The crossroads opened again before the heroes understood why it had closed.
That bothered Hexen more than the monsters.
Monsters made sense in retrospect. Even the strange ones did. The eyeless creatures had attacked anyone crossing the roads. The corpse-swarms had risen when the first assault failed. A blue dragon had carried a rider powerful enough to hurl magic across hundreds of feet and invoke a name that none of them could quite remember.
All of those things were dangerous.
Danger was familiar.
But by the following morning, merchants began using the crossroads again.
At first, only one wagon appeared.
Kaylor saw it from where he sat atop an abandoned cart, sharpening a blade that did not require sharpening. The vehicle approached from the northern road with two horses, three guards and a driver who looked deeply unhappy about being the first person foolish enough to test whether the Heroes of Oxland had actually accomplished anything.
The wagon slowed when it saw them.
Then stopped.
The driver stared at the battlefield.
There was less to see than there should have been.
The corpse swarms had fallen apart when whatever animated them broke. The stranger creatures from the first attack left almost nothing useful behind. Hexen's overgrown vegetation still covered part of the road, though he had spent the morning persuading enough of it to retreat that wagons could pass.
The abandoned carts remained.
Those were worse.
They stood exactly where their missing owners had left them.
Kaylor climbed down.
The driver looked at him.
Recognition came immediately.
"You're—"
"Yes."
Kaylor had learned this saved time.
The man's gaze moved past him toward Fendor, Isamu, Hexen and Nethnarel.
"Is it safe?"
Fendor answered before Kaylor could.
"Probably."
The driver's expression suggested that was not the word he had hoped for.
Nethnarel looked at Fendor.
"Helpful."
"I could lie."
The driver tightened his grip on the reins.
Kaylor glanced down each road.
Nothing moved except morning wind.
"We cleared what was here."
"What was here?"
Kaylor considered.
"Several things."
The driver's concern increased.
"Are they dead?"
"Most of them."
Fendor closed his eyes.
Kaylor looked over.
"What?"
"Nothing."
The driver stared at the road ahead.
His guards exchanged looks.
Then one of them recognized Peacemaker.
Another noticed the Oathbow.
Perhaps reputation accomplished what reassurance could not.
The wagon moved.
Slowly.
It crossed the exact center where the colors had appeared the day before.
Nothing happened.
No voices entered anyone's mind.
No tentacles tore through the dirt.
No blue dragon descended.
The wagon continued south.
All five heroes watched until it vanished behind the trees.
Isamu spoke first.
"One."
Kaylor nodded.
An hour later came another.
Then a pair of riders.
Then a farmer driving a cart loaded with something that smelled worse than the battlefield.
Each traveler hesitated.
Each crossed.
Each continued.
By midday, the crossroads had begun remembering what it was built for.
A place where roads met.
Nothing more.
That should have felt like victory.
Instead Hexen stood beside one of the abandoned wagons and looked at the empty driver's seat.
"We stopped the disappearances."
Kaylor leaned against the cart.
"Looks that way."
"We don't know where the people went."
"No."
"Or why they were taken."
"No."
"Or what that rider wanted."
"No."
"Or where the dragon went."
Fendor joined them.
"No."
Hexen looked toward him.
"You could contribute something besides agreement."
"I am confirming the quality of our investigation."
Nethnarel sat on the opposite side of the wagon with one boot propped against the wheel.
"We know more than that."
Everyone looked at her.
She counted on her fingers.
"Something broke Ragnap's tomb."
"Yes."
"Something freed the horned spirit inside the diamond."
"Yes."
"The tomb's guardians became corrupted after that happened."
"Yes."
"The swamp changed around the same time."
Hexen frowned.
That was the part he had been avoiding.
Not because it was wrong.
Because it was close enough to right to become dangerous.
The growth in the Moaning Waters had been recent.
Weeks.
Thomas Lightfoot had described the disappearances beginning weeks ago.
Ragnap had told them that the prison guarding the horned spirit had endured for thousands of years before something powerful came and broke it.
Separate events could happen close together.
They had learned that too.
