The fog had grown while they slept.
That was what bothered Hexen most.
Monsters could be killed.
He had spent a considerable portion of his life proving that point.
The creatures beneath the swamp had died. The shadow-things among the trees had died. The vulture sorcerer had died. The enormous worms had died.
None of it mattered to the fog.
From the windows of the Manticore’s Tail, morning looked ordinary. Oxland woke to carts on the streets, doors opening, smoke rising from chimneys. Somewhere nearby, Marcus had his father back. His brother. His uncle. Three men who had entered yesterday as corpses were again eating, speaking and wondering how to explain what had happened to them.
That mattered.
It simply had not stopped anything.
Hexen set breakfast before the others.
Fendor looked at it.
“Again?”
“You complained about being poisoned yesterday.”
“I was not poisoned.”
“Exactly.”
Fendor sat.
Heroes’ Feast had stopped more than poison. Whatever had happened within that corrupted region, the magical meal had repeatedly kept effects from taking hold that might otherwise have crippled or killed them.
No one argued with breakfast.
They ate.
When the magic settled into them again, Kaylor rose.
“Northeast.”
Nethnarel looked toward the window.
“We still do not know where it ends.”
“That’s why we go.”
Fendor sighed.
“Eventually someone is going to invent a form of heroism where we wait for dangerous things to come here.”
Isamu stood.
“They do.”
Fendor considered the Manticore’s Tail.
The Naked Goddess had come for them.
The Swarm had come for them.
Half the strange things in their lives eventually seemed to find the inn.
“That was a poor suggestion.”
Hexen was already changing.
This time the transformation did not turn him into wind.
His body expanded.
Then expanded again.
Dark hair became coarse brown fur. Hands thickened into heavy feet. His back rose until it stood above everyone in the room. Tusks curved forward from a massive head.
Fendor stared at the mammoth now occupying an unreasonable percentage of the Manticore’s Tail.
“I preferred the elemental.”
The mammoth looked down at him.
Fendor pointed toward the door.
“Yes. Outside.”
Getting Hexen outside required considerably more care than changing into Hexen had.
Afterward they gathered around the teleportation magic.
One of them had left enough of an anchor at the corrupted region to make a precise return possible.
The helm answered.
Oxland vanished.
The world returned.
And everything was worse.
They appeared almost exactly where they had left the previous day.
The location was recognizable.
That was all.
The fog had thickened until daylight became something remembered rather than seen. The gray that had once hung between the trees now seemed to belong to the trees, the ground, the stagnant water and the sky equally. What little color remained looked drowned beneath it.
Fendor turned slowly.
“Was it this dark yesterday?”
“No,” Hexen said.
The answer came from the mammoth as an enormous low rumble. Somehow everyone understood enough.
Nethnarel stepped away from the others.
The air felt heavier.
Not physically.
Oppressive.
The corrupted country no longer looked merely sick.
It looked occupied.
Kaylor extended Divine Sense.
He turned.
“There.”
Isamu followed the direction immediately.
Something lay ahead.
Kaylor could feel a presence within range—not enough to tell him what entire ecology of horror the fog had invented this time, but enough to know something malign waited among the trees.
Isamu was already moving.
“Wait,” Kaylor said.
The monk vanished into the fog.
Fendor looked after him.
“Why do we still say that?”
A heartbeat later they heard impact.
Then Isamu returned.
He had run into the darkness, struck something repeatedly and retreated before the others had finished deciding where he had gone.
“There are things there.”
Fendor blinked.
“That was scouting?”
“Yes.”
“You attacked them.”
“Yes.”
“That is not scouting.”
“They know we are here now.”
“That is precisely my objection.”
Hexen charged past both of them.
The mammoth hit the first creature like a falling wall.
It had been half-hidden among the dead vegetation—an insectile thing with hooked limbs and a body whose plates seemed too thick for its size. Hexen drove his tusks into it and lifted.
The creature went sideways.
Before it could recover, strange fire struck it.
The mammoth bellowed.
Fendor stared.
“I do not know how he is doing that.”
Nethnarel raised the Staff of Power.
“You stopped asking sensible questions several books ago.”
Kaylor ran.
The Hammer of Thunderbolts came into his hand.
The insect-creature was farther than he wanted.
That had stopped being a problem.
He threw.
The hammer crossed the fog in a straight line.
It hit.
Thunder exploded.
The sound rolled through the corrupted forest with enough force to shake water from branches hundreds of feet away. The creature collapsed.
Kaylor extended one hand.
The hammer returned.
Fendor watched it come back.
“I still dislike that.”
“You have a sword that removes heads.”
“Yes.”
