The swamp attacked Big Oak first.
There was no warning beyond the ground becoming soft.
One moment the awakened tree strode behind the heroes with the ponderous certainty of something that had spent most of its existence assuming the earth would support it. The next, one enormous root plunged through what appeared to be a mat of moss and vanished almost to the trunk.
Big Oak lurched.
Branches swept overhead.
Fendor ducked.
Kaylor did not.
A smaller limb struck the back of his armor and shoved him three steps forward.
He turned.
The tree was sinking.
“Hexen.”
“I see it.”
Big Oak pulled.
The mud answered by swallowing another root.
The sound was obscene—a deep, wet sucking noise from beneath the surface as water and black soil closed around living wood. The awakened oak shifted its immense weight, which accomplished exactly what anyone familiar with mud would have predicted.
It sank farther.
Hexen ran back.
“Stop moving.”
Big Oak stopped.
Fendor looked at him.
“It is a tree.”
“It listens.”
“Better than Kaylor.”
Kaylor was already reaching for one of the oak’s lower branches.
“I heard that.”
“Then the comparison remains accurate.”
The ground beneath Kaylor’s boots sagged.
He stepped back quickly.
Hexen crouched at the edge of the false ground and pushed his fingers through the moss. What looked solid from above was only a woven skin of roots and vegetation suspended over deep muck. Water gleamed beneath it.
The Moaning Waters had hidden the trap perfectly.
Not intentionally.
The swamp did not need intention to kill the careless.
That distinction mattered to Hexen.
“There’s firmer ground to the north,” he said. “We should have taken it around.”
Kaylor looked at Big Oak.
“Can it pull itself free?”
The great tree strained.
Wood groaned.
Mud released one root with a sound like something tearing loose from flesh.
The others helped where they could, though helping an oak tree the size of a house involved more encouragement than leverage. Hexen guided the tree backward instead of letting it fight straight upward. Kaylor pulled on a branch despite Fendor observing that the branch was probably stronger than he was. Isamu found solid footing and used a rope around one of the lower limbs, mostly to give the movement direction.
Nethnarel stood where the ground was safest and watched.
Kaylor glanced at her.
“Any time.”
“You want me to levitate the tree?”
“Can you?”
“No.”
“Then why are you standing there?”
“Because I know I can’t levitate the tree.”
Big Oak tore free.
Mud exploded outward.
Kaylor received most of it.
Nethnarel smiled.
Fendor looked at him.
“She may have planned that.”
Kaylor wiped black swamp water from his face.
“I know.”
Big Oak stepped carefully backward until every root stood upon firmer earth. Its branches shook once, scattering water, mud and several things that had apparently been living in its bark.
Hexen rested a hand against the trunk.
The oak was annoyed.
That came through clearly enough.
“You’re going around.”
A branch lowered.
“No.”
The branch moved toward Hexen.
“You are.”
The tree’s green eyes brightened faintly in the bark.
Fendor watched the exchange.
“Are you arguing with the tree?”
“Yes.”
“Winning?”
Hexen looked up.
“No.”
They found the firmer route anyway.
The problem was not the delay. Thomas Lightfoot’s people had been disappearing for weeks. Another half hour would not decide anything.
The problem was what the delay revealed.
The Moaning Waters were changing.
Hexen saw it everywhere once he stopped looking only at the dead trees.
Reeds stood brown where they should have been green. Mats of floating plants had curled at the edges. Several stretches of water were strangely clear, as though even the tiny life that ordinarily clouded them had died. In other places, color appeared where it did not belong—small, vivid growths in pinks and purples too bright for the dark wetland.
And the fog remained.
It did not drift as mist should.
It occupied.
The deeper they went, the more the landscape seemed to exist inside it rather than beneath it.
Kaylor decided elevation would be useful.
His peryton launched from a stretch of dry ground with two heavy beats of its wings.
Fendor watched it climb.
“I still object to that thing.”
Kaylor looked down.
“You object to everything.”
“Not everything.”
“You objected to the swamp.”
“The swamp tried to eat the tree.”
“You objected to the tree.”
“The tree tried to hit you.”
Kaylor considered.
“Fair.”
The peryton climbed above the gray haze.
From thirty feet up, Kaylor could see more of the wetland, though not enough to explain it. Pools connected through dark channels. Islands of tangled vegetation rose from the water. Dead trees stood like black fingers in the fog.
