The knock came again.
It was not loud.
That was the first unusual thing about it.
People rarely approached the Manticore’s Tail timidly. The inn had been the home of the Heroes of the New Beginning for long enough that most of Oxland had developed opinions about the proper way to enter it. Regulars simply walked in. Merchants came looking for business. Soldiers arrived with messages. Nobles sent servants. Priests entered with varying degrees of reverence or suspicion depending upon which of the heroes they intended to speak with.
People carrying terrible news usually pounded on the door as though the building itself had offended them.
This knock was different.
Three uncertain taps.
A pause.
Then two more.
Fendor looked toward the door.
“That sounds harmless.”
Kaylor was still thinking about the eye.
He had been thinking about it since the vision failed.
Zidara looking directly back through the Scrying spell had changed something Kaylor had not quite managed to put into words. Hunting someone from a distance was one thing. Knowing that the hunted understood the pursuit was another.
The dracolich knew Kaylor was searching.
Perhaps he had known for weeks.
Perhaps every failed glimpse—the wing, the claw, the strange green-black scales slowly covering what had once been exposed bone—had been permitted rather than stolen.
Kaylor disliked that possibility.
The knock came a third time.
Hexen looked toward the entrance.
“Someone should probably answer that.”
Fendor remained seated.
“I agree.”
Nobody moved.
Isamu was eating.
That eliminated him immediately.
Nethnarel had books and papers spread across one end of a table, portions of her Oslan notes still stubbornly refusing to become comprehensible simply because she had returned home. She looked up long enough to confirm that the door continued to exist and then returned to a diagram of the impossible gate.
Hexen sighed.
“I live with heroes.”
Kaylor stood.
“You live with us.”
“Yes.”
“That was your mistake.”
Kaylor crossed the common room.
The Hammer of Thunderbolts was not in his hand. It had taken several days before everyone in the Manticore’s Tail stopped watching the enormous weapon whenever he carried it through the room, and even Kaylor had eventually accepted that most conversations did not require a giant-killing hammer.
Final Word remained with him.
That was different.
The sword was part of him now in a way furniture was not.
He opened the door.
A boy stood outside.
Young enough that the journey to the Manticore’s Tail had plainly required more courage than he wanted anyone to know.
Farm clothes. Dust from the road. No weapon worth mentioning. Nothing about him suggested assassin, cultist, celestial messenger, undead herald, displaced god or any of the other things that had developed an unfortunate habit of seeking out the heroes at home.
The boy looked up at Kaylor.
Then farther up.
Kaylor was accustomed to this.
The dragonborn filled a doorway impressively even before someone gave him a Hammer of Thunderbolts and made him stronger than several monsters he had once considered frightening.
The boy swallowed.
“Is Hexen Brew here?”
Kaylor did not answer immediately.
Behind him, Fendor called from the common room.
“Harmless?”
Kaylor ignored him.
The boy shifted.
“I was told he was here.”
Kaylor looked at him more carefully.
There were lessons one learned after living long enough to die several times.
One of them was that frightened children and old men were not automatically harmless.
Another was that anyone arriving specifically asking for one member of the party deserved at least a moment of caution.
Kaylor reached inward.
Divine awareness spread from him.
The familiar sense passed through the doorway and over the young stranger, searching for the spiritual wrongness Kaylor had learned to recognize long before his relationship with the divine became considerably more complicated.
Nothing answered.
No undead presence.
No fiend.
No celestial power wearing mortal skin.
No hidden thing radiated from the boy.
Whatever else stood before Kaylor, it appeared to be exactly what it looked like.
A frightened young man who had come a long way to ask for help.
Kaylor stepped aside.
“He’s here.”
The boy entered.
The Manticore’s Tail was warmer than the road outside. He seemed to notice that only after the door closed behind him. His eyes traveled across the room, taking in Fendor, Nethnarel and Isamu before finally settling on Hexen.
Recognition came immediately.
“You’re Hexen Brew?”
Hexen studied him.
“Yes.”
The boy took several steps forward.
“My name is Marcus.”
There was something about the way he said it that made the room change.
Not magic.
Expectation.
The ordinary sounds of the inn continued around them. Someone farther away laughed at something. A mug touched wood. A chair moved. None of the other patrons knew that the heroes had begun listening.
Marcus did.
He looked suddenly aware that he had the attention of people who had fought dragons, gods and things without names.
Hexen softened his voice.
“What happened?”
Marcus glanced toward the door as if the road he had traveled might have followed him inside.
“My father is missing.”
That was not, by itself, a problem for the Heroes of the New Beginning.
It was a tragedy for Marcus.
There was a difference.
