The book was already reading him.
Fendor’s fingers had not yet touched the page when the first word entered his mind.
It arrived without sound.
A shape of meaning. A command written in a language he had never learned and somehow understood well enough to obey.
His hand settled upon the open book.
The undying flame above the table bent toward him.
“Fendor?” Grazim said.
The elf did not answer.
Black ink moved across the page.
At first, Kaylor thought it was only a trick of the strange purple light beyond the windows. Then the letters uncoiled from their lines like worms disturbed beneath a stone. They gathered around Fendor’s fingers and climbed the veins of his hand.
His lips parted.
The voice that emerged was not his.
It was deeper than any mortal throat should have carried, each syllable spoken with the weight of something falling through an endless distance.
Nethnarel’s face changed.
“That is a spell.”
She crossed the gallery in three strides and thrust one hand toward him.
“Fendor, stop.”
He continued.
The words carried through the Grand Library.
Far below, the movement between the shelves multiplied.
Nethnarel tore at the forming magic. Her counterspell struck the incantation like a blade against an iron chain.
The chain did not break.
The dark voice continued through Fendor.
One of the words might have been a name.
Abarak.
Arbayoc.
Something between the two, spoken in a tongue that made certainty impossible.
The undying flames throughout the library dimmed.
Grazim raised his holy symbol and called upon his god to strip the magic from Fendor.
Golden light swept over the elf.
The letters beneath his skin burned brighter.
“Still going,” Isamu observed.
Kaylor moved around the table.
“Knock the book away.”
Isamu struck the volume with the flat of his blade. It slid across the table, fell open upon the floor and continued turning its own pages.
Fendor did not look at it.
He did not need to.
The spell had already found its way inside him.
Kaylor caught him by the shoulders.
“Wake up.”
Fendor’s eyes remained fixed on something beyond the library walls.
The chanting quickened.
Nethnarel heard a title buried inside the demonic phrases.
Lord of Plagues.
Lord of Flies.
Lord of the Crawling Host.
Whatever was being summoned, they were running out of words before it arrived.
Someone produced the Immovable Rod.
There followed a brief and entirely unsuccessful attempt to determine whether an object that could not be moved might also prevent a possessed elf from speaking.
Fendor continued around it.
Kaylor abandoned subtlety.
His armored boot struck the elf hard enough to lift him from the floor.
Fendor folded over the edge of the table.
The incantation broke.
Every undying flame in the library flared white.
Then the room went still.
Fendor drew a long, ragged breath.
He looked at the faces around him, then down at where Kaylor had kicked him.
“Why does everything hurt?”
“Because reason failed,” Kaylor said.
Fendor straightened slowly.
“I had hoped friendship might survive longer than that.”
“You were summoning something.”
“That is an accusation requiring evidence.”
Nethnarel pointed toward the book on the floor.
Its pages were still turning.
Each one was filled with writing so black it seemed cut through the paper into a deeper darkness.
“You were halfway through a demonic invocation.”
Fendor glanced at the volume.
“Then I withdraw my objection.”
The sound beneath the shelves became a tide.
Thousands of claws scratched against stone.
The first rats poured into the aisle below.
They came in a gray-black river, flowing around table legs and over fallen books. Some were ordinary vermin made fearless by hunger. Others had pale eyes and patches of skin through which dark veins pulsed. They climbed one another in twisting heaps, filling the lowest steps.
Kaylor looked at Fendor.
“Your book?”
“I only read the first line.”
“That was enough.”
The rat swarms reached the gallery.
Kaylor met them at the head of the stairs.
His newly recovered bastard sword cut through the first mass, but a swarm did not die like a single creature. Rats split around the blade, climbed his boots and threw themselves against his armor. He stamped, struck and drove them back with broad sweeps.
Isamu moved beside him.
Where Kaylor fought like a gate slamming shut, Isamu fought like water finding every opening. His fire-bearing blade flashed low across the steps. Flame ran through fur and dry paper. His heel crushed one rat against the stone, then another, each movement carrying him beyond the teeth snapping at his ankles.
