The Titan looked at Isamu.
Isamu looked at the Titan.
Neither seemed particularly impressed with the other.
The difference was that Isamu had just stuck his arm into a giant skull and caused the thing to appear.
Fendor considered this relevant.
“You did this.”
“I was investigating.”
“You put your hand in its eye.”
“Yes.”
“And now there is a giant.”
“Yes.”
“I would like the definition of investigating revised.”
The creature towered over the chamber.
Titan was the only word large enough to fit comfortably.
Its body resembled an enormous human shape warped by whatever power had preserved or created it. One massive hand held a hammer built for something twice Kaylor’s height. The other carried a greatsword almost as long as some of the corridors they had crawled through to reach this place.
Its abdomen was worse.
The flesh there hung open like a living wound. Four serpentine things writhed within it—worms or snakes thick enough to be monsters in their own right, their bodies emerging from the Titan as though its belly contained a nest rather than organs.
The summoning circle burned faintly beneath its feet.
Behind the heroes, the door marked with Oslan’s warning remained open.
Danger.
For once, Fendor thought, the ancient people had been admirably clear.
Isamu moved first.
Hunter’s Mark settled over the Titan.
Then the monk attacked.
His weapon struck once.
Again.
Again.
The Titan’s flesh was thick, but not invulnerable. Each hit opened another wound.
Isamu looked satisfied.
The Titan looked angrier.
“That worked.”
Fendor drew the Vorpal Longsword.
“Please do not sound surprised.”
Isamu moved away before the Titan could answer.
Kaylor was already reaching for a potion.
He pulled the small vial free and drank.
Fendor recognized it.
“Speed?”
Kaylor emptied the potion.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
The magic hit immediately.
The room slowed.
Not truly.
Kaylor simply became faster.
His heartbeat accelerated without losing rhythm. Muscles tightened. Thought sharpened until everyone else seemed to be moving through thicker air.
He advanced.
One of the creatures in the Titan’s abdomen tore itself free enough to strike at him.
It missed.
Kaylor barely acknowledged it.
Final Word came around.
The first blow cut into the Titan.
Radiance followed.
The second landed before the creature fully reacted.
More divine force.
The potion gave Kaylor enough speed for another attack, and he used it without hesitation.
The Titan staggered.
Not far.
Enough.
Kaylor stepped back into guard.
“It bleeds.”
Fendor stared at the enormous creature.
“That is reassuring in a very limited way.”
Hexen changed.
There were transformations the others had become accustomed to.
Wolf.
Bear.
Elemental.
Triceratops.
Creatures so strange that ordinary people would have spent the rest of their lives discussing the experience while the Heroes of the New Beginning barely interrupted conversation.
This one was different.
Hexen’s human form brightened.
His silhouette grew.
Wings unfolded behind him.
Not leather.
Not feathers belonging to any ordinary bird.
White-gold wings filled with celestial light.
Armor formed around a body larger and more perfect than the human shape it replaced. A great luminous weapon appeared in one hand.
Fendor stopped.
Kaylor actually turned.
Isamu stared.
Nethnarel smiled.
Hexen Brew stood before them as a planetar.
Fendor looked slowly upward.
“You could do that?”
Hexen’s celestial face turned toward him.
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“Long enough.”
“That was deliberately vague.”
“Yes.”
Fendor pointed toward the Titan.
“Fine. Angel first. Questions later.”
The Titan charged.
Its hammer came around.
The greatsword followed.
Kaylor avoided the hammer.
The sword clipped him instead.
Even through armor, the impact felt like being struck by part of the building.
Kaylor moved with it rather than against it, letting the potion-enhanced speed keep his feet beneath him.
Nethnarel studied the battlefield.
She still had meteors available.
Fireball would work.
Probably.
The Titan was too large to miss.
The problem was Kaylor standing beneath it.
Again.
There were moments when Nethnarel suspected the paladin’s primary tactical function was to make area spells inconvenient.
Then she looked at the things writhing in the Titan’s abdomen.
Four minds.
Not one.
Four.
Perhaps five with the Titan itself.
Nethnarel’s expression changed.