But sometimes chronology was evidence.
Hexen looked toward the northern horizon, where the Moaning Waters lay beyond sight.
"The timing matches."
Fendor's expression sharpened.
"How closely?"
"Close enough."
Kaylor straightened.
"The thing gets out. People start disappearing."
"Approximately."
"And the swamp starts dying."
"Approximately."
Nethnarel looked toward the abandoned wagons.
"Then whatever was happening here probably started when the prison was broken."
Hexen nodded slowly.
"Probably."
Fendor crossed his arms.
"That is an unpleasant use of the word."
"It's the only one we have."
Kaylor looked south.
The wagon that had tested the road first was long gone.
"So we solved the how."
"No," Hexen said.
Kaylor glanced back.
"We killed the things taking people."
"We think."
"They stopped disappearing."
"Apparently."
Fendor smiled faintly.
"Hexen is enjoying this."
"I am not."
"You have discovered uncertainty."
"I have always known uncertainty."
"No. You used to become a bear and hit it."
Hexen considered.
"That was often effective."
Isamu looked at the deserted carts.
"What did they want the people for?"
That ended the humor.
No one knew.
They searched again before leaving.
Not because anyone expected evidence to appear simply because a battle had ended, but because walking away without trying would have been worse.
Fendor examined every wagon.
Cargo remained untouched.
One had carried tools. Another grain. Another cloth and household goods. There were coins hidden beneath one driver's bench that no ordinary bandit would have left behind.
Hexen searched the woods.
No trails of bodies.
No mass grave.
No animal disturbance suggesting large numbers of people had been dragged through the undergrowth.
Isamu followed the roads farther than the others.
Nothing.
Nethnarel examined the residue of the strange magic.
Very little remained.
The effect at the crossroads had not behaved like ordinary spellcraft to begin with. Now it was almost completely gone.
Kaylor studied the sky.
The dragon never returned.
By afternoon, there was nothing more to learn.
They decided to go to Hearthwaite.
Thomas Lightfoot had come from there.
If the road was truly open, his people deserved to know before the next rumor arrived ahead of them and turned success into something stranger.
Big Oak carried them.
The awakened tree had accepted travel again after sufficient sunlight and water, although Hexen suspected it remained offended by the Moaning Waters. Its enormous roots moved steadily along the road while the heroes rested among the platforms in its branches.
The journey gave them time to think.
That was unfortunate.
Kaylor sat with his back against the trunk.
Peacemaker lay beside him.
"Varietal."
The name sounded wrong when spoken quietly.
Fendor looked over.
"You remembered something?"
"No."
"Then stop saying it."
"I thought hearing it might help."
"It hasn't."
"Not yet."
Nethnarel stared through the branches.
The rider's voice remained easier to remember than the word itself.
Not because it had been loud.
Because of the way the invocation had changed the air.
A prayer.
That much seemed certain.
The dragon rider had not merely shouted the name while escaping.
He had called to Varietal.
Asked for aid.
Protection.
Power.
Something.
"The rider worships her," Nethnarel said.
Hexen looked up.
"Assuming Varietal is a her."
Nethnarel shrugged.
"The prayer felt like a goddess."
Kaylor glanced toward her.
"You were unconscious."
"Eventually."
"Fair."
Fendor rolled the name around once.
"Varietal."
Nothing.
Then his expression changed.
Not recognition.
Almost.
"I've heard it."
"So have I," Hexen said.
"Where?"
"If I knew that, we'd be finished."
"We've heard thousands of names."
Kaylor looked toward the horizon.
"Most don't arrive on dragons."
Hearthwaite was smaller than Oxland by an almost comical margin.
Calling it a town was generous.
The settlement clustered around one main road and several narrower ones, with low homes, gardens, workshops and fields stretching beyond them. Halflings dominated the population, though not exclusively. The entire place had the scale of a community built for people who knew most of their neighbors and had never expected legendary heroes to arrive riding in the branches of a walking oak.
The first child saw Big Oak.
The second saw Kaylor.
After that, privacy ended.