Fendor drew his bow.
His first arrow passed through three rats and pinned the last to a bookshelf.
His second struck a knot of vermin climbing the railing.
The third was aimed elsewhere.
Across the library, something small stood upon a reading table.
It had the shape of a child only at a distance.
Its limbs were too thin and its head too large. Gemlike eyes shone from a face with no expression except a narrow smile. Its fingers rested upon the shoulder of a stone warrior standing beside the table.
The statue opened its eyes.
“Not a child,” Fendor said.
The arrow struck.
The creature vanished behind the statue with a laugh that seemed to come from every aisle at once.
The stone warrior stepped down from its plinth.
Others followed.
Weapons carved as part of their bodies came free with grinding cracks. Stone spears lowered. Stone swords scraped against stone shields.
Kaylor forced the rat swarm down one step and looked back.
“Of course the statues move.”
“They guarded the library for thousands of years,” Grazim said.
“They could have guarded it quietly.”
The first warrior charged.
Its spear struck Kaylor hard enough to drive him through the railing. His cloak blurred, leaving three false images of the dragonborn falling in different directions. The statue chose the wrong one.
The second did not.
A stone blade smashed into Kaylor’s side and sent him sprawling across a reading table. Ancient wood shattered beneath his weight.
Nethnarel hurled fire through the rats. Flame rolled along the aisle and scattered the swarm in shrieking clumps.
The little creature appeared again, this time crouched atop a serpent statue coiled around the lower stairs.
Its gemstone eyes fixed upon her.
Nethnarel closed one hand.
The floor rose.
A fist made of packed earth and shattered stone erupted beneath the creature. Great fingers closed around its body and lifted it above the floor.
The creature stopped smiling.
“Caught you,” Nethnarel said.
Its eyes brightened.
Something entered her mind.
Not a voice.
A memory.
A place from childhood she had buried deeply enough to believe it lost. Darkness without stars. A presence behind her that had known her name before she knew it herself. The old certainty that something waited inside her blood and would one day claim her.
The library vanished.
She was small again.
Alone again.
Nethnarel screamed and ran.
Her earthen hand remained closed.
The creature twisted within its grip, trapped even as the sorcerer fled between the shelves from a terror no one else could see.
“Keep it held!” Fendor called.
Nethnarel did not answer.
She did not release it either.
Fendor’s next arrow struck the creature through one shoulder.
Black fluid ran down its chest.
It laughed again.
The stone serpents uncoiled.
One slid from the staircase in a shower of broken masonry. Its jaws opened wide enough to close around Kaylor’s torso. He caught the upper jaw with one hand and drove the bastard sword upward through its mouth.
The blade tore free in a burst of stone fragments.
Jorah appeared beside the serpent.
His returning dagger flashed into its eye, vanished around the curve of its skull and returned to his hand.
“Useful sword,” the elf said.
Kaylor shoved the serpent away.
“I noticed.”
Two warrior statues advanced on Grazim.
The halfling met the first with his shield. The impact drove his boots backward across the floor but did not put him down. His warhammer struck the statue’s knee. Divine force cracked the joint.
The second raised its sword.
Hexen became water.
His human form collapsed into a rushing column that surged between Grazim and the blow. The stone sword passed through his shoulder, scattering half the elemental across the gallery.
The water re-formed.
Hexen wrapped both arms around the statue and hurled it over the railing.
It fell into the rat-filled aisle below and vanished beneath the swarm.
“Quietly,” Hexen said, his voice flowing through his body like a river over stones. “They could have guarded it quietly.”
The child-creature shrieked.
The sound sent another pulse of fear through Nethnarel.
She collided with a shelf, turned and fled in another direction, still holding the thing in the earthen fist.
Isamu ran after neither of them.
He ran toward the grip itself.
