Doors of the Dead Wizard
The door opened only while the floor was moving.
That seemed exactly like the sort of thing Craven would have designed.
Behind the heroes, the circular chamber began to rotate again. The broken bodies of the six clockwork abominations moved with it, metal scraping across stone as the mechanism slowly gathered speed.
Ahead, a passage opened where there had been only wall.
Grazim rested one hand against the stone until the dizziness passed.
He had been burned, battered, knocked unconscious, restored, and then expected to continue walking.
The others looked little better.
Kaylor glanced at him.
“You can heal yourself?”
Grazim considered the question.
Then the war-priest touched the wounds beneath his armor and called upon his god.
Warm light passed through him.
Not enough.
But better.
“That answers that,” Hexen said.
They entered the passage.
The stone corridor lasted only a short distance.
Then everything changed.
Wood appeared beneath their feet.
Polished wood.
Not old planks or rotted boards, but a rich floor gleaming beneath warm light. Voices drifted from somewhere ahead.
Laughter.
Music.
Conversation.
Many conversations.
Some in Common.
Some in Elven.
Others in languages none of them knew.
The smell reached them next.
Fresh bread.
Roasted meat.
Spices.
Wine.
For one impossible moment, the Vault of Craven ceased to exist.
They had entered a feast.
Fendor stopped.
An elven woman stood before him.
She had not been there a heartbeat before.
Silver hair fell across her shoulders. Her eyes seemed to hold light of their own. She smiled and extended one hand toward him.
The conversations around him changed.
Common disappeared.
Draconic vanished.
Every voice became Elven.
The woman leaned closer.
Come.
Fendor smiled.
He took her hand.
Behind him, the others stared at an empty hallway.
The polished wood faded beneath their feet.
The warm lamps vanished.
The feast became dust.
Tables appeared along the walls, but whatever food had once covered them had collapsed into powder centuries before. Bones lay among broken cups and dry plates.
No musicians played.
No guests laughed.
No beautiful elf waited.
Fendor walked deeper into the ruin anyway.
“Fendor?” Kaylor called.
The elf turned.
His expression was happier than any of them had seen since awakening upon the mountain.
“You should see this.”
“We are seeing it.”
“No.” Fendor laughed. “You are not.”
He continued down the hall.
Kaylor followed.
Fendor disappeared into one of the side rooms.
To him, it was crowded with elves.
Beautiful strangers raised jeweled cups as he entered.
Food covered every table.
Music filled the chamber.
Someone placed wine in his hand.
Fendor drank.
Grazim entered behind Kaylor.
He saw only an elf sitting amid dust and bones, raising an empty cup to his lips.
Kaylor slapped him.
Fendor blinked.
Then laughed.
“Kaylor! You came.”
“Get up.”
“Sit down.”
“There is nothing here.”
Fendor gestured toward people who did not exist.
“You always say that when we find somewhere enjoyable.”
He grabbed Kaylor and attempted to pull him into the celebration.
Kaylor shoved him away.
“This is not a celebration.”
Fendor looked genuinely offended.
Nethnarel approached from the hall.
She understood immediately.
The tiefling lifted one hand.
Her voice multiplied.
Not twice.
Hundreds of times.
Whispers filled the room from every direction.
Illusion.
This is an illusion.
Nothing you see is real.
The voices surrounded Fendor.
He looked around.
Then smiled.
“The singers are getting interesting.”
Nethnarel lowered her hand.
“Well.”
Kaylor extended his senses.
Divine awareness swept outward through the hall.
He expected corruption.
Undead.
Fiends.
Something.
He found nothing.
“No evil.”
“That is reassuring,” Hexen said.
“No, it isn't.”
Kaylor stepped toward Fendor and raised both hands.
Divine magic gathered around him.
“Stand still.”
Fendor raised his cup.
“I am sitting.”
“Close enough.”
Kaylor cast Dispel Magic.