People emerged from homes.
A smith abandoned his work.
Farmers came in from nearby fields.
By the time Big Oak stopped outside the settlement, half of Hearthwaite seemed to have gathered.
Thomas Lightfoot pushed through them.
Relief transformed his face when he saw the heroes.
"You came back."
Kaylor climbed down.
"We said we would."
Thomas looked toward the road behind them.
"The crossroads?"
"Open."
The word passed through the crowd.
Not shouted.
Repeated.
Open.
Open.
Open.
The reaction surprised Hexen.
He had forgotten what an ordinary road could mean to ordinary people.
Trade.
Medicine.
Letters.
Relatives.
Food during a bad harvest.
Access to cities.
A way out if something went wrong.
The heroes had spent their lives crossing roads toward danger.
For Hearthwaite, that road was life.
Thomas looked at Kaylor.
"What was there?"
Kaylor opened his mouth.
Then stopped.
He looked toward Nethnarel.
Nethnarel looked at Hexen.
Hexen looked at Fendor.
Fendor sighed.
"Complicated."
Thomas waited.
"That doesn't sound good."
"It isn't," Fendor said. "But the road is usable."
"For now," Hexen added.
Fendor looked toward him.
"We were trying to make them feel better."
"They should know."
Thomas's expression tightened.
Kaylor took over.
"There were creatures at the crossing. Something affecting people's minds. Undead. A dragon."
Several people in the crowd reacted at once.
Thomas stared.
"A dragon?"
"Blue."
"Like Scourge?"
"No."
That answer came from Fendor immediately.
Everyone looked at him.
Fendor shook his head.
"Scourge was ancient. Enormous. This one was large, but nowhere near the same scale."
Kaylor smiled faintly.
"So a normal dragon."
Fendor stared.
"There is no useful meaning of normal in that sentence."
Thomas looked between them.
"You killed it?"
"No."
The relief vanished.
"It escaped," Kaylor said.
"With a rider."
Thomas absorbed that.
"Who?"
"We're working on that."
They questioned Hearthwaite for the rest of the afternoon.
Nobody had seen the dragon.
Nobody knew of blue dragons nesting nearby.
Nobody recognized the rider's description.
Nobody recognized the strange four-armed creatures from the crossroads.
The Pack Glitch—as the table's strange term for the dragon-riding being had begun to settle in their minds—meant nothing to the people of Hearthwaite.
Varietal meant nothing too.
Hexen asked the eldest villagers.
Nothing.
Nethnarel found a woman who kept books for the settlement.
No ancient references.
Fendor asked merchants who had traveled from farther west.
Blank looks.
For a moment Kaylor considered testing whether intimidation could improve scholarship.
He decided against it.
Mostly.
By evening they knew two things.
Travelers were successfully passing the crossroads again.
And Hearthwaite knew nothing about the enemy that had fled from it.
The first fact was enough for celebration.
The second kept the five heroes from sharing it fully.
Hearthwaite fed them anyway.
That part no one refused.
Several tables were moved outside because no single building could comfortably hold everyone who wanted to join them. Food appeared in quantities that made Kaylor reconsider whether halfling hospitality was actually a military strategy.
Fresh bread.
Roasted vegetables.
Meat.
Cheese.
Pies.
Then additional pies, apparently because someone had noticed the first group of pies and concluded their existence constituted an emergency shortage.
Fendor looked at the table.
"This may be why Thomas is shaped like that."
Thomas heard.
"I'm standing right here."
Fendor nodded.
"Evidence."
The evening became warmer than the heroes expected.
People asked about the crossroads.
Then about Scourge.
Then about stories they had heard over the years.
A boy asked Isamu whether he truly punched a dragon.
Isamu thought about it.
"Probably."
The boy's eyes widened.
Fendor looked over.
"Do not encourage this."
"You killed a giant king with one sword stroke."
"That happened."
"Then mine can happen too."
Kaylor laughed.
For a little while, the road was simply open.
That mattered.
Particularly because they knew it would not remain the entire story.
The next morning they left for Gildan.
