The music stopped.
Fendor noticed because he had spent the last hour wishing it would.
The final metallic construct lay in pieces beneath Hexen’s wolves. Thin smoke rose from its ruptured shell. Somewhere inside the wreckage, a small gear continued turning without anything left for it to move, producing a soft mechanical click every few seconds.
Around them, the strange armory smelled of scorched metal and lightning.
But the waltz was gone.
Fendor turned toward the corridor.
“That seems worse.”
Kaylor wiped a black streak from Peacemaker’s blade.
“What?”
“The music.”
“You complained about the music.”
“Yes.”
“And now it stopped.”
“Yes.”
Kaylor waited.
Fendor gestured toward the dark passage.
“Try to keep up.”
Nethnarel leaned on the Staff of Power while the last tremor of lightning left her hands. The weapon had almost nothing left to give. She could feel that as clearly as she could feel exhaustion in her own body.
“One charge,” she reminded them.
Kaylor nodded.
“Then save it.”
“That was my intention.”
“You used most of it on metal balls.”
“They were shooting lightning through us.”
“They’re dead.”
“Because I shot lightning through them.”
Fendor slid the Vorpal Longsword back into its sheath.
“I support her reasoning.”
He still looked slightly pleased with himself.
The blade had finally answered the enchantment worked through its sheath and cut one of the constructs apart with the impossible perfection he had been waiting to see since gaining it.
Isamu looked at the scattered pieces.
“You killed one.”
Fendor turned.
“I killed it exceptionally.”
“I killed more.”
“That is because apparently you count.”
“I finish things.”
Kaylor groaned.
“Not this again.”
Hexen returned to human form.
The Cloak of the Moon flowed out of the transformation with him, settling across his shoulders as though it had always been there. The magic inside it still felt new. Not foreign. That would have been easier.
Familiar.
The Path had known the cloak belonged to him.
It had known his name.
It had known Grazim’s.
And when Fendor, Hexen and Nethnarel passed the golden door, something hidden in the ancient machinery had spoken directly into their minds.
Masters, you have returned.
Then—
Something is foul.
Something is wrong.
Hexen looked toward the corridor.
The absence of the waltz made those words louder.
“We should move.”
Fendor stared at him.
“You too?”
“The constructs were guarding something.”
“Or stored here.”
“Same result.”
“That is exactly the sort of reasoning Kaylor uses.”
Kaylor started walking.
“Good reasoning.”
Fendor sighed and followed.
The wolves went first.
They disliked the place.
That was not unusual. Animals tended to recognize things civilized people required considerable scholarship to become properly frightened of. What bothered Hexen was the way they moved now.
Earlier they had sniffed corners, prowled ahead, occasionally stopped to investigate scents left by things long gone.
Now their heads remained low.
Their hackles stayed raised.
They did not explore.
They tracked.
There was something ahead.
The corridor narrowed before bending back toward the center of the structure. The walls remained decorated with the same disturbing relief work they had seen elsewhere: bodies stretched into impossible shapes, tentacles woven through limbs, faces caught halfway between ecstasy and torment.
The figurines had been worse because they could be held.
The walls were worse because they could not be escaped.
Nethnarel stopped beside one carving.
A woman knelt in profile.
Something winged stood behind her.
Time had destroyed most of the upper figure, leaving only fragments of stone where its face should have been.
Tentacles curled around both.
Nethnarel stared a moment longer.
Kaylor noticed.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“That means something.”
“It means I don’t know.”
Fendor looked at the ruined relief.
“The Naked Goddess?”
“Maybe.”
“Pack Glitch?”
“Maybe.”
“Ancient cult dedicated to extremely poor decorating decisions?”
Nethnarel smiled faintly.
“Most likely.”
They continued.
The corridor opened onto a gallery overlooking the chamber Nethnarel had first seen through the glass roof.
Blue light filled it.
From outside, the overgrowth had hidden nearly everything. From within, the scale became apparent.
The room had once been beautiful.
That was the worst part.
Iron frames arched overhead, supporting the remnants of an enormous glass ceiling. Plants filled stepped gardens below. Narrow channels crossed the floor where water had once flowed. Stone benches curved around dry fountains. Even beneath centuries of neglect, Hexen could see that whoever created the place had intended life to flourish there.