One serpent struck at him from the side. He stepped onto its snout, crossed the length of its head and leapt from the crown. His fire-bearing sword came down through the creature trapped in Nethnarel’s spell.
The first strike cut deep.
The second broke something inside it.
Then Isamu’s hands became a blur.
Fist.
Elbow.
Heel.
Blade.
Each blow landed before the small creature could recover from the last. Its gemstone eyes cracked. The laughter became a wet rattle.
Isamu drove the point of his sword through its chest.
The thing went limp.
All across the library, the statues stopped.
The serpent beneath Kaylor froze with its jaws inches from his throat.
A warrior’s blade halted above Grazim.
The stone figure grappling Hexen became dead weight in his arms.
Then the old magic left them.
Statues toppled where they stood.
One of the serpents collapsed across a reading table and crushed it flat.
The remaining rats lost whatever command had driven them. Some fled into the shelves. Others continued biting until fire and steel ended them.
Nethnarel stopped running.
The earthen hand crumbled.
She stood alone between the shelves, one palm pressed against her chest.
Fendor found her there.
“What did it show you?”
“Nothing.”
“That did not look like nothing.”
She turned her face toward him.
Fendor decided that nothing was the correct answer.
They gathered again near the open book.
Hexen resumed his human shape but did not remain standing for long. The damage suffered as an elemental followed him into flesh. He took two steps, swayed and collapsed.
Grazim caught him before his head struck the floor.
The cleric’s hands glowed against Hexen’s chest. Warmth entered the druid, steadied his breathing and drew him back from the edge.
Kaylor sat on the broken reading table while Grazim worked.
Stone dust covered his armor. Blood marked one corner of his mouth.
Fendor picked up the fallen book with the edge of his sword.
Nethnarel returned cautiously.
She studied its binding without touching it.
The cover was made from a dark hide that might once have belonged to something capable of speech. Iron corners had been shaped into screaming faces. No title appeared upon the surface, but none was needed.
“I have heard of this,” she said.
Grazim looked up from Hexen.
“Good things?”
“No.”
“The Book of Vile Darkness,” Nethnarel said. “Or one of the works given that name. It contains rites meant to call things that should remain elsewhere.”
Fendor rubbed the bruise Kaylor had given him.
“What was I calling?”
Nethnarel looked down at the lines.
“The words named a lord of disease. Flies. Insects. Swarms.”
“Did I finish?”
“No.”
“How close?”
She considered lying.
“Close enough.”
They wrapped the book in cloth.
Then another layer.
Then a third.
No one volunteered to carry it.
In the end it entered the party’s collected gear without any formal decision regarding whose burden it had become.
The other books were less immediately hostile.
One contained the oldest account they had yet found of Ninurta. Its pages described the god of the hunt battling a many-headed beast in an age when the mountains had no names. The details differed from the carvings in the sanctuary, but the blood offering and the god’s hatred of monstrous predators remained the same.
Hexen took a history of the surrounding lands. The book was dry, cracked and heavy enough to serve as a weapon in an emergency.
Nethnarel found a spellbook buried beneath a collapsed shelf.
Its owner had recorded several modest enchantments before apparently being interrupted forever. None of the heroes could make practical use of the methods, but the volume had value.
“Finally,” Nethnarel said, “a book that only wants to be sold.”
Kaylor examined a mound of ruined pages nearby.
“We should burn the rest.”
Fendor looked at him.
“We crossed a titan’s skull, three sanctuaries and a water god’s guardian to reach these books.”
“One of them tried to summon an insect demon through your mouth.”
“That was one book.”
“One is enough.”
Kaylor lifted a broken chair leg from the floor and held it toward an undying flame.
Something rose from the pages at his feet.
It had no body.
Only a disturbance in the air, a cold shape that entered him through the space between one breath and the next.
Kaylor stopped moving.
The library changed.
Fendor became Craven.
So did Grazim.
Hexen’s face lengthened into the dead wizard’s smile. Isamu wore the features of Kaylor’s false master. Nethnarel stood among them with Craven’s eyes and the blood of the murdered witness across her hands.