If Hearthwaite had no knowledge of the blue dragon or its rider, a major city might.
Gildan sat far enough away that overland travel would ordinarily have consumed many days. Big Oak and magic shortened the journey. The heroes alternated between the awakened tree and flight when practical, cutting across terrain instead of following every bend in the road.
The country changed around them.
Small farms became larger holdings.
Traffic increased.
River routes appeared.
Trade wagons became common enough that seeing one no longer demanded attention.
Until they saw the one surrounded by tigers.
Fendor noticed first.
"Down."
Kaylor looked over the edge of Big Oak's platform.
A merchant caravan traveled along the road below.
Several wagons.
A handful of guards.
And shapes moving around them.
At first they looked like animals.
Large cats.
Then one stood upright.
Humanoid shoulders rose above a striped body. Hands held steel. Another creature shifted between a more bestial stance and something unsettlingly close to a man.
Weretigers.
The merchants were losing.
One guard already lay motionless beside a wagon.
Another fought with his back against a wheel while two striped attackers closed.
Nethnarel stood.
"Are we helping?"
Kaylor was already moving.
Fendor sighed.
"Apparently."
They descended at dusk.
There was no great cosmic mystery in the encounter.
That almost felt refreshing.
The weretigers were thieves.
Competent thieves.
Dangerous enough that the merchants would not have survived without intervention.
But after Ragnap's tomb and the crossroads, the fight felt brutally comprehensible.
Isamu reached the road first.
One weretiger turned toward him with a roar.
Isamu struck.
The creature's head snapped sideways.
It recovered quickly.
Isamu hit again and tried to interrupt the movement of its body completely.
The weretiger resisted.
That interested him.
"Good."
The creature probably interpreted the word incorrectly.
It attacked.
Isamu moved.
Nethnarel chose fire.
She had nearly reached the point where fire felt less like a spell choice and more like punctuation.
The first blast forced several weretigers away from the wagons.
One changed shape completely, dropping to four legs and racing toward her.
Fendor put an arrow into the road directly before it.
The creature swerved.
The second arrow struck.
Kaylor landed near the merchants.
"Behind the wagons."
A surviving guard stared at him.
Kaylor's red eyes probably did not improve the order.
"Now."
The guard moved.
Hexen entered the fight in a form that made every sensible predator reconsider its decisions.
The druid expanded.
Horn and muscle replaced his human body.
A triceratops struck the road hard enough to shake dust from the wagons.
The nearest weretiger stopped.
Fendor saw the hesitation.
"Correct response."
The weretiger attacked anyway.
Fendor revised his assessment.
Hexen charged.
Several tons of druid met werecat.
The result favored Hexen.
Wolves joined him.
Summoned shapes rushed along the roadside, breaking the thieves' attempt to surround the caravan. One weretiger turned on them and killed a wolf. Another joined.
The pack answered.
The road dissolved into claws, arrows, flame and dust.
Isamu found one of the stronger weretigers.
It came at him with a scimitar.
He avoided the first cut.
The second scored his clothing.
Isamu answered with the Flame Tongue weapon he still carried alongside his own more familiar methods of violence.
Fire ran along the blade.
The weretiger recoiled.
Isamu struck.
Then deliberately changed the angle of the next blow.
Not killing.
Disabling.
The creature went down.
Alive.
"Keep that one," Isamu said.
Kaylor heard.
"Why?"
"Questions."
Kaylor looked toward the remaining attackers.
"Good."
The fight turned.
Weretigers died.
Others fled.
Hexen trampled one that made the unfortunate choice of continuing to fight a triceratops.
Nethnarel divided Scorching Rays between two attackers.
Fendor's arrows cut down another before it reached the merchant wagons.
The surviving thieves understood eventually.
Two broke away.
One shifted fully into tiger form and ran with a speed that made pursuit possible but annoying.
Fendor raised the bow.
Then lowered it.
"Let them."
Kaylor looked toward Isamu's prisoner.
"We have one."
The merchants emerged when silence returned.
Two guards were dead.
Several others were wounded.
