They did not leave immediately.
That surprised Marcus.
Kaylor could see it in the boy’s face when Hexen began laying out food.
The boy had come to the Manticore’s Tail expecting heroes to seize weapons and thunder through the door. Songs tended to omit the parts where sensible people prepared before walking deliberately toward something capable of making three grown men disappear.
Hexen Brew had survived long enough to become very sensible about preparation.
“Eat.”
Fendor looked at the table.
“We were already eating.”
“This is different.”
“How?”
Hexen gave him the look.
Fendor sat.
The meal was more than food. By the time Hexen finished working his magic through it, warmth had settled into muscle and bone, sharpening resolve and reinforcing life itself. The protection was familiar to them now: fear would find poor purchase, poison would struggle to touch them, and their minds would stand more firmly against whatever tried to twist them.
The Heroes of the New Beginning had reached the point where preparing to investigate three missing farmers involved a feast enchanted strongly enough to protect kings from supernatural terror.
Nobody commented on that.
Kaylor summoned his pegasus.
Fendor looked at the celestial creature, then at the Hammer of Thunderbolts.
“You’re riding that while carrying that?”
“Yes.”
“Does the horse have an opinion?”
The pegasus looked at Fendor.
Fendor considered.
“Apparently.”
Nethnarel gathered her Staff of Power and the rest of what she considered essential, which was increasingly enough magical equipment to make small kingdoms nervous. Isamu checked the acidic flail he had recovered beneath Oslan. He had spent enough time with it now that the weapon no longer felt borrowed. Its balance had become part of his own.
Hexen took the Staff of the Woodlands.
Then the five left Oxland behind.
Marcus’s directions did not send them far.
That was the first troubling thing.
His father had not vanished after weeks on some distant road. He had disappeared within the surrounding country—lands close enough to Oxland that the heroes knew the general shape of them. Farms. Open fields. Small stands of woodland. Roads worn by generations of carts carrying grain, vegetables and livestock toward the city.
Ordinary country.
The kind heroes were supposed to make safe by doing things elsewhere.
Kaylor rode above the others, the pegasus keeping him clear of the road while Fendor traveled by his own means and Nethnarel’s wings occasionally lifted her above uneven ground. Isamu moved as though roads existed mostly as suggestions. Hexen remained nearer the earth.
It was Hexen who felt the wrongness first.
He stopped.
The others noticed because Hexen rarely stopped without reason.
Ahead of them, something gray lay across the landscape.
At first Kaylor mistook it for weather. A low bank of cloud had settled over the country, too close to the ground and too dense for the hour. It stretched across the road and swallowed the trees beyond in a flat, colorless haze.
Hexen stared into it.
“What?”
Fendor had already drawn the Oathbow.
Hexen did not answer immediately.
The druid’s attention had gone beyond sight.
Every living place possessed patterns. Water moved according to the land beneath it. Roots followed soil. Birds, insects, wind, decay, flowering and season all joined one another in relationships most people never consciously noticed.
Hexen did.
Something ahead had broken them.
“That shouldn’t be there.”
Fendor looked at the fog.
“The cloud?”
“The land.”
They advanced more carefully.
The smell reached them next.
Wet earth.
Standing water.
Vegetation decomposing beneath moisture.
Swamp.
Hexen’s expression darkened.
Kaylor brought the pegasus lower.
There had never been a swamp here.
He knew that much without needing Hexen’s instincts. This country was close enough to Oxland that he had traveled it before. Open ground should have stretched on either side of the road. There should have been grass. Dry earth. Sparse trees.
Instead water lay between black trunks.
Dead branches reached upward through the mist.
The road disappeared into mud.
Whatever had happened here had not merely damaged the countryside.
It had replaced it.
Nethnarel landed beside a tree at the edge of the corruption.
The trunk was dead.
Not old.
Dead.
There was a difference.
Nothing about the gray bark suggested the gradual surrender of age. The tree looked as though life had been removed from it while its shape remained behind.
Isamu stared into the water.
“This was plains?”
“Yes,” Hexen said.
Fendor looked toward the fog.
“How quickly does a swamp normally happen?”
Hexen looked at him.
