Return to the False Temple
The burning hay struck the guards like a falling sun.
A thousand pounds of straw, timber fragments and flame crashed into the field below the loft. One armored figure disappeared beneath it. Another rolled free with fire spreading across his cloak and armor.
The night filled with shouting.
Nethnarel held both hands extended.
Invisible force kept the burning mass together as it rolled across the ground, scattering embers through the guards surrounding the barn.
Isamu jumped from the loft.
He landed outside the main doors and ran around the building toward the spellcaster who had hurled the Fireball into the hay.
The guard saw him coming.
Not soon enough.
Isamu’s rapier struck first. A focused blow followed, ki entering the man’s body and locking every muscle in place.
The spellcaster froze.
Nethnarel leaned through the loft doors.
Magic divided around her hands.
Eight glowing missiles curved through the night and struck the guard who had escaped the burning hay.
The first bolts spun him.
The final ones dropped him.
Fendor’s arrows followed.
One struck a guard advancing from the western fence.
Another found a spellcaster positioned behind a low stone wall.
Kaylor descended through the barn instead of jumping.
He reached the main floor, threw open the broad doors and stepped into the field with his axe in one hand and the Dancing Sword rising beside him.
The guards surrounding the farm wore the armor of the Sanctum.
Some carried the same symbols Kaylor had torn from his own body only hours earlier.
He attacked them anyway.
A Ray of Frost crossed the field.
Ice gathered across one guard’s shield and arm.
Kaylor advanced through the opening.
Hexen raised both hands.
Grass erupted from the earth.
The short field became a wilderness of thick stalks, thorned weeds and twisting roots. Guards who had expected to charge the barn found their legs caught beneath them.
Some hacked at the growth.
Others tried to force their way through.
The heroes struck while they struggled.
Isamu moved from one trapped soldier to the next, using the plants as easily as flat ground. His rapier flashed. His fists followed. Then he was gone before anyone could answer.
Grazim summoned a spiritual weapon and sent it across the field.
The spectral hammer struck one of the approaching guards.
Fendor continued firing from the loft.
Nethnarel released the last meteors orbiting her head. They streaked downward and burst among the soldiers still trapped near the burning hay.
Hexen called wolves into the field.
The pack tore into one of the men who had escaped the plants.
The guard fought desperately.
Flame already covered part of his armor.
When the wolves brought him down, the fire spread through the summoned pack.
One after another, the animals vanished beneath the flames.
Hexen watched the final wolf disappear.
“That was unnecessary.”
The guard could no longer answer.
The battle stretched across the entire farm.
Spells struck the barn.
Arrows passed through the open loft.
A Dust Devil whirled into existence near the western fence, scattering dirt, grass and burning straw into the soldiers trying to advance.
It was not Hexen’s greatest spell.
It did make the field considerably more unpleasant.
Nethnarel looked down at it.
“That is doing almost nothing.”
“It is creating atmosphere.”
A horn sounded from the west.
Kaylor knew the call.
Retreat.
The guards nearest the road began withdrawing.
Some dragged wounded companions.
Others abandoned the field entirely.
Kaylor watched them go.
The soldiers did not appear relieved to escape.
They appeared confused.
Several looked back toward the barn as though awakening from a dream they did not understand.
Then the air behind Isamu opened.
A man stepped through.
For one heartbeat, Isamu saw a triton.
Broad shoulders.
Soldier’s bearing.
The familiar face of Kaylor’s mentor.
Viran.
Then the creature struck him.
A blade entered Isamu’s side.
Necrotic power followed, rotting flesh around the wound.
Isamu twisted away.
“Not Viran.”
Fendor saw the false face.
The Oathbow rose.
Four arrows struck before the demon could fully turn.
The image of Viran broke beneath them, revealing glimpses of something darker beneath the stolen form.
The creature whispered.
The words crawled through the field.
Grazim heard them.
So did Hexen.
Suspicion disappeared from their faces.
The demon suddenly seemed familiar.
Trustworthy.
Worth protecting.
The thing looked toward Grazim.
“Protect me.”
Grazim stepped between it and Fendor.
Hexen moved with him.
Isamu stared.
“Grazim.”
The cleric raised his shield.
“You will not attack him.”
“He just stabbed me.”