Then he noticed the color.
Something bright grew near the water below.
Not flowers exactly.
Too large.
Too vivid.
A cluster of pink and violet shapes surrounded a thicker central growth that seemed to pulse slightly whenever the wind moved through it.
Kaylor circled.
“Hexen!”
The druid looked up.
Kaylor pointed.
“Over there.”
Hexen followed the gesture.
He saw the strange growth.
He also saw the water behind Kaylor rise.
“Kaylor!”
The dragonborn turned.
The swamp erupted.
Something immense came out of the water.
Its body suggested a frog only in the broadest possible sense: a vast, wet mass of muscle, jaws and glistening skin large enough to make an ordinary amphibian comparison insulting. Tentacles whipped outward from around its mouth. Its legs struck the water with enough force to throw sheets of black spray into the air.
One tentacle caught Kaylor across the side.
The blow nearly removed him from the peryton.
Another wrapped around the creature’s wing.
Kaylor swore.
The peryton screamed and fought upward.
The thing below opened its mouth.
Fendor stared.
“That is an extremely large frog.”
Isamu was already moving.
Hexen looked at the creature.
“With tentacles.”
“Yes.”
“That seems unnecessary.”
The monster pulled.
Kaylor’s peryton lost altitude.
The dragonborn struck downward with Peacemaker.
The black blade met rubbery flesh.
The tentacle recoiled.
For half a heartbeat Kaylor thought that would be enough.
Then three more reached for him.
“Neth!”
“I see it.”
Nethnarel drew the wand from her belt.
She had carried it for so long that using it barely required thought. The wand of magic missiles rose in her hand, and six bolts of pale force erupted from its tip almost simultaneously.
They curved through the fog.
Every one struck.
The giant amphibian convulsed beneath the impacts.
Kaylor’s peryton tore free.
“Up!” he shouted.
The creature climbed.
Below them, the swamp came alive.
Isamu reached the water first.
He did not enter it.
The surface was deceptive, and he had already watched an oak tree nearly disappear through ground that looked solid. Instead he crossed the available hummocks with short, precise leaps, each foot finding something firm for only the instant required.
Hexen called for help of a different kind.
Wolves appeared in the mist.
Several materialized on what Hexen had assumed was ground.
Two immediately sank to their bellies.
One looked at him.
Hexen stared back.
“Yes. I know.”
The wolf struggled.
Another patch of vegetation rose behind it.
Not vegetation.
The mound unfolded.
Rotting branches and waterlogged vines shifted upward into the suggestion of shoulders. A mass of leaves opened where a head might have been. Water poured from the thing as it stood.
Fendor drew the Oathbow.
“That is not a plant either, I assume.”
Hexen looked at it.
“That one is closer.”
“Excellent.”
A second mound moved farther away.
Then a third shape disturbed the reeds.
The heroes had not walked into one monster’s hunting ground.
They had walked into an entire piece of swamp that had decided they were prey.
The enormous amphibian struck at Kaylor again.
He abandoned the sky.
“Down!”
The peryton descended sharply.
Kaylor waited until the ground was close enough to offend common sense, released his grip and dropped. His boots hit the mud. He rolled, came up with Peacemaker in both hands and slapped the peryton’s flank.
“Go.”
The creature hesitated.
“Go!”
It climbed away.
Kaylor turned just as the frog-thing surged toward him.
The first tentacle missed.
The second did not.
It wrapped around his torso.
Kaylor’s displaced image tore sideways, confusing another strike, but the creature already had the real dragonborn. It pulled him toward the water.
Kaylor planted Peacemaker into the ground.
The sword cut through soil.
He slid anyway.
“Absolutely not.”
Power gathered around the black blade.
It was not the clean radiance of the oath he had once carried. Whatever remained of Kaylor’s old divine strength had changed with him, become harsher and less interested in the approval of sacred institutions.
He struck.
The blow staggered the huge creature.
It released him.
Isamu reached its flank a moment later.
The Swarm Gloves moved over his hands.
Years had not made them pleasant to look at. Tiny bodies still shifted within the dark surfaces. Wings occasionally unfolded and vanished. A beetle crawled across one knuckle as Isamu drew back his fist.