“That was not a serious question.”
“No.”
“Good.”
Kaylor closed his eyes.
Divine Sense moved outward.
For years the ability had been one of the simplest pieces of his old faith. Celestial. Fiend. Undead. Some things carried a nature that could be felt regardless of disguise.
He expected darkness.
Undeath, perhaps.
Something demonic.
Instead he found something stranger.
A faint celestial presence.
Everywhere.
Kaylor opened his eyes.
“Well?”
Nethnarel was watching him.
“Celestial.”
Fendor glanced around the dead swamp.
“That seems unlikely.”
“It’s all around us.”
“Good celestial?”
Kaylor frowned.
“That isn’t what the sense tells me.”
Hexen looked toward the gray sky.
The same thought passed through all of them.
Mystra had empowered Zidara.
That did not prove the dragon had done this.
It proved nothing.
Still, Kaylor’s hand tightened around the reins.
They continued.
Tracks marked the road behind them.
Wagons.
Horses.
People.
The ordinary scars of traffic.
Isamu found where they stopped.
Not turned aside.
Not scattered.
Stopped.
He crouched at the edge of the corrupted ground.
“The tracks end.”
Fendor joined him.
“Washed away?”
“Maybe.”
Isamu studied the transition.
Behind them, the road remembered people.
Ahead, it remembered nothing.
Kaylor rose higher on the pegasus, looking across the drowned landscape.
No wagon.
No horse.
No body.
Nothing that told them where Marcus’s father had gone.
Hexen stepped closer to the water.
Isamu did not.
He walked onto it.
The enchanted ring he carried accepted the swamp’s surface as if it were solid earth. His weight barely disturbed the black water.
Fendor watched.
“That continues to be irritating.”
Isamu took another step.
Something exploded out of the swamp.
The tendril was thicker than a man’s arm.
It came from beneath the water with enough force to scatter mud and rotten vegetation across Isamu’s legs. A bulbous, plantlike shape followed behind it, but only partly—most of the creature remained somewhere below the surface.
The tendril snapped for Isamu’s chest.
He moved after it had already begun striking.
That was the unnerving part.
One instant he stood in its path.
The next he was somewhere else.
The tendril cut empty air.
Isamu looked at it.
“Bad plant.”
Then he attacked.
The acidic flail swung for the first time in a battle as something truly his.
Its enchanted head struck the wet plant-flesh with a sound halfway between impact and rupture. Acid spread through the wound. Isamu reversed the weapon and hit again before the creature recovered, then followed with a bare-handed blow driven into the same damaged tissue.
The creature recoiled.
Something brushed Isamu’s mind.
Not a voice.
Not even a thought.
A searching tendril of another kind reached inward, trying to find purchase.
Hexen’s feast held.
Isamu’s will held with it.
The intrusion slipped away.
He backed toward the others.
“It does that too.”
Fendor was already moving.
The Vorpal Longsword came free.
“Of course it does.”
He crossed the wet ground and began cutting.
The creature possessed no useful neck, but the Vorpal blade had learned long ago not to be discouraged by anatomy. Fendor opened one side of the plant, then another, shredding tendrils while the thing whipped at him.
Water erupted behind Kaylor.
Another one.
The pegasus climbed as a tendril lashed upward.
Kaylor avoided the first strike.
The second caught him.
Heat traveled through it.
Not flame exactly.
Something molten.
The blow struck armor hard enough to shift him in the saddle, and before Kaylor could answer, a spine shot from the end of another tendril and punched through a seam in his protection.
Poison entered with it.
Or tried.
The magic of Hexen’s feast stopped it.
Kaylor felt the toxin reach for his muscles, carrying a paralysis powerful enough that he understood what it would have done without Hexen’s preparation.
Nothing happened.
He pulled the spine free.
“Useful meal.”
Hexen raised an eyebrow.
“You’re welcome.”
A third plant erupted.
Then another.
Nethnarel’s Staff of Power flashed.
Lightning crossed the swamp.
The bolt struck one of the creatures in a blast that turned wet vegetation white for an instant. Before the afterimage faded, a mote from the Crown of Stars descended from around Nethnarel’s head and hammered into the same creature with radiant force.