The five had spent enough of their lives confronting threats measured in cities and kingdoms that ordinary suffering could become distorted by scale. One missing farmer did not mean an army was marching. It did not mean a goddess had fallen. It did not mean an ancient civilization had returned from another plane.
Sometimes a man simply failed to come home.
Hexen knew this.
That was probably why Marcus had asked for him.
Not Kaylor.
Not Fendor.
Hexen.
The druid had always possessed a way of listening to ordinary people without making them feel that their problem needed to threaten the world before it mattered.
“Tell me.”
Marcus took a breath.
His father had left with crops.
Northwest.
The journey should have ended with the man returning home.
He had not.
At first the family waited.
Roads were uncertain. Wagons broke. Weather changed. Markets delayed men. Animals threw shoes, threw riders, developed illnesses or simply decided that cooperation with civilization had been a temporary mistake.
There were a hundred explanations for a farmer being late.
Then lateness became absence.
Marcus’s brother went looking.
His uncle went with him.
Neither returned.
Hexen’s expression changed.
One missing man could be misfortune.
Three men disappearing along the same trail was something else.
“How long?” Kaylor asked.
Marcus looked at him.
Kaylor had returned to the table but had not sat down.
He rarely sat when a conversation began to feel like a hunt.
Marcus explained again, this time more carefully. His father first. Then the search. His brother and uncle following the route northwest after there had been no word.
Nothing.
No message.
No returning wagon.
No traveler bringing news that they had been injured or delayed.
They had simply gone into the northwest and failed to come back.
Fendor leaned forward with his forearms on the table.
“You came here alone?”
Marcus nodded.
Fendor glanced toward Isamu.
The monk was still eating, though more slowly now.
“What?” Isamu asked.
“Nothing.”
Fendor looked back at Marcus.
“Continue.”
Marcus did.
He had not come looking for warriors because someone had seen a monster.
Nobody had.
He had not come because there were tracks from a dragon around the farm, or bodies in the road, or a village burning beneath strange fire.
There was almost nothing to describe.
That was what frightened him.
His father was gone.
His brother was gone.
His uncle was gone.
And there was no explanation.
Nethnarel set down her pen.
Oslan disappeared from her attention.
That alone said something.
“Where northwest?”
Marcus described the direction as well as he could.
Not a map.
Not coordinates.
A road.
Farmland giving way to country beyond what he traveled regularly. The route his father had taken with the crops. The same route the two others followed when they went searching.
Kaylor listened.
Northwest.
The word bothered him.
He did not know why yet.
Hexen asked about enemies.
Debts.
Anyone who might have wanted to hurt Marcus’s father.
Marcus knew of none.
Bandits were possible.
Bandits were always possible.
But bandits took things.
A wagon.
Horses.
Crops.
Money.
Someone usually found what remained.
And if bandits had taken Marcus’s father, then his brother and uncle had somehow disappeared while searching for him as well.
Too clean.
Kaylor watched Marcus answer.
The boy was frightened, but he was not telling the kind of story people built when they wanted heroes to make their fears more important.
He kept returning to the same facts.
His father left.
He did not return.
Two men went after him.
They did not return either.
Marcus had finally decided that whatever had happened was beyond his ability to fix.
So he had come to the Manticore’s Tail and asked for Hexen Brew.
Fendor looked toward Hexen.
“You have admirers.”
Hexen ignored him.
“Do you know when your father disappeared?”
Marcus nodded.
Then gave them the day.
Kaylor stopped breathing.
Not for long.
A heartbeat.
Perhaps two.
But Fendor noticed.
Fendor noticed things for a living.
He turned immediately.
“What?”
Kaylor stared at Marcus.
“Say that again.”
Marcus did.
The same day.
Kaylor knew before the boy finished.
The room disappeared.
For an instant he was sitting again with the Scrying spell open before him.
Darkness.
A shape.
Not bone.
That had been the first thing that mattered.
Zidara had been skeletal when they found him atop Oslan. An ancient dragon reduced to death and enchanted bone, chained to a mountain by power older than kingdoms.
What Kaylor had seen during the weeks afterward was different.
A wing with substance.
A claw covered in flesh.
Scales.
Green-black.
Then the face.
The long draconic muzzle becoming something whole again.
And the eye.
The eye opening.
Looking directly through the spell.
Looking at him.
Kaylor remembered the moment because everything about the hunt had changed there.
He had known exactly when it happened.
Now Marcus had just named the same day.
Hexen saw Kaylor’s expression.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
Marcus looked between them.
“What?”
Kaylor did not answer him yet.
Nethnarel did.
“That date means something.”
Kaylor nodded.