The dragonborn drew his sword.
“Kaylor?” Nethnarel said.
He crossed the distance before she understood.
The bastard sword struck once.
His Dancing Sword tore free from where it rested and attacked from the other side.
Nethnarel raised a shield of magic. Kaylor shattered it with the first blow. The second opened her shoulder. The Dancing Sword drove into her back.
She fell beside the open spellbook.
Fendor moved to intercept.
Kaylor turned on him with murder in his eyes.
“Craven.”
Fendor saw at once that the name was not meant for him.
The spirit had chosen its wound carefully.
“Kaylor, look at me.”
The dragonborn charged.
Grazim stepped between them and raised the symbol of the Naked Goddess.
His prayer struck the library like sunrise.
The possessing spirit screamed.
It tore out of Kaylor in a column of pale shadow, leaving him on one knee with both swords still in his hands.
The ghost hung above them.
Its face changed constantly—old, young, human, elven, skeletal—every identity it had stolen during its long imprisonment among the books.
Fendor’s sword passed through it and carried a flash of enchanted steel into the spirit’s heart.
Isamu followed with a strike that disturbed the air itself.
Hexen called a beam of sunlight through the darkness of the library. Radiance caught the ghost and burned portions of it away.
Jorah’s dagger flew through the fading shape and returned rimed with frost.
The spirit reached for Kaylor again.
Grazim denied it.
Divine power closed around the ghost. Fendor struck once more, and the thing came apart in tatters of cold mist.
Kaylor remained kneeling.
His eyes cleared.
He saw Nethnarel on the floor.
Blood spread beneath her.
“What did I do?”
“Move,” Grazim said.
The halfling reached her first.
His healing light entered the tiefling before death could settle completely over her. Nethnarel coughed, dragged in a breath and looked directly at Kaylor.
For once, she had no joke.
Jorah moved nearby.
Perhaps he reached for Nethnarel.
Perhaps he reached for his dagger.
Perhaps the sudden motion meant nothing more than a man trying to decide whether the possessed dragonborn remained a threat.
Kaylor saw movement.
After Craven, after the false temple, after the spirit had made every friend wear the dead wizard’s face, uncertainty was enough.
He attacked.
Jorah’s dagger came up.
Kaylor was faster.
The first stroke broke the elf’s defense.
The second cut through his enchanted leather armor.
The third ended the fight before anyone else had fully understood that it had begun.
Jorah fell beside one of the stone serpents.
His returning dagger slipped from his hand.
No one spoke.
Kaylor stood over him, breathing hard.
The ghost was gone.
Craven was gone.
Jorah remained dead.
Fendor looked from the body to Kaylor.
“What did he do?”
Kaylor’s answer came too quickly.
“He moved against us.”
“Did he?”
“He disappeared during the water fight. He had every opportunity to take the sword.”
“The sword you are holding.”
Kaylor looked down at the bastard blade.
The certainty left his face.
It did not restore the elf.
Grazim knelt beside Jorah.
He placed two fingers against the wound and then withdrew them.
There would be no easy healing.
No breath waiting to return.
Whatever chance existed to call the elf back would require power, time and a decision no one made.
Hexen picked up the returning dagger.
It flew from his hand when he tested it and returned neatly to his palm.
He stared at it without pleasure.
Jorah’s enchanted leather armor was removed and gathered with the party’s equipment. A ring was found among his possessions, marked with magic associated with great leaps and impossible footing. No one agreed upon its final owner.
His body remained in the Grand Library.
The heroes continued without him.
That was the truth of it, however little they wished to name it.
Beyond the reading chamber, the library narrowed into older passages.
The shelves grew farther apart. Books gave way to clay tablets, sealed cases and stone records carved before the language of Oxland had existed.
At the end of one aisle they found a chamber without a door.
A glowing design filled the floor.