The spell struck whatever held Fendor.
For an instant the feast shimmered.
Kaylor felt the enchantment resist him.
Not merely resist.
Overpower.
The magic was far beyond the strength of an ordinary illusion.
Then the feast returned.
Fendor smiled.
“You almost spilled my drink.”
Kaylor stared.
“That should have worked.”
Grazim examined the room.
“I can prepare the same prayer.”
“Can you cast it now?”
“No.”
“Of course.”
Leonidas reached into the Bag of Holding.
“What about something less conventional?”
That sentence had become dangerous.
He withdrew the jade-inlaid mug.
“No,” said Grazim.
“Why does everyone say that before I have explained?”
“Experience.”
Leonidas began sorting through their potions.
They chose one they could afford to lose.
A potion of climbing.
Fendor accepted it eagerly.
Anything offered to him inside the feast seemed trustworthy.
Leonidas poured the potion into the magical mug.
The liquid changed.
No one knew how.
Fendor drank.
Everyone waited.
The elf's eyes widened.
Strength returned to his face.
Some of the wounds he carried closed.
He sat straighter.
“I feel excellent.”
Kaylor rubbed his forehead.
“Is the party gone?”
Fendor looked around the glorious banquet.
“No.”
“Then it did not help.”
“It helped me.”
Hexen stepped forward.
“Enough.”
He spoke a word.
Magic locked around Fendor's body.
The elf froze.
His smile remained.
Fendor could still see the celebration.
He could still hear the music.
He simply could not move toward it.
“Hold Person,” Nethnarel said.
Hexen nodded.
“How long?”
“A minute.”
Kaylor looked toward the doors at the end of the hall.
“Then move.”
They grabbed Fendor.
The illusion did not want to lose him.
The moment they dragged him across the threshold, Fendor screamed.
Pain tore through him.
His body arched against the magic holding him rigid.
Blood appeared beneath his armor.
Thirty-five points of pain, Grazim thought with the instinctive precision of a battle healer.
Enough to kill an ordinary man.
Not enough to break the enchantment.
Fendor's eyes remained fixed upon the doorway behind them.
“Take me back.”
“No,” Kaylor said.
“You don't understand.”
“We understand perfectly.”
“No. You really don't.”
They had entered a cavern.
The ceiling rose high above them into darkness.
A raised formation stood near the center, its upper surface hidden by the angle. A strange glow came from somewhere atop it.
Farther away waited darkness.
For the moment, no creature attacked.
They took advantage of it.
They tied Fendor.
Then they made the situation considerably more secure with the Immovable Rod.
Fendor stared at them.
“You are tying me up because I was enjoying myself.”
“We are tying you up because you tried to run back into a room that nearly killed you,” Kaylor said.
“It was a very good party.”
Kaylor placed one hand against Fendor's shoulder.
Divine power flowed through the paladin.
He tried to purge poison.
Nothing.
He tried to purge disease.
Nothing.
The compulsion remained.
Fendor flexed against the ropes.
The cords strained.
Everyone heard them.
Kaylor looked down.
“Don't.”
Fendor pulled harder.
The rope began to tear.
Kaylor punched him.
Fendor stared at him.
“You hit me.”
“I am trying not to kill you.”
“That is not as comforting as you think.”
Fendor broke loose.
He ran.
Not away from the party.
Toward it.
Kaylor struck him as he passed.
The blow staggered him but did not stop him.
Fendor kept going.
He passed Grazim.
The war-priest swung.
His hammer caught Fendor hard enough to drop him.
The elf collapsed.
Silence filled the cavern.
Hexen looked at Grazim.
“You knocked out our archer.”
“He was escaping.”
Kaylor crouched beside Fendor.
“He was going back.”
Leonidas nodded thoughtfully.
“Still, we should remember this if any of us ever becomes inconvenient.”
Grazim ignored him.
When Fendor awakened, they tried again.
This time Grazim prayed for guidance.
