The screams came from the center of Aalune.
Not one voice this time.
Several.
They rose together above the rooftops, ragged with the kind of terror that no longer needed explanation. The people of Aalune had spent weeks learning what a scream meant. Someone disappeared. Something came from the dark. Another house became empty.
Tonight they had learned something worse.
The screams did not always come one at a time.
Kaylor reached the street first.
Isamu would have passed him if there had been enough distance left to do it.
The center of the village had once been the safest place in Aalune. The houses stood closer together there, gathered around a broad meeting ground where paths from the outer farms converged. A well occupied one edge. A communal hall faced the open space. Lanterns had been hung from posts and doorways, more than anywhere else in the village, because frightened people trusted light even after the night had repeatedly demonstrated that light was not enough.
Now the lanterns illuminated people running in every direction.
Kaylor came around the corner and nearly collided with a tiefling carrying a child. The man did not recognize him. He barely seemed to recognize the street. He twisted past the dragonborn and kept running.
Others followed.
They fled the center.
Kaylor looked beyond them.
The ground was moving.
At first he thought another fissure had opened.
After Hexen’s earthquake at the fishing village, Kaylor had acquired a more specific understanding of what the earth looked like immediately before it became inconvenient. This was different.
The road itself had softened.
Stone and packed soil sagged inward, not collapsing into an empty space beneath but becoming something with the consistency of thick mud. The surface bulged.
Something pushed upward.
A tentacle emerged.
Then another.
They were not clean limbs. They looked as though the substance beneath the road had attempted to remember what a tentacle was and had only achieved the general idea. Thick ropes of dark, glistening matter rose from a mass spreading through the center of the square.
The village elder stood beside it.
For half a heartbeat Kaylor did not understand why.
Then he saw that the elder was not standing.
He was being held.
One tentacle had wrapped around his torso. Another dragged at one leg. The old tiefling clawed at the ground with both hands while the mass beneath him opened.
There was no mouth.
There did not need to be.
The elder sank into it.
Nethnarel arrived above the rooftops in a rush of flame.
She saw his horns last.
Then they disappeared.
The surface closed.
The thing swallowed him whole.
“No.”
Nethnarel descended.
The word had not been loud.
It carried anyway.
She had spoken to the elder only hours earlier. He had stood in the village and described the people who had vanished. He had admitted that he did not know what hunted them. He had watched Kaylor sense evil spreading through Aalune and understood from one word that his fear had been justified.
He had stayed.
Others had fled.
The elder had remained because someone needed to be there when help finally came.
Help had come.
He died in front of it.
Kaylor reached the mass and struck.
His weapon plunged into something that resisted like flesh and mud at once. Dark material splashed across the street. The creature convulsed, its tentacles pulling inward before unfolding again.
Isamu came from Kaylor’s left.
He did not stop.
The monk entered the square at speed, crossed the last distance and attacked twice in a movement so quick that the creature seemed to react only after Isamu had already passed it. His whip tore through one extended limb and opened another line across the central mass.
Then he kept moving.
The thing struck where he had been.
Nothing.
Isamu circled.
Fendor arrived with Hexen and the wolves.
He took in the scene in fragments.
The running villagers.
Nethnarel above the square.
Kaylor nearly standing in the creature.
Isamu moving around it.
The elder absent.
A wet shape spreading from what had once been solid road.
Fendor drew the Oathbow.
The newer Icy Burst bow was useful. He liked it considerably.
This was not the time for useful.
The ancient weapon settled into his hand with the familiarity of something that had killed beside him through too many lives.
Fendor looked at the creature.
“I name you.”
The magic answered.
Whatever intelligence lived inside the thing understood nothing of oaths.
The bow did.
Fendor fired.
The arrow struck the central mass and buried itself almost completely. The creature recoiled. A second arrow landed nearby, followed by another.
The wolves reached it.
Hexen sent them from opposite sides, forcing the tentacles to divide their attention. Teeth found the dark substance. Claws tore.
The effect was strangely limited.
