For a long while after Fann vanished, no one moved.
The mountain had not become quiet. Nothing so simple could happen in a place whose bones were filled with fire. Lava continued to shift beneath the broken crust of the caldera, rolling against stone with a deep, liquid thunder. Somewhere farther down the tunnels, rock split with a report like distant siege engines. Heat shimmered above Scourge Firebreath's corpse, bending the dead dragon into impossible shapes whenever anyone looked at him too long.
But the battle was over.
That was different from silence.
Kaylor stood nearest the dragon, his greataxe hanging at his side. Blood darkened his armor, some of it his own, and the unnatural quickness granted by the potion had already begun to bleed away from his limbs. Only minutes before, Scourge had driven him into the stone and nearly killed him. Grazim's impossible return had hauled him back from the edge long enough to finish what they had come here to do.
Now the dragon lay dead.
Not wounded. Not defeated until it could gather itself again. Dead.
And the thing that had lived beyond its body—the red spirit that Fann had reduced to the absurd shape of a small animal—had been torn from the world as well.
Kaylor looked toward the place where Fann had disappeared.
There was nothing there.
No gold dragon. No lingering glow. No final miracle.
She had done what she promised. She had denied her brother the protection that made him nearly untouchable by magic, fought the spirit while the heroes fought the flesh, and when Scourge was finished she had chosen the rest she had wanted for longer than any of them could truly comprehend.
Nethnarel watched the same empty stretch of air.
For days there had been another presence with her—not merely a voice, not merely power, but something ancient sharing the narrow boundaries of one mortal body. Its absence ought to have felt like freedom.
Instead it felt strangely like losing someone.
"She's gone," Isamu said.
Nethnarel nodded.
"She wanted to be."
Isamu considered that and gave her the small, solemn nod that passed between people who understood that some victories were not improved by discussing them.
Behind them, insects moved.
Hexen turned.
For an instant Grazim still stood among the drifting smoke.
Or something wearing the memory of Grazim did.
The halfling shape was unmistakable, as was the war cleric's battered certainty, but the swarm made any resemblance to the man they had known incomplete. Insects crawled through the edges of him and circled in the air around his armor. They had brought healing when Kaylor lay dying. They had carried power into the fight. The manifestation had even called upon the old blessings Grazim once gave so freely.
That did not make him alive.
Hexen knew that better than any of them.
He had killed Grazim.
The memory never needed inviting.
The strange maul. The corrupted body. Isamu's whip holding him. The soul that had seemed, at the end, to find peace.
And now this.
Grazim looked almost substantial until he didn't. The outline of his body loosened. Armor became shadow. Shadow became insects.
A few of the swarm circled Hexen before disappearing into the volcanic darkness.
Then Grazim was gone again.
No one called after him.
Fendor finally lowered the Oathbow.
"We should make sure the dragon doesn't have another soul hidden in a jar somewhere."
Kaylor looked at him.
"Please don't give the universe ideas."
It was enough to break the spell.
Not the grief. Not the exhaustion. Merely the paralysis that followed surviving something that should have killed all of them.
They began to search.
Scourge Firebreath had not lived inside the mountain for contemplation.
The dragon had collected.
That became apparent almost immediately.
The passages beyond the caldera widened into chambers whose floors vanished beneath wealth. Coins had fused into low ridges where volcanic heat had softened them. Gems glittered from cracks in the black stone. Old weapons lay amid warped armor and half-burned chests, some obviously taken from warriors, others perhaps removed from tombs or cities that had ceased to exist centuries ago.
Scourge had accumulated the debris of lives.
Fendor stepped carefully between piles of coin, studying the chamber with the wary expression he usually reserved for traps.
"Dragons really are incapable of throwing anything away."
"He's organized," Nethnarel said.
Fendor looked toward a mound containing coins, the remains of a shield, three goblets, part of a statue, and what appeared to be a human jawbone.
"That is not organized."
"It might be organized by dragon standards."
"Everything is organized by dragon standards if the standard is 'put it underneath me.'"
Kaylor picked up a blackened metal cup, examined it, and tossed it back onto the pile.
"I've met people with worse systems."
Hexen was already moving deeper into the hoard.
"Try not to touch anything that whispers."
"That rule seems very specific," Isamu said.
"It has become necessary."
That, unfortunately, was true.
