The Path did not begin with a temple.
It began with crates.
Kaylor stopped beneath the first low arch and stared at a stack of wooden boxes piled against an ancient wall.
Behind him, Fendor stepped through the blue-lit passage and came to the same conclusion.
“This seems insufficiently divine.”
The corridor they had followed from the buried threshold had twisted upward and sideways through old stone until the architecture changed around them. The walls were still ancient—older than modern Gildan, perhaps older than several versions of Gildan—but someone had been using them.
Recently.
Barrels stood against carved pillars. Rope hung from iron hooks. Crates had been stacked in alcoves where religious statuary or ceremonial objects might once have stood. Lanterns had been fixed into places never intended to hold them.
The room had the unsettling appearance of history converted into storage.
Hexen ran his fingers along one wall.
“This stone is old.”
Fendor looked at the crates.
“Those aren’t.”
“No.”
Nethnarel peered farther into the gloom.
“So somebody found this place before we did.”
Isamu looked at Kaylor.
“Thieves?”
Kaylor thought of the weretiger they had interrogated on the road.
The frightened prisoner had given them directions to a guild operating near Gildan’s docks. They had come below the city following something far older, but cities had a habit of letting unrelated secrets collide underground.
“Would explain the boxes.”
“Or exceptionally organized cultists,” Fendor said.
Kaylor stepped forward.
A thread snapped against his shin.
Nethnarel saw it.
“Kaylor.”
He stopped.
The strand was almost invisible, stretched only inches above the floor.
It had already broken.
Everyone stared at it.
Kaylor looked down.
“That was there before.”
“Yes.”
“Important?”
“Probably.”
Nothing happened.
No blade swept from the wall.
No stone dropped.
No fire erupted.
They waited.
Still nothing.
Fendor slowly looked at Kaylor.
“Excellent.”
“I didn’t see it.”
“That was the problem.”
“I set it off and we’re alive.”
“That is not the same thing as successfully disarming a trap.”
Kaylor stepped over the remains of the wire.
“Seems close.”
They had gone another twenty paces when a man appeared from between two rows of crates.
He carried no drawn weapon.
That did not make him harmless.
He wore dark leather, a short cloak and enough concealed pockets to make his profession apparent before he opened his mouth. A bow rested over one shoulder. A dagger rode one hip. His eyes moved quickly across the five heroes, counting weapons and exits.
“What are you doing down here?”
Kaylor smiled.
The man did not.
“How did you find this place?”
Nethnarel moved before Kaylor answered.
Her appearance changed subtly.
Not enough to become someone else entirely.
Enough.
The hard lines of her tiefling features softened. Her expression warmed. The shape of her face shifted toward an ideal that existed entirely inside the thief’s preferences, as though his own imagination had been invited to finish the spell.
Fendor watched the man’s posture change.
“Oh, that’s cruel.”
Nethnarel smiled.
The thief relaxed.
Only slightly.
That was enough.
“We’re looking for something,” she said.
His attention remained on her.
“What?”
“A very old part of the city.”
The thief glanced at the walls.
“Most of this is old.”
“Older.”
He hesitated.
Then made a low whistle.
A hand gesture followed.
Movement stopped in the shadows farther away.
Other thieves.
They had been watching.
Kaylor looked toward the darkness.
The first man noticed.
“No one’s looking for a fight.”
“Good,” Kaylor said.
Nethnarel shot him a look.
Kaylor folded his arms.
She returned to the thief.
They asked about the Pack Glitch.
Nothing.
Varietal.
Nothing useful.
The ancient presence the Grand Sage’s research had placed beneath this part of Gildan.
The man looked increasingly confused.
“This has been ours for generations.”
“Yours?”
“The guild’s.”
That explained the crates.
He swept one hand around the chamber.
“Warehouse. Storage. Whatever you want to call it. My grandfather knew this place. His grandfather knew it. We’ve used these tunnels longer than anyone remembers.”