“You have a bow that hates specific enemies.”
“Yes.”
“You have a flying carpet.”
“Yes.”
Kaylor caught the hammer.
“This is where you draw the line?”
“It comes back.”
Something crashed through brush behind Isamu.
The thing that emerged looked as though several nightmares had been asked to agree upon anatomy and failed.
Its head carried too many eyes.
Its body was broad and heavily muscled.
Claws tore furrows through the ground.
It hit Isamu before anyone had time to decide what it was.
One claw missed.
Another passed through empty air when the monk twisted aside.
The jaws connected.
Isamu was knocked backward but remained standing.
The creature slammed its weight into him, trying to drive him down.
Isamu set his feet.
The ground broke beneath them.
He did not.
“Another,” Nethnarel called.
A second shape came through the trees.
Then a third.
Fendor looked into the fog.
“I preferred the worms.”
“No, you didn’t,” Kaylor said.
“That is irrelevant.”
Nethnarel took flight.
Her wings carried her above the worst of the undergrowth. The Staff of Power pointed down.
Lightning erupted.
The bolt struck the nearest creature and continued through the darkness beyond.
For an instant the entire forest appeared in negative—black branches against white fire, monsters frozen in silhouettes, the heroes stark beneath the flash.
Then the fog swallowed the light.
Fendor stepped forward.
Before drawing the Vorpal Longsword, he took a small bottle from his equipment.
Kaylor recognized it.
“Now?”
Fendor looked at the monsters.
“I have been saving it.”
He drank.
The potion hit him like a second body being poured into the first.
Muscle tightened.
His posture changed.
The elf looked down at his own hands.
“Interesting.”
Kaylor knew the feeling.
Storm-giant strength.
For the next hour, Fendor possessed the raw power of something that might ordinarily have considered buildings throwable.
He drew the Vorpal Longsword.
“Better.”
Then the air filled with insects.
They came from nowhere.
Not the small numbers expected from swamp and rot. A swarm erupted around the heroes in a choking black mass. Wings filled mouths. Tiny bodies struck eyes. Mandibles found skin between armor plates.
Nethnarel saw the source.
One of the creatures farther in the fog had raised itself in a gesture unmistakably magical.
“Enough.”
Counterspell snapped outward.
The hostile magic fought her.
For an instant Nethnarel thought she had it.
Then the insects remained.
Fendor spat several from his mouth.
“Successful?”
“No.”
“Excellent.”
The swarm thickened.
Something else approached Fendor.
Its body crawled with insects.
Not insects around it.
Insects from it.
They poured from gaps in its hide and spread into a dense halo, biting and cutting everything close enough to reach.
Fendor stepped backward.
“That one is especially unpleasant.”
Isamu was already headed toward it.
Hunter’s Mark settled.
He hit the creature.
Once.
Again.
Then retreated before its living cloud could completely surround him.
Fendor watched him pass.
“There. That. That is scouting.”
“I hit it.”
“You always hit it.”
“Yes.”
Fendor entered the swarm.
He had already survived decapitation recently.
Insects were not going to determine his mood.
The Vorpal Longsword moved.
The first creature took three strokes before it understood Fendor had reached it.
The fourth nearly ended it.
Fendor continued.
He had more speed.
More strength.
And the particular concentration that came upon him when the appropriate answer to a problem became simply more sword.
One strike.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Then the reserve he kept beneath ordinary battle opened.
Action Surge.
The elf accelerated.
The first monster fell.
Fendor was already turning.
His next cuts passed through the second creature so quickly that for a moment it remained standing.
Then both sections shifted.
The body collapsed.
Two enemies lay dead.
Fendor lowered the blade.
Isamu looked at him.
“That was excessive.”
Fendor stared at the monk.
“You just sprinted into supernatural fog alone.”
“Yes.”
“We have different standards.”
Kaylor had reached another creature.
The Hammer of Thunderbolts struck.
The monster recoiled.
Kaylor hit it again.
It screamed but remained upright.
Then the mammoth arrived.
Hexen lowered his head.
For all the sophistication of twenty-circle heroes, ancient magical civilizations, gods, dracoliches and ninth-circle magic, there remained something remarkably convincing about several tons of angry mammoth.
He charged.
The tusks connected.
The monster went down.
Hexen raised one enormous foot.
Fendor saw what was coming.
“Oh, this should be—”
The stomp missed.
The creature rolled away.
Fendor stared.
Hexen stared.
Isamu looked at the mammoth.
“Again.”
Hexen trumpeted.
Nethnarel laughed despite herself.
Then fire lit the battlefield.
She cast once.
Flame spread through the fog.