She had been saving something.
The greatest spells were like that.
At twentieth level, there were no more circles waiting above her in the ordinary system. She had reached the roof Mystra had allowed mortal magic to possess.
Ninth circle.
The ceiling.
She had come to Oslan because she wanted to know whether the ceiling had always existed.
The answer, increasingly, appeared to be no.
Nethnarel raised her hands.
Fendor saw the motion.
“What?”
“Something loud.”
“That is not enough information.”
Nethnarel screamed.
No ordinary throat produced the sound.
Psychic Scream entered the chamber without passing through air.
Thought itself ruptured.
The Titan jerked.
The things in its abdomen convulsed.
Four serpent-like creatures shrieked inside Nethnarel’s spell.
One resisted.
Three did not.
Their bodies went rigid.
Their heads stopped moving.
Three of the four horrors hanging from the Titan’s gut were stunned.
Nethnarel lowered her hands.
Blood did not come from her nose.
It felt as though it should have.
Fendor stared.
“What did you do?”
“Ninth-circle magic.”
“Good.”
“Three of the things in its stomach can't move.”
Fendor looked at the Titan.
“Better.”
The flying carpet came out.
Kaylor saw him step onto it.
“No.”
Fendor looked down.
“What?”
“You were killed an hour ago.”
“That was a completely different monster.”
“You were decapitated.”
“Yes.”
“And now you're flying toward a Titan's head.”
Fendor adjusted his grip on the Vorpal Longsword.
“Exactly.”
The carpet rose.
Fendor climbed past the Titan’s waist.
Then chest.
One of the serpent-things snapped at him from below.
It missed.
The Titan turned.
Too slowly.
Fendor reached its head.
For a heartbeat the elf floated face-to-face with something that looked capable of biting a horse in half.
Fendor smiled.
“Hello.”
He attacked.
The first sword stroke struck the Titan across the face.
The second opened its temple.
Then Fendor stopped fighting like an ordinary man.
Action Surge.
Eight attacks.
The Vorpal Longsword blurred.
The Titan’s size should have made precision difficult.
It did the opposite.
There was simply more target.
Fendor hit again.
Again.
Again.
One strike found that impossible line the sword loved.
Vorpal magic tore through flesh.
The Titan reeled.
Fendor kept going.
Another perfect stroke.
More catastrophic damage.
The blade passed through portions of face and neck that would have ended a smaller creature several times over.
The Titan remained alive.
Fendor struck again.
And again.
By the time the burst ended, he was breathing hard and the Titan’s head looked as though it had spent several minutes inside a sawmill.
The creature stared at him.
Fendor stared back.
“That usually works.”
The Titan roared.
Then attacked him.
The hammer moved.
Fendor tried to evade.
There was nowhere to go.
The flying carpet shifted, but the weapon was simply too large.
The Titan struck.
The first impact nearly threw Fendor from the carpet.
Another followed.
Then the hammer connected cleanly.
Thunder exploded.
Not lightning.
Sound.
A concussive clap erupted from the weapon hard enough to shake dust from the chamber walls.
Fendor’s entire body went numb.
For one frightening instant the paralysis from the skull-creatures returned to memory.
He forced it away.
The stunning force failed to take him.
Fendor spat blood over the side of the carpet.
“That is a good hammer.”
The Titan swung again.
Fendor moved.
“Very good hammer.”
Below them, Isamu watched.
The Titan had turned enough to expose one side.
The monk ran.
Straight at it.
One of the living things in the Titan’s abdomen snapped toward him.
Stunned.
Another tried.
Also stunned.
Isamu reached the giant.
His first strike landed.
Then another.
He spent ki.
Flurry of Blows.
His hands and weapons became a sustained series of impacts against the Titan’s lower body.
Knee.
Fist.
Whip.
Elbow.
Another strike.
Isamu found weak points Fendor could not see from above and Kaylor could not reach from directly in front.
Then he pushed deeper.
More ki.
More force.
The last blows landed with enough impact to make the Titan’s enormous body shift.
Isamu stepped back.
Fendor looked down from the carpet.
“How much did you hit it?”
“A lot.”