“And you’ve never found anything beneath them?” Hexen asked.
The thief frowned.
“Beneath them?”
“Old doors. Sealed passages. Symbols.”
“We find old things all the time.”
“What kind?”
“Stone. Broken statues. Rooms nobody uses.”
Fendor looked around.
“Apparently rooms somebody uses.”
The thief shrugged.
“We don’t care who built it.”
That, Hexen thought, explained why the thieves had managed to occupy the ruins for generations without learning what they were standing inside.
They had never asked.
For them, history was architecture.
Walls were useful because they remained standing.
A room was valuable if it stayed dry.
An old mystery that did not contain gold was simply wasted storage space.
The thief followed them as they explored.
Nethnarel’s glamour helped.
So did the fact that the five intruders were recognizable once anyone looked carefully enough.
Nobody in the guild seemed eager to tell the Heroes of Oxland they were trespassing.
They reached the first statue near the western wall.
Fendor stopped.
The figure stood nearly twice life-size.
Time had damaged the stone, but not enough.
An elaborate cloak fell from narrow shoulders. One hand held something resembling a parasol. Around the statue’s feet, later stonework—or perhaps corruption added by another sculptor—showed twisting tentacles curling upward.
Fendor stared.
Nethnarel stared.
Hexen’s face changed.
Kaylor looked between them.
“You know him.”
Fendor walked closer.
“I knew him.”
Isamu studied the statue.
“Who?”
There were memories older than the lives they currently inhabited.
That remained difficult to explain even among themselves.
Before their awakening into the age that had eventually produced Scourge, Craven and the Swarm Lord, some of them had lived before. Not metaphorically. Not through inherited stories.
They had histories.
Companions.
Conflicts.
People whose names sometimes surfaced with the weight of dreams.
“Leonidas,” Hexen said.
The name felt strange in the buried room.
Fendor circled the statue.
“He had the parasol.”
Nethnarel looked at him.
“That is what convinces you?”
“I remember the parasol.”
Kaylor studied the tentacles carved around the statue’s legs.
“Was that part of him too?”
“No.”
Fendor’s humor faded.
At least, he did not remember it that way.
The twisting shapes had the wrong character. They transformed the old companion into something stranger, something touched by imagery the heroes had seen more recently.
Tentacles.
Ancient powers.
Things that preferred patrons, pacts and names.
Hexen searched the base.
Nothing moved.
No hidden compartment opened.
No magical revelation rewarded them.
Only the face of someone they had once known remained in the stone.
They found the second statue farther east.
This one required no argument.
It was Hexen Brew.
Twelve feet of Hexen Brew.
Kaylor looked at the statue.
Then at Hexen.
Then back at the statue.
“They improved you.”
Hexen stared at him.
“The stone version is quieter,” Fendor said.
Hexen ignored both.
The likeness was too exact to dismiss.
Not merely the face.
The clothing.
The posture.
Tiny details worked into the carving belonged to a version of Hexen that should have been separated from this place by centuries.
Perhaps far longer.
The thieves had stored crates beside it.
Generations of criminals had walked past his face without recognizing the man whose likeness watched their warehouse.
Isamu touched the stone base.
“Who built this?”
Nobody knew.
Kaylor moved around the statue.
Something looked wrong.
It took Fendor longer to see it.
A clasp.
Or perhaps a decorative fastening worked into the statue’s clothing.
On Hexen himself it would have faced one direction.
Here it had been carved backward.
“That.”
Hexen followed his gaze.
“What?”
“The buckle.”
Fendor leaned closer.
“He’s right.”
Kaylor put one hand on the stone ornament.
Fendor immediately said, “Wait.”
Kaylor turned it.
A tremendous crash answered from the south.
The thieves shouted.
Several fled before the heroes even moved.
Stone shook beneath their boots.
Dust fell from the ceiling.
Somewhere beyond the crates, an entire section of floor collapsed.
The five heroes ran toward the sound.