Something else had flourished instead.
Vines as thick as ropes strangled the railings.
Roots split the stone.
Pale fungi grew in sheets along the walls.
And among them were the things Nethnarel had mistaken for vines from above.
Tentacles.
Some were dead.
Or dormant.
Or perhaps merely still.
They twisted through the garden in great red-black lengths, wrapping pillars and disappearing beneath the soil. Several had grown through the iron supports of the glass ceiling as though flesh and architecture had fused together.
Blue light came from below.
Not above.
A broad glow rose through cracks in the central garden and washed everything in cold color.
Isamu leaned over the railing.
“Down there.”
Kaylor nodded.
The wolves did not.
Hexen whistled softly.
They reluctantly followed.
The staircase into the garden had partially collapsed. Isamu crossed the broken section without slowing. Nethnarel flew. Fendor jumped farther than he particularly enjoyed admitting he could. Kaylor simply stepped onto the damaged stone until something strong enough remained beneath him.
Hexen looked at the gap.
Then at Kaylor.
“Subtle.”
“You were a bear ten minutes ago.”
“Yes.”
“You pulled a flying machine out of the air with a vine.”
“Thorn.”
“Whatever.”
Fendor turned from below.
“Are you two coming?”
They descended.
The blue illumination changed near the center.
It was not a single source.
Lines of it ran beneath the garden.
Old channels.
Perhaps magical.
Perhaps something stranger.
Roots had broken into them over centuries, and wherever plant growth entered the glowing seams, the leaves turned almost translucent.
Hexen crouched.
One wolf came beside him and whined.
He did not touch the light.
“Magic?”
Nethnarel extended one hand.
Her expression tightened.
“Yes.”
“What kind?”
“Yes.”
Fendor nodded.
“Excellent.”
“It’s old.”
“So is Kaylor.”
Kaylor looked back.
“Keep walking.”
They reached another burned mark.
This one was smaller than the summoning symbol outside.
Older too.
Not ancient.
But older than a month.
Several overlapping circles had been scorched into the stone at different times. Some had nearly disappeared. Others remained distinct beneath dirt and creeping growth.
Nethnarel examined them.
“More than one ritual.”
Hexen looked around the garden.
“Over how long?”
“No idea.”
“Recent?”
“Some.”
Kaylor drew Peacemaker.
Fendor watched him.
“You think the circle is going to attack?”
“No.”
“Then why—”
One of the tentacles moved.
Fendor drew the Oathbow.
“I withdraw the question.”
The thing had been wrapped around a dead tree near the edge of the garden.
At first it shifted only slightly.
Then the end lifted from the ground.
No eyes opened.
No mouth appeared.
It simply turned toward them.
The wolves growled.
The tentacle withdrew.
Not quickly.
Not frightened.
It slid backward through the vegetation and vanished beneath an archway on the far side of the chamber.
The same direction as the wolves’ scent.
Kaylor moved.
Fendor caught his shoulder.
“Wait.”
Kaylor looked at the hand.
Then at Fendor.
“You are physically restraining me now?”
“I wanted the experience.”
“Finished?”
“Yes.”
Fendor released him.
Kaylor headed after the tentacle.
“So worth it,” Fendor said.
The archway led away from the ruined garden.
Beyond it, the structure became less ceremonial.
The rooms were smaller.
More functional.
Tables.
Storage.
Sleeping chambers with furniture long since rotted.
Several doors had been opened recently.
Dust showed it.
So did footprints.
Not clear enough to count.
Not clear enough to identify.
Clear enough to matter.
Nethnarel crouched over one print.
“That summoning circle outside wasn’t an accident.”
“No,” Hexen said.
Fendor looked farther down the passage.
“Someone has been living here.”
“Something.”
“Thank you, Isamu.”
The monk shrugged.
“Could be both.”
None of them liked that answer.
They passed through rooms that had been disturbed but not occupied in any normal sense.
A broken chest.
An overturned chair.
Pieces of metal too new to belong to the ruin.
Several shards of dark stone.
A strip of blue scale caught beneath fallen masonry.
Kaylor reached for it.
Fendor stopped him.
This time with one word.