“That is not a number.”
“More than a hundred.”
Fendor stared.
“Show-off.”
Isamu ran back out of reach.
The one serpent not stunned finally found an opening.
It struck toward Fendor.
The Titan itself followed.
The battle no longer resembled ordinary combat.
It had become demolition.
Kaylor moved through the ruin of each impact faster than any armored creature his size should have been able to move. Potion magic still burned through him.
Final Word struck again.
The Titan turned.
Kaylor smote it.
Radiance burst from the wound.
Still alive.
He attacked again.
Another divine strike.
The Titan’s leg nearly folded.
Still alive.
Kaylor looked upward.
“How much did you hit it?”
Fendor shouted down.
“A lot.”
Isamu laughed.
Kaylor understood.
Nethnarel was recovering from Psychic Scream.
The spell had taken more out of her than she wanted anyone to see.
One of the unstunned serpentine things tore farther from the Titan’s stomach and attacked.
The blow struck.
Nethnarel braced.
Something tried to drag or overpower her.
Kaylor’s presence helped.
The paladin’s aura steadied body and will alike, giving her enough strength to break the effect.
Nethnarel backed away.
“Thank you.”
Kaylor did not turn.
“You're welcome.”
The Titan moved toward him.
Kaylor raised Final Word.
Three attacks remained available through the potion’s impossible acceleration and his own practiced violence.
The first landed.
Divine energy followed.
The Titan swayed.
Fendor watched from above.
“Still up!”
“I know!”
Kaylor attacked again.
Radiance tore through the giant.
One knee struck the stone.
The four things in its abdomen screamed.
Three remained stunned.
The fourth thrashed wildly.
The Titan attempted to stand.
Kaylor saw the opening.
Final Word entered beneath the ribs.
He drove it upward.
Then smote.
Light filled the giant from within.
For an instant every wound Fendor had opened became a line of gold.
The Titan froze.
The worm-things in its belly froze with it.
Kaylor pulled the sword free.
The Titan fell.
Fendor rode the carpet away from its head.
Isamu sprinted clear.
The enormous body crashed across the circle.
Stone shook.
Dust rose.
The serpentine creatures died at the same instant.
Not one after another.
Together.
Nethnarel stared.
“They were part of it.”
Hexen returned from his planetar form, celestial light collapsing inward until the familiar druid stood where the angelic warrior had been.
Isamu looked at the Titan’s ruined abdomen.
“Good.”
Fendor descended.
The carpet landed on the giant’s chest.
Kaylor climbed onto it from the opposite side.
For a moment the two of them stood above the fallen Titan.
Isamu joined them.
Something about the situation overwhelmed dignity.
Kaylor struck his chest.
Isamu did the same.
Fendor stared at both.
“No.”
Kaylor did it again.
Isamu followed.
Fendor looked around to see whether anyone else was witnessing this.
Nethnarel was.
That made it worse.
Fendor stepped off the corpse.
“I refuse to participate.”
The hammer lay nearby.
Kaylor noticed it immediately.
Of course he did.
The weapon had fallen from the Titan’s hand when it died. It was enormous—built as a maul for a giant-sized creature, its haft thick enough that an ordinary man would have struggled to wrap both hands around it.
Kaylor climbed down.
He approached the weapon.
Fendor followed.
“You want it.”
“Yes.”
“You haven't even identified it.”
“It hit you.”
“That is exactly why I want it identified.”
Nethnarel came over.
The hammer radiated magic.
Not subtle magic.
Power sat inside it like weather waiting for permission.
Nethnarel examined it.
Understanding followed.
“Hammer of Thunderbolts.”
Fendor looked at Kaylor.
His expression changed.
“Oh, no.”
Kaylor looked back.
“What?”
“You're going to become unbearable.”
“I already have Final Word.”
“This is worse.”
Nethnarel continued examining the weapon.
The hammer was stronger than a common example of its kind. The Titan’s version carried tremendous bludgeoning force and a second concussive impact like contained thunder. It could be thrown far beyond the useful range of an ordinary maul.
More importantly—
“It comes back.”
Kaylor looked at her.
“What?”