The thief who had been so fascinated by Nethnarel followed for perhaps half the distance.
Then he saw what had opened.
His fascination ended.
A broad portion of the warehouse floor had fallen away into black water.
What remained formed a ring around a raised central structure that had been hidden beneath newer stonework. A narrow route of old masonry reached toward it.
At the center stood an altar-like platform.
A pale flame had awakened there.
Not ordinary fire.
Light without fuel.
Ancient.
The other thieves stared from a safe distance.
One muttered something.
Then ran.
His companions followed.
Nethnarel watched them leave.
“Do we tell them we’ll lock up?”
“No,” Kaylor said.
They approached the central platform.
Water filled the newly exposed space around it.
Deep water.
Their lights vanished into it before reaching the bottom.
Hexen cast the magic that made the surface support them, and the group crossed without testing whatever else might be living below.
Four symbols surrounded the central light.
Kaylor crouched beside the first.
Old language.
Older than the city above.
He recognized enough.
“Wind.”
Another symbol represented earth.
Another water.
Another fire.
Fendor looked at the four.
“Subtle.”
Kaylor stepped onto the wind symbol.
Nothing happened.
He blew on it.
Still nothing.
Nethnarel smiled.
“Powerful.”
Hexen moved to the fire mark.
Flame appeared in his hand.
He lowered it.
The symbol accepted it.
The fire remained after his spell should have ended.
All five heroes went still.
“One,” Isamu said.
For earth, they found soil among the newer storage areas.
Hexen placed a handful upon the ancient mark.
Green shoots appeared.
Small at first.
Then several thin leaves unfurled from barren dirt.
“Two.”
Water came from the pool surrounding them.
When it touched the matching symbol, the ancient stone darkened and began to glow beneath the surface.
“Three.”
Wind took longer.
They experimented.
Breath had not been enough.
Movement was not enough.
Eventually magic answered the old word in the language it had been waiting to hear.
The fourth symbol awakened.
Nothing happened.
Fendor waited.
“That feels disappointing.”
The water moved.
Hexen looked down.
Something pale passed beneath his feet.
Then another.
Bones.
The first skeleton came from the pool carrying a scimitar.
Fendor already had his bow drawn.
His arrow struck the creature before it finished climbing.
Kaylor moved forward.
More shapes rose.
Some carried blades.
Others lifted skeletal hands and released narrow bolts from their fingers.
One dart of strange energy passed Kaylor’s head.
Another struck stone.
Isamu moved into them.
Flame ran along his weapon as he broke the first creature apart.
It should have fallen.
Instead, the pieces scattered toward the edge.
Finger bones skittered.
A rib rolled.
The skull bounced twice and vanished into the pool.
Isamu stared.
“It’s going back.”
Another skeleton collapsed under Fendor’s blade.
Its bones followed.
Not drifting.
Moving.
Fendor saw it.
“Stop those.”
Isamu put one foot on a femur.
The bone twisted beneath him.
Smaller pieces scattered around his boot.
“What are they doing?”
Hexen knew only that he disliked the answer.
Nethnarel rose into the air.
Flaming wings spread from her back, shedding orange light across the black water.
The skeletal warriors continued climbing.
She lifted the Staff of Power.
Fire exploded across two of them.
They broke apart.
Every fragment fled toward the pool.
“That is definitely not good,” Fendor said.
Hexen raised the Staff of the Woodlands.
Thorns erupted across part of the platform.
The wall caught several undead and crushed them inside living briars.
Bones cracked.
Then began working free.
One by one.
Returning to the water.
Kaylor smashed another apart.
“Keep killing them.”
“We are,” Fendor said.
“They keep leaving.”
“Then kill them faster.”
That was, unfortunately, a strategy Kaylor could usually make work.
The fight became a furious circle around the ancient elemental platform.
Isamu drove through the undead at close range.
Fendor abandoned the bow when the creatures crowded him and brought out the Vorpal Longsword.
Nethnarel attacked from above.
