaced it.
Kaylor hit the ground with his lungs already protesting.
The others appeared around him in rapid succession. Nethnarel stumbled once and caught herself. Fendor inhaled sharply. Hexen bent slightly at the waist as though someone had struck him in the chest. Isamu stood still until the dizziness passed.
Then they breathed.
Carefully.
The air was thin enough to feel unfinished.
Fendor looked back for the circle they had crossed.
It remained behind them, glowing faintly in the stone.
“Well,” he said between breaths, “that was better than climbing.”
Kaylor straightened.
“Higher.”
Nethnarel looked toward the horizon.
Much higher.
The first Oslan plateau had risen roughly ten thousand feet above the world. This one stood another five thousand beyond that, a broad shelf of stone suspended in air too thin for ordinary habitation.
Yet a city had once stood here.
Almost nothing remained.
That was the first thing they understood once the dizziness faded.
The lower plateau had contained ruins. Walls. Foundations. Broken avenues. Enough structure that the heroes could imagine buildings standing there before time destroyed them.
Here, destruction had been less patient.
The city had been blasted flat.
Not weathered.
Not collapsed.
Erased.
Stone foundations extended in pale scars across the plateau. In places the ground had melted or fractured. Broken fragments lay scattered so widely that whatever force had destroyed Oslan’s second city seemed to have struck from every direction at once.
Fendor turned slowly.
“Something hated this place.”
Nethnarel did not answer.
She was studying the devastation.
The old books had said Oslan possessed magic more powerful than the system she understood. Hexen’s scrying had shown green mountaintops, impossible cities, ships sailing through the air.
Here was the answer to that grandeur.
A civilization sophisticated enough to build cities fifteen thousand feet above the world had been reduced to almost nothing.
Only one structure seemed to have survived.
A fountain stood near the heart of the plateau.
It sat precisely enough within the ruined city that even after the surrounding streets had vanished, the heroes could feel that it had once occupied the center of something important.
The basin was wide and circular.
Dry.
At its center rose a statue.
A woman.
Not a goddess, so far as any of them could tell. An Oslan woman rendered with the same nearly human features they had seen in the great statues below, though this carving had survived in far better condition.
Beautiful.
Tall.
Calm.
Her stone garments flowed around her as though sculpted from cloth rather than rock. Her face possessed the serenity of someone who had never expected her city to become dust.
Isamu approached first.
Fendor watched him.
“No lantern.”
Isamu looked back.
“I know.”
“No touching strange objects.”
“I know.”
“No setting things on pedestals.”
“I know.”
“No—”
“I understand.”
Fendor nodded.
“Good.”
Isamu continued toward the fountain.
Fendor waited several seconds.
“I’m still watching you.”
Kaylor moved after him.
The others followed more cautiously.
The basin was completely dry.
No dampness.
No moss.
No stain showing where water had once stood.
Hexen crouched beside the edge.
“The fountain survived.”
Nethnarel looked across the flattened city.
“Almost nothing else did.”
“That probably means something.”
Fendor glanced at the female statue.
“Yes. It means we’re going to activate it.”
Kaylor looked at him.
“We don’t have to.”
Everyone stared at Kaylor.
He frowned.
“What?”
Nethnarel smiled.
“That may be the funniest thing you’ve ever said.”
Hexen inspected the basin.
“The mechanism might require water.”
Fendor closed his eyes.
“There it is.”
Nethnarel looked around.
“Does anyone have enough?”
Hexen stared at her.
She shrugged.
“I know. Druid.”
The question became how much water was enough.
A waterskin would be polite.
This fountain had been built at the center of an ancient magical city.
Politeness seemed unlikely to accomplish much.
Hexen considered Tidal Wave.
Fendor immediately objected.
“We need to fill the fountain, not remove it from the mountain.”
“It would work.”
“That sentence has preceded several disasters.”
Hexen ultimately chose restraint.
Water began flowing into the basin under his magic.
At first nothing happened.
The liquid struck ancient stone and spread across the bottom. Dust became mud. Centuries of dryness darkened.
Then the fountain accepted it.
That was the only way Nethnarel could later describe what happened.
The water did not simply remain where Hexen placed it. It began distributing itself through channels invisible until the liquid found them. Thin streams crawled outward from the central basin and into the stone around it.
The fountain filled.
Then the ground around the fountain began filling too.