Then he hit the monster.
The impact traveled through its body.
Fendor watched the flesh ripple.
“Still horrible.”
Isamu struck again.
“They work.”
“That was not praise.”
“It never is.”
Fendor uncorked a small potion.
Kaylor saw him.
“What is that?”
“An answer.”
“To what?”
Fendor drank.
A moment later his boots left the ground.
Kaylor stared.
Fendor rose above the mud, Oathbow in hand.
“The swamp.”
Kaylor looked at his own boots, already ankle-deep.
“I dislike elves.”
“Most people do.”
The battle widened.
One shambling mass came for Hexen.
Another moved toward Nethnarel.
The wolves fought where they could and bogged down where they could not. Big Oak remained farther back on the firm route Hexen had chosen, its enormous weight making participation more dangerous than useful.
That left five veterans doing what they had done for years.
Adapting.
Nethnarel stopped trying to preserve the swamp.
A sphere of fire formed above her hand.
Hexen saw it.
“Careful!”
“I’m always careful.”
Everyone looked at her.
Nethnarel frowned.
“Occasionally.”
She released the spell.
Fire bloomed around the giant amphibian.
The fog turned orange.
The creature recoiled more violently than Kaylor expected.
Heat rolled across the water. Reeds vanished. Steam erupted around the monster’s legs.
Hexen saw the reaction.
“Fire.”
Fendor, hovering above the swamp, drew.
“Everything dislikes fire.”
“Not everything.”
“We have had several unfortunate exceptions.”
The Oathbow released.
An arrow struck deep into the creature’s hide.
Kaylor followed.
Isamu came from the opposite side.
The froghemoth—if that was what it was—had survived the swamp by becoming the thing nothing else attacked.
It had chosen the wrong afternoon.
The creature collapsed into the water.
It did not rise.
Nobody celebrated because the shambling mounds were still coming.
Hexen felt the swamp grabbing at his legs.
Roots caught his boots.
Mud tried to hold every step.
He spoke a short word and pushed nature’s restraint away from himself. The wetland ceased to impede him. Water no longer tugged at his movement. Vines slipped from his clothing instead of binding.
Then one of the shambling creatures hit Fendor.
The elf had flown too low.
A mass of branches opened beneath him.
Fendor saw it a heartbeat too late.
The mound engulfed him.
One moment he hovered above it.
The next he vanished.
“Kaylor!”
“I saw.”
Kaylor crossed the distance.
The mound folded around Fendor, pulling the elf into a body made from rotting vegetation. The Oathbow disappeared. One pale hand remained visible for an instant, then leaves closed over it.
Inside, Fendor discovered that breathing through decomposing swamp was difficult.
He also discovered that the Vorpal Longsword was extremely inconvenient when there was no room to draw it.
Outside, Kaylor attacked.
Peacemaker carved a black line through the mound.
Nethnarel aimed.
Kaylor looked at her.
“No.”
“I have it.”
“No.”
“I can hit the creature.”
“Fendor is inside.”
“Yes.”
“That is the important part.”
Nethnarel adjusted her aim.
Fire gathered.
Kaylor moved.
The bolt struck.
The mound burned.
So did Kaylor.
The blast caught him across the shoulder and back hard enough to make his armor glow.
Kaylor turned slowly.
Nethnarel stared.
For perhaps half a second, neither said anything.
Then Fendor’s voice emerged muffled from inside the mound.
“Are we arguing while I’m being eaten?”
Kaylor pointed at Nethnarel.
“Later.”
“Agreed.”
They tore the mound apart.
Fendor came out covered in wet leaves, black mud and an expression suggesting the swamp had offended him personally.
He inhaled.
Then looked at Nethnarel.
“Did you set Kaylor on fire?”
“It was tactical.”
Kaylor stared.
Fendor wiped vegetation from his face.
“I regret missing it.”
Hexen ended the second mound with fire.
Not because he enjoyed burning living things.
Because these things were wrong.
He could feel it now.
The realization had been building since the first attack. A predator protecting territory was natural. A shambling mound responding to movement was possible. Even the enormous amphibian could have belonged here, however unlikely its proportions.
But all of them?
Together?
Attacking immediately?
Something pushed at the swamp.
Not command.
Influence.
Agitation.