Fendor sat back.
“The dragon.”
Marcus went very still.
Hexen looked at Fendor.
Perhaps he might have preferred the word delivered more gently.
Fendor recognized the look.
“What? We were eventually going to mention the dragon.”
Marcus stared.
“Dragon?”
Kaylor crossed the room and lowered himself enough that he was no longer towering over the boy quite so badly.
“We don’t know that a dragon had anything to do with your father.”
That distinction mattered.
He forced himself to make it.
Kaylor wanted Zidara responsible.
That was dangerous.
He wanted the disappearances to belong to the dracolich because he had spent weeks hunting something he could not find. A road northwest was more than he had possessed yesterday.
But wanting an enemy to be guilty did not make him guilty.
The Heroes of the New Beginning had learned that lesson too many times.
“What we know,” Kaylor continued, “is that something happened on the same day.”
Marcus waited.
Kaylor looked toward Hexen.
The druid gave the smallest nod.
So Kaylor told him enough.
Not Oslan.
Not Mystra.
Not the gate.
Not the Titan or the ancient anti-magic fields or the impossible civilization waiting on another plane.
Only what mattered.
There was a dragon they had been trying to locate.
A very dangerous one.
On the day Marcus’s father disappeared, Kaylor had managed to see it.
That did not prove anything.
But it was enough that nobody at the table regarded the missing men as an ordinary road problem anymore.
Marcus looked pale.
“Did it kill them?”
“We don’t know,” Hexen said.
The answer came immediately.
Firmly.
Not reassuring Marcus with a lie.
Not frightening him with a guess.
“We do not know what happened to them.”
Marcus nodded.
It was obvious he wanted something more certain.
People who came to heroes usually did.
That was part of the legend nobody wrote songs about.
Heroes were supposed to know.
Know where the monster lived.
Know what spell broke the curse.
Know which god was lying.
Know whether the missing were alive.
Know what waited beyond the hill.
The truth was less impressive.
Most adventures began exactly like this.
Someone walked through a door carrying a question nobody could answer.
Kaylor stood again.
“What did your father have with him?”
“Crops.”
“Anything unusual?”
Marcus shook his head.
“Any reason he would leave the road?”
Another shake.
“Anyone else disappear?”
“I don’t know.”
Kaylor looked toward Hexen.
Then Nethnarel.
Fendor had already risen.
That made Kaylor pause.
“You’re coming?”
Fendor looked offended.
“A frightened boy walks into our tavern, tells us three members of his family vanished on the same day your pet undead dragon started growing skin, and you think I’m staying here?”
“He isn’t my pet.”
“Good. I was hoping that was the part you objected to.”
Kaylor ignored him.
Isamu finished what remained of his food.
Then stood.
Nobody asked whether he was coming.
Nethnarel gathered her papers.
Oslan disappeared beneath a closed book.
She hesitated for only a moment before checking that the Staff of Power was within reach.
The gesture was small.
Marcus noticed it.
Perhaps for the first time he understood that asking the Heroes of the New Beginning for help did not mean someone would ride out with a lantern and search the roadside.
These people prepared for missing farmers the same way other people prepared for war.
Hexen remained beside him.
“We’ll look.”
Marcus’s shoulders lowered.
Not relief.
Not yet.
Something closer to permission to stop carrying the problem alone.
“Thank you.”
Hexen nodded.
Kaylor walked toward the place where he kept the Hammer of Thunderbolts.
Fendor watched him.
“The hammer?”
“Yes.”
“We are investigating a road.”
“Yes.”
“You think the road requires the giant hammer?”
Kaylor lifted the weapon.
Strength moved through him as the enchantment awakened.
He rested it against one shoulder.
“No.”
Fendor waited.
Kaylor looked northwest, though the walls of the Manticore’s Tail stood between him and anything worth seeing.
“I think the dragon might.”
That ended the conversation.
They did not know Zidara was there.
They did not know Marcus’s father had ever seen the dragon.
They did not know whether his brother and uncle had found the first man, whether all three still lived, or whether the same danger had taken each of them separately.
They possessed only a direction.
Three disappearances.
And a date.
Sometimes that was enough.
Kaylor remembered the green-black eye staring through the Scrying spell.
Until now, Zidara had been somewhere.
Somewhere vast enough to hide a dragon.
Somewhere protected from divination.
Somewhere beyond Kaylor’s reach.
Now a boy had walked into the Manticore’s Tail and given that somewhere a direction.
Northwest.
Kaylor tightened his grip around the Hammer of Thunderbolts.
The day Marcus’s father vanished was the day the dragon looked back.
He did not believe in coincidences that large anymore.