The Well of Many Worlds went into Nethnarel’s pack.
No one suggested opening it again.
That alone distinguished it from most of the dangerous objects they acquired.
The heroes returned through the subterranean passages beneath the farmhouse, leaving the dead burrowing worms behind them and following the branches they had not yet explored. The cavern changed as they went. The dark, flecked granite surrounding the worm tunnels gradually gave way to something denser and more volcanic, stone blackened as if enormous heat had once flowed through it and then vanished so completely that even warmth had become a memory.
Hexen stopped beside one wall.
At first Fendor thought the druid had found another egg.
Then Hexen pressed his hand against the stone.
“What?”
Hexen moved his fingers along a vertical seam.
“Here.”
There was almost nothing to see. One portion of the wall was perhaps a shade darker than the surrounding rock, enough that once Hexen pointed it out the others could follow the outline. The shape was rectangular, too regular for a natural fracture, and large enough that what looked like solid stone might actually be an enormous sliding panel.
Kaylor stepped forward.
He put both hands against it.
Nothing happened.
He set his feet more carefully.
Still nothing.
The dragonborn possessed strength that had stopped being ordinary years ago. He had torn through doors, shifted stones intended for giants and solved several architectural disagreements by applying sufficient force to make the architecture reconsider.
The wall did not reconsider.
Kaylor struck it.
The sound traveled through the cavern, heavy and dull.
Fendor winced.
“That seems thick.”
Kaylor struck it again.
“Yes.”
“How thick?”
“Enough.”
Fendor nodded. “Technical.”
Isamu crouched beside the seam.
He found the mechanism before he found anything resembling a lock. Hidden metal ran through the rock itself: old, engineered and far more complicated than a simple latch. Whatever opened the wall required something specific.
A key.
Not a key shaped for an ordinary door.
Something stranger.
Isamu tested what little of the mechanism he could reach. There was no useful purchase for a pick and no simple tumbler waiting to be persuaded.
He stood.
Kaylor looked disappointed.
“Can’t open it?”
“Not without what it wants.”
Fendor glanced at the wall. “For once, something down here has standards.”
There was no reason to waste strength or magic trying to break a barrier whose maker had clearly intended it to withstand exactly that. The heroes marked the location and continued along the alternate passage, looking for the missing key.
The tunnel curved through another stretch of ordinary granite before looping back toward the deeper complex. It was an inelegant piece of underground geography, the kind of path that felt important until it returned travelers almost to where they began.
They chose the remaining southern route.
The stone changed again.
This time, everyone noticed.
The black walls glittered.
At first Nethnarel thought she was seeing quartz. Then she looked closer.
The flecks were too numerous.
Tiny metallic points covered the cavern walls, catching their light and returning it as thousands of distant sparks. The effect transformed the passage. The stone ceased looking merely black and began resembling a night sky that had somehow been crushed into rock.
The resemblance became stronger when the passage opened into a large cavern.
Stone spires rose from floor to ceiling.
Some were thick as towers. Others narrowed into twisted columns, dark silhouettes against the star-speckled walls. They divided the chamber into corridors and pockets of shadow, obscuring sight across the room and creating the unsettling impression that the heroes had entered a forest made entirely of stone.
The ceiling hung thirty-five or forty feet overhead.
Fendor looked up.
“Better than the worms.”
Nethnarel glanced at him.
“You have been saying that about each new thing.”
“I am trying to remain optimistic.”
“How is that going?”
Fendor studied the black pillars.
“Poorly.”
They spread just enough to search without losing one another.
The cavern contained no obvious furniture, carvings or construction. After the mechanical wall, Fendor had expected a workshop, temple or underground vault. Instead there was only the impossible stone and its glittering mineral surface.
Isamu examined one of the larger formations.
It was rock.
He moved to another.
Also rock.
Hexen studied the floor.
Natural.
Mostly.
Nethnarel searched for magic and found nothing immediately strong enough to explain the strange appearance of the chamber.
That bothered her more than discovering magic would have.
Isamu leaned closer to one wall.
The stone looked back.
An eye opened.
It happened so smoothly that for one absurd moment Isamu simply regarded it.
The eye regarded him.
It was large, wet and completely incompatible with the wall around it.
Isamu raised one finger.
“Don’t,” Fendor said.
Isamu poked it.
The cavern erupted.
Tentacles tore out of the wall.
The creature had been inside the stone without being behind it. Its body had mimicked the cavern surface so perfectly that the heroes had walked within a few feet without recognizing anything alive. Now the hidden thing pushed free, round and floating, one enormous central eye surrounded by a writhing mass of tendrils.