The swamp shuddered.
Fendor stopped.
Not from the creatures.
From the ground.
He looked at Hexen.
“No.”
Hexen had already begun.
The earth moved.
There were spells that looked violent because of fire, light or sound.
Earthquake did not need spectacle.
The world simply stopped agreeing to remain still.
The road cracked.
Trees pitched sideways.
The surface of the swamp broke into violent ripples as earth beneath it split open. Water began pouring into fractures faster than it could refill them.
The plant-creatures reacted instantly.
Their tendrils withdrew.
Not dying.
Retreating.
Fendor saw it.
“They’re going down.”
“No,” Hexen said.
The ground rose.
Something beneath the swamp pushed upward.
Kaylor pulled the pegasus higher.
Mud domed.
Water rolled outward.
Roots emerged.
Then the thing beneath them came out.
The smaller creatures had not been separate.
Or perhaps they had been growths.
Extensions.
Parts of something much larger.
The swamp split around an enormous plant.
Its body rose from a buried root mass vast enough to have occupied a cavern beneath the land. Tendrils uncoiled in every direction. A gigantic flower-like head opened above them, malformed petals surrounding a dark central maw.
Fendor stared upward.
“Of course.”
Isamu gripped the flail.
“That is a bigger plant.”
“Thank you.”
“Accurate.”
The monster attacked.
Isamu went into it first.
He always did when the distance between himself and something dangerous could be solved by moving faster.
The acidic flail struck.
Then his fists.
Then the flail again.
He spent his strength with the disciplined brutality of the Kensei, moving away before the giant tendrils could close around him.
Fendor followed.
The Vorpal Longsword flashed through a descending root.
Then another.
He found the exact impossible line the sword was made to find.
Vorpal power tore through the plant.
A great section of its flowered crown separated and crashed into the swamp.
The creature remained alive.
Fendor looked at what he had cut away.
“Deadheading.”
Kaylor heard him.
“What?”
“Apparently that’s what it’s called.”
“This is not the time.”
“It came up.”
Nethnarel rose above the broken ground.
She looked at the enormous plant and chose a spell designed to make living things regret containing moisture.
Abi-Dalzim’s Horrid Wilting.
The magic spread through the creature.
Water vanished from tissue.
Petals contracted.
Roots split.
Thick wet tendrils shriveled into dark cords.
The creature convulsed.
Nethnarel drove more power into the spell when the first surge failed to do enough. Then a star from her crown struck the drying mass.
It still did not die.
One tendril caught Fendor.
Another struck Kaylor.
The paladin avoided the sweeping limbs but not the enormous spine launched afterward. It drove through armor like a spear.
Kaylor groaned.
Fendor heard him.
“That sounded unpleasant.”
“It was.”
Hexen continued shaking the earth.
The spell had already changed the battlefield. Much of the swamp around the root-system had become mud, broken ground and draining water. The creature no longer possessed the protection of its hidden lair.
Hexen attacked the plant itself.
Death magic entered it.
Blight.
Against ordinary flesh the spell was terrible.
Against a plant, it was ruin.
The great creature withered visibly.
Its stalk bent.
Leaves turned black.
Kaylor circled on the pegasus.
He moved away from Fendor and Hexen, spreading the party before the creature discovered some new way to kill everyone standing together.
The Hammer of Thunderbolts came into his hands.
Fendor saw it.
“There we are.”
Kaylor descended.
The first blow landed against the plant’s central mass.
Thunder rolled through wet earth.
He struck again.
The giant flower folded.
Kaylor drove divine power behind the hammer as it came down.
The root-body ruptured.
The creature collapsed into the swamp.
Tendrils fell.
The remaining flower twisted sideways and struck the mud.
Kaylor landed nearby.
He lifted the hammer.
Then brought it down again.
Fendor watched.
“It’s dead.”
Kaylor hit it once more.
“Yes.”
“No, I mean before that.”
“I know.”
The earthquake faded.
Silence returned slowly.
Water continued draining into the fractured earth.
The enormous root mass remained partly exposed, far larger beneath the surface than it had appeared from above. Whatever lair or hollow had housed it was now crushed beneath collapsed mud and stone.