The surviving traders stared at the heroes with the same expression Kaylor had seen in Hearthwaite.
Recognition mixed with disbelief.
One merchant looked at Hexen.
Hexen was still a triceratops.
The merchant looked toward Kaylor instead.
"Thank you."
Kaylor nodded toward the dead guards.
"We were late."
The merchant followed his gaze.
There was no answer to that.
Victory did not always arrive in time for everyone.
That had not changed during the peaceful years.
They questioned the prisoner after he woke.
Kaylor handled most of that.
Fendor stood nearby.
Nethnarel stayed where the weretiger could see her hands.
Hexen returned to human form.
Isamu watched quietly.
The prisoner looked at the five of them.
Then at the bodies of his companions.
His confidence lasted approximately thirty seconds.
"Why attack the merchants?" Kaylor asked.
The weretiger smiled.
"Why do you think?"
"Money."
"Very good."
Fendor glanced toward Kaylor.
"Excellent interrogation."
Kaylor ignored him.
"Where are you from?"
The prisoner said nothing.
Kaylor's eyes brightened.
Peacemaker remained on the ground beside him.
He did not need it.
The weretiger swallowed.
"We travel."
"From where?"
Silence.
Fear entered the conversation.
Not ordinary intimidation.
Magic.
The prisoner fought it briefly.
Then failed.
Whatever defiance remained inside him collapsed.
His body lowered.
His voice changed.
"Don't kill me."
Kaylor crouched.
"Answer."
The words came quickly after that.
They were not lone highwaymen.
They belonged to a larger thieves' organization operating from Gildan.
More than the prisoner could count.
He had personally seen perhaps fifty.
The number interested Fendor.
"Forty-three now."
The weretiger looked at him.
Fendor offered no explanation.
"Where?"
The prisoner hesitated.
The fear tightened.
He answered.
The guild operated near the river docks.
He gave streets.
Crossings.
Landmarks.
The information was specific enough that even if several details were false, they now had a place to start.
Kaylor was about to dismiss him when Hexen noticed something.
Not the weretiger.
A word.
Earlier.
During the fight.
Or perhaps immediately before surrender.
Something spoken beneath the roar and steel.
"Wait."
Kaylor looked toward him.
Hexen stepped closer.
"What did you say?"
The prisoner stared.
"When?"
"During the fight."
"I said many things."
"You prayed."
The weretiger became still.
There.
Fendor saw it too.
"To whom?"
The prisoner looked away.
Fear made the answer easier.
"Varietal."
The name entered the evening.
Everything else disappeared.
The merchant wagons.
The bodies.
The road.
Hexen heard the dragon rider again.
The magically amplified voice crossing the sky.
Varietal.
He had known the name.
Not consciously.
Somewhere beneath memory, it had been waiting.
The ancient histories.
Grazim.
That was the key.
Grazim.
Not the cleric who had died with them.
Something connected to him.
Someone he had spoken of.
A divine patron.
A figure the heroes had once referred to by another title because titles were easier than names.
Hexen closed his eyes.
The memory moved.
Not enough.
Fendor spoke.
"The Naked Goddess."
Hexen's eyes opened.
Nethnarel turned.
"What?"
Fendor stared at the prisoner.
The words seemed to surprise him as much as anyone.
"The Naked Goddess."
Hexen felt the final piece move.
"Yes."
Kaylor's expression hardened.
"You know that?"
"Now I do."
He looked at the others.
"Varietal was her name."
Nethnarel searched her own memory.
The Naked Goddess.
A divine being connected to Grazim.
Old descriptions were inconsistent because gods and angels accumulated stories more easily than facts.
But the association remained.
Hexen remembered more.
"She was celestial."
Fendor looked toward him.
"A goddess?"
"Maybe."
"That is not an answer."
"An angel. Or something that was once an angel."
The distinction mattered less than another word emerging with it.
Fallen.
Hexen said it aloud.
"Fallen."
The weretiger remained kneeling.
Kaylor looked down at him.
"You worship her?"
"She is the goddess."
"Of thieves?"