Kaylor stepped backward.
“That isn’t normal.”
Fendor moved farther away.
“I appreciate you establishing that early.”
Water spread in a widening circle across the plaza.
Not rapidly.
Deliberately.
It gathered against low surviving walls and broken foundations, turning the center of the ruined city into a broad shallow pool.
The statue remained dry above it.
Nethnarel watched the level rise.
“It’s activating something.”
Fendor drew the Oathbow.
“What gave it away?”
Sixty feet above the fountain, the air split.
Something appeared.
Not through a portal.
Not with the violent discharge of teleportation they had grown accustomed to.
One instant the space above the water was empty.
The next, a figure floated there.
Its lower body blurred into a churning column of water, mist or translucent energy. The substance streamed downward toward the fountain without behaving like anything gravity properly understood.
A staff rested in one long hand.
Its upper form was thin and strange, vaguely humanoid but not belonging to any people the heroes recognized.
It did not attack.
That surprised everyone.
Fendor kept the bow raised.
“Friend?”
Nethnarel looked at him.
“You ask that every time.”
“One day the answer may be yes.”
The figure spoke.
Its first sounds crackled like stone dragged across glass.
No language any of them understood.
Then something changed.
Not the creature.
Them.
Meaning emerged inside the sounds. The words reshaped themselves without changing.
“Leave now.”
The heroes stared upward.
The floating creature lowered its staff slightly.
“The Master would not want you here.”
Fendor looked toward Kaylor.
“See? Conversation.”
Kaylor drew Final Word.
The greatsword still carried the fading radiance of Holy Weapon from the battle below.
Fendor sighed.
“Brief conversation.”
Kaylor stepped into the shallow water.
“Your master.”
The creature looked down.
“Yes.”
Kaylor’s grip tightened around the sword.
He still had not told them what he had seen when he struck the statue below.
The skeletal dragon.
The dead face turning toward him.
Attention reaching across impossible distance.
Now this servant stood above another dead Oslan city warning them away in the name of a master.
Kaylor looked up.
“I want to drink your master’s blood and take his power.”
The silence that followed was extraordinary.
Fendor slowly turned his head.
Hexen stared.
Nethnarel’s mouth opened.
Isamu looked at Kaylor as if reevaluating several years of friendship.
The floating creature answered.
“You stand no chance against the Master.”
Kaylor smiled.
“What about against you?”
Fendor rubbed one hand across his face.
“There goes diplomacy.”
“I think diplomacy ended at the blood part,” Nethnarel said.
Kaylor lifted Final Word.
The creature’s attention moved past him.
“Oh.”
That was not the response Kaylor expected.
The servant looked down at the water.
“I see you are bringing friends.”
Kaylor frowned.
Fendor turned.
“What friends?”
Shapes appeared beneath the water.
At first they looked like shadows cast from somewhere above.
Then the shadows rose.
Bony hands broke the surface.
Ancient figures climbed from water that had not existed minutes earlier. Skeletal warriors pulled themselves upward, carrying curved blades. Some possessed little remaining flesh. Others seemed constructed almost entirely from bone, armor and magical spite.
Several did not bother climbing.
They flew.
The servant raised its staff.
“You will need them.”
The first bony fingers came through the air.
Kaylor almost mistook them for darts.
They were not shaped like fingers.
They were fingers.
Long skeletal digits detached from the hands of one of the guardians and shot across the flooded plaza with the velocity of crossbow bolts.
Two passed Kaylor.
A third struck the back of his helmet.
The impact itself hurt.
What happened afterward was worse.
The bone began moving.
Kaylor reached behind his head.
The finger was trying to bore through his armor.
Not physically alone.
He felt something probing farther inward, scratching toward thought.
Kaylor clenched his jaw.
The thing pushed.
He pushed back.
For a moment he felt the obscene certainty of another creature attempting to force a piece of itself through his skull.
Then resistance hardened inside him.
The finger stopped.
It remained embedded against his armor but could go no farther.
Kaylor tore it free and threw it into the water.
“That,” he said, “was disgusting.”
More fingers flew.
Two passed Hexen.
One struck Fendor.
The elf staggered sideways.
The bone immediately began burrowing.
Fendor’s hand snapped up.
“No.”
Whatever psychic pressure traveled with the thing struck a mind that had spent too many years refusing unreasonable propositions.
The finger stopped.