The creatures behaved like animals trapped too close to a forest fire—aggressive because something had stripped away every other instinct.
Hexen raised his hand.
A wall of flame erupted between two approaching mounds.
One tried to force its way through.
It caught fire.
The other turned.
That mattered.
“Stop.”
Kaylor finished pulling vegetation from Peacemaker.
“What?”
“Stop chasing it.”
The surviving mound withdrew through the reeds.
Fendor raised the Oathbow.
Hexen lowered his hand.
“Let it go.”
“It tried to digest me.”
“I know.”
“That usually moves something higher on my list.”
“They’re not right.”
Kaylor looked toward the retreating creature.
“You’ve said that before.”
“Not like this.”
The wall of fire diminished.
Smoke mingled with the fog.
Hexen crouched and touched the mud.
He closed his eyes.
The swamp was not a single mind. Nature rarely was. Thousands of small lives overlapped here. Roots. Fish. Insects. Fungi. Birds. Things beneath the water without names anyone had bothered to give them.
All of it felt disturbed.
Pressed.
The attacks had been symptoms.
Hexen opened his eyes.
“Something is affecting them.”
Nethnarel looked toward the vivid growth Kaylor had noticed before the fight.
“The pretty thing?”
Fendor followed her gaze.
“I have learned to distrust anything you call pretty.”
“That sounds like a personal problem.”
They approached.
The strange growth looked even more wrong from nearby.
Its colors were magnificent.
That was part of the problem.
The Moaning Waters were a place of dark greens, browns, gray water and flowers that fought for whatever sunlight reached them. This thing seemed painted onto the landscape by someone who had never seen the swamp and guessed at what life should look like.
Pink tendrils wrapped a thick central stalk.
Violet lobes opened like petals but possessed no recognizable structure.
Fine threads spread outward beneath the surface.
Far outward.
Hexen followed one with his eyes until it disappeared into the mist.
He crouched.
The longer he studied it, the less he liked the word plant.
The shape borrowed from plants.
That was different.
Nethnarel joined him.
Her expression changed almost immediately.
“That’s not from here.”
Hexen looked at her.
“No.”
“Not just the swamp.”
“I know.”
Magic clung to the growth in a way neither of them liked.
Not arcane.
Not divine.
Something from a place where the laws separating living things from hostile intention were less reliable.
The Abyss.
Or somewhere close enough that the distinction offered no comfort.
Hexen touched one of the outer tendrils with the end of his staff.
The growth pulsed.
He withdrew.
“It grew recently.”
“How recently?” Kaylor asked.
“Weeks.”
Thomas again.
People began disappearing.
Trees began dying.
This thing took root.
The pattern stopped being coincidence.
Hexen traced the tendrils with his eyes.
“It’s feeding.”
“On what?” Isamu asked.
Hexen looked around at the dead swamp.
“Everything.”
Fendor drew the Vorpal Longsword.
“Good.”
Hexen stood.
“What?”
“Something I can solve.”
“Wait.”
Fendor looked at him.
“Is it alive?”
“Yes.”
“Does it belong here?”
“No.”
“Is it killing the swamp?”
“Yes.”
“Then I have completed the investigation.”
Kaylor almost smiled.
“He’s got a point.”
Hexen stepped back.
“Fine.”
Fendor approached.
The Vorpal blade came free of its sheath with the faint pressure of magic Hexen still disliked remembering the source of. The Lord of Swarms had chosen that gift for Fendor well.
Perhaps too well.
The first cut split one of the thick tendrils.
Dark fluid seeped from it.
The thing shuddered.
Fendor struck again.
The growth tore.
Roots pulled free from the mud.
Then something moved behind it.
Fendor saw the shape before the others.
That saved him from surprise.
It did not save anyone else.
A creature unfolded from the base of a dead tree.
Spider was the nearest useful word.
It had too many angles where limbs joined its body and too little certainty in the outline between them. Its surface seemed to shift when looked at directly, becoming solid and then strangely indistinct. Long appendages struck the ground around the ruined growth.
Fendor turned.
The creature looked at him.
Something entered his mind.
There was no voice.
That would have been easier.
A voice could be argued with.
This was an instruction appearing where Fendor’s own intentions lived.
Kill them.
His hands tightened around the Vorpal sword.
No.
The pressure increased.
