The creatures beneath them were running.
Kaylor heard them through the stone.
At first the sound was little more than a distant scraping beneath the passage—wet bodies dragging themselves through recently carved tunnels, tentacles striking rock, loose earth spilling from walls that had been opened too recently to settle. Then Hexen moved closer to the edge of the lower cavern, and the noise became frantic.
Whatever lived below knew what he had become.
The pit fiend stood nearly twice Kaylor’s height, broad wings folded against the rough ceiling and heat rolling from red-black flesh. Horns curved back from a face made for terror. Clawed feet scored the stone. Infernal power surrounded him so strongly that even Kaylor’s senses had difficulty separating Hexen from everything else wrong with the place.
The reaction below was immediate.
Scraping became retreat.
Fendor listened.
“They’re afraid of him.”
“They should be,” Nethnarel said.
Fendor looked at Hexen.
“I’m still deciding.”
Hexen showed him far too many teeth.
The shape was temporary. They all understood that. Somewhere inside the enormous devil remained Hexen Brew: druid, deceiver of demon lords, breaker of temples, provider of excellent breakfasts and currently the most convincing reason anything underground had found to reconsider its plans.
Kaylor looked farther into the freshly cut tunnel.
“Keep him in front.”
Fendor nodded.
“One of your better ideas.”
They followed the fleeing sounds.
The recently opened passages twisted through old stone, but they did not remain ordinary caverns for long. Some walls bore the raw scars of recent excavation. Others were worked masonry that had no business being beneath farmland outside Oxland—blocks fitted together by hands long gone, the remains of halls or foundations buried under centuries of earth.
Then those ruins changed.
Hexen stopped.
Not abruptly.
The great infernal body simply became still.
Kaylor almost walked into one folded wing.
“What?”
Hexen stared ahead.
The answer did not come from Hexen’s own memory.
Kaylor saw that immediately.
Something in the form recognized what they were looking at.
Ancient stone continued for several yards and then became something else without a clean boundary between them. Masonry darkened to black-red rock. Mortar gave way to fused ridges that looked half melted. Veins of dull ember-light ran through portions of the wall. A staircase that had once belonged to the buried ruin climbed upward several steps, but halfway along its ascent the stone changed into material that looked grown rather than built.
Two places occupied the same space.
Neither had won.
Hexen’s voice came out deeper than before.
“Hellmouth.”
Nobody moved.
Fendor looked ahead.
“I assume that is exactly as pleasant as it sounds.”
Hexen studied the rupture.
The knowledge came with the body.
Not a doorway one stepped through to visit the Hells.
Not quite.
Something had crossed.
Something infernal had pushed against the world strongly enough that the boundary had torn and failed to heal properly. Creatures from another plane had established themselves here. Their presence had left a residue—a wound where the substance of one world and another had begun occupying the same place.
Kaylor looked at the buried ruin.
“So we’re not going to Hell.”
“No.”
“Good.”
Fendor glanced around.
“An unexpectedly low standard.”
Nethnarel touched the blackened wall with the end of the Staff of Power.
The stone was warm.
“Something from Hell came here.”
Hexen nodded.
That was worse.
The heroes had followed a dragon’s wake through a countryside that no longer obeyed the memory of what it had been. Plains had become swamp. Trees appeared where there had been none. Monsters with no relationship to one another emerged beneath the fog. The forest itself had awakened and tried to crush them.
Now, beneath it all, they had found a place where another plane had been allowed to bleed through.
Kaylor extended Divine Sense.
The awareness traveled through the chamber.
There was a fiend behind him.
A very large one.
Hexen waved.
Kaylor ignored him.
Nothing else answered within the immediate range.
That did not make Kaylor feel better.
The Hellmouth continued beyond it.
They advanced.
The architecture grew stranger as they went. A ruined stairway climbed beside a cavern wall and ended nowhere. Columns protruded from natural rock. Half of an arch stood embedded in the ground at an angle no builder would have chosen. In other places the infernal intrusion covered the ruins entirely, turning floors black and glossy or forcing thornlike ridges through ancient stone.
It looked as if someone had taken two buildings from different realities, shattered both, and rebuilt the pieces without caring which belonged where.
Then they heard skittering.