Hexen surveyed his work.
Fendor looked at the shattered swamp.
“Subtle.”
“It worked.”
“That remains your defense for everything.”
“Yes.”
The mist remained.
That mattered more than the plant.
They waited.
Nothing changed.
Gray fog still covered the land.
The trees remained dead.
The swamp remained where plains should have been.
Killing the enormous creature had removed a danger.
It had not removed the corruption.
Kaylor returned to the air.
From above, the damage was easier to understand.
The transformed region continued beyond the immediate swamp. Dead trees stood among living ones. Wet ground intruded where no watercourse had ever existed. The grayness stretched farther than the plant’s reach could explain.
Then Kaylor saw the campsite.
A small break among the trees.
Signs that people had stopped there.
He angled the pegasus toward it.
Below, Isamu had seen something else.
Movement.
Not obvious.
A lesser observer would have dismissed it as mist passing behind a tree.
Isamu did not.
Something dark moved along the trunk.
He stopped.
Watched.
There.
A shape.
It resembled a section of tree stump made from shadow.
Not black wood.
Shadow wearing the idea of wood.
It moved.
Isamu shifted Hunter’s Mark onto it.
Then ran up the tree.
Fendor saw him go.
“Why is he climbing?”
A moment later Isamu struck the thing.
“That.”
The shadow-creature recoiled.
Isamu hit it again.
And again.
Then another appeared beside him.
There was no approach.
No sound.
One instant it did not exist.
The next it stood within reach.
It looked exactly like the first.
A shadow tendril hit Isamu.
Cold spread through the wound.
Necrosis followed it.
This was not the same corruption as the giant plant.
This felt closer to death.
Isamu disengaged before both could surround him.
“Two.”
Kaylor turned the pegasus.
He drew the frost-bound longbow Fendor had passed to him.
Below, Isamu paused.
His Hunter’s Mark remained active.
He could feel it.
Not on the creature beside him.
The marked thing had moved away.
“That one is false.”
Fendor looked toward him.
“You can tell?”
“The mark.”
The duplicate lunged.
Isamu destroyed it.
It dissolved almost too easily.
That told them something else.
Nethnarel flew toward the fight, Staff of Power ready.
Another shadow-creature appeared.
Then another.
They did not seem to travel through the forest.
They simply emerged from its darkness.
Kaylor held his shot.
One appeared beside Isamu.
The frost bow snapped.
The arrow struck perfectly.
Cold magic exploded through the shadow-form.
Even Fendor looked impressed.
“Apparently I should have kept that.”
Kaylor fired again.
Nethnarel found a line through two of the creatures.
Lightning Bolt erupted from the Staff of Power.
Blue-white energy passed through shadow and dead branches alike.
Hexen abandoned human shape.
Wind replaced him.
The Air Elemental surged across the battlefield faster than flesh could have managed.
Then Hexen did something much less dramatic and far more useful.
Faerie Fire spread over one of the shadow-creatures.
Light clung to darkness.
The contradiction offended the eye.
Fendor raised the Oathbow.
“There.”
Arrows crossed the forest.
One shadow-creature fell.
Another vanished.
The original kept moving.
Only Isamu knew where.
Hunter’s Mark pulled him after it like an invisible thread.
“It’s south.”
Nobody else could see anything.
Kaylor flew circles above the trees.
Nethnarel held magic ready.
Fendor searched through the Oathbow.
Nothing.
Isamu kept moving.
The marked creature had concealed itself completely now.
That did not matter.
The monk closed his eyes.
The thing was there.
A few paces ahead.
Invisible.
Hidden in shadow.
He entered its reach anyway.
Isamu attacked empty air.
The first strike found nothing.
The second also missed.
The third connected.
Something screamed.
The shadow-creature reappeared.
Kaylor had been waiting.
The frost bow fired.
The arrow struck the revealed creature.
Shadow ruptured around it.
The thing collapsed.
For several breaths, nobody moved.
They waited for another duplicate.
None came.
The forest remained unnaturally quiet.
Isamu released Hunter’s Mark.
“No more.”
Kaylor looked toward the campsite.