“You are mistaken.”
“I am bleeding.”
“That proves nothing.”
Fendor drew again.
Isamu moved into the path of the bow.
The monk raised one arm and tried to knock the arrow aside.
He failed.
The shaft passed him and entered the demon.
Grazim turned on Fendor.
“Stop.”
Kaylor crossed the field toward them.
The demon wearing Viran’s face looked at him.
“Kaylor.”
The voice was almost right.
That made it worse.
Kaylor remembered the real Viran standing inside the Sanctum library.
My friend.
He remembered the demon revealing itself in the street outside Hunter’s Landing.
He remembered the dark wings unfolding behind the face of the man who had trained him.
“Face me,” Kaylor said.
The creature smiled.
Kaylor struck.
The first blow tore through the false shape.
The second carried the new power that had awakened when he rejected his oath.
It was not radiant in the way his old Smites had been.
It burned darker and harder.
A Vicious Smite.
The demon staggered.
Kaylor struck again.
The Dancing Sword cut across its back.
The creature tried to restore the wounds.
Flesh tightened.
Bones shifted.
Kaylor removed a flask from his belt.
Holy water struck the demon’s face.
The liquid hissed.
The stolen features of Viran melted away.
For the first time, Kaylor saw the thing that had murdered his mentor without any disguise between them.
He brought the axe down.
The demon fell.
The charm broke.
Grazim stared at the corpse.
Then at the shield he had raised against Fendor.
Hexen lowered his spears.
“What happened?”
“You protected it,” Isamu said.
Grazim looked at the dead creature.
“I believed it was my friend.”
“So did Kaylor.”
Movement crossed the barn roof.
A masked woman stood above them.
The same woman who had sent them to Joraya.
The same woman who had taken the witness’s body.
She looked down at the fallen demon.
Then at Kaylor.
She spoke a curse.
Magic struck Fendor.
Strength drained from his limbs, though the Oathbow remained steady in his hands.
The woman turned toward the fiends emerging from behind the barn.
“Hold them.”
More creatures entered the field.
Small black things leapt from the roof and fences, carrying crystal spears and staring with eyes that carried their own magic.
A larger shape charged through Hexen’s tangled plants.
It resembled a centaur designed by someone who had never seen a horse but understood demons perfectly.
Hooves struck the earth.
Clawed arms reached from a torso crowned with the horns of a minotaur.
Lightning gathered between them.
The masked woman looked toward the distant towers of Krinrith.
“The master has begun the spell.”
She smiled beneath the mask.
“You need only keep them here a little longer.”
Then she vanished.
Kaylor looked toward the city.
Ten minutes.
That was what she needed.
Whatever waited inside the Sanctum was already happening.
The horned creature charged him.
Kaylor set his feet.
Its hooves struck first.
One caught him in the chest.
The claws followed, opening lines across his armor.
Kaylor answered with axe and Dancing Sword.
Nearby, one of the smaller fiends leapt through the burning hay rather than go around it.
Flames covered the creature.
It continued forward.
Nethnarel cast Blight.
The fiend shriveled in midstride and collapsed in the grass.
Hexen called an Insect Plague into the field.
The air darkened around the horned creature.
Thousands of biting insects filled the space, crawling over its face and entering the wounds Kaylor had opened.
The demon pushed through them.
Grazim reached it.
His hammer struck with the force reserved for things that did not belong in the mortal world.
The creature fell.
Another appeared behind it.
Nethnarel raised a Wall of Stone through the demon’s body.
The wall trapped it midway, leaving claws and part of its horned head protruding from the rock.
The creature roared and struggled.
Grazim pointed toward it.
A bell tolled where no bell existed.
Toll the Dead passed through stone.
The demon convulsed.
The magic hurt it far more deeply than Grazim expected.
Fendor descended from the loft and met one of the leaping fiends with his longsword and shield. The curse weakened his strength, but not his precision.
He struck twice.
The creature fell.
Another jumped from the roof and landed beside him.
Its spear struck.
Fendor answered with a pulse of restorative power from the Oathbow, healing himself and his companions before returning to the sword.
Isamu attacked the masked woman’s remaining servant.
Rapier.
Palm.
Elbow.
The creature resisted his first attempt to stun it.
Then his second.