Left.
Right.
Ahead.
Hexen raised his head.
Something came down the wall.
At first Kaylor mistook it for one of the creatures that had fled them earlier. Then it entered the dim infernal light.
Hyena-like.
Humanoid enough to carry weapons.
Wrong in ways that had nothing to do with anatomy.
It watched Hexen.
The pit fiend’s fear rolled toward it.
The creature kept coming.
Fendor slowly drew the Oathbow.
“That one doesn’t care.”
Hexen seemed offended.
The creature made a sound somewhere between laughter and a growl.
More movement answered from the darkness.
Hexen lifted one clawed hand.
The Hellmouth answered him.
Two devils appeared.
They were smaller than Hexen’s shape but still large enough that an ordinary adventuring company would have reconsidered the wisdom of the room. Barbed bodies flexed beneath the infernal light, hooks and spines catching orange reflections from the walls.
The pair turned toward Hexen.
Not hostile.
Bound, for the moment, to the will of the greater devil who had summoned them.
Fendor looked at the new arrivals.
“We have demons now.”
“Devils,” Hexen corrected.
“Of course.”
“There is a difference.”
“I’m sure they care deeply.”
Nethnarel took flight.
The cavern roof gave her perhaps twenty feet before the broken stone narrowed overhead, but that was enough. The Staff of Power angled downward.
Eldritch force struck the first hyena-creature.
Once.
Again.
Again.
The impacts drove it backward against a piece of ancient masonry.
A star from Nethnarel’s crown followed.
Radiance exploded across the creature’s chest.
It remained alive.
Something else came running from the opposite side.
This one carried a battleaxe.
Nethnarel saw it too late.
The creature leapt from broken stone and swung. The axe struck hard enough to throw her sideways in the air.
Kaylor moved before she recovered.
The Hammer of Thunderbolts came over his shoulder.
The first blow struck the creature’s head from one side.
The second came from the other.
There were weapons designed for precision.
The Hammer of Thunderbolts was not among them.
The creature hit the floor.
It did not move again.
Fendor stared.
“That was unnecessary.”
“It was trying to kill Nethnarel.”
“I meant the second one.”
Kaylor looked at the body.
“I was already moving.”
“Fair.”
Fendor turned toward the creature Nethnarel had wounded.
Arrows came quickly.
The first buried itself high in the torso.
The second struck beneath it.
The third carried something more.
The arrow exploded.
The creature disappeared inside a burst of force and fragments of infernal masonry.
When the smoke cleared, it was dead.
For several heartbeats the chamber became still.
Then something appeared beside Kaylor.
No approach.
No sound.
One instant empty stone occupied the space.
The next a smaller hyena-like thing stood there holding a three-headed flail.
Kaylor turned.
The weapon spun.
One head missed him.
Another struck only the shifting distortion of his cloak.
The third connected.
The impact hit hard.
Then force caught Kaylor and hurled him backward.
He slid across the floor, armor grinding against black stone, and came to a stop on one knee.
Fendor looked over.
“Did the little one just throw you?”
Kaylor stood.
“Yes.”
“With a flail?”
“Yes.”
“You have the strength of a storm giant.”
“I am aware.”
Fendor nodded.
“I wanted to be sure.”
Another creature teleported directly in front of Hexen.
The pit fiend raised his claws.
The three-headed flail struck.
Once.
Again.
Then the third head found him.
Hexen barely reacted.
The thing struck again.
Infernal flesh could withstand punishment that would have turned Hexen’s ordinary body into a problem for resurrection magic.
The next effect was different.
Hexen stopped moving.
The pit fiend stood rigid.
His wings locked.
One claw remained half raised.
Kaylor stared.
“Hex?”
No answer.
Paralyzed.
The irony would have been amusing if more creatures had not begun appearing.
One materialized near Fendor.
Another rushed the barbed devils.
The chamber filled with metal and snarling.
Hexen’s summoned fiends met the newcomers head-on. They were not winning decisively, but that did not seem to matter. Every axe blow and flail strike that landed on a barbed devil was one not landing on the heroes.
Fendor fired until one of the creatures closed.
Then the bow stopped being useful.
The Vorpal Longsword came free.
Something larger appeared.