Fendor had resisted enchantments before. He knew the feeling of foreign magic forcing itself through thought. This was subtler.
It did not tell him he loved the creature.
It did not make him forget his friends.
It simply changed what action seemed necessary.
Hexen became a target.
Fendor fought it.
For one heartbeat, he won.
Then the creature pushed deeper.
His body moved.
“Fendor?”
Hexen saw him coming.
Not quickly enough.
Fendor crossed the distance with the efficiency of someone who knew exactly how Hexen fought.
The druid raised his staff.
Fendor stepped inside it.
The Vorpal blade flashed.
There were weapons so sharp that pain arrived after injury.
Fendor’s sword was beyond that.
Hexen saw silver.
Then the swamp turned sideways.
His body remained standing for an impossible fraction of a second.
His head did not.
Kaylor watched it happen.
The sound that came from him belonged to something older than language.
Hexen’s body collapsed.
His head struck the mud several feet away.
Everything stopped.
Not the swamp.
Not the spider.
The heroes.
Fendor stood above his friend holding the sword.
Blood ran down the blade.
His face showed nothing.
No horror.
No triumph.
Nothing Fendor would ever have chosen to wear.
Nethnarel stared.
Isamu did not move.
Kaylor did.
He hit the spider.
Peacemaker crossed the space between them like judgment.
The black blade tore into the creature.
It recoiled.
Something invisible broke.
Fendor inhaled.
His eyes changed.
He looked down.
Hexen’s body lay at his feet.
The Vorpal Longsword remained in his hand.
“No.”
The word barely existed.
Kaylor turned toward him.
Fendor looked at Hexen’s head.
“No.”
There were wounds magic could heal.
They had known people who returned from death.
They had once traveled with a cleric who could reach across that boundary and pull them back.
Grazim was dead.
And decapitation did not offer much time for improvisation.
Nethnarel’s hand went toward her gear.
“The scroll—”
“Too late,” Kaylor said.
She stopped.
The magic she carried could stop time from continuing.
It could not make what had already happened unhappen.
Isamu looked at Hexen.
Then at Fendor.
Then at the impossible reserve of power the party had almost forgotten because the world had been quiet long enough that wasting miracles seemed foolish.
Two wishes remained.
He used one.
The world broke.
There was no light.
No thunder.
No god announcing that reality had changed its mind.
One moment Hexen’s blood darkened the mud.
Then Fendor was moving toward him again.
Kaylor remembered the first time.
So did Nethnarel.
So did Isamu.
So did Fendor.
Worst of all—
so did Hexen.
He saw the sword coming.
He remembered it cutting through his neck before it reached him.
There were experiences the mind had no place to store.
Being dead was one.
Fendor’s blade changed by inches.
Perhaps because the magic changed chance.
Perhaps because Fendor’s resistance changed something inside the repeated moment.
The Vorpal edge struck Hexen across the shoulder and chest instead.
Blood came.
Pain came.
His head remained attached.
Hexen fell.
Alive.
Fendor staggered backward as though he had been struck.
For an instant the spider ceased to matter.
He looked at Hexen.
“I killed you.”
Hexen pressed one hand against his wound.
“Yes.”
“I remember.”
“So do I.”
That was worse.
Kaylor faced the creature.
“Deal with that later.”
Fendor stared at him.
Kaylor’s voice became harder.
“Fendor.”
The elf looked at the spider.
The Oathbow remained on his back.
The Vorpal sword remained in his hand.
He wanted to throw it into the swamp.
Instead he tightened his grip.
“Later.”
The creature attacked.
Poison rolled through the fog.
Another shape moved beneath the water.
Then another.
Whatever had grown beneath the alien plant had not come alone.
The first spider-thing lost solidity.
Its body became mist.
Not disappeared.
Changed.
A gray shape rushed through Kaylor and the peryton as he remounted, leaving a burning sickness behind before reforming on the other side.
Kaylor twisted in the saddle.
“I hate this place.”
Fendor drew the Oathbow.
“You said that about the temple.”
“I hated that place too.”
“Consistent.”
Hexen pushed himself upright.
His neck hurt.
That was irrational.
The sword had not touched his neck this time.
His body knew that.
His memory did not.
For a heartbeat he felt the impossible sensation again—the clean severing, the loss of ground, the instant in which sight continued after his body ceased belonging beneath him.