Hexen’s thorns divided the battlefield.
Kaylor held the center.
One skeleton after another fell.
And every time, the pieces returned to the water.
By the end, Isamu was trying to physically catch them.
A hand skittered between his feet.
He stamped.
The hand broke apart into smaller bones.
Those moved too.
He watched several tiny fragments throw themselves into the pool.
“That’s ridiculous.”
The last skeleton collapsed.
Its ribs separated.
The bones slid over the edge.
Water swallowed them.
Silence lasted one heartbeat.
Then the pool began to boil.
Everyone moved away from the edge.
Bubbles broke the surface.
The water churned harder.
Bones appeared beneath it.
Thousands.
Tens of thousands.
Every piece they had destroyed was returning.
And there were far more waiting below.
The water erupted.
A hurricane of dead things rose from the pool.
There was no skeleton inside it.
No single body.
The creature was motion.
A vast, whirling mass of bones turning around an invisible center. Skulls spun among ribs. Vertebrae became chains. Arms and legs flashed through the vortex.
It towered above the platform.
Nethnarel climbed higher.
Hexen was not fast enough.
The storm struck him.
Bones hammered his body from every direction and threw him sideways.
Kaylor entered the storm.
Fendor stared.
“Of course he did.”
Kaylor’s axe came around.
Holy and unholy power had become complicated things in his hands over the years, but whatever remained of his old divine violence still knew what to do with the dead.
The blow tore a gap through the spinning mass.
Bones exploded outward.
More immediately filled the space.
Fendor crossed the water.
The Vorpal Longsword did not find a neck because there was no neck to find.
It did not need one.
The blade carved through the storm with unnatural efficiency, splintering old remains into powder.
Hexen retaliated with cold.
Ice and sleet tore across the upper portion of the creature.
For a moment the bones slowed beneath a shell of frost.
Then the storm broke free.
Nethnarel gathered green energy between her hands.
The ray struck the center.
Disintegration did what steel could not.
A broad section simply ceased to exist.
The creature staggered without possessing legs.
Kaylor hit it again.
Fendor followed.
Hexen changed tactics.
Sunlight erupted underground.
The brilliance filled the chamber with the force of noon.
Ancient bones bleached white.
Some cracked.
Others became dust.
The hurricane diminished.
But it did not stop.
It struck at them one last time.
Then Isamu stepped through the spinning debris.
He had spent most of the fight looking for a center that did not exist.
At last he found something close enough.
One small bone rotated near the heart of the storm.
A finger.
Perhaps a toe.
He struck it.
The bone snapped.
For one absurd instant, nothing happened.
Then the entire creature collapsed.
Thousands of bones fell out of the air at once.
Kaylor raised an arm over his head.
Fendor turned away.
Hexen disappeared beneath a clattering shower of the dead.
Isamu stood in the center of it.
When the noise ended, he looked around.
“I got it.”
Fendor lowered his arm.
“You broke its finger.”
“It worked.”
The bones began moving again.
Everyone stared.
“No,” Nethnarel said.
But they were not reforming.
The fragments slid toward the water.
One after another.
The great heap dissolved across the platform, streaming into the pool until nothing remained.
The last tiny bone vanished.
Then the elemental symbols rose.
Earth.
Water.
Fire.
Wind.
The stones lifted from the platform and began rotating slowly around the pale central flame.
The pool drained.
Not lowered.
Drained.
Water spiraled downward through openings none of them had seen.
The stone beneath the heroes trembled.
Fendor looked at Kaylor.
“Do not touch anything.”
“I’m not.”
The entire platform descended.
They moved toward the edges.
There were no edges anymore.
The ancient mechanism carried them downward as smoothly as a lift, the rotating elemental stones descending with them.
Above, the thieves’ warehouse slowly disappeared.
The last visible lantern became a star.
Then nothing.
“How far does this go?” Isamu asked.
Nobody knew.
It went far enough that they rested.
There was time.
More than enough.