The chamber seemed to shrink around it.
The creature resembled the others in the same way a wolf resembled a hunting dog. The proportions were familiar.
The scale was not.
It towered over the smaller things, its body thick with muscle beneath matted hide. A massive flail hung from one arm. Its mouth opened wide enough that the teeth looked less like part of a face than a trap.
It looked first at Hexen.
The paralyzed pit fiend.
Fendor saw what was coming.
“Hexen.”
Hexen could not answer.
The giant creature lunged.
Its jaws closed.
The bite landed with terrible force.
Infernal flesh tore.
Hexen’s concentration shattered.
The pit fiend disappeared.
For one instant the huge devil occupied the chamber.
Then Hexen Brew stood in its place.
Considerably smaller.
Considerably more vulnerable.
The giant creature seemed disappointed only for a moment.
Fendor was already there.
The elf crossed the chamber with the Vorpal Longsword low.
He struck.
Then again.
Then stopped fighting like a patient man.
Fendor had always possessed a reserve of violence that sat beneath his usual precision. He could spend entire battles waiting for the correct angle, choosing shots, reading movement, making exactly the attack required.
Sometimes the correct attack was all of them.
The Vorpal blade became a line of silver-black light.
One cut.
Two.
Three.
Four.
More.
The enormous creature staggered under the assault.
Fendor continued until whatever impossible burst of speed he had drawn upon finally exhausted itself.
Then he stepped back.
The creature remained standing.
Barely.
Fendor breathed once.
“Rude.”
The giant flail-creature turned toward him.
That had been the other consequence.
He had its complete attention now.
The barbed devils vanished.
Their borrowed minute had ended.
Hexen watched them disappear.
“They were useful.”
Fendor kept his eyes on the monster.
“They were.”
“Should I summon something else?”
“Yes.”
Hexen did.
Wolves began appearing.
Not one.
Not five.
Packs.
They flooded the broken chamber in gray bodies, moving around stone and infernal growth with the coordinated chaos of animals that understood one another without needing to speak.
Nethnarel looked down from above.
“How many?”
Hexen considered.
“A lot.”
That was sufficient.
The wolves could not match what had come through the Hellmouth individually.
They did not need to.
They surrounded.
Distracted.
Snapped at heels.
Forced creatures to turn.
Created openings.
And in a battle where Fendor and Kaylor could turn an opening into death, that made them dangerous.
Nethnarel lifted both hands.
The magic gathering around her did not look like fire.
It looked like absence.
A sphere of death spread through the chamber.
Kaylor saw it coming.
So did Fendor.
Neither moved.
Nethnarel bent the spell around them.
Necrotic power rolled through the Hellmouth, passing over allies without touching them and striking everything else.
The lesser hyena-creatures died almost together.
Bodies collapsed across ruined stairs.
One fell from the wall.
Another dropped beside the wolves.
The enormous creature remained upright.
Nethnarel’s magic twisted.
Wildness entered it.
That familiar wrongness—the part of her power that had never agreed that magic needed to behave predictably—opened another instant where none should have existed.
Nethnarel used it.
Death crossed the chamber again.
This time she drove it toward the largest creature.
It absorbed the magic and snarled.
Still alive.
“Of course,” Nethnarel said.
The creature came for Fendor.
Its bite connected.
The flail followed.
Fendor’s dark armor took the first impact badly.
The next was worse.
He retreated half a pace and then stopped himself.
His breathing had changed.
Blood ran beneath one side of his armor.
Still he raised the sword.
“Still here.”
The creature swung again.
Nethnarel saw more shapes entering.
Not the ordinary hyena-things.
These resembled the teleporting flail-creatures.
One was huge.
Several were merely enormous.
The Hellmouth was not running out of answers.
Nethnarel spread her arms.
Fire raced over her skin.
Then she screamed.
The sound was not made by lungs.
It entered the mind.
Psychic force exploded through the chamber.
The wolves howled.
Kaylor flinched.
The creatures from the Hellmouth staggered as something invisible tore through their thoughts.
For an instant it looked as though the attack might break all of them.
Then the strongest simply refused.
Power gathered around them.
Infernal will hardened.
They remained conscious.
Damaged.
Not broken.