Their adventures had taught them that wealth ceased being simple somewhere beyond the first few thousand gold pieces. A sword might be a sword. A crown might be a crown. But sooner or later there was always a book that wanted to be read, a crystal containing an ancient dragon, a weapon tied to a demon, or a perfectly ordinary-looking object capable of ruining an entire kingdom.
They sorted accordingly.
Coins and gems were the easy part. Valuable, certainly, but understandable. Those could be collected, divided, carried away as circumstances allowed.
The other things demanded more respect.
The ring was one of them.
It was small enough to disappear in a closed hand.
That alone seemed offensive.
Nethnarel held it between two fingers while the others gathered around. There was nothing about its appearance proportional to its importance. No crown of flame rose from it. No choir of forgotten gods sang when it was touched.
Yet the magic within it was immense.
"Three?" Kaylor asked.
Nethnarel looked up.
"That is what it appears to be."
"Three what?" Isamu asked, although his expression suggested he already understood.
Nethnarel gave him a flat look.
"Wishes."
For perhaps the first time since entering Scourge's mountain, no one had a joke ready.
Fendor stared at the ring.
"Actual wishes?"
"Apparently."
"Meaning anything?"
"Meaning," Nethnarel said carefully, "something powerful enough that I don't want anyone phrasing a sentence casually while wearing it."
Kaylor folded his arms.
"That seems wise."
Hexen leaned closer but did not touch the ring.
"So we could fix things."
The room changed.
It was subtle, but everyone felt it.
There were too many things in their history that could fit inside those four words.
Cities destroyed. People dead. Choices made badly because the truth arrived one day too late. Grazim. The Crystal City. Malareth and everyone who had died when its defenses failed. The witness Craven's people had murdered. Friends, strangers, whole stretches of history that might look different if a person could reach backward and command the world to change.
Nethnarel closed her fingers around the ring.
"Maybe."
Hexen looked at her.
"That's not a no."
"No." Her voice was softer now. "It's also not a yes."
Isamu glanced toward Scourge's corpse.
"Things that powerful usually have rules."
"Or interpretations," Fendor said.
Kaylor's mouth tightened.
He knew something about promises that became weapons when someone else decided what the words meant.
"Then nobody uses it because they're angry," he said.
Hexen looked at him.
"That eliminates most of us."
"Good."
"And drunk?"
"Especially drunk."
Nethnarel tucked the ring safely away with the party's other dangerous acquisitions, without making its ownership permanent.
Three wishes.
Three opportunities to change the world.
Three opportunities to discover why mortals were rarely given that kind of authority.
They moved on.
The horn was much less subtle.
It was heavy, reinforced in metal, and looked as though whoever fashioned it had expected the instrument to be heard by armies.
Hexen lifted it.
Fendor immediately stepped away.
Hexen noticed.
"What?"
"I know you."
"You say that like it's bad."
"I say that like I don't want to be standing in front of you when you discover what that does."
Nethnarel studied the horn.
"It releases a destructive blast."
Fendor took another step back.
"See?"
Hexen turned the horn in his hands.
"How destructive?"
"Enough that using it carelessly would be memorable."
"That's not a measurement."
"It's the one you're getting."
The horn remained with Hexen.
This, too, seemed to concern Fendor.
They continued through Scourge's collection, separating useful things from objects whose nature could not immediately be trusted. Some items were remarkable. Others were valuable simply because ancient dragons did not often waste space on worthless things. There were discussions of armor, protections against flame, weapons and enchanted tools, each weighed not only by power but by who might actually use it.
That had changed.
Once, treasure had been treasure.
Now every new object joined an increasingly complicated web of bargains, old weapons, divine grudges, demon gifts and powers whose prices had not always been visible when they were accepted.
Isamu carried a whip taken from something infernal.
Hexen could summon powers that did not belong to any ordinary druid.
Kaylor was an oathbreaker whose faith had been shattered by men who had used holiness as camouflage.
Nethnarel carried fire in rings given to her through forces none of them fully trusted.
Fendor possessed a sword capable of ending a life with one perfect stroke.
And Grazim was dead.
Yet sometimes he came when called.
Standing in the treasure chamber of an ancient red dragon, surrounded by enough wealth to make kings homicidal, it was difficult to pretend that power had made anything simpler.
Fendor crouched beside a spill of gemstones and began gathering them.
"We're still taking the money."
Kaylor looked at him.
"Obviously."