It was part hexagram, part binding circle and part geometry no mortal scholar would have willingly drawn. Runes burned in six interlocked bands around a stone coffin twice the size required for any human body.
The coffin lay upon a low altar.
Metal straps crossed its lid and descended into the floor. Each was carved with symbols of confinement. More runes glowed along the walls, all feeding toward the center.
The darkness inside the room had weight.
Nethnarel stopped at the boundary.
“Something is held here.”
Kaylor studied the coffin.
“Something large.”
“Something old,” Hexen said.
Fendor looked back toward the room in which Jorah had fallen.
“And something someone wanted kept away from the books.”
Grazim examined the nearest rune without crossing it.
“The binding is strong.”
“Strong enough to hold evil?” Isamu asked.
“Or good,” Kaylor said. “Craven would have imprisoned anything that threatened him.”
“This place predates Craven,” Fendor replied.
“That does not mean the prisoner does.”
They tested the circle from a distance.
Magic touched it and dispersed.
A thrown stone crossed the first line, struck the coffin and remained there.
Nothing answered from within.
Kaylor considered throwing Isamu.
Isamu advised him that the stone had been a sufficient test.
Their wounds made the decision for them.
The party returned to the sanctuary of the water god. They rested beneath the sound of the waterfall, among the silver offerings they had left behind.
No guardian came.
No book whispered.
No one discussed Jorah.
When they returned to the Grand Library, their strength had been restored but nothing else had improved.
Hexen summoned a pack of wolves before they entered the binding chamber. The animals paced along the edge of the sigil, hackles raised. None would cross willingly.
The metal straps were too strong to break quietly.
The runes prevented ordinary tampering with the lid.
Hexen studied the coffin’s side.
“We do not need the lid.”
He placed both hands against the stone.
The rock softened beneath his magic. A section of the coffin flowed outward like wet clay, forming an opening large enough to see inside.
The stench came first.
It burst from the coffin with the force of a living thing.
Rot.
Disease.
Carrion left beneath a summer sun.
Hexen stumbled away, gagging. Nethnarel turned and vomited against the outer wall. Two wolves fled the chamber entirely.
A gray vapor spilled through the opening.
Flies moved inside it.
The cloud rose above the coffin, gathering mass as it climbed. Shoulders formed. Arms. A narrow waist beneath a chest ribbed like the body of an insect.
The figure stood nearly ten feet tall when it became solid.
Its flesh was the color of old ash. Veins of yellow light moved beneath translucent skin. Its eyes burned with the same sickly glow. Ragged wings hung behind it, not feathered or leathery but made from overlapping clouds of insects.
Flies crawled from its mouth when it smiled.
“Freedom.”
It stepped from the coffin.
The binding circle flared.
Invisible force struck the creature and hurled it backward. It crashed against the altar, scattering stone fragments, then rose laughing.
The runes had not failed.
They had merely allowed the prison to stand.
Nethnarel wiped her mouth.
“I know you.”
The fiend’s gaze settled upon her.
“No,” it said. “You know names given by frightened things.”
“The Book of Vile Darkness.”
Its smile widened.
Fendor rested one hand upon the hilt of his Vorpal Longsword.
“The spell was meant to summon you.”
“To open a path,” the creature said. “A path denied to me by the hunter.”
“Ninurta,” Hexen said.
At the god’s name, every fly in the room changed direction.
“The jailer,” the fiend hissed. “The butcher. The thief of my dominion.”
Kaylor stepped closer to the glowing boundary.
“We opened your coffin.”
The yellow eyes turned toward him.
The fiend breathed deeply.
Its expression became one of disgust.
“Oathbreaker.”
Kaylor’s jaw tightened.
“You know nothing of my oath.”
“I smell betrayal upon you. Faith torn from its root. Promises abandoned when they ceased to comfort you.”
The words found their mark.
Kaylor gripped his sword.
The fiend dismissed him with a turn of its head.
“I will not bargain with one whose word is already carrion.”
Kaylor took another step.