Nethnarel stared down.
“I dislike that.”
One of the stars still orbiting her head dropped.
It struck the largest creature.
The great monster swayed.
Hexen changed again.
Stone replaced flesh.
His body expanded into the heavy, blocklike shape of an Earth Elemental. Cracks opened across his surface, glowing faintly where the Hellmouth’s light caught them.
The elemental sank partly into the cavern floor.
Then raised both arms.
Sunlight erupted.
The Hellmouth turned white.
For the first time since they had entered the corrupted region, true brilliance filled everything. It washed across black-red walls and ancient stone, turning infernal residue pale beneath it.
The largest creature took the blast directly.
Its flesh began peeling.
Not burning.
Peeling.
Fendor looked at it.
“That helped.”
Kaylor was already moving.
The wolves opened around him.
The greater creature snapped at Kaylor as he came in.
The bite struck.
Kaylor ignored it.
He brought the Hammer of Thunderbolts down.
Then again.
Divine force followed.
Not the clean light of the oath Kaylor had once carried.
Something harder.
Something that belonged to the man he had become after Craven taught him that holy words did not guarantee holy people.
Power moved through the hammer.
The creature reeled.
Kaylor hit it again.
The great body collapsed.
The giant flail struck the floor.
For a heartbeat, everything near the corpse stopped.
Fendor looked at Kaylor.
“You got the big one.”
Kaylor breathed heavily.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
More flails rattled in the dark.
Fendor looked toward them.
“I was hoping that meant we were done.”
They were not.
The lesser versions attacked.
One struck with unnatural precision.
The blow landed against Nethnarel.
Her armor answered.
The bone plate had never looked entirely comfortable on a living person. Pale material curved around her body in shapes that seemed grown rather than forged, another impossible piece of Oslan that obeyed rules none of them fully understood.
Now the bones moved.
The floor erupted beneath the creature that had struck her.
White growths tore upward.
Not roots.
Bone.
They wrapped around the creature’s legs and locked.
The attacker tried to step away.
Could not.
Nethnarel stared.
“Well.”
Fendor glanced over while blocking a flail.
“Did your armor do that?”
“Yes.”
“Useful.”
“Apparently.”
Kaylor attacked the trapped creature.
The hammer drove it lower against the bone restraints.
He did not spend more divine power.
There were still enemies left.
There might be more after them.
And for all their strength, everyone in the chamber had begun to look like people who had been fighting since yesterday.
Another creature went after Hexen.
The Earth Elemental took the bite.
Then the flails.
One blow cracked stone.
Another tore away part of Hexen’s borrowed body.
The elemental form broke.
Hexen returned.
He immediately became something else.
Fendor did not even look anymore.
There had been a time when Hexen transforming in the middle of battle required attention.
That time had passed.
Nethnarel raised one hand.
A thin green beam gathered.
“Move.”
The nearest creature turned toward her.
The spell struck.
Disintegrate.
The creature resisted.
The magic passed without reducing it to ash.
Nethnarel looked personally insulted.
“No.”
Kaylor was not watching her.
The creature in front of him had begun swinging.
First flail.
Second.
Third.
All three landed.
Kaylor’s armor rang.
The impacts drove him backward.
Then the creature chose pain over trickery.
Another burst of force hammered through him.
Kaylor nearly dropped.
Fendor saw it.
Twenty-one heartbeats of life would have been too poetic.
What Kaylor possessed was simpler.
Very little blood left to lose.
Fendor disengaged from his own opponent and ran.
The creature raised the flail over Kaylor.
The Vorpal Longsword arrived first.
Fendor struck with everything he had left.
The creature came apart beneath the assault.
Not the great one.
Not the enemy Fendor would later remember as the centerpiece of the battle.
Just the one that would have killed Kaylor.
That made it important enough.
Kaylor looked at him.
Fendor pointed the sword toward the remaining creatures.
“You can thank me later.”
Kaylor lifted the hammer.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Good.”
Nethnarel fired into the survivors.
Eldritch force crossed the chamber.
One blast.
Another.
Another.
She followed it with simpler magic when subtlety stopped mattering. Bolts of force curved around wolves and shattered against the remaining enemy.
Hexen’s newest shape absorbed another attack.