On the third strike, its body locked.
Isamu continued hitting it.
Kaylor destroyed the demon trapped inside Nethnarel’s wall.
Hexen’s insects consumed another.
Grazim’s hammer broke the last creature trying to reach the barn.
The field became quiet.
The masked woman was gone.
The guards had retreated.
The fiends were dead.
Then Kaylor saw the light.
The farm stood upon a rise outside Krinrith. From the barn roof, the towers of the Sanctum were visible beyond the city walls.
Magic shone above the highest chamber.
Not torchlight.
Not fire.
A column of power twisted into the sky, pulsing with each phrase of a spell being spoken somewhere inside.
The light bent strangely around the tower.
For an instant, part of the Sanctum appeared to become translucent.
Then solid again.
Kaylor climbed onto the roof.
“The temple.”
The others joined him.
Nethnarel saw the distortion.
“It is shifting.”
“Between planes?” Fendor asked.
“Perhaps.”
Grazim looked at the bodies surrounding the farm.
The guards had delayed them.
The demons had delayed them.
The woman’s final command had been to buy ten minutes.
“We cannot reach it in time,” Hexen said.
Kaylor started down from the roof.
“Then we run.”
Grazim remained where he was.
He lowered his hammer.
Then knelt.
The others stopped.
Grazim’s prayer began quietly.
He did not ask for healing.
He did not ask for power.
He asked his goddess to intervene.
The chance that any god would answer directly was small.
Divine servants prayed their entire lives without receiving such a response.
Grazim asked anyway.
The world changed.
The sounds of the farm faded.
The burning hay slowed.
Embers hung motionless in the air.
A woman appeared before Grazim.
Not entirely flesh.
Not entirely light.
The presence of the goddess filled the hilltop so completely that the heroes could not look directly at her for long.
Grazim lifted his face.
“We need to reach the Sanctum.”
The goddess looked toward Krinrith.
The ritual light pulsed above the temple.
Then she looked at the battered heroes.
Wounds closed.
Exhaustion vanished.
Spent magic returned as though they had rested for an entire night within a single breath.
The world folded.
The farm disappeared.
Stone formed around them.
They stood inside a cavern beneath the Sanctum of Serenity.
Kaylor recognized it.
He had awakened there in his original life.
Not after the monument.
Before it.
The others had found him inside this chamber during the first war, when the paths between worlds opened and people from another plane entered his own.
A stone altar stood at the center.
Upon it rested a coffin.
The chamber should have been empty.
It was not.
Grazim extended his senses.
“Fiends.”
“Where?” Kaylor asked.
Grazim turned slowly.
“Everywhere. Then nowhere.”
The presences shifted whenever he tried to locate them.
Nethnarel examined the pentagram carved into the floor near the altar.
Magic clung to it.
Something about the chamber was unstable.
Kaylor approached the coffin.
The lid carried the symbol of his former order.
He reached toward it.
Nethnarel stopped him.
“Holy water first.”
Kaylor looked at her.
“It worked last time.”
She poured the water across the stone.
A crack appeared.
The upper half of the lid slid sideways and struck the floor.
Inside lay Kaylor.
The dragonborn standing beside the coffin did not move.
Neither did the body.
The corpse wore armor nearly identical to Kaylor’s.
Not exactly.
The designs represented a slightly later period in his service.
The body’s face was pale enough to look carved from ash. No wounds marked it.
No decay had begun.
The corpse had been completely drained of blood.
Fendor looked from the body to the living Kaylor.
“That is you.”
“Yes.”
“The you from this time.”
Kaylor stared at his own dead face.
Memories struck him in fragments.
The fall of the Sanctum.
The invasion.
The first battles against creatures crossing between planes.
His own death.
Not enough to reveal exactly what had happened.
Enough to know the body belonged here.
Nethnarel examined the armor.
“We have moved forward.”
They had arrived in Krinrith before the war.
The corpse before them belonged to a Kaylor only slightly older than the one whose memories he carried.
Months had passed.
Perhaps less than a year.
The goddess had not merely moved them beneath the temple.
She had placed them at the moment when the Sanctum was falling.
Kaylor looked toward the ceiling.
“The ritual.”
“It may be disturbing time as well as the planes,” Nethnarel said.
Grazim knelt beside the corpse.