Grazim placed himself between the dragonborn and the circle.
The Lord of Swarms looked over the others.
“One of you opened the stone. One of you ended the silence. I offer payment.”
“What payment?” Nethnarel asked.
“One thing you require.”
“We require the death of an ancient red dragon,” Hexen said.
The flies around the creature’s shoulders stirred.
“I know the beast. I know what shields its life. I know where its strength may be broken.”
Every hero became still.
That was why they had entered the mountain.
That was why Oxland had armed its walls and watched the neighboring peak.
Fendor’s hand remained on his sword.
“And the price?”
“Release.”
The word passed through the chamber like an infection.
The fiend extended one clawed hand toward the runes.
“The hunter bound me here. His rings of flame sustain the prison. They were hidden where he believed no servant of mine could reach them. Bring them to me. Burn away the binding. I will give you the knowledge required to humble your dragon.”
“Where are the rings?” Nethnarel asked.
“I can send you to them.”
“And bring us back?”
The fiend smiled.
“If you survive.”
Hexen stepped nearer.
“What else can you give?”
Kaylor turned toward him.
“Hexen.”
The druid did not look away from the prisoner.
“Power,” the Lord of Swarms said. “Command. The strength to make lesser wills bend when you speak.”
Hexen considered the offer.
“I will serve you,” he said, “if you grant me that power and show us how to defeat the dragon.”
The chamber became silent except for the buzzing.
Kaylor stared at him.
“You would give this thing your spirit for information?”
“For the means to save a city.”
“We came here for knowledge. We can keep looking.”
“We found the knowledge.”
“No. We found a prisoner telling us what we want to hear.”
Hexen finally turned.
“And if he is telling the truth?”
“Then we find another way.”
“How many people die while we search?”
Kaylor’s voice dropped.
“You are not trading coin. You are not taking a weapon from a dead giant. You are offering worship.”
Hexen’s expression remained unreadable.
“I know what I offered.”
Fendor stepped beside Kaylor.
“Ninurta allowed us through his sanctuary. The god who imprisoned this creature gave us passage.”
The Lord of Swarms laughed.
“The hunter sent you toward me because all roads built by gods lead eventually to their vanity.”
“You expect us to trust you?” Fendor asked.
“No. I expect you to desire what I possess.”
One of the heroes raised a weapon toward the circle.
The exact challenge was lost beneath the sudden beating of wings.
The Lord of Swarms lifted one finger.
Pestilence rolled across the boundary.
The challenger doubled over, vomiting until nothing remained but bile.
The fiend’s smile did not change.
“My prison limits my steps,” it said. “Not my reach.”
The wolves began growling.
Fendor drew the Vorpal Longsword fully.
“No.”
Hexen looked at him.
“No bargain,” Fendor said. “No release.”
The Lord of Swarms studied the elf.
Then it opened both hands.
The coffin erupted.
Worms spilled from the hole Hexen had shaped.
Flies poured from beneath the altar.
Rats emerged between the stones. Scarabs covered the walls in black, shining plates. Pale winged eyes opened inside the cloud, their trailing nerves writhing like tails.
The swarms climbed over one another until the chamber’s center disappeared.
They filled the prison from floor to ceiling.
The binding runes stopped the Lord of Swarms from crossing.
They did not stop everything it commanded.
Hexen’s wolves attacked first.
The pack charged through the edge of the insect wall.
They vanished.
Fur, blood and bone appeared for a moment inside the crawling mass, then nothing remained.
Hexen stared at the place where they had been.
“Back!” Grazim shouted.
The swarm struck him.
The winged eyes reached his face.
Thin tendrils drove beneath his eyelids. Tiny hooked limbs pulled at the flesh around them.
Grazim screamed.
He fell to both knees, clawing at creatures trying to tear his eyes from their sockets.
The world went white.
Then a woman’s hand covered his face.
No one else saw her clearly.