The pack worried at the monster and came away with black slime across their muzzles, but the wounds seemed to seal almost as quickly as they opened.
Hexen saw it.
“Not enough.”
Fendor drew again.
“What?”
“The wolves.”
“They appear committed.”
“That isn’t the same thing.”
The creature moved.
Everyone saw it.
For a thing built like spilled pudding, it moved far too quickly.
The mass contracted violently toward its center. One tentacle snapped across the ground. Another struck toward Isamu.
The monk moved.
So did the creature.
Its speed changed.
Not gradually.
One moment it dragged itself through the square like something too heavy to possess urgency.
The next it crossed several yards with an impossible burst.
Isamu barely avoided it.
He landed, turned and stared.
Kaylor saw the expression.
“What?”
Isamu did not answer immediately.
The creature moved again.
This time there was no doubt.
The sudden acceleration looked wrong because they had already seen it somewhere else.
Fendor understood.
“It moves like you.”
Isamu’s eyes narrowed.
The monster rushed him.
He stepped aside at the final instant.
A tentacle passed his ribs close enough to move his clothing.
“Not quite.”
The creature recoiled.
Something seemed to travel through it.
Not light.
Not color.
An alteration.
Fendor had watched mimics change shape. He had seen illusions steal faces. He had fought things that imitated voices and creatures that wore human bodies after killing the person who originally owned them.
This felt different.
The thing had not copied Isamu.
It had taken an idea from him.
Speed.
Movement.
Some part of what made the monk impossible to catch.
Hexen watched the thing accelerate again.
“That’s bad.”
Kaylor struck it.
The creature folded around the blow and snapped back into shape.
“You keep saying that.”
“Because things keep being bad.”
Nethnarel remained above them, searching for a clean attack.
The square had become crowded in the worst possible way.
Heroes.
Wolves.
Tentacles.
Villagers still trying to escape between houses.
She could burn a great deal of Aalune very quickly.
Tonight had already demonstrated that.
Instead she waited until the nearest civilians cleared the road and sent a concentrated spell into the central mass.
Magic struck.
The creature screeched.
Not the sound of an animal.
Something wetter.
Something that made the villagers still close enough to hear it run faster.
“Keep going!” Fendor shouted.
A tiefling woman looked back.
“Run!”
That she understood.
She vanished between two houses with the others.
The heroes had spent the night trying to preserve Aalune.
By now, survival might require temporarily abandoning it.
The first creature was still alive when the muck beside Fendor moved.
He felt the change beneath his boots.
“Hexen.”
“I see it.”
“No, you don’t.”
The road bulged.
Fendor moved.
Something erupted behind him.
Not another tentacle.
Another creature.
It hauled itself upward from the same dark substance spreading through the village center. Its shape was more definite than the first but no more natural. Limbs unfolded from a body that seemed assembled around whatever function it required at that moment.
The air changed when it emerged.
Nethnarel felt the pressure first.
Her focus fractured.
Not pain.
Confusion.
For an instant distances became difficult to judge. Kaylor seemed farther away than he was. Fendor’s outline doubled. The creature itself became impossible to place precisely despite being plainly visible in the lantern light.
She blinked.
Nothing improved.
“What did it do?”
Fendor heard her.
“What?”
“My aim.”
The new creature struck toward Kaylor.
It missed.
Kaylor stepped into its reach.
That solved Nethnarel’s problem and created another one.
“Of course.”
Peacemaker came around.
The first blow opened the creature.
The second drove it backward.
The third should have knocked it down.
It stayed upright.
Kaylor looked at it.
“You’re one of those.”
Fendor glanced over.
“One of what?”
“Difficult.”
“That category has become unhelpfully broad.”
Isamu came in from the side.
Whatever hesitation the new creature imposed upon perception did not survive contact with the monk’s discipline. Isamu attacked with frightening concentration, driving a sequence of strikes into the thing before escaping its reach.
He returned.
Hit it again.
Then opened himself to the more dangerous techniques he normally conserved.
His movement changed.
The economy remained.
The restraint did not.