The wolves kept moving.
Kaylor saw the last creature.
So did everyone else.
The Hellmouth pulsed behind it.
Ancient ruin and infernal stone strained against one another.
The creature swung at Hexen.
Fendor tried to reposition.
Nethnarel searched for another spell worth the cost.
Kaylor walked through the wolves.
They scattered around him.
The Hammer of Thunderbolts hung low in one hand.
The last creature turned.
Kaylor attacked.
Once.
The wolves distracted it.
The second blow landed cleanly.
The creature dropped.
Silence hit the chamber.
Not gradually.
Immediately.
The Hellmouth moved.
Fendor looked toward it.
“Uh.”
The infernal architecture began pulling inward.
Black-red stone fractured.
Ember-light dimmed.
The pieces of Hell that had forced themselves into the buried ruin started collapsing toward the wound that had allowed them through.
The opening narrowed.
Kaylor did not need an explanation.
“Out.”
Nobody argued.
Wolves ran.
Hexen moved.
Nethnarel dropped from the air.
Fendor paused beside the corpse of the greater creature.
Kaylor saw him.
“What are you doing?”
“The flail.”
“Fendor.”
“We killed it.”
The enormous weapon lay beside the body.
Even on the ground it looked unreasonable: a brutal multi-headed flail built for something far larger than a human or elf.
Fendor grabbed it.
The weapon barely moved.
Kaylor sighed.
Then helped.
Together they dragged it.
The chamber continued closing behind them.
Infernal stone folded into nothing.
Ancient walls cracked as the foreign material vanished from between them. The stairway shuddered. Sections of cavern that had existed only because two planes overlapped ceased agreeing about their own geometry.
The heroes ran.
The wolves disappeared as Hexen released them or the magic ended.
They reached the recently carved tunnels.
Behind them came a deep grinding roar.
Not a monster.
A wound closing.
They did not stop until the Hellmouth was behind them.
Then they did.
Fendor leaned against the wall.
Kaylor let the great flail hit the stone between them.
Nethnarel lowered the Staff of Power.
Hexen looked back toward the passage.
No infernal light followed.
The Hellmouth had closed.
Not Hell.
Not every creature that had crossed.
Not whatever had first opened it.
But this breach was gone.
Fendor looked at the flail.
“Do you think it’s cursed?”
Kaylor stared at him.
“It came from a thing that crawled out of a Hellmouth.”
“That isn’t a no.”
Nethnarel looked at the weapon.
“Do not touch it more than necessary.”
Fendor released the handle.
“Excellent advice, slightly late.”
Hexen returned fully to himself.
The echoes of the battle faded beneath the earth.
For the first time since they had entered the burrow, nothing was running from them.
Nothing was coming toward them.
The four stood in the dark with a weapon they did not understand and a closed wound between worlds behind them.
It should have felt like victory.
It did not.
Kaylor thought of Marcus’s father looking up and seeing a dragon pass overhead.
Then the ground shaking.
The fog rolling in.
A countryside becoming something else.
They had followed that trail and found swamp, shadow, impossible monsters, a living forest, burrowing horrors and finally a place where Hell itself had pushed into their world.
The Hellmouth had not been their destination.
That was what mattered.
They had never come here looking for devils.
They were looking for a dragon.
Kaylor picked up the Hammer of Thunderbolts.
Fendor looked toward the tunnels leading back to the surface.
“So.”
Kaylor knew the question.
“North.”
“Northeast.”
“Still.”
Hexen frowned.
“We just closed a Hellmouth.”
“Yes.”
“And we keep going.”
“Yes.”
Nethnarel stared toward the darkness ahead.
“That is becoming a pattern.”
They climbed.
Above them waited the corrupted forest.
Beyond it, the fog.
Beyond that, somewhere, the shadowed dragon whose passing had turned familiar country into a collection of things that should never have existed beside one another.
Kaylor did not know whether the dragon had created the Hellmouth.
He did not know whether it had merely weakened the world enough for something else to break through.
He did not know whether any of the horrors behind them had been intentional.
But he understood one thing now.
The trail was getting worse.
The farther they followed the dragon’s shadow, the less the world remained itself.
And Hell had only been one of the things waiting in the wound.