"Good. I thought the mood was about to become philosophical enough that someone suggested leaving it."
Hexen slung the horn where he could carry it.
"I'm not that changed."
"Comforting."
It almost felt normal.
Almost.
They rested as much as the mountain permitted.
There would be time later to count coin properly, to determine the value of stones, to argue about ownership and whether any newly recovered object should be used at all. For now there were wounds to bind and exhausted bodies to force back into usefulness.
The survivors of the army they had brought into the mountain made the cost harder to ignore.
Most of that army was gone.
Awakened trees had burned in passages too narrow for them to escape. Giants had fallen into lava or died under the violence of creatures born from it. Kaylor's peryton had been torn from the air before they ever reached Scourge. The last stages of the assault had ceased to resemble an army at all. They had become the familiar five, forcing their way forward because turning back would have made every death behind them meaningless.
Now the dragon was dead.
That mattered.
Oxland would no longer wake beneath Scourge Firebreath's shadow. No city would watch that enormous shape cross the sky and wonder whether this was the morning it burned.
That mattered too.
Hexen sat against a shelf of black rock and watched lava move through a fissure below.
The bargain was fulfilled.
He had been told so.
The words had come clearly after the ancient binding was destroyed.
The bargain is fulfilled.
He had wanted that certainty.
Now he had it, and still insects sometimes came when he called.
Still fire harmed him differently.
Still Grazim could be pulled out of death wearing the Swarm's shape.
Hexen looked down at his hands.
Nothing crawled across them.
That did not help.
"You're doing it again," Kaylor said.
Hexen looked up.
Kaylor stood several paces away.
"Doing what?"
"Thinking loudly."
"You're one to talk."
"I don't think."
"That explains several things."
Kaylor almost smiled.
Then his expression changed.
Not much. Just enough.
"You all right?"
Hexen considered lying.
It would have been easy. He had plenty of practice making impossible things sound temporary.
Instead he looked back toward the fissure.
"No."
Kaylor waited.
Hexen continued.
"But that's becoming normal."
"That's not the same as being all right."
"No."
Neither man had anything useful to add to that.
Sometimes friendship was knowing when advice would only make the truth smaller.
Kaylor sat beside him.
For a little while they watched the mountain burn.
The Lord of Swarms found them before peace could.
There was no doorway.
No herald.
No circle of fire opening in the stone.
The first sign was sound.
A single insect.
Then another.
Hexen's head rose.
Across the chamber, Isamu stopped moving. Fendor's hand went immediately to the Oathbow. Nethnarel stood, magic gathering almost instinctively around her fingers.
Kaylor did not draw a weapon.
Weapons had never been the useful part of conversations with the Swarm Lord.
The buzzing multiplied.
It came from the cracks in the mountain, from beneath coins, from fissures too narrow to see. Not an invasion. Not yet.
A reminder.
Hexen stood.
"I thought we were finished."
The answer did not belong to the chamber.
It seemed instead to arrive inside the spaces between their thoughts.
The bargain concerning Scourge was finished.
That distinction was immediately clear.
Something else was being offered.
Not demanded.
Offered.
That made it worse.
The presence showed them—or made them understand—the temple.
His temple.
A place that had once been his and was not wholly his now. The Hunt Lord's influence remained there. Other powers remained as well. Guardians. Defenders. A presence described with a word so strange in the mouth of a demon that for a moment none of them quite trusted they had understood it.
Goodness.
The Lord of Swarms wanted it removed.
Kaylor's eyes narrowed.
"He actually said that?"
Nethnarel glanced toward him.
"I heard it."
Fendor's expression had gone utterly still.
"The problem with his temple is goodness."
Hexen rubbed at his face.
"Apparently."
Isamu leaned against the stone.
"That's unusually clear."
No one laughed.
The offer continued.
Each of them would receive a gift.
Not treasure divided among them. Not payment in coin.
Something chosen.
Something suited to the individual.
Power for service.
Again.
Hexen stared into the gathering insects.
"No."
The swarm shifted.
Not in anger.
Waiting.
Hexen's jaw tightened.
"I mean that's what this is. Another bargain."
The distinction came again.
The old bargain had been fulfilled.
This was new.
Voluntary.
Kaylor laughed once, without humor.
"Of course it is."
Fendor looked toward him. "You sound disappointed."
"No. I'm admiring the technique."
"What technique?"