Each strike landed with greater force than the last.
The creature absorbed them.
Isamu stepped away.
“That should have stopped it.”
Kaylor smiled.
“Hit harder.”
Isamu looked at him.
Then returned to the fight.
Fendor was already doing exactly that.
He abandoned the Oathbow.
At this distance the weapon’s vow mattered less than the very immediate problem of something trying to tear his companions apart.
The Vorpal Longsword came free.
Fendor closed.
The first cut entered the creature deeply.
The second crossed the first.
He accelerated.
Once.
Twice.
Again.
The blade became a sequence of silver lines around him.
He had used this sword often enough now to know when its deeper enchantment wanted to take a head.
This creature offered none.
There was no neck worth severing. No anatomy the sword could resolve into the clean promise of decapitation.
The weapon seemed almost offended.
Fendor was not.
“If there’s nothing to cut off,” he said, “I’ll cut everything else.”
He did.
The creature staggered beneath the assault.
Kaylor stared.
“How many times was that?”
“Enough.”
Isamu looked over.
“Not dead.”
Fendor raised the sword again.
“Then apparently not enough.”
Nethnarel descended far enough to see the creature clearly through the distortion around it.
The Staff of Power appeared in her hand.
She hesitated.
Not because she feared using it.
Because they had promised themselves they would stop reaching immediately for the most expensive answer to every problem Aalune placed in front of them.
The night had punished waste.
That did not mean they had to become stupid.
She reached into the staff’s magic.
“Hold.”
Power closed around the creature.
For one instant its body stiffened.
Then something inside it rejected the spell.
The magical restraint shattered.
Nethnarel frowned.
Fendor looked over.
“Worked?”
“No.”
“Excellent.”
“I can try again.”
“That is not what excellent meant.”
Then Hexen reached it.
He had spent much of the fight behind the wolves, testing the creatures before committing himself. The first mass resisted ordinary tearing. The second warped perception. Neither behaved like anything nature would produce without considerable insult.
Hexen had stopped expecting categories to help.
He attacked.
The strike landed.
The creature turned toward him.
Everything changed.
Hexen felt something touch his magic.
Not his body.
Not his mind.
Something deeper.
The connection was so strange that for a moment he thought a spell had been countered.
Then he reached instinctively for one of his familiar abilities.
Nothing answered.
Hexen froze.
The creature shuddered.
Its body expanded.
Fendor took one step back.
“What did you do?”
Hexen stared.
“I didn’t.”
The thing grew.
Dark flesh spread outward. Limbs thickened. The rough shape of its body collapsed under the pressure of something much larger trying to emerge through it.
A shell formed.
Kaylor stopped smiling.
“No.”
The shell widened.
Scales replaced the shifting flesh.
A long reptilian neck rose above the square.
Horns.
Heavy jaws.
A massive head turning above houses built for ordinary people.
Nethnarel climbed immediately.
Fendor stared upward.
The memory of boiling steam over the Great Lake returned with unreasonable clarity.
“No.”
Kaylor looked at him.
“You’ve already used that response.”
“I meant it more this time.”
The dragon turtle filled the center of Aalune.
Not the same one.
Fendor knew that.
Intellectually.
That distinction provided no comfort whatsoever.
Hexen looked from the monster to his own hands.
“It took something.”
Nethnarel remained in the air.
“What?”
“Mine.”
“What did it take?”
Hexen reached for the missing part of himself again.
The answer remained incomplete.
An ability.
A connection.
Enough of his power to make the creature into this.
The dragon turtle opened its jaws.
Kaylor looked up.
“Move.”
Hexen did something else.
He looked at the enormous creature.
Then at the sky.
His expression changed.
Fendor recognized it.
“No.”
Hexen raised one hand.
“What?”
“Whatever you’re about to do.”
“You don’t know what I’m doing.”
“I have learned that this sentence means I should object early.”
Gravity reversed.
The dragon turtle fell upward.
For one extraordinary moment, everyone in the square watched a creature large enough to crush a house leave the ground without wings.