Fendor ripped it away.
He looked at Kaylor.
“I’m revising my opinion of the wool argument.”
Kaylor blocked a scimitar.
“Busy.”
Another guardian flew across the water and landed beside Nethnarel.
Its bony blade flashed.
The first cut struck.
The second came harder.
Ancient steel opened her armor.
Nethnarel backed away.
Something else hit her from the opposite side.
A finger.
This one found the side of her head.
She gasped.
It pressed against her ear.
Then entered.
Nethnarel screamed.
Fendor turned.
“Neth!”
She clawed at the side of her head.
The finger was not large.
That somehow made it worse.
The dead fragment worked deeper, crooked joints writhing as it tried to force its way toward her skull.
Nethnarel fought it.
The creature won enough.
Pain detonated behind her eye.
Her balance vanished.
She remained upright through anger.
“There is a finger in my ear.”
Fendor stared.
“Yes.”
“Get it out.”
“That was already the plan.”
Kaylor moved into the guardian nearest Fendor.
Final Word fell.
The glowing blade struck ancient bone.
Kaylor forced divine power into the hit.
Radiance burst through the creature’s ribs.
He struck again.
The skeletal body came apart in pieces.
Not dead yet.
Close.
Kaylor raised the sword once more.
The battle spread.
The servant remained above it all.
Sixty feet over the fountain.
Untouched.
Isamu looked at the column of churning water and energy beneath the creature.
Then upward.
Fendor saw him looking.
“No.”
Isamu ran.
The monk crossed the flooded plaza.
Water barely slowed him.
When he reached the strange column supporting the servant, he did something that should not have worked.
He ran up it.
His first step landed on water.
The second higher.
Then another.
The frothing column resisted him, pressure twisting around his legs, trying to throw him away. Isamu adjusted as though the impossible surface were merely an unpleasant staircase.
Twenty feet.
Thirty.
Forty.
Fendor watched from below.
“I have stopped asking.”
Isamu climbed.
The current fought harder.
He pushed through.
Sixty feet above the ruins, he reached the floating servant.
Hunter’s Mark settled over it.
The creature looked surprised.
Isamu’s whip snapped.
The first strike failed to penetrate whatever protected the servant.
The second landed.
Then another.
The figure recoiled.
Beneath Isamu’s feet the water column surged violently, attempting to tear him away.
He remained.
The servant raised its staff.
A bolt of killing frost shot toward him.
Isamu twisted aside.
The spell vanished past his shoulder.
Green fire followed.
Isamu dropped his body against the column.
The flame missed.
A second icy bolt came immediately after.
He leaned away.
The bolt passed through the space where his face had been.
Three attacks.
Nothing.
Isamu looked at the servant.
The expression on his face remained almost offensively calm.
Below, Fendor stopped watching.
He had his own problem.
A skeletal warrior stood directly in front of him.
Fendor attacked.
The Vorpal Longsword moved so quickly that individual swings became difficult to separate.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Then he spent the reserve of speed he kept for moments when ordinary lethality proved insufficient.
Four more.
The first enemy came apart.
Fendor was already moving before its bones hit the water.
He entered the shallows after the next guardian.
The sword flashed again.
The ancient sheath at his side seemed to hum with every perfect stroke.
Two cuts landed almost impossibly clean.
The table of fate, had anyone been able to see it, would have called them vorpal.
Fendor called them sufficient.
He left another guardian collapsing behind him.
“Next.”
Hexen saw the water filling with enemies.
He remembered the previous battle.
The solution remained excellent.
The druid became a triceratops.
Bone shifted beneath flesh.
Human size vanished.
Mass replaced subtlety.
A horned prehistoric monster stood where Hexen had been.
Nethnarel, still struggling with the finger in her ear, saw him transform.
“Of course.”
Hexen charged into the water.
The first skeletal guardian turned too late.
The triceratops struck.
Water exploded around its legs.
Ancient bone flew.
The guardian managed to twist enough that Hexen failed to fully trample it, but several tons of angry druid remained persuasive even without perfect technique.
The servant above continued fighting Isamu.
The lesser guardians answered from below.
Another barrage of finger-darts flew toward the monk.
Isamu saw them.
One passed.
The second came directly at his head.
His hand moved.
He caught the attack.
Not completely.
The impact still carried force.
But he turned the flying bone aside, reducing what should have been a brutal strike to something survivable.