Kaylor remained beside the elf, the protective force of his presence strengthening Fendor's resistance.
The memory of the feast still waited.
Fendor could smell the bread.
Hear the music.
Remember the woman's hand in his.
But now another thought existed beside it.
His friends had beaten him unconscious to keep him from returning.
They would not have done that without reason.
Fendor closed his eyes.
The music faded.
Not completely.
Enough.
“I still want to go back.”
Kaylor nodded.
“But?”
Fendor looked at him.
“But I won't.”
Kaylor healed the wounds they had inflicted while preventing him from killing himself.
It was, Fendor decided, a very strange kind of friendship.
They chose the cavern as their resting place.
No one particularly liked the decision.
There were no better ones.
Leonidas spent the first quiet hour restoring Pete.
The familiar had been obliterated by the trap in the rotating chamber. When the ritual was complete, Pete returned to the world as if offended by the entire concept of death.
Leonidas immediately sent him on watch.
Fendor tried to sleep.
The party remained inside his thoughts.
Hours passed.
One.
Two.
Three.
Nothing approached.
Four.
Five.
Six.
Grazim began to believe they might actually finish a night without being attacked.
During the seventh hour, metal growled in the darkness.
Pete saw them first.
Four shapes moved around the cavern.
Dogs.
Almost.
Their bodies were mechanical.
Brass and steel formed armored torsos. Jointed legs struck stone with sharp metallic clicks. Their jaws opened to reveal rows of engineered teeth.
Clockwork hounds.
Leonidas sighed.
“Of course.”
The hounds charged.
Nethnarel reacted first.
Magic Missiles streaked from her hands, splitting between the nearest machines.
The glowing bolts struck metal.
One hound staggered.
Another accelerated.
It reached Fendor.
Its jaws closed.
The bite tore through armor and flesh.
Fendor answered immediately with his bow.
Across the cavern, Grazim met another hound with his warhammer.
The hammer struck the creature's armored shoulder.
Grazim followed with his shield.
He drove the rim beneath the machine's body and heaved.
The hound crashed onto its side.
“Now!”
Hexen attacked.
The Spear of Death entered between two plates.
The Spear of Life followed.
The construct jerked beneath the second strike.
Hexen waited for the familiar pulse of returning vitality.
Nothing came.
He looked at the spear.
“It doesn't work on machines.”
“That seems fair,” Leonidas said.
“It does not feel fair.”
Leonidas placed his Hex upon another hound.
Then eldritch force struck it.
The construct flew backward.
His second blast hit another and drove it away from the group.
Kaylor met the nearest machine head-on.
A frost-rimed axe swept into the creature.
Divine light followed.
The hound's metal body buckled beneath the combined impact.
It exploded.
Fire burst from the ruined machine.
Kaylor raised one arm against the blast.
Fendor ducked.
Pete fled.
When the flames passed, Kaylor remained standing.
“Anything else?”
The remaining hounds answered by attacking.
The fight became a violent contest of steel against steel.
Grazim hammered one to the ground.
Nethnarel sent lightning into another.
Fendor's arrows found gaps between plates.
Leonidas kept driving the constructs backward with eldritch force.
Hexen's matched spears struck in alternating flashes.
Kaylor destroyed another hound.
Then another.
The last mechanical dog collapsed with smoke leaking from its jaws.
For a few moments, they waited.
No additional creatures came.
Leonidas nudged the nearest carcass.
“Can we sell it?”
They tore useful metal from the constructs.
There was enough electrum among the mechanisms to make the interruption at least mildly profitable.
“Now,” said Grazim, “we sleep.”
No one argued.
They completed the rest.
When they awakened, Fendor still remembered the feast.
He suspected he always would.
But he could ignore it.
That was enough.
Pete flew toward the raised formation at the center of the cavern.
Leonidas closed his eyes.
Through the familiar, he saw what had been hidden above them.
An egg.