“You throw it. Call it back.”
Fendor looked offended.
“My bow does not come back.”
“You don't throw your bow.”
“That is irrelevant.”
Nethnarel tested the enchantment further.
“It can stun whoever it hits.”
Kaylor smiled.
Fendor pointed at him.
“That face.”
“What face?”
“That one.”
Kaylor reached for the hammer.
The weapon should have been too heavy.
It was not.
Magic accepted him.
Strength poured through Kaylor’s body.
His grip tightened around the haft.
The difference was immediate.
Not subtle reinforcement.
Power.
The strength he already possessed expanded until armor felt lighter, Final Word lighter, his own body more capable of violence than it had been seconds before.
Isamu watched.
“You got bigger.”
“I did not.”
“Somehow you did.”
Nethnarel smiled.
“Not physically.”
Fendor looked toward the Titan.
“So the enormous hammer makes the already enormous dragonborn stronger.”
“Yes.”
“Wonderful.”
Kaylor lifted it onto one shoulder.
Final Word remained at his side.
For the first time in several minutes, Fendor looked genuinely concerned about whoever fought them next.
Then the circle moved.
Everyone stopped.
The Titan’s body lay partly across the center of the room.
Beneath it, the pattern that had summoned the creature changed.
The anti-magic field returned.
Nethnarel felt it.
Magic vanished from the center.
Not the entire chamber.
Only the circle.
She stepped backward instinctively.
The Staff of Power remained alive in her hands.
Kaylor’s new hammer remained enchanted.
But inside the central ring—
nothing.
The field had contracted.
Fendor looked around.
“Did we break it?”
Nethnarel watched the boundary.
“No.”
“What happened?”
“It got smaller.”
That mattered.
Their entire journey beneath Oslan had been shaped by fields and barriers suppressing magic.
The locked door.
The Portable Hole dying at the threshold.
Zidara’s binding.
All of it tied, somehow, to the ancient mechanisms beneath the mountain.
Now one of those effects had collapsed inward until only the central circle remained.
Isamu looked at Kaylor.
“The dragon?”
Kaylor understood.
They had come down here to disable the magic holding Zidara.
If the Titan had been part of the system—
“Maybe.”
Fendor looked toward the ceiling.
“You think we freed him?”
Kaylor did not answer immediately.
There was no way to see the mountaintop from here.
No way to know whether the dracolich had already taken flight.
But the binding magic had changed.
That was enough for hope.
Then something appeared inside the anti-magic field.
At first, Nethnarel thought it was a distortion.
A spiral.
Light folded inward where no magic should have functioned.
She moved closer.
“Wait.”
The others joined her.
The spiral widened.
A gate.
There was no mistaking it.
They had seen portals before.
Plane Shift.
Teleportation circles.
The Well of Many Worlds.
Gates to places that should not exist.
This possessed the same fundamental truth.
An opening from one location into another.
Inside an anti-magic field.
Nethnarel stared.
“No.”
Fendor looked at her.
“No dangerous?”
“No impossible.”
“That has stopped meaning anything.”
“You don't understand.”
She pointed.
“The field is still active.”
Kaylor looked at the circle.
“Yes.”
“Magic doesn't work inside it.”
“Yes.”
“The gate is magic.”
Fendor considered this.
Then pointed at the functioning portal.
“Apparently not.”
Nethnarel gave him a look that should have killed him.
Hexen approached the boundary.
The portal continued turning.
Through it—
there was a city.
Not ruins.
Not another underground complex.
Not another mountain.
A living city.
Buildings rose on the other side.
Tall.
Impossibly straight.
Some climbed higher than the greatest towers the heroes had seen, but without stone buttresses, crenellations or the familiar proportions of castles. Their sides were smooth and regular, faced with enormous fields of glass that reflected a bright foreign sky.
Broad streets ran between them.
Lights moved.
Shapes moved.
Structures stood so close together and yet so ordered that the view looked less like a fantasy of civilization than civilization perfected according to rules none of them knew.
Fendor stepped closer.
“What is that?”
Nethnarel could barely answer.
“Oslan.”
Hexen looked through the portal.