Bare skin untouched by the insects. A presence that did not recoil from filth, corruption or pain. The Naked Goddess held Grazim’s eyes in place while divine warmth burned through the grasping tendrils.
The creatures fell away smoking.
Grazim could see again.
Barely.
Kaylor seized the back of his armor and pulled him away from the densest swarm.
“Move.”
The Lord of Swarms rose above the coffin.
Flies entered its mouth and emerged from its eyes.
“You opened the way,” it called. “Do not flee before receiving your reward.”
Nethnarel thrust both hands toward it.
Stone exploded from the floor.
Walls rose around the fiend inside its own prison. One slab after another locked together, forming a second enclosure around the altar and coffin.
The Lord disappeared behind stone.
The swarms did not.
They covered Nethnarel’s arms before the final wall settled into place. She screamed but held the magic long enough to seal it.
Hexen raised the Staff of the Woodlands.
A pale barrier spread around him.
Living creatures struck the unseen shell and recoiled. Rats piled against it. Flies flattened across its surface and were carried aside as Hexen moved.
“Stay close!”
The protective field gave them a path.
Not safety.
A path.
Isamu reached the wall of insects first.
There was no opening.
He lowered his head and ran through.
Teeth tore at his legs. Beetles crawled beneath his clothing. Winged eyes struck his face. He emerged on the far side bleeding from dozens of wounds but still upright.
Fendor followed behind the moving shell, cutting at anything large enough to reach him.
Kaylor dragged Grazim.
The swarm closed over them.
Insects entered the seams of Kaylor’s armor. They filled his ears and crawled beneath his eyelids. He tried to call upon magic and lost the words when beetles covered his tongue.
His cloak filled the chamber with false dragonborn.
The swarms attacked every image.
For one precious moment, they chose incorrectly.
Nethnarel reached the insect wall.
She could not cross it.
Too much of her strength had gone into the stone enclosure. The first creatures climbing her body drove her backward.
Hexen saw her failing.
He changed her.
Nethnarel resisted from instinct.
Magic overcame her.
Her body expanded violently. Armor and clothing vanished into thick black fur. Her hands became enormous fists. The ceiling seemed to drop toward her as she grew into a giant ape.
The new body gave her strength the tiefling no longer possessed.
It also gave the insects more flesh to consume.
Nethnarel roared.
She drove both hands into the swarm and forced her way forward.
Hexen released the protective shell only when the others had nearly reached the edge.
Fire consumed him.
The druid became a walking inferno. Beetles ignited against his body. Flies vanished in sparks. He crossed the swarm as a figure of living flame and emerged into the outer library trailing smoke.
Fendor came through next.
Then Kaylor.
Then Nethnarel, still wearing the shape of the giant ape, struck the floor beyond the boundary hard enough to crack it.
Isamu pulled insects from his wounds.
Hexen returned to human form.
Kaylor released the armor in his grasp.
It was empty.
He turned.
“Grazim?”
The halfling had been with him.
A moment before, Kaylor had felt the weight of him.
Now there was only a torn strap in his hand.
The insect wall had closed behind them.
It filled the doorway from floor to ceiling, too dense to see through. The hidden Lord of Swarms laughed somewhere behind Nethnarel’s stone walls.
Kaylor stepped toward the crawling barrier.
“Grazim!”
No answer came.
Hexen seized his arm.
“You cannot go back through.”
“I already did it once.”
“And barely came out.”
“Grazim did not.”
The giant ape struck the floor and bellowed into the swarm.
Still no answer.
Fendor raised his bow but found no target among the millions of moving bodies.
Isamu stood closest to the wall.
He listened.
Beneath the buzzing, the scratching and the wet movement of countless creatures, he thought he heard a distant voice.
Then it vanished.
The heroes had entered the Grand Library seeking a way to kill a dragon.
They had found a darker book, opened an older prison and awakened something the god of the hunt had buried beneath a mountain.
Now five heroes and a giant ape stood outside the sealed chamber.
Grazim Von remained within.