Its claws struck empty air.
The shell tilted.
The enormous body rose.
Ten feet.
Twenty.
Fifty.
The dragon turtle flailed.
It continued upward.
Kaylor craned his neck.
“I can’t reach it.”
Fendor looked at him.
“That may be the first intelligent thing the universe has done for you tonight.”
“I was going to kill it.”
“You may have noticed Hexen has placed it in the sky.”
Kaylor lowered Peacemaker.
“I noticed.”
The dragon turtle reached the upper boundary of Hexen’s reversed world and remained there.
One hundred feet above Aalune.
It twisted helplessly against nothing.
For several seconds the battlefield became almost peaceful.
The villagers who had not yet escaped stared upward.
A dragon turtle floated above their village.
Fendor considered what explanation might eventually be offered.
None seemed sufficient.
Then Hexen changed shape.
His human body dissolved into wind.
The Cloak of the Moon vanished within an expanding current as he became an air elemental, a vaguely humanoid storm turning upon itself.
Nethnarel looked at him.
“You have a plan?”
Hexen’s voice came from moving air.
“Part of one.”
“That sounds familiar.”
Kaylor remained below.
He had no ranged weapon worth using against something that size at that distance.
He rested Peacemaker against one shoulder.
“I’ll wait.”
Fendor stared.
“For?”
“It has to come down.”
That was difficult to argue with.
Nethnarel flew higher.
She approached the floating dragon turtle carefully, remaining outside the reach of claws and jaws that had very little control over their own position.
A spell came to her.
It was not subtle.
It was, however, funny.
That mattered more than it probably should have.
Nethnarel lifted one hand.
“Hexen.”
The air elemental turned.
“Keep it there.”
“What are you doing?”
“Making it smaller.”
Fendor heard from below.
“Oh, no.”
Magic wrapped around the dragon turtle.
The creature resisted.
Nethnarel pushed.
Its enormous shell contracted.
The long neck shortened.
Claws folded inward.
Hundreds upon hundreds of pounds of stolen monstrosity compressed into something small enough to disappear briefly against the night sky.
A tiny tortoise floated one hundred feet above Aalune.
Silence took the square.
Kaylor looked up.
Then at Fendor.
Fendor continued looking up.
“No.”
Kaylor started laughing.
Isamu joined him.
Even Hexen’s elemental winds changed in a way that might have been amusement.
Nethnarel hovered beside the tortoise.
“There.”
Fendor finally looked at her.
“You turned the dragon turtle into a turtle.”
“Yes.”
“A small turtle.”
“Yes.”
Kaylor was still laughing.
Nethnarel pointed at Hexen.
“His turn.”
Hexen rose.
As an air elemental he moved through the sky as naturally as the creature below had once moved through water. He circled the tiny floating tortoise, caught it gently in a current and carried it higher.
Fendor understood.
“No.”
Kaylor looked at him.
“You say that a lot.”
“I have to.”
Hexen climbed.
The village shrank beneath him.
The tortoise rose with him.
Another hundred feet.
Nethnarel followed partway, then stopped.
“How high?”
Hexen looked down.
“Enough.”
Fendor heard none of this.
He did not need to.
He could see what was happening.
“Are we dropping it?”
Kaylor’s smile widened.
“Yes.”
“You do not know that.”
“Yes.”
“You are disturbingly excited.”
Kaylor positioned himself beneath the airborne tortoise.
Fendor stepped away from him.
“That is prudent,” Isamu said.
“Thank you.”
The reversed gravity ended.
The tortoise fell.
It was so small that Fendor lost sight of it almost immediately.
Then it reappeared.
Faster.
Falling through lantern light.
The tiny shape struck the ground near Kaylor.
The impact should have killed a tortoise.
It did.
That was the problem.
Nethnarel’s transformation broke.
The stolen form returned all at once.
A dragon turtle erupted out of something the size of a dinner plate.
The expansion happened against the ground.
The sound was enormous.
Stone cracked.
Dust exploded outward.
Kaylor braced.