The finger twisted in his hand.
Tried to burrow.
Isamu closed his fist.
“No.”
His body rejected the intrusion.
He threw the bone away.
One of the flying guardians closed behind him with twin scimitars.
This time both blades found him.
Isamu absorbed the wounds and remained on the impossible column.
There were now undead above the water, undead in the water and a servant floating over the entire battlefield.
Fendor looked around.
“Hexen?”
The triceratops bellowed.
“Good.”
Nethnarel was less good.
The finger in her ear continued digging.
It had not reached her brain.
Yet.
That qualifier occupied far too much of her attention.
Gygax climbed from her clothing.
The little mouse stared at the protruding length of bone.
Nethnarel looked at him.
“Get it.”
Gygax seized the finger.
He pulled.
For a creature his size, the attempt bordered on heroic.
Tiny paws braced against Nethnarel’s head.
The skeletal finger writhed.
Gygax pulled harder.
For a moment Nethnarel felt it shift.
Then the cursed thing jerked deeper.
Gygax lost the contest.
He did not release it.
Nethnarel screamed through clenched teeth.
“Keep pulling.”
Fendor looked over.
The sight was one of the strangest things he had witnessed.
This assessment came from a man who had recently watched Isamu run sixty feet up a fountain.
“You have a mouse fighting a finger.”
“Yes.”
“Do you want help?”
“Yes!”
Fendor raised the bow.
Nethnarel saw the arrow.
“No!”
“You just said—”
“Not like that!”
“I have an angle.”
“You absolutely do not.”
Gygax kept pulling.
Nethnarel forced herself to concentrate.
The pain was interfering with everything.
Fine.
If she could not remove the distraction, she would work around it.
She looked at the rubble scattered across the ruined plaza.
Ten small stones lifted from the ground.
Fendor noticed.
“Oh.”
The rocks began moving.
Not rolling.
Flying.
Animate Objects.
One after another, the pieces of ruined Oslan masonry launched upward toward the servant hovering over the fountain.
The first missed.
Then another.
Several struck.
Stone hammered into the creature from different angles.
The servant reeled.
Isamu took advantage.
The fight above the fountain became a ridiculous convergence of monk, flying rocks, ice, green fire and a column of water that apparently possessed opinions about all of them.
Nethnarel smiled despite the bone trying to enter her head.
“There.”
Another guardian attacked Hexen.
The scimitar struck the triceratops.
It did very little.
A second blow landed harder.
Hexen absorbed that too.
The enormous druid turned.
The undead warrior seemed to reconsider its choices.
Too late.
Kaylor remained in the center of the flooded ruins.
Holy Weapon still burned along Final Word.
The light turned the shallow water around him gold.
A guardian moved toward Fendor.
Kaylor intercepted.
His blade crushed through bone.
Smite followed.
The thing staggered apart.
Another emerged from the water.
Then another.
How many had appeared when the fountain activated was difficult to determine. The water itself concealed them until they chose to rise.
Kaylor looked upward.
Isamu was still sixty feet in the air.
The servant remained alive.
Nethnarel had a finger in her head.
Hexen was a dinosaur.
Fendor was knee-deep in water killing skeletal warriors with a sword that had long ago stopped pretending to be reasonable.
Kaylor considered the battlefield.
“Normal.”
Fendor heard him.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
The servant above raised its staff again.
Isamu shifted.
The churning column beneath him tried to pull his footing apart.
He adjusted.
Bony guardians flew toward him.
One attacked from behind.
Another prepared more finger-darts.
Nethnarel’s animated stones circled upward.
Gygax continued tugging at the finger buried in her ear.
Hexen lowered his horns.
The triceratops charged again.
Water erupted beneath him.
Fendor entered another burst of movement, sword cutting so fast that droplets hung in the air after each passing stroke.
Kaylor raised his glowing blade.
The ruined city had been destroyed thousands of years ago.
Its guardians had waited anyway.
And somewhere beyond them was the Master.
The one who would not be happy.
The one Kaylor had perhaps already seen.
A dead dragon’s face turned inside his memory.
He did not tell the others.
Not yet.
The servant pointed its staff at Isamu.
The skeletal warriors converged.
Nethnarel’s living stones climbed through the thin mountain air.
Hexen thundered into the water.
Then the battle began again in earnest.
And the fountain kept rising.