The descent became measured not in feet but in the gradual healing of wounds, the slowing of breath and the growing certainty that they had left Gildan’s sewers far behind.
The air grew colder.
Then colder again.
Hexen looked upward.
No light.
No warehouse.
No city.
They had been descending nearly an hour when the platform finally slowed.
The walls had widened around them until their darkvision could no longer find the limits of the shaft.
Ice appeared first.
Crystalline formations covered the stone.
Long frozen columns descended from above.
Others rose beneath them.
The platform settled into a shallow pool only a few inches deep.
The elemental stones stopped turning.
The central flame went out.
Cold filled the silence.
Fendor stepped away from the platform.
“Going back may be inconvenient.”
Kaylor looked upward.
“Later.”
“That’s what you always say about exits.”
The cavern stretched beyond sight.
Ice caught their light in pale blue reflections.
A natural bridge crossed one narrow section like a spiderweb made of frozen glass.
Water covered much of the floor in a thin sheet.
Then Isamu heard something.
He raised one hand.
The others stopped.
From the north came a mechanical sound.
Deep.
Metal grinding against metal.
Something awakening.
They followed it.
The object emerged from darkness slowly.
At first Fendor thought it was a pillar.
Then their light climbed it.
Gold had been worked into the surface.
Not decoration alone.
Bands of metal disappeared upward until the cavern ceiling swallowed them. Stone had grown around parts of the structure, as though the earth itself had spent centuries—or millennia—trying unsuccessfully to bury it.
The cylinder was enormous.
And covered in words.
Thousands of them.
Different scripts.
Different alphabets.
Languages from kingdoms that still existed.
Languages none of them recognized.
Languages Kaylor had seen only in old religious texts.
Some inscriptions were carved into individual stone or metal tiles set into tracks.
Others formed rings around the cylinder.
Nethnarel approached.
“What is this?”
Kaylor did not answer.
He was reading.
Not all of it.
Enough.
His eyes stopped on one tile.
Hexen noticed.
“What?”
Kaylor pointed.
The inscription was written in an old tongue.
But the name required no translation once he understood it.
“Hexen Brew.”
Nobody spoke.
Hexen stepped closer.
His own name had been carved into a mechanism buried beneath Gildan long before the modern city existed.
Fendor looked upward along the cylinder.
“There are others.”
Kaylor examined the tracks.
One tile could be moved.
Slowly.
The ancient mechanism resisted at first, then yielded.
He slid the stone bearing Hexen’s name downward.
Near the base of the cylinder waited a narrow recess.
One of five.
The tile settled into it.
Something turned deep inside the machine.
A single metallic note passed through the cavern.
Isamu stared at the remaining spaces.
“Five.”
Kaylor was already searching again.
The languages changed as he moved around the cylinder.
Draconic.
Celestial.
Older forms.
Fragments he knew.
Fragments he almost knew.
Then he found another name.
He stopped.
The others knew something had changed before he spoke.
Kaylor touched the tile.
The letters were old.
The name was not.
“Grazim Von.”
The frozen cavern seemed to become quieter.
No one made the joke that would normally have followed.
No one suggested coincidence.
Grazim had been dead for years.
Dead meant dead.
They had learned to live with that because they had been forced to.
But here, beneath a city built over cities, inside machinery old enough that the cavern itself had grown around it, someone had carved Grazim’s name beside Hexen’s.
Fendor stepped closer.
“How old?”
Hexen looked at the gold buried inside the stone.
“Older than us.”
Nethnarel shook her head.
“Not all of us.”
That was the problem.
Some of them had histories that reached farther back than their current lives.
Leonidas had already been waiting in stone above.
Hexen had found his own face.
Now the machine knew Grazim.
Kaylor looked at the other thousands of names.
Then at the three empty recesses.
Somewhere inside the cylinder, metal shifted.
A second note sounded.
And from somewhere far out in the frozen dark came the faint, unmistakable sound of something moving across the ice.