Fendor threw one arm over his face.
The shell slammed down hard enough to shake nearby buildings.
The monster roared.
Kaylor was waiting.
Peacemaker struck the instant the creature returned.
The blow cut through its borrowed shape before it could recover from the fall.
Isamu came next.
He crossed the square and attacked the dragon turtle with the accumulated violence of a man who had been fighting through Aalune for hours and had become increasingly offended by the village’s refusal to remain saved.
His first strike landed.
Then another.
Then another.
The monk became almost impossible to follow.
Whip.
Hands.
Feet.
Movement threaded between them.
The dragon turtle tried to turn.
Isamu was already somewhere else.
A final blow struck with enough force that even Kaylor stepped back.
Fendor watched.
“That was excessive.”
Isamu looked at the monster.
“It’s alive.”
“Correction accepted.”
Kaylor entered.
Whatever patience he had demonstrated while the dragon turtle floated overhead had apparently accumulated into violence.
He fixed his hatred upon the creature.
The old power of enmity focused him.
Peacemaker came down.
The first strike landed.
The second carried more than steel.
Dark divine force detonated through the wound.
Kaylor struck again.
Another burst followed.
The dragon turtle convulsed.
Its shell cracked.
The enormous shape flickered.
Hexen, still wind, saw it first.
“Again.”
Kaylor did.
The borrowed body failed.
Scales dissolved.
The shell sagged inward.
The dragon turtle collapsed into the smaller nightmare that had risen from Aalune’s muck.
The original creature returned already dying.
Kaylor stood over it.
For an instant, Fendor wondered whether there would be another transformation.
Another stolen talent.
Another impossible answer.
There was not.
The creature slumped.
Dark fluid spread beneath it.
It stopped moving.
The thing that had borrowed Isamu’s speed, reached into Hexen’s power and worn the shape of a dragon turtle died in the center of Aalune without ever revealing what it truly was.
The heroes remained ready.
No one trusted death immediately anymore.
Nethnarel descended.
Hexen returned from wind to flesh.
Fendor approached the body but did not touch it.
Isamu checked the surrounding streets.
Kaylor wiped Peacemaker clean.
For several breaths, nothing attacked them.
The absence felt miraculous.
Around the square, the remaining villagers stared.
Their elder was gone.
Swallowed so completely that there was no body to retrieve.
Homes had been damaged.
The streets were covered with monster blood and broken stone.
Many of their neighbors had already fled into the woods.
The Heroes of Oxland had killed everything that had risen against them.
And Aalune was losing.
Nethnarel looked at the place where the elder had disappeared.
She remembered asking him whether these people might somehow be connected to her own forgotten past.
He had not known.
Now he never would.
Fendor came beside her.
He did not ask whether she was all right.
That question had become nearly meaningless among them.
Instead he looked at the dead creature.
“What was it?”
Nethnarel shook her head.
“Something that takes.”
Hexen looked toward her.
“My power.”
“Isamu’s speed.”
Isamu had heard.
“It didn’t take it.”
Fendor looked at him.
“It moved like you.”
“Badly.”
Kaylor smiled.
“There he is.”
The humor lasted only a heartbeat.
Then the ground trembled.
Hexen felt it first.
He stopped.
Fendor saw his expression.
“Was that you?”
“No.”
The road moved beneath their feet.
Not the soft bubbling that had produced the tentacled thing.
Not the opening of another portal.
This came from deeper.
Much deeper.
A low vibration passed beneath the entire center of Aalune.
Roof tiles rattled.
Lanterns swung.
The well water rippled.
Kaylor turned slowly.
“What now?”
The ground lifted.
Not cracked.
Lifted.
A section of the village center rose several inches before slamming down again.
People screamed.
Hexen reached toward the earth with his senses.
What answered was too large.
Fendor drew his sword.
“That seems unnecessary.”
The ground rose again.
This time it did not come back down.
Earth.
Stone.
Broken pieces of road.
Fragments of foundations.
Parts of Aalune itself began climbing into the night.
Something beneath the village was standing up.