“Dragon.”
Kaylor crouched.
The fragment was small.
Too small to prove anything by itself.
But blue.
They had seen a blue dragon carrying the Pack Glitch away from the Crossroads.
Nethnarel looked toward the ceiling.
“No way it came through here.”
“Not this corridor,” Hexen said.
Fendor examined the broken walls.
“There may be another entrance.”
“Or it left that somewhere else and somebody carried it here.”
Kaylor stood.
“So we’re close.”
Fendor sighed.
“Somehow every discovery becomes permission.”
The air changed.
They all felt it.
Not cold.
Pressure.
A sensation behind the eyes.
The wolves stopped.
One crouched.
Another gave a low warning growl and backed toward Hexen.
Then the waltz began again.
Not behind them.
Ahead.
Three notes.
Three more.
Three more.
The melody crawled down the corridor.
Slower than before.
Nethnarel’s wings ignited.
Kaylor lifted Peacemaker.
Isamu loosened his whip.
Fendor drew.
Hexen put one hand on the Cloak of the Moon.
They entered the next chamber together.
The music ended halfway through a measure.
Someone was waiting.
They knew him.
Not his name.
Not yet.
His shape.
The figure stood on a raised section of floor at the far end of the room, surrounded by the architecture of the ancient Path and the newer corruption that had invaded it.
They had seen him in the sky.
At the Crossroads.
Above a battlefield, riding the blue dragon while the dead came for them and a name older than kingdoms was shouted into the world.
The Pack Glitch.
No dragon stood beneath him now.
He did not need one.
Fendor drew the Oathbow fully.
“There.”
The Pack Glitch did not run.
Kaylor stepped forward.
“You’ve been difficult to find.”
No answer came.
Or perhaps one did and the room swallowed it.
The air around the figure changed.
Tentacles shifted behind the walls.
The blue light beneath the floor brightened.
Nethnarel felt old magic gathering around something that should never have been allowed to touch it.
The warning returned.
Something is foul.
Something is wrong.
Hexen whispered, “This.”
Fendor heard him.
“You think?”
“I think the Path knew.”
Kaylor tightened his grip.
“Then we fix it.”
The Pack Glitch moved.
What followed was not a duel.
It was the kind of battle that only people who had fought beside one another for years could survive.
The chamber itself seemed unwilling to remain neutral.
Ancient power moved beneath the floor while something newer twisted through it. Blue light flared and vanished. Shadows crossed distances they should not have crossed. The growth beneath the walls convulsed whenever the Pack Glitch called upon whatever patronage still bound him.
The heroes did not waste time trying to understand every manifestation.
They had learned that lesson long ago.
Kaylor took the center.
He always did.
Peacemaker turned the first attack aside, and whatever struck the black blade sent enough force through Kaylor’s body to move him several feet across stone.
He stopped moving.
Then went forward again.
Fendor found angles.
The Pack Glitch was quick, but Fendor had spent more of his lives than he could remember learning that speed meant nothing if you knew where something had to be next.
Arrows crossed the chamber.
Some struck.
Some vanished into darkness.
Some forced the creature to move where Fendor wanted it.
Isamu was already there when it arrived.
The monk moved through danger without appearing to acknowledge it. His whip caught stone, flesh, shadow—whatever the Pack Glitch gave him. His hands followed whenever distance collapsed.
Nethnarel fought with restraint because restraint was now necessary.
The Staff of Power held almost nothing.
Her own magic held far more.
That was usually the dangerous part.
Flame spread behind her.
Wild power pushed at the edges of every spell.
She made it behave.
Mostly.
Hexen gave the chamber back to life.
Roots tore through the corrupted garden beyond the archway. Vines forced themselves into cracks between ancient stones. Green growth crossed blue light and red-black corruption alike.
For a moment, the Path contained three competing histories.
What it had once been.
What the Pack Glitch had made of it.
And what Hexen demanded it become now.
The Cloak of the Moon answered him.
He changed.
Not once.
More than once.
Shape became strategy.
Mass when they needed mass.
Speed when the thing tried to escape.
Claw and fang when distance vanished.
Magic when flesh alone was insufficient.
Fendor saw one transformation end and another begin.
“You are abusing that cloak.”