“Alive?”
No one knew.
The city certainly looked alive.
Not preserved.
Not abandoned.
Alive.
Kaylor held the Hammer of Thunderbolts.
He extended it toward the anti-magic field.
Nethnarel saw what he intended.
“Careful.”
He pushed the hammer through the boundary.
The magic vanished.
Immediately.
The weapon became only metal.
Heavy metal.
Kaylor felt the supernatural strength it had granted disappear from his body.
He nearly dropped it.
“Interesting.”
Fendor grabbed the haft with him.
“Interesting?”
Kaylor pulled the hammer backward.
The instant it crossed out of the field, the enchantment returned.
Strength flooded through him again.
The hammer became more than metal.
Kaylor stared at the portal.
“The field works.”
Nethnarel nodded.
“Then the gate shouldn't.”
“But it does.”
“Yes.”
Silence settled around them.
This was what she had been searching for.
Not tenth-circle magic.
Not exactly.
Something more important.
Evidence.
The rules were not absolute.
Modern magic said an anti-magic field suppressed magical gates.
This gate had been deliberately built to operate inside one.
Ancient Oslan had not merely possessed more powerful spells.
They had possessed a different relationship with magic itself.
Nethnarel stepped close enough that the boundary of the field lay inches from her boots.
“They hid it.”
Hexen looked at her.
“What?”
“The gate.”
She stared through at the city.
“Think about it. You build an opening to somewhere else. Then you surround it with something that suppresses magic.”
Fendor understood.
“So someone searching with magic doesn't see it.”
Nethnarel nodded.
“Maybe.”
Kaylor looked through the portal.
“Mystra.”
Nobody spoke.
The hypothesis was dangerous.
It was also obvious.
If the goddess of magic had acted against Oslan—
If Oslan knew it was being hunted—
If its people possessed the knowledge to create a gate that continued functioning where ordinary magic died—
Then perhaps the cities on the mountaintops had never been the end of Oslan.
Perhaps they were what had been left behind.
Fendor moved closer to the portal.
“So they escaped.”
“Maybe,” Hexen said.
Nethnarel shook her head.
“Not just escaped.”
She looked at the impossible city.
“They kept going.”
The civilization on the other side did not look like refugees.
It looked advanced beyond anything in their world.
Thousands of years had passed since Oslan vanished.
Thousands of years during which the known world forgot them.
Thousands of years in which Oslan, perhaps, had continued.
Somewhere else.
Outside Mystra’s reach.
Or beyond the rules she had imposed.
Isamu stepped toward the gate.
Fendor grabbed him.
“No.”
Isamu looked back.
“I was only looking.”
“You look with your entire body.”
“I wasn't going through.”
“Your history argues otherwise.”
Kaylor stood beside them.
The Hammer of Thunderbolts rested across one shoulder.
Final Word hung at his side.
Behind them lay the Titan.
Above them, somewhere beyond miles of stone, waited a dead dragon who might finally be free.
Before them stood a portal into a civilization that should have vanished millennia ago.
Nethnarel looked through.
This was why she had begun.
The library.
Gygax.
The old records.
The frustration.
The certainty that modern magic was smaller than it pretended to be.
She had wanted proof that something lay beyond the ninth circle.
Now she was staring through a doorway made from magic that broke the rules of magic.
Fendor watched her.
“You want to go.”
Nethnarel did not answer.
She did not need to.
Kaylor looked at the portal.
“We accomplished what we came here to do.”
“Maybe,” Nethnarel said.
“The binding changed.”
“Yes.”
“If Zidara is free—”
“He probably is.”
Kaylor looked at her.
“Then we can leave.”
Nethnarel finally turned from the gate.
“Can we?”
Fendor sighed.
“There it is.”
Hexen smiled slightly.
Isamu moved one careful step nearer the portal.
Fendor tightened his grip on the monk’s shoulder.
The city beyond continued moving.
Untouched by their argument.
Untouched by their world.
Untouched, perhaps, by Mystra herself.
The gate turned inside the anti-magic field.
It should not have worked.
It worked anyway.
And on the other side, Oslan waited.