That was the closest word for it.
The structure was enormous.
Translucent.
Almost liquid in appearance.
Inside floated scores of smaller eggs.
Perhaps a hundred.
Shapes moved within them.
Embryos.
Creatures.
At the heart of the mass shone an intense light, illuminating every developing thing around it.
Leonidas opened his eyes.
“That is unpleasant.”
“How unpleasant?” Nethnarel asked.
“Approximately one hundred things waiting to be born.”
Hexen stared upward.
“Can we leave?”
Pete flew farther.
On the southern side of the cavern stood an immense bronze door.
Nearly fifty feet across.
Twenty feet high.
A way forward.
Kaylor pointed toward it.
“There.”
Nethnarel looked at the egg.
Then at the door.
Then back at the egg.
“No.”
Kaylor frowned.
“No?”
“We are not leaving a hundred unknown creatures behind us.”
“They are eggs.”
“Yes.”
“Which are not currently attacking us.”
“That is how eggs work.”
Leonidas nodded.
“She has a point.”
Hexen studied the mass.
“What happens if we break it?”
“No idea,” Grazim said.
“What are the chances,” Nethnarel asked, “that whatever comes out is something we want alive?”
No one answered.
That was answer enough.
One of them pulled a useful patch from the Robe of Useful Items.
A flask appeared.
Oil.
They lit it.
Then threw it.
The burning flask struck the translucent mass.
The enormous egg ruptured.
Five smaller eggs shot from it.
They struck the cavern floor.
Then began growing.
Fast.
Far too fast.
Within moments, the shells split.
Five creatures emerged.
They were huge.
Pale, wet bodies unfolded across the stone.
Long tentacles extended from malformed torsos.
Mouths opened where mouths should not have been.
The largest rose several times the height of a man.
Leonidas looked at the others.
“There were one hundred inside.”
“Yes,” said Nethnarel.
“We should perhaps not hit the large egg again.”
“Yes.”
The creatures charged.
Nethnarel reached into a pocket.
Her mouse familiar appeared in her hand.
Grazim stared.
“What are you doing?”
“I have been considering this.”
“That is rarely comforting.”
Nethnarel threw the mouse.
The tiny familiar sailed over the nearest creature.
Nethnarel cast Polymorph.
The mouse changed in midair.
Tiny became enormous.
Fur became thick hide.
Delicate feet became crushing legs.
A rhinoceros fell from above.
It landed upon the creature.
The impact shook the cavern.
The rhinoceros drove its horn into the thing beneath it.
For several seconds, no one spoke.
Leonidas finally nodded.
“That was excellent.”
“I know.”
Fendor drew the Oathbow.
The weapon seemed to recognize the enemy with him.
He named the creatures as his chosen prey.
Then he fired.
Arrow after arrow crossed the cavern.
One struck.
A second.
A third.
A fourth went wide.
Fendor changed the arrow's course.
The shot curved toward another creature and struck with greater force than the original attack.
Hexen raised both hands.
Wolves appeared.
The pack spread through the cavern.
Then Hexen changed.
His body expanded.
Green robes disappeared beneath black chitin.
Arms became massive claws.
A giant scorpion stood where the druid had been.
The wolves attacked.
The scorpion followed.
Kaylor charged another creature with the frost-rimed axe.
The first blow opened its side.
The second carried divine power into the wound.
Light erupted through the creature's body.
Leonidas marked another with his Hex.
Eldritch Blast struck it and drove the enormous thing backward.
Grazim attacked beside him.
His hammer hit.
Then his shield.
The creature was too large to be thrown down easily.
It barely moved.
One of the beasts lashed out.
A tentacle wrapped around Leonidas.
Another struck.
The second missed.
The mouth did not.
Teeth closed on him.
Leonidas answered with Hellish Rebuke.
Fire raced across the monster's body.
It screamed.
Hexen's scorpion claws seized another creature.
The beast struggled.