"No."
"Weretigers?"
The prisoner shook his head.
"I don't know."
Fendor stared.
"You pray to a goddess you know nothing about."
The weretiger looked almost offended despite the fear.
"Do you know everything about yours?"
Kaylor's expression changed.
Fendor noticed.
So did Hexen.
Craven had made that question more dangerous than the prisoner understood.
Kaylor stood.
"We're done."
He took a blade.
Not to kill.
The weretiger recoiled.
Kaylor caught him by the head.
One quick cut marked the skin of his forehead.
A scar.
Visible.
Memorable.
"If I see you attacking travelers again, you won't get another conversation."
The prisoner nodded frantically.
"Go."
The weretiger stared.
Kaylor pointed west.
"Go."
He ran.
For a few moments he remained humanoid.
Then his form changed.
The tiger that emerged moved astonishingly quickly toward Gildan.
Isamu watched.
"I could catch him."
Kaylor shook his head.
"No."
Fendor looked west.
"He's going to the city."
"Yes."
"Where the thieves' guild is."
"Yes."
"And we've just warned them we're coming."
Kaylor smiled.
"Also yes."
Fendor considered that.
"All right."
The merchants continued toward Gildan with them.
Nobody particularly wanted to separate after the attack.
The road followed the river eventually, and trade traffic thickened as they drew closer to the city. Barges moved along the water. Warehouses appeared first, then farms serving the surrounding population, then walls rising across the plains.
Gildan was not ancient.
Not by the standards of the places they knew.
Elven cities had roots reaching into ages most humans treated as myth. Dwarven halls had foundations cut when kingdoms now forgotten had still possessed names.
Gildan was human.
It had grown quickly because people needed it to.
Stone walls.
Broad gates.
River docks.
Merchant districts.
Towers built for practicality first and grandeur afterward.
The city sprawled across the plain with the confidence of a place still becoming itself.
Kaylor looked at the walls.
He had been here before.
All of them had.
After the Temple of the Swarm.
After they returned as heroes.
Gildan had celebrated them along with the other kingdoms.
That seemed like another life already.
Fendor moved beside him.
"So."
Kaylor waited.
"We started because a halfling said people were disappearing."
"Yes."
"We fixed the road."
"For now."
"We discovered an ancient diamond prison had been broken."
"Yes."
"Something serving an ancient evil escaped."
"Yes."
"A blue dragon attacked us."
"Yes."
"With a Pack Glitch riding it."
"Apparently."
"Who prayed to the Naked Goddess."
"Varietal."
"And we have a thieves' guild full of weretigers somewhere near the docks."
Kaylor looked toward the city gates.
"Busy week."
Fendor sighed.
"Several years of peace were nice."
Kaylor did not answer immediately.
He looked back.
The road stretched east behind them.
Somewhere far beyond sight lay Hearthwaite.
The Crossroads.
The Moaning Waters.
A Linnar tree growing over the tomb of Ragnap the Strong.
An empty prison that had remained sealed for thousands of years.
The old adventure had not returned.
That was becoming clear.
This was not Scourge.
Not the Swarm Lord.
Not Craven reaching from the grave.
The names were new.
The questions were new.
And one of them had just remembered a name that belonged to something much older.
Varietal.
The Naked Goddess.
The gates of Gildan opened before them.
People recognized the Heroes of Oxland.
Guards straightened.
Voices spread through those waiting to enter.
Kaylor felt the old weight settle around them again.
Reputation.
Expectation.
Responsibility.
For several years they had been able to become people.
Now the world had started calling them heroes again.
Kaylor rested one hand near Peacemaker and walked through the gates.
Behind him came Isamu, Nethnarel, Hexen and Fendor.
Five.
Ahead waited a city that might know where the dragon had come from.
Or what a Pack Glitch was.
Or why servants of a fallen goddess had begun moving through the world at the same time an ancient prison was broken open.
Fendor glanced toward Hexen.
"Varietal."
Hexen nodded.
This time the name did not slip away.
And with that remembered name, the mystery of the crossroads became something larger.