“Then we search.”
They found three bodies.
The first was enough to make even Fendor stop speaking.
Desiccated.
That was the only proper word.
These men had not decayed naturally. They looked as though years had been taken from them after death, moisture and vitality stripped away until skin clung to bone.
Yet Marcus’s father had been missing only weeks.
The other two had disappeared two days ago.
They looked almost the same.
Hexen knelt.
“One of these has been dead too long.”
Kaylor understood.
Marcus’s father.
Raise Dead had limits.
Hexen possessed something deeper.
He had used it on Fendor beneath Oslan after the Vorpal blade took the elf’s head.
Now he placed his hands upon a farmer.
True Resurrection.
Magic did not care that the man had never ruled a kingdom.
It did not care that no prophecy named him.
It did not care that he had been carrying crops when he died.
Death was death.
Life was life.
Hexen called him back.
The ruined body changed.
Dry flesh restored itself.
Eyes returned beneath closed lids.
Breath entered lungs that had been empty for weeks.
The farmer gasped.
Kaylor watched him return.
There had been a time when resurrection had seemed like something heroes earned.
Then Grazim died.
Then all of them died.
Then Fendor lost his head.
Now Hexen was kneeling beside a stranger because a frightened boy had asked for help.
Perhaps that was what power was supposed to become.
Not something reserved for legends.
Something legends could give away.
The other two men had been dead only days.
Hexen did not need the deepest spell for them.
Raise Dead was enough.
Once.
Then again.
Marcus’s brother returned.
Then his uncle.
Three dead men sat beneath dead trees breathing again.
Fendor looked at Hexen.
“You realize normal people are going to start expecting this.”
Hexen stood slowly.
“Let them.”
The farmer was confused.
That passed gradually.
Kaylor waited until the man could speak.
“What happened?”
The answer changed everything.
The road had been normal.
Not swamp.
Not fog.
Not dead trees.
The farmer had been traveling with his crops exactly where Marcus said he would be.
Then something flew overhead.
Large.
Winged.
Dragon-like.
But wrong.
The farmer described it as shadow.
Kaylor did not interrupt.
The ground began shaking after it passed.
Then the fog came.
The landscape changed.
The strange trees appeared among the ordinary forest.
The farmer had abandoned the road and tried to hide.
Something found him anyway.
Not the dragon.
One of the shadow-things.
It reached him.
Drained him.
Pulled the life from him until nothing remained but the desiccated corpse the heroes had found.
Kaylor looked toward the northeast.
“Which way did the dragon go?”
The farmer pointed.
“Northeast.”
Hexen looked at Kaylor.
Nobody said Zidara.
They did not need to.
Not yet.
The farmer continued.
The fog had followed the creature.
Not instantly.
Afterward.
Rolling across the land behind it.
Then came the trees.
The swamp.
The things beneath the water.
The shadow-creatures.
The rot.
Marcus’s brother and uncle had followed the road later, searching for him. They reached the ruined campsite.
They found his body.
Then the shadow-creatures found them.
Hexen looked at the three men.
“Go home.”
The farmer glanced toward the northeast.
“What about—”
“We’ll take care of it.”
There was no boasting in Hexen’s voice.
No promise that nothing worse waited ahead.
Only certainty that these men had already paid enough.
They escorted the family back toward the edge of the transformed land until the fog thinned and ordinary country returned. From there, the road toward Oxland was clear.
Three men who had been dead began walking home to Marcus.
The heroes turned around.
Northeast.
The gray cloud stretched in that direction.
Kaylor mounted the pegasus again.
The Hammer of Thunderbolts rested across his back.
Fendor carried the Oathbow.
Nethnarel’s Staff of Power still held traces of charge from the lightning she had sent through the shadows.
Isamu looked once toward the road behind them.
Hexen stared at the boundary between living land and what had replaced it.
They had spent weeks trying to find Zidara.
Scrying had failed.
Questions had failed.
Rumors had failed.
Then Marcus walked through their door.
Now they possessed something better than a vision.
A trail.
Not footprints.
Consequences.
Kaylor looked northeast into the gray.
The shadow had passed here.
And everything beneath it had begun to die.