She cast again.
The second blast landed beside the first, carefully placed around the people below. Fire rolled over the monsters without swallowing Fendor, Isamu or Kaylor with them.
The dead trees burned reluctantly.
The fog resisted the heat.
That was almost more disturbing than the monsters.
Ordinary mist should have broken.
This merely glowed orange and stayed.
More shapes moved beyond the flames.
The heroes could hear them.
Skittering.
Claws.
Heavy bodies disturbing the swamp.
Fendor looked into the gray.
“How many things does this place contain?”
Hexen could not answer in mammoth form.
Nethnarel could.
“All of them, apparently.”
The next creature came at Hexen.
It was massive enough that, for once, the mammoth did not look absurdly larger than everything around it.
The two bodies collided.
Hexen dug his feet into the mud.
The creature pushed.
Hexen pushed back.
Mud erupted around them.
For a moment neither moved.
Then Hexen twisted.
The creature lost balance.
The mammoth drove forward and forced it down.
The monster hit the ground.
Hexen planted one heavy foot against it and held it there.
Fendor looked over.
“That seems useful.”
The creature thrashed.
Hexen leaned harder.
It stayed down.
Nethnarel moved through the air above them.
Several small spheres of flame orbited her.
Melf’s Minute Meteors.
She selected the pinned creature.
One meteor descended.
Then another.
Fire burst across its body.
The monster tried to rise.
The mammoth disagreed.
Fendor walked toward it.
Kaylor saw the sword.
“Do not say it.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You were.”
“I was going to say something entirely different.”
“What?”
Fendor lifted the Vorpal Longsword.
“Hold still.”
Hexen held the creature down.
Fendor struck.
The first blow opened the neck.
The second went deeper.
The third finished the work.
The creature’s head separated.
For a moment Fendor remained beside it, sword extended, Hexen’s mammoth foot still planted on the dead body.
Nethnarel hovered above them.
Kaylor approached with the hammer.
Isamu emerged from the thinning insect swarm.
Fendor looked at the severed head.
Then around at the others.
“I did that.”
Isamu nodded toward Hexen.
“He held it.”
“That does not diminish the sword.”
Hexen released the corpse.
The mammoth took one step backward.
The head rolled deeper into the mud.
Fendor watched it go.
“Nobody saw that part.”
Everyone had.
Nobody corrected him.
Silence began returning to the forest.
Not normal silence.
There were still no birds.
No frogs.
No small animals rustling through vegetation.
Even the insects created by the monsters disappeared with the battle rather than settling into the landscape.
Smoke rose between dead trees.
Bodies lay across mud and black water.
The fog remained.
Again.
Kaylor stood among the corpses.
Yesterday they had found a giant plant beneath it.
Then shadow creatures.
Then the vulture thing.
Then the worms.
Today they had returned to the same place and found entirely different monsters waiting.
Not descendants.
Not replacements from a nearby nest.
Different things.
Things that should not have shared a forest.
Fendor wiped the Vorpal blade.
“If we leave and come back tomorrow, what do you think we get?”
Nethnarel looked around.
“I do not want to speculate.”
“That bad?”
“Yes.”
Hexen returned to himself.
The mammoth contracted until the druid stood once more among them.
He examined the nearest corpse.
Then the trees.
Then the fog.
“The land is not producing them.”
Kaylor looked at him.
“How do you know?”
“I don’t.”
Hexen touched the dead ground.
“But nothing here fits.”
That was what they had already begun understanding.
It was becoming harder to deny.
The swamp was not becoming a new ecosystem.
It was becoming a place where impossible things appeared.
As though the shadow had loosened whatever rules normally decided what belonged where.
Nethnarel stared northeast.
The father had said the dragon went that way.
The fog followed.
Every time the heroes advanced, they encountered another random collection of powerful creatures.
Every time they killed them, the fog remained.
Fendor sheathed the sword.
“We are not solving this by killing whatever crawls out of the trees.”
Kaylor rested the Hammer of Thunderbolts across one shoulder.
“No.”
Isamu looked northeast.
“Then we keep going.”
There was no immediate answer.
The battle had cost them little compared with what they had survived before.
That was almost irrelevant.
Power was not the problem.
Direction was.
They could spend days moving through the corruption and slaughter everything it placed before them.
The fog would still be there.
Somewhere ahead, something had crossed the land.
Something whose passage left monsters behind like footprints.
Kaylor looked through the dead trees.
The darkness beyond them seemed thicker than when the fight began.
Perhaps it was only the smoke.
Perhaps not.
They had returned because the fog was growing.
They had found it darker than before.
And nothing they had killed had made it lighter.