“It is fresh enough to restore.”
Everyone looked at him.
Kaylor did not.
“How long?”
“The prayer would take an hour.”
“We do not have an hour.”
“No.”
“And if you restore him?”
Grazim looked from the corpse to the living dragonborn.
“I do not know.”
Two Kaylors.
The same soul divided across time.
Or two bodies competing for one life.
The consequences could not be guessed.
Kaylor lowered the coffin lid as far as the broken stone allowed.
“If we survive, we return.”
The fiends arrived.
They did not emerge from the coffin.
They appeared around it.
Two creatures resembled the barbed beasts that had guarded the assassins inside Joraya. A massive birdlike predator materialized near the cavern wall, its wings scraping the ceiling as it unfolded.
One of the barbed creatures lunged at Kaylor.
Its jaws missed.
The stinger struck his side.
Poison entered the wound.
Kaylor barely noticed.
The power no longer affected him.
The Oathbreaker looked at the creature.
“That will not work again.”
Isamu reached it from behind.
Gavasani’s enchanted dagger struck.
A Stunning Strike followed.
The creature resisted.
Kaylor’s presence weakened that resistance, but not enough.
Isamu attacked again.
Hexen summoned wolves around the altar.
The pack surrounded the second beast.
Nethnarel formed a Cloud of Daggers around the great bird. Spinning blades filled the air around its wings.
Fendor declared the nearest creature his enemy and fired.
An explosive arrow struck.
Force tore through the beast and everything close enough to share the impact.
Grazim called down a Flame Strike.
Holy fire filled one side of the cavern.
The barbed creature inside it collapsed.
The great bird escaped the daggers and flew along the ceiling.
It released a cloud of spores over Nethnarel.
She held her breath and endured the choking assault.
Then the blades caught the creature again as it tried to turn.
Hexen became a fire elemental.
Living flame crossed the cavern and struck the bird.
The first blow ignited it.
The second turned feathers and flesh into a burning mass.
Isamu’s boomerang crossed the chamber and struck the creature as it tried to climb away.
The great bird fell.
The final beast died beneath Fendor’s arrows, Kaylor’s axe and the jaws of Hexen’s wolves.
Silence returned to the cavern.
Kaylor looked once more at his coffin.
Then north.
A tunnel led toward the temple above.
They followed it.
The passage ended at a stone door.
Isamu opened it.
Battle waited on the other side.
Sanctum guards fought fiends inside a broad chamber.
Several dragonborn soldiers already lay dead. A surviving archer fired at one of the small black creatures the heroes had fought at the farm.
A cleric maintained a spiritual weapon against a horned demon.
The guards were losing.
Isamu ran to help them.
One of the black fiends drove a spear through an injured guard before the monk could reach him.
Kaylor cast Ray of Frost at the horned creature.
The magic struck and slowed it.
Hexen’s wolves attacked another fiend, though their ordinary teeth could do little against its unnatural body.
Hexen followed as a fire elemental, moving through the creature and leaving flame behind.
Grazim brought his hammer down upon the horned demon.
Isamu joined him.
Nethnarel cast Fireball into a space clear of the guards.
Flame filled the chamber.
Fendor shot through it.
The remaining fiends fell.
The surviving guards immediately moved to their wounded companions.
One knelt beside a fallen soldier and attempted to stop the bleeding.
Another lowered his weapon when Kaylor approached.
Kaylor dragged the edge of his axe across the stone.
The sound filled the room.
“What changed?”
The guard stared at the torn place where Kaylor’s Sanctum symbol had once been.
Then answered.
“The master has gone mad.”
“Ishgar?”
The guard nodded.
“He locked himself inside the upper chamber. Then the creatures began appearing.”
“You attacked us outside the city.”
Confusion crossed the guard’s face.
“We were ordered to find you.”
“By whom?”
“The master.”
“Why?”
The guard pressed one hand against his temple.
“I do not know.”
Another soldier looked toward the dead fiends.
“We believed you had murdered the witness. We believed you had attacked the Sanctum.”
“Do you still believe that?”
The guard looked at the creatures that had killed his companions.
“No.”
Whatever influence had driven the soldiers against the heroes was broken.
Perhaps it had ended with the demon wearing Viran’s face.