"Never ask someone to sell his soul when you can convince him he's only renting out an afternoon."
Nethnarel looked toward the treasure they had just taken from Scourge.
The irony was impossible to miss.
They had killed an ancient red dragon. They had survived a mountain that had consumed nearly every ally they brought into it. They had watched a gold dragon choose final rest.
And before Scourge's blood had cooled, another power wanted to know what they were willing to do next.
"What exactly is in the temple?" she asked.
The answer was less clear.
Servants of the Hunt.
Defenders.
Obstacles.
Those who prevented the Lord of Swarms from reclaiming what was his and returning his influence more fully to the world.
Fendor's eyes hardened.
"Enemies?"
No answer came that gave him the word he wanted.
Kaylor noticed.
"So they're not necessarily evil."
The insects continued moving.
That was answer enough.
Isamu looked at Hexen.
"You've dealt with both sides of this more than the rest of us."
Hexen gave him a long stare.
"That is an extremely generous way to describe what has happened."
"But accurate."
"Unfortunately."
"What do you think?"
Hexen looked down.
Somewhere inside him was the memory of the Hunt Lord—the old power that had stood opposite the Swarm, the force whose temple and servants had crossed their path before.
And somewhere else was the Swarm Lord, who had offered bargains, power, certainty and corruption in combinations that were increasingly difficult to separate.
Hexen had once believed finishing the service would draw a line.
There would be a before and an after.
Instead the line had moved.
"The Hunt Lord imprisoned him," Hexen said.
"Yes," Fendor replied.
"And the Swarm Lord wants us to clear the Hunt's people out of his temple."
"Yes."
"So if we do this, we're helping a demon lord remove the people keeping him contained."
The buzzing seemed louder.
Kaylor stood.
"At least we understand the job."
Nethnarel looked at him sharply.
"That doesn't make it better."
"I didn't say it did."
"Then why do you sound like you're considering it?"
Kaylor turned toward her.
For a moment she saw again the paladin he had once been, buried beneath anger, betrayal and the name Oathbreaker. He had spent too long learning that righteous words did not guarantee righteous purposes. Perhaps that had made him less willing to trust goodness when someone merely claimed it.
Perhaps it had also made him more willing to walk into darkness if he believed he could survive it.
"Because I want to know what's there," he said.
Fendor exhaled slowly.
"That is a terrible reason."
"Probably."
Isamu looked toward the swarm.
"What are the gifts?"
No exact answer.
Only promise.
That was enough to make everyone more suspicious.
And interested.
Those two feelings had become dangerous companions.
Fendor shook his head.
"We have reached the point where a demon lord says, 'Go remove the goodness from my temple and I'll give each of you a present,' and we're not immediately leaving."
Hexen looked at him.
"We're discussing it."
"That's my point."
Nethnarel said nothing.
Neither did Isamu.
Kaylor looked toward the passage leading out of Scourge's hoard.
They could leave.
That was the truth none of them could avoid.
There were no chains around their wrists. No spell forcing their legs toward the temple. No domination hiding their choices from them.
They could take Scourge's treasure, return to Oxland, raise cups to the dead, and let the Lord of Swarms solve his own problem.
The offer remained.
Five people stood in a dead dragon's mountain and measured themselves against it.
Power.
Curiosity.
Old grudges.
Unfinished questions.
The dangerous conviction that they could walk into a demon's bargain and still decide where the bargain ended.
Perhaps each of them had a different reason.
That did not change the decision.
Kaylor picked up his weapons.
Isamu straightened.
Fendor's displeasure did not stop him from checking his arrows.
Nethnarel secured the treasures they could carry.
Hexen took the Horn of Blasting and listened to insects move in the darkness.
"Just so we're clear," Fendor said, "when this becomes a terrible idea, I reserve the right to remind everyone that I noticed."
"You always reserve that right," Kaylor said.
"Because I'm frequently correct."
"No. Because you're an elf."
Fendor stared at him.
Kaylor headed for the tunnel.
Isamu followed.
After a moment, Nethnarel did too.
Hexen remained behind for one last heartbeat.
The swarm gathered near his boots but did not touch him.
The old bargain was finished.
This one had not yet begun.
That distinction mattered.
Perhaps not enough.
Hexen stepped after the others.
Behind them lay Scourge Firebreath, dead at last.
Ahead waited a temple held against a demon lord by beings the demon himself had called good.
And the heroes went anyway.