Hexen answered from a mouth poorly designed for speech.
“You’re jealous.”
“Deeply.”
The Pack Glitch struck between them.
Humor disappeared.
Stone exploded from the wall.
Fendor rolled.
Hexen took the impact and changed again.
Nethnarel attacked from above.
Kaylor came through the debris.
Isamu appeared where no reasonable person could have arrived so quickly.
For a time, the battle lost ordinary shape.
There was only pressure.
The Pack Glitch had escaped them before.
At the Crossroads, it had possessed height, a dragon and the initiative.
Here it possessed something else.
A lair.
Prepared ground.
Ancient power it understood well enough to corrupt.
Perhaps that was why the Path had warned them.
Perhaps not.
The heroes had learned to distrust answers that arrived too easily.
What mattered was simpler.
They had found the enemy they had come beneath Gildan to find.
This time, it would not fly away.
The Pack Glitch tried.
Fendor saw the movement first.
“Left!”
Isamu changed direction.
Kaylor blocked the nearest passage.
Hexen drove living growth through another.
Nethnarel rose toward the only open line.
The creature hesitated.
One heartbeat.
Against ordinary enemies, that meant little.
Against the Heroes of Oxland, it was enough.
They closed.
The chamber shook.
Old glass shattered somewhere in the greenhouse.
Blue light surged beneath their feet.
One of the great tentacles outside the room tore free from the wall and collapsed.
The Pack Glitch fought with the desperation of something that suddenly understood the difference between battle and defeat.
Kaylor did not speak.
Neither did Fendor.
There were moments when banter helped.
This was not one.
Fendor loosed.
Nethnarel cast.
Hexen struck.
Isamu entered the opening.
Kaylor followed.
No single blow ended it.
That mattered later.
In memory, people preferred victories to possess one clean instant. One sword. One arrow. One spell. One hero whose hand could be pointed to when someone asked who killed the monster.
The truth was less tidy.
They broke the Pack Glitch together.
Its power failed in pieces.
One defense collapsed.
Then another.
Its control over the chamber weakened.
The twisted growth recoiled.
The blue channels beneath the stone flickered.
The pressure behind their eyes vanished so suddenly that Fendor nearly staggered.
The final exchange came quickly.
Too quickly to belong to anyone alone.
And then the Pack Glitch fell.
Silence.
No dragon carried it away.
No darkness opened.
No army of the dead came to rescue it.
The figure hit the ancient floor and remained there.
Nethnarel stayed airborne.
Isamu waited.
Kaylor held Peacemaker ready.
Fendor did not lower the bow.
Hexen listened through every root he had forced into the building.
Nothing attacked.
Nothing moved except the wolves.
One crept forward.
It sniffed the fallen enemy.
Then whined.
Hexen’s expression changed.
“What?”
The wolf backed away.
Fendor looked toward the corpse.
Something bothered him.
Not magic.
Not movement.
Proportion.
The Pack Glitch had been strange from the first time they encountered it. There had always been something difficult to hold clearly in memory. Features that belonged together until one tried to describe them afterward.
Now the power surrounding it was gone.
Fendor took one step forward.
Then another.
Nethnarel landed beside him.
“What?”
He did not answer.
There were faces one remembered with the mind.
Others lived somewhere deeper.
A person could forget the exact line of a jaw, the shape of a nose, how age had settled around the eyes.
Recognition did not care.
Fendor stopped.
“No.”
Hexen came closer.
The word pulled Kaylor’s attention away from the walls.
“What?”
Fendor stared at the fallen Pack Glitch.
Something old moved through memory.
A parasol.
That absurd parasol.
A companion from a life before the life they had awakened into.
A warlock.
A gambler.
A man who had carried Demon Dice because ordinary bad decisions had apparently not been dangerous enough.
Someone who had once fought beside them.
Someone whose statue they had discovered beneath Gildan only hours earlier, tentacles carved around his legs as though history itself had been trying to warn them.
Hexen saw it.
His face emptied.
Nethnarel whispered the name.
“Leonidas.”
Kaylor looked at her.
Then at the corpse.
“No.”
Fendor finally lowered the bow.
“It’s him.”
“No,” Kaylor said again. “Leonidas disappeared.”