Perhaps the opening ritual had freed them.
The exact cause no longer mattered.
The guards were not Craven’s willing servants.
They had been another weapon used against the heroes.
“The captain took the elite guard toward the main hall,” the soldier said. “They are trying to reach the master.”
“How many remain?”
“I do not know.”
“Show us the fastest way.”
The route crossed the Dragon Gate and the bridge leading into the Sanctum proper.
The gate was locked.
Gygax slipped beneath it.
Through the mouse, Nethnarel saw the bridge beyond.
Strange fog churned below it.
The open space beneath the temple no longer looked like a cavern or courtyard. It resembled a tear between worlds.
Isamu knelt at the lock.
His thieves’ tools worked carefully through the mechanism.
The final pin moved.
The gate opened.
They crossed the bridge.
The Sanctum Kaylor remembered was disappearing.
Beautiful mosaics had cracked beneath their feet. Black fluid leaked through the broken lines.
The walls shifted between stone and translucent light.
Two immense crystal formations pulsed beside the main path, each releasing waves of magic into the structure.
Kaylor could feel the ritual above them.
Every phrase vibrated through the temple.
The floor trembled in time with the words.
Fighting continued inside the prayer hall.
More guards battled more fiends.
The heroes entered without hesitation.
Fendor’s arrows struck first.
Isamu crossed the room and drove his rapier into a horned creature.
Nethnarel’s Magic Missiles curved around the guards.
Hexen’s wolves dragged one of the smaller fiends down.
Grazim knocked a larger demon from its feet with his shield and finished it with his hammer.
A guard summoned his own Fireball.
Nethnarel nearly countered it before realizing the spell was aimed at the demons.
The explosion consumed the far side of the chamber.
She looked at the guard.
“My apologies.”
He had no idea what she meant.
When the battle ended, the surviving soldiers tried to heal their fallen comrades.
Kaylor did not wait.
The spiral staircase leading toward the upper chamber lay beyond the central hall.
The heroes crossed another bridge.
More guards and fiends fought ahead.
A massive translucent sphere rested beside the path.
It had not been part of the Sanctum.
Magic pulsed inside it.
Nethnarel raised one hand.
Telekinesis wrapped around the sphere.
It moved slightly.
Not enough.
“It is anchored.”
Fendor understood.
He drew an exploding arrow.
The shaft struck the stone and crystal beneath the sphere.
Force broke the base.
The enormous object shifted.
Nethnarel pushed again.
The sphere rolled.
Kaylor stood directly in its path.
He tried to jump aside.
The sphere clipped his ankle and nearly knocked him down.
Then it continued.
The first fiend disappeared beneath it.
Hexen, still shaped as living fire, struck the rolling sphere from behind.
The impact accelerated it.
The massive object crossed the hall, crushing another creature and scattering the rest.
Cracks spread through its surface.
The pulsing magic inside became unstable.
“Run,” Nethnarel said.
The sphere exploded.
Light and force filled the hall.
Two fiends trying to escape the rolling object vanished inside the blast.
The way to the staircase opened.
Isamu reached the door first.
Beyond it, the spiral stair had been deliberately destroyed.
Stone steps hung broken along the walls. Entire sections were missing. Rubble filled the center of the shaft.
The route remained possible.
Barely.
More fiends entered the hall behind the heroes.
One hurled a lance of lightning.
The bolt passed through Kaylor, Nethnarel and Grazim.
All three staggered.
Hexen killed the creature with two burning strikes.
Fendor ran for the door.
Grazim followed.
Kaylor and Isamu held the opening long enough for the others to pass.
Then they retreated.
The doors closed.
The heroes forced the locking bar into place as claws and weapons struck the other side.
For several moments, the stone shook.
Then the attacks stopped.
Only the ritual remained.
The words came from above.
Slow.
Measured.
Ancient.
The spell had been designed to take time because whatever it accomplished required more power than any ordinary casting could contain.
Kaylor stood at the base of the broken staircase.
Somewhere above him waited Ishgar.
Craven.
The man who had led his order.
The man whose servants had murdered Viran, destroyed Riverwind, eliminated the witness and turned the Sanctum against itself.
The final words of the ritual continued descending through the shaft.
Kaylor lifted his axe.
“Now we climb.”