He forced the memory away.
Not gone.
Later.
Everything had become later.
A spider emerged from beneath the water.
Nethnarel reacted first.
Magic wrapped around it.
The creature’s outline collapsed inward.
Eight long limbs shortened.
Its mass disappeared.
A tiny crawling thing dropped onto a patch of mud.
Nobody agreed afterward whether it most resembled a slug, an aphid or something else too small to matter.
Kaylor looked down from the peryton.
“Keep that.”
Nethnarel stared at him.
“Why?”
“I have an idea.”
Fendor groaned.
“Those words again.”
The second spider leapt toward Nethnarel.
She moved.
It struck empty air.
She rose above the swamp on magic, keeping herself outside the creature’s immediate reach. Flame gathered around her.
At first it circled her hands.
Then her arms.
Then fire enveloped her entirely.
Hair became a silhouette within the blaze.
Heat pushed the fog away.
The spider recoiled.
Nethnarel smiled.
“Better.”
Isamu reached the creature from below.
He struck once.
Again.
The Swarm Gloves tightened.
His next blow hit somewhere that made the creature’s entire body seize.
It stopped.
Not died.
Stopped.
Fendor knew an invitation when he saw one.
The Oathbow sang.
Arrows crossed the swamp.
Kaylor drove the peryton down through the fog and attacked from above.
Hexen called radiant power into his hands. Light struck the creature and forced it backward toward the remains of the demonic growth.
The battle became vertical.
Kaylor and Nethnarel above.
Isamu and Hexen moving through the wet ground.
Fendor hovering where the potion still held him beyond the swamp’s reach.
Spider-things turned to mist, reformed, bit, vanished beneath the water and returned somewhere else.
Poison drifted through the reeds.
The heroes adapted.
They had fought dragons.
A swamp full of demonic spiders was offensive.
It was not incomprehensible.
That mattered.
The source mattered more.
Nethnarel saw it first.
The ruined alien growth still lived.
Even hacked apart, its buried tendrils pulsed. Wherever they reached, fog continued bleeding from the ground.
“Plant!”
Hexen looked toward her.
“It’s not a plant.”
“You know what I mean.”
She raised both hands.
Energy gathered.
Kaylor saw where she was aiming and pulled the peryton upward.
“Everyone clear!”
Fendor flew aside.
Isamu moved.
Hexen did not argue semantics.
Nethnarel released the magic.
Lightning tore through the alien growth.
For one instant every hidden root became visible beneath the swamp, outlined in white-blue fire.
The network was enormous.
Tendrils stretched in every direction.
Then they burned.
The central growth split.
The strange color vanished.
The fog moved.
Everyone noticed.
Not disappeared.
Moved.
For the first time since entering the Moaning Waters, wind pushed it.
Hexen felt the swamp inhale.
“Again.”
Nethnarel did not need encouragement.
The remaining growth died.
The spiders reacted.
One fled beneath the water.
Another tried to become mist and found Kaylor waiting where it reformed.
Peacemaker struck.
Fendor’s arrow arrived behind it.
Isamu closed.
The creature went down.
The tiny polymorphed thing remained.
Kaylor pointed.
“That one.”
Nethnarel looked at him.
“What are you planning?”
“Giving it distance.”
“From us?”
“From the ground.”
Fendor stared.
“Oh.”
The peryton descended.
The tiny transformed creature was transferred with substantially more care than anyone thought a demonic spider deserved.
Kaylor took it aloft.
Higher.
Higher still.
The swamp shrank beneath him.
Trees became dark marks.
The others became small shapes in clearing fog.
Fendor shaded his eyes.
“How high is he going?”
Nethnarel watched.
“Too high.”
“That was my estimate.”
At roughly five hundred feet, Kaylor released the creature.
The tiny shape fell.
For several seconds, nothing happened.
Then it struck the ground.
Magic failed.
The spider returned to its true form at the moment of impact.
Its enormous body slammed into the swamp hard enough to throw mud outward in a ring.
It moved.
Barely.
Isamu reached it first.
Kaylor’s peryton descended behind him.
The monk struck.
The creature tried to rise.
Isamu hit it again, finding the same perfect interruption between intent and motion.
The spider froze.
Fendor’s arrows struck.
Kaylor landed.