“With Pete,” Hexen said quietly.
“And the dice.”
The Demon Dice.
Kaylor remembered.
They all did.
A wish.
A moment of madness.
Leonidas asking for release from his life and vanishing with Pete before any of them fully understood what the dice had done.
Gone.
Not dead.
Not alive.
Gone.
Fendor looked down.
“This isn’t possible.”
Nethnarel gave him a tired look.
They stood in a buried complex that contained statues of their forgotten lives, a machine built with their names thousands of years before they reached it, a cloak apparently designed for Hexen and a voice that called some of them masters.
“Choose a better word.”
Fendor almost laughed.
He could not.
Isamu came beside Kaylor.
He had known Leonidas for less of the impossible history than the others, but even he recognized enough.
“The same man?”
Hexen did not answer.
Nethnarel crouched.
She did not touch the body.
“Maybe.”
Kaylor frowned.
“Maybe?”
“The Path is older than our lives.”
“That doesn’t make two Leonidases.”
“No.”
Fendor looked toward the twisted reliefs.
The ancient statues.
The tentacles.
The past that refused to remain past.
“Timelines.”
Nobody responded immediately.
The word was too large and too simple at the same time.
Their lives had already broken every ordinary rule.
They had lived, died, returned.
They had crossed a thousand years backward.
They had met people who should have been long dead.
They had awakened without memories beside a monument bearing their own names.
Leonidas himself had vanished through an artifact capable of turning desire into catastrophe.
Perhaps a single history had never been enough to contain all of that.
Hexen looked at the fallen Pack Glitch.
“What he became somewhere else.”
Kaylor’s eyes narrowed.
“You know that?”
“No.”
“Then don’t say it like you do.”
Hexen nodded.
Fair.
Nethnarel tried another shape for the thought.
“An echo.”
Fendor looked at her.
“Ghost?”
“Not literally.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t.”
That answer, at least, belonged in this place.
Hexen stared toward the corridor through which they had entered.
“The statue.”
Everyone remembered.
Leonidas in stone.
The parasol.
Tentacles curling around him.
Fendor had insisted the tentacles were wrong.
Not part of the man he remembered.
He had been correct.
And perhaps not correct enough.
“Someone knew,” he said.
Kaylor looked at him.
“Knew what?”
“This.”
Fendor gestured at the dead Pack Glitch.
“Whatever happened to him. Whatever version of him this is. Somebody carved it.”
“Long before we got here,” Hexen said.
Nethnarel looked toward the dead thing that wore their friend’s face.
“Maybe long before it happened.”
Nobody liked that.
Isamu walked to the far side of the chamber.
The monk had the useful habit of continuing to pay attention to physical reality while everyone else wrestled with cosmic impossibilities.
“There’s more.”
Kaylor immediately turned.
“What?”
Isamu stood beside a recessed opening partially hidden behind warped stonework.
Beyond it waited another room.
Boxes.
Chests.
Metal.
The gleam of coins.
Fendor stared.
“Treasure.”
Isamu nodded.
Kaylor looked at the corpse.
Then at the treasure.
Then back at the corpse.
“Later.”
Fendor blinked.
“You said that?”
“Yes.”
“About treasure?”
“Yes.”
Fendor looked at Nethnarel.
“Check him.”
Kaylor ignored them.
The humor faded almost immediately anyway.
There was wealth inside the Pack Glitch’s lair.
Perhaps objects it had collected.
Perhaps offerings.
Perhaps remnants of people who had entered this place and never left.
That could wait.
Leonidas could not.
Not because he needed anything.
There was nothing they knew how to give him.
No prayer that made sense.
No burial yet.
No certainty that the thing before them had ever been their Leonidas at all.
That uncertainty made the grief stranger.
Fendor had mourned companions before.
Grazim’s absence remained a permanent room inside all of them.
This was different.
Leonidas had not returned.
That would have been simple.
Terrible.
But simple.
Instead they had encountered something wearing the consequence of a life they remembered only in fragments.
A man they had known.
A man they had lost.
A man who might have lived another history in which the path bent differently and carried him into service of the Naked Goddess.
Or perhaps the Pack Glitch had always been this.