The tendrils were worse up close.
Each ended in hooked structures and small circular mouths lined with points that looked capable of cutting, biting and holding simultaneously.
One lashed around Isamu.
The monk twisted away before it closed.
A second snapped past his shoulder.
The creature floated clear of its stone pocket.
Fendor drew his sword.
“So much for optimism.”
He crossed the space between them before the creature could withdraw.
The Vorpal Longsword flashed.
Fendor had spent much of his life ensuring that enemies never reached him.
The last few years had complicated that preference.
He struck once.
Then again.
The creature’s eye widened.
Fendor accelerated.
The ancient sword became a silver arc around him, six precise blows delivered so quickly that the floating horror seemed to receive them almost simultaneously. None found the particular angle that would awaken the weapon’s most terrible enchantment.
They did not need to.
Flesh opened.
Tentacles fell.
Dark fluid struck the stone.
The creature recoiled into the chamber with a shriek that sounded astonishingly high for something so grotesque.
Isamu stepped in behind it.
His whip cracked.
Another strike followed.
The monster tried to turn between the two of them.
It never completed the motion.
Then another eye opened in the wall.
Nethnarel saw it.
“Oh.”
The stone bulged.
A second creature tore free.
Then another.
The cavern had not contained strange rock formations.
It contained nests.
The dark walls were pocked with shallow hollows where the creatures had hidden themselves, their bodies blending into the mineral surface until only the opening eyes betrayed them.
The second horror came for Nethnarel.
Its tentacles struck before she could climb into the air.
One hooked mouth ripped across her.
Another slammed into her side.
A third wrapped toward her waist and tried to close.
She tore free before it could fasten properly, but the effort cost her.
Pain staggered her.
Nethnarel had not fully recovered from the farm battle. Some of the wounds beneath her clothing were only recently closed, the healing more functional than complete. Now fresh blood appeared across the stone beneath her boots.
She rose several feet.
The creature followed.
“They fly,” she said.
Fendor was still cutting apart the first one.
“Unhelpful.”
“That was information.”
“It remains unhelpful.”
Another tentacle struck Nethnarel.
She nearly fell.
The world narrowed around her.
Her breath came sharply.
She knew, with the clarity of someone who had spent far too much of her life counting the distance between pain and death, that she had almost no margin remaining.
Five heartbeats, perhaps.
Five mistakes.
Maybe fewer.
Isamu saw her.
He moved.
One instant he was beside Fendor.
The next he crossed the cavern, whip uncoiling before him.
The floating creature turned toward the monk.
That was its mistake.
Isamu marked it.
The first strike snapped its body sideways.
The second tangled one of the feeding tendrils.
The monk stepped beneath the thing, hit it again and was already moving away before the remaining mouths could close.
Nethnarel gained distance.
Fendor finished his own opponent and turned.
A third wall-creature had emerged near him.
It struck.
One of the tendrils pierced through his guard and tore across his shoulder.
The hooked mouth tried to fasten.
Fendor ripped himself free.
“What are these?”
Hexen was looking at the shape of the nearest one.
He had seen enough monsters—and become enough monsters—to recognize families even when individual names were less certain.
“Something related to beholders.”
Fendor looked at the giant floating eye.
“You think?”
The words had barely left him when something larger moved between the stone spires.
It did not emerge from the wall.
It simply floated into view.
The creature was nearly spherical, armored in thick hide, with a great central eye and an enormous mouth full of teeth. Smaller eye-stalks twisted independently above it, each one searching a different part of the cavern.
Everyone recognized that one.
Fendor stopped.
“Ah.”
Nethnarel looked toward it.
“Oh, that’s worse.”
A full-sized beholder regarded them.
One eye-stalk rotated toward Nethnarel.
A ray flashed.
She threw herself aside.
The beam crossed the cavern and struck a stone pillar behind her.
Another eye-stalk turned.
Fendor saw it point at him.
He moved.
Not far enough.
The ray hit.
Pain passed through him so completely that for an instant there was nothing else. It was not the sensation of a blade or arrow. There was no point of impact he could isolate, no wound he could understand. The magic attacked everything between one side of him and the other.
Fendor hit the ground.
His bow skittered away.
He remained conscious.
Barely.
Nethnarel stared.
“Fendor?”
He lifted one hand.
“That was unpleasant.”
The beholder’s eye-stalks continued moving.
A third ray snapped toward Nethnarel.
Something in the magic carried an unmistakable finality.
She did not know the spell.
She did not need to.
Her body reacted before thought.
She twisted aside.
The beam missed.
Fendor pushed himself upright.
“What was that one?”