Peacemaker came down.
The thing stopped moving.
For good.
Silence returned.
This time no one trusted it immediately.
They waited.
Nethnarel remained wreathed in fading fire.
Fendor hovered above the mud, arrow drawn.
Isamu watched the water.
Kaylor stayed beside the peryton.
Hexen listened.
One spider-like creature had been contained behind stone during the chaos. Whether it remained trapped or had found some path beneath the earth, none of them could say. It did not return.
Nothing else attacked.
The fog continued thinning.
A breeze crossed the water.
Weak sunlight reached the reeds.
It touched one of the dead trees.
Then another.
The Moaning Waters did not become beautiful.
That would have been dishonest.
Too much had died.
Rot remained where the demonic growth had fed. Dead wood stood throughout the swamp. Burned patches marked Nethnarel’s spells and Hexen’s wall of flame. The enormous amphibian floated partly submerged farther away.
But the air moved.
Birdsong returned somewhere distant.
One call.
Then another.
Hexen stood beside the ruined alien growth.
The part of him that remembered dying insisted his head was not connected correctly.
He lifted one hand to his neck.
Whole.
Uninjured.
The wound Fendor had actually inflicted remained across his shoulder.
Fendor saw the gesture.
He looked away.
Hexen noticed.
“Fendor.”
The elf remained silent.
“You weren’t yourself.”
Fendor finally looked toward him.
“I remember doing it.”
“So do I.”
“That doesn’t help.”
“No.”
They stood with that.
There was no quick sentence capable of making it harmless.
The creature had controlled Fendor.
That was true.
Fendor’s hands had still held the sword.
That was also true.
Hexen remembered the blade passing through him.
Both memories existed now: the death that happened and the death that had been undone.
Some scars apparently did not require wounds.
Isamu approached.
Hexen looked toward him.
“One left?”
Isamu nodded.
One wish.
They had entered the swamp with two.
Now reality itself had been rewritten because a monster had turned one hero against another.
Kaylor came down beside them.
He looked at Hexen’s neck.
Then Fendor.
Then Isamu.
“No more getting decapitated.”
Hexen stared at him.
“I’ll try.”
“Good.”
Fendor cleaned the Vorpal sword.
“I would also support that policy.”
Nethnarel’s flames faded.
“Should we discuss the fact that our first minor investigation in several years required rewriting reality?”
Nobody answered.
That answer was sufficient.
Hexen crouched beside what remained of the demonic growth.
Nothing moved within it now.
The tendrils had gone gray.
He reached into one of his pouches.
Fendor watched.
“What are you doing?”
Hexen removed a small flower.
Ordinary.
The sort of thing he carried without remembering when he had collected it.
He pressed its roots into the wet soil beside the dead alien thing.
Kaylor stared.
“That’s your solution?”
“No.”
Hexen covered the roots.
“It’s a flower.”
“I know what a flower is.”
“Good.”
“Why?”
Hexen stood.
The small bloom moved in the breeze.
Because it belonged here.
Because the thing they had destroyed did not.
Because after years of demon lords, dragons, dead friends, celestial blood and impossible bargains, there were moments when the difference between protecting the world and saving it could be something very small.
He did not say any of that.
“It looked empty.”
Fendor nodded.
“That is annoyingly druidic.”
“Thank you.”
The fog lifted farther.
Beyond the clearing, the Moaning Waters stretched south toward the road Thomas Lightfoot had asked them to investigate.
The crossroads were still ahead.
They had not found the missing travelers.
They had not found the guards.
They had not learned why people vanished.
They had only discovered that something from beyond their world had taken root beside the road and poisoned an entire swamp around itself.
Kaylor looked south.
Four days earlier, the adventure had sounded simple.
Find the missing people.
Now Hexen remembered being beheaded.
Isamu had one wish left.
Fendor no longer trusted his own sword.
And something from the Abyss had been growing beside one of the busiest roads in the realm.
Kaylor rested Peacemaker across his shoulder.
“Thomas left out the swamp.”
Fendor looked at him.
“Perhaps he took the long way for a reason.”
Isamu began walking.
Nethnarel followed.
Hexen looked once more at the flower.
It remained standing.
For now.
Then he joined the others.
Behind them, the Moaning Waters began to breathe again.
Ahead waited the crossroads.