Perhaps every time they saw it they had been looking at Leonidas and failing to recognize him.
That possibility was worse.
Nethnarel stood.
“The Crossroads.”
Fendor looked at her.
“He was there.”
“Yes.”
“On the dragon.”
“Yes.”
“He saw us.”
She said nothing.
Fendor looked away.
Maybe Leonidas had known them.
Maybe he had not.
There was no evidence either way.
The temptation to invent meaning was almost overwhelming.
Heroes did that.
People did that.
They found a wound and demanded a story shaped neatly enough to explain why it existed.
Fendor had lived too long for that.
Sometimes a wound was merely a wound.
Hexen looked toward the twisted growth.
“Whatever he was doing here, we stopped it.”
Nethnarel nodded.
“One more plan.”
“Whose?”
She looked around them.
The corrupted structure.
The tentacles.
The ritual scars.
The fallen celestial imagery threaded through everything they had found since the Crossroads.
“Varietal.”
Kaylor used the older name.
“The Naked Goddess.”
Fendor glanced at him.
“You prefer Naked Goddess.”
“It’s descriptive.”
“It’s stupid.”
“It’s memorable.”
“Unfortunately.”
The argument lasted exactly long enough to remind them who they were.
Then silence returned.
Hexen walked to the edge of one of the glowing channels.
The blue light was fading.
Not extinguishing.
Settling.
The red-black growth around it had already begun losing tension. Several smaller tentacles lay motionless across the stone.
He touched the Cloak of the Moon.
“Maybe this was what the Path sensed.”
Fendor joined him.
“Something foul.”
“Something wrong.”
Nethnarel looked toward Leonidas.
“Maybe.”
Kaylor frowned.
“You don’t think so?”
“I think assuming the first answer is the whole answer is how we end up finding another demon temple.”
Hexen smiled faintly.
“She has a point.”
Kaylor looked around the impossible structure.
“This is not a demon temple.”
Fendor stared at the tentacles.
“Strong argument.”
Isamu returned from the treasure room.
“Nobody followed us.”
“Good,” Kaylor said.
“There may be another exit.”
“Better.”
Fendor looked at him.
“For once.”
They searched enough to know they were no longer in immediate danger.
No second Pack Glitch waited behind a wall.
No blue dragon descended through the broken glass.
The red ooze did not return.
The metallic constructs remained dead.
The twisted waltz did not resume.
Whatever ritual had been underway in the buried structure, whatever work had brought someone here only weeks earlier, whatever purpose the Naked Goddess had assigned the creature that wore Leonidas’s face—
it had stopped.
That was victory.
It did not feel like one.
Fendor eventually crouched beside the fallen figure.
He had no speech prepared.
He was glad.
Leonidas would have hated a speech.
At least the Leonidas he remembered would have.
The man with the parasol.
The Chimes of Opening.
Pete.
The Demon Dice.
The habit of moving through danger as though consequences were stories that happened to other people.
Fendor looked at the face.
“You always did find the strangest way out.”
Hexen heard.
He said nothing.
Nethnarel turned away.
Kaylor stood guard over people who did not need guarding.
Isamu waited beside the unopened treasure.
For a while they remained there.
Five living heroes.
One old friend.
Or his ghost.
Or a possibility wearing his face.
The distinction mattered.
They simply did not know how.
Eventually Kaylor looked toward the treasure chamber.
“We should see what he was protecting.”
Fendor rose.
“Tomorrow.”
Kaylor looked at him.
Fendor smiled faintly.
“Enjoy this. I may never say it again.”
Kaylor almost smiled back.
They had defeated the Pack Glitch.
They had stopped another design of the Naked Goddess.
They had reached the end of the ancient Path beneath Gildan and found that it did not terminate in a forgotten god, a nameless monster or some relic waiting patiently for scholars.
It ended with someone they knew.
That was the cruelest thing about the Path.
It had spent all those miles preparing them.
The statues.
The names.
The golden portraits.
The voice calling them masters.
Leonidas carved in stone with tentacles at his feet.
Every answer had been waiting below them.
They simply had not understood the question.
Now they did.
Fendor looked once more at the fallen Pack Glitch.
At Leonidas.
And understood why the dead sometimes returned without ever coming back.