Hexen held it.
His stinger came down.
Poison entered its body.
Elsewhere, one of the creatures released a foul breath.
Kaylor staggered.
For a moment, he seemed uncertain which direction the enemy stood.
The confusion passed.
His anger did not.
The Dancing Sword moved beside him.
Kaylor attacked with both weapon and will.
Another burst of divine radiance struck the creature.
Nethnarel maintained the spell transforming her mouse while sending other magic through the cavern.
When two of the creatures moved close enough together, she saw the opening.
“Move.”
The others moved.
A Fireball crossed the cavern.
It exploded behind the creatures.
Flame rolled over both.
Fendor continued firing through the smoke.
The rhinoceros charged again.
Leonidas blasted another beast backward.
Grazim pointed toward a wounded creature.
A bell sounded.
Not in the cavern.
Somewhere deeper.
Somewhere death could hear it.
Toll the Dead.
The creature collapsed.
The wolves tore into another.
One of the beasts tried to retreat.
Hexen's scorpion chased it.
Claw.
Claw.
Stinger.
The poison spread.
The creature fell.
Silence returned.
Five malformed bodies covered the cavern floor.
The rhinoceros stood among them.
Nethnarel ended the spell.
The massive beast shrank.
A mouse sat on the stone.
It cleaned one paw.
Nethnarel picked it up.
Kaylor looked toward the giant egg.
It remained.
Still translucent.
Still glowing.
Still filled with embryos.
“What did the fire do?” he asked.
Leonidas considered the five corpses.
“It released five.”
Hexen looked upward.
“So every time we damage it—”
“Possibly.”
“—more come out.”
“Yes.”
Everyone looked at Nethnarel.
She folded her arms.
“We learned something.”
Fendor lowered the Oathbow.
“We learned to leave it alone.”
“That too.”
Leonidas reached into his pouch.
The Demon Dice appeared in his hand.
Kaylor saw them.
“No.”
“I have not even rolled.”
“No.”
Leonidas rolled.
The dice clicked across the stone.
Their symbols stopped.
Leonidas waited.
Then frowned.
His movements became noticeably slower.
Nethnarel stared.
“How long?”
Leonidas examined the result.
“A day.”
Hexen nodded.
“Excellent experiment.”
Leonidas put the dice away.
“I dislike all of you.”
They left the egg alive.
It was not satisfying.
But the Vault had begun teaching them an important rule.
Not every dangerous thing needed to be touched.
They crossed the cavern toward the bronze doors.
As they approached, the carvings became visible.
At first, they appeared to be decorative reliefs.
Then the shapes resolved.
Bodies.
Dozens of them.
Humans.
Elves.
Creatures Grazim could not identify.
Some lay broken.
Others knelt.
Others seemed to be screaming.
A figure stood above them.
Dragonborn.
Robed.
A wizard.
His carved hands were raised over the dead.
Some of the bodies beneath him had been cut open.
Others had been twisted into impossible forms.
The image did not portray a guardian.
It portrayed a master at work.
Kaylor stopped.
No inscription named him.
None was necessary.
The book.
The house.
The vault.
The dead wizard whose traps had tried to charm them, crush them, burn them, and tear them apart.
If the figure upon the door was not Craven, then Craven had wanted visitors to believe it was.
Fendor stared at the mountain of carved corpses beneath the wizard's feet.
The memory of the beautiful feast returned unexpectedly.
For the first time, he understood it differently.
The spell had not offered happiness.
It had studied him.
Found something he wanted.
Then used it.
Grazim stepped closer to the bronze doors.
“So this is Craven.”
Kaylor looked up at the dragonborn wizard carved above the dead.
“No.”
His voice was quiet.
“This is how he wanted to be remembered.”
No one answered.
Beyond the bronze waited the rest of the vault.
And for the first time since entering it, they were no longer merely moving through the traps of a dead wizard.
They were beginning to meet the man who had built them.