Nethnarel kept staring at the beholder.
“Death.”
“Specific.”
“Yes.”
Hexen measured the cavern.
Thirty-five feet to the ceiling.
Perhaps forty in the highest places.
The monsters flew.
That removed several obvious solutions.
For one dangerous moment Earthquake occurred to him.
Then he looked at the stone columns supporting the chamber.
No.
Bringing the entire mountain down on their heads simply to inconvenience creatures capable of floating would not qualify as improvement.
Hexen chose another spell.
Gravity reversed.
The world changed direction.
Loose stones flew upward.
Dust leapt from the floor.
One of the smaller eye-creatures shot toward the ceiling.
It struck hard.
The beholder followed.
Its spherical body slammed into the stone overhead.
For an instant both creatures seemed stunned by the insult.
Hexen held the spell.
Fendor looked upward.
“That worked.”
“Yes.”
“They fly.”
“Yes.”
“They appear annoyed.”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
A creature hidden in the wall beside Hexen chose that moment to reveal itself.
Tentacles exploded from the black stone.
One struck the druid.
Hexen absorbed the blow and held his concentration.
The feeding mouth tried to wrap around him.
He tore free.
Gravity remained reversed.
The beholder stayed pinned near the ceiling, eye-stalks twisting furiously.
Nethnarel landed long enough to pull the Staff of Power into her hand.
She was still dangerously wounded.
That did not make the beholder less present.
She pointed the staff upward.
Lightning filled the cavern.
The bolt struck the beholder directly.
Electric light reflected from every metallic fleck in the walls. For one blinding instant the entire chamber became a sky filled with stars.
The beholder screamed.
Then the world stopped.
Not because the creature was dead.
Because the heroes had reached one of those strange moments in battle when everything balanced on the edge of whatever came next.
The beholder was wounded but alive.
The wall-creatures remained.
Hexen held gravity upside down.
Fendor was badly hurt.
Nethnarel was worse.
The cavern smelled of ozone, blood and scorched stone.
No one suggested retreat.
They had not come beneath the farmhouse looking for this fight.
That had ceased to matter.
When the battle resumed, Isamu moved first.
He targeted one of the tentacled creatures still hanging within the reversed field and crossed the cavern in a blur. His first attack struck hard enough to twist the floating body. The second carried the precise disruption of ki behind it.
The monster froze.
Stunned.
Isamu did not waste the opening.
Nethnarel saw the helpless target.
Green-white power gathered in her hand.
The spell passed through the creature.
Disintegrate left almost nothing behind.
One moment the monster existed.
The next it became drifting powder drawn upward by Hexen’s reversed gravity.
Nethnarel moved away from the remaining creatures.
She had learned the value of distance.
Hexen had another problem.
The beholder was airborne by nature. Reversing gravity had smashed it into the ceiling, but the creature could still fly once it recovered enough control. The spell had bought time, not imprisonment.
Hexen released it.
Gravity returned.
Dust and debris fell.
So did anything that could not fly.
The beholder adjusted.
Hexen changed shape.
His body expanded.
Armor became shell.
Human proportions vanished beneath an impossible weight of draconic flesh.
A Dragon Turtle filled an alarming portion of the cavern.
Fendor, still recovering his bow, looked over.
“You fit?”
Barely.
That was sufficient for Hexen.
The beholder disagreed.
An eye-stalk turned.
A beam struck the Dragon Turtle.
Hexen absorbed the first ray.
Another followed.
Then another.
The great reptilian head shifted as the magic washed over him.
For an instant nothing happened.
Then stone spread across his scales.
It began at one shoulder.
Gray raced over the shell.
Hexen understood what was happening one heartbeat before he lost the ability to respond.
The Dragon Turtle became a statue.
A massive stone Dragon Turtle now occupied part of the battlefield.
Fendor stared.
“No.”
Kaylor turned toward the beholder.
The dragonborn had been patient by his standards.
That ended.
Radiant power entered his axe.
Light ran along the blade.
He charged the nearest stunned wall-creature instead of wasting time trying to reach the beholder above the stone spires.
The axe fell.
Holy force detonated through the thing.
Kaylor struck again.
The creature sagged.
It remained alive only because monstrosities had unreasonable opinions about dying.
Elsewhere, another tentacled horror descended on Nethnarel.
She tried to evade it.
Her injuries made her slower.
One tendril hit.
Then another.
The feeding mouths wrapped around her.
Nethnarel felt them close.
Pain.
Pressure.
Then the cavern disappeared.
She hit the floor unconscious.
The flames that sometimes answered her pain never came.
There was no consciousness left to summon them.
Isamu saw her fall.
So did Fendor.
Fendor’s expression changed.
The humor went out of him.
The wall-creature remained wrapped around Nethnarel as if trying to feed.
Isamu started toward her.
Another enemy intercepted him.
Fendor had a line.
He fired.
The arrow struck.
Not enough.
Nethnarel did not move.
The battle became smaller.
Not in scale.
In purpose.
Kill what was between them and her.
Stay alive long enough to reach her.
Do not let the beholder decide otherwise.
The great eye turned toward Isamu.
Three rays followed.
Isamu avoided the first.
The second forced him into a movement so sharp it would have torn muscles in anyone less trained.
The third struck close enough that he felt the magic pass across his skin.
He remained standing.
The beholder looked almost offended.
Fendor sympathized with it slightly.
Isamu was difficult to kill.
That was one of his better qualities.
The wall-creatures continued attacking.
Fendor was struck again.
A tendril tried to seize him.
He tore free.
Another ray from the beholder locked onto him.
For a moment something invisible held his body.
Fendor forced himself against it.
The magic broke.
Another effect followed.
He resisted that too.
A third struck.
Pain returned.
He remained upright through stubbornness, training and the increasingly thin collection of resources that separated a veteran hero from a corpse.
Kaylor worked his way through another of the smaller creatures.
Isamu kept pressure on the beholder whenever he could reach an angle.
The cavern became a maze of stone pillars, flying bodies, beams and desperate repositioning.
Hexen remained petrified.
Nethnarel remained down.
Fendor could no longer pretend he was fine.
Then healing moved through them.
Not much.
Enough.
Nethnarel gasped.
Her eyes opened.
The first thing she saw was a tentacle.
She hated the cavern immediately.
Fendor saw her move.
“Good.”
Nethnarel pushed herself upright.
“Did I die?”
“No.”
“Then stop looking relieved.”
Fendor almost smiled.
Almost.
He used what healing remained to steady himself and returned to the fight.
The smaller wall-creatures began dying.
Fendor cut one down with the Vorpal Longsword, switching targets as soon as the first collapsed. Kaylor destroyed another under axe and radiant force. Isamu refused to let the beholder control the rhythm of the battle, constantly forcing it to choose between protecting itself and attacking someone else.
Nethnarel rose on fiery wings.
The beholder floated beyond one of the pillars.
She climbed until she could see around it.
The Staff of Power came up again.
“Move.”
Fendor did not ask why.
He moved.
Lightning erupted.
The bolt passed through one surviving wall-creature and continued into the beholder.
Both convulsed.
Fendor used the opening to recover more of his strength, then went back into close combat.
Kaylor finally reached the beholder.
The creature had descended during its engagement with Nethnarel, low enough that the dragonborn could close the distance.
Kaylor looked up at the great central eye.
“I am tired of you.”
The beholder’s mouth opened.
Kaylor declared it his enemy.
The oath he had broken had changed him.
It had not erased the part of him that knew exactly what to do when a monster needed killing.
His axe struck.
Radiant power followed.
The beholder reeled.
Kaylor struck again.
The great floating body dropped.
It hit the cavern floor with a sound like wet stone.
The eye closed.
Silence spread.
Everyone waited.
No new eyes opened in the walls.
No tentacles emerged.
No rays crossed the chamber.
Fendor remained motionless for several breaths.
Then he looked toward the stone Dragon Turtle.
“We have a problem.”
Kaylor turned.
Hexen had become excellent statuary.
Nethnarel limped over.
“Can we fix him?”
Kaylor approached the petrified druid.
The stone transformation was magical.
That mattered.
There were curses and enchantments that required miracles to remove.
There were also some that simply required the correct application of divine authority.
Kaylor placed a hand against the Dragon Turtle’s petrified shell.
He reached inward.
Not toward the oath he had broken.
Toward the power that remained his anyway.
The magic resisted.
Then yielded.
Color returned to the stone.
Gray became scale.
The enormous chest moved.
Hexen inhaled.
The Dragon Turtle’s eye opened.
Kaylor stepped back.
Hexen looked at him.
Then at the dead beholder.
Then at his own body.
He returned to human form.
Fendor watched him.
“You were a statue.”
“I noticed.”
“You made a very convincing turtle.”
Hexen looked around the wrecked cavern.
“You’re all alive?”
Nethnarel raised one hand.
“Debatable.”
That was close enough.
They searched.
The hidden creatures had kept little of obvious value, but the beholder’s cavern contained the remains of previous possessions and victims. Coins had accumulated among them, enough gold to matter even to people who had reached the unfortunate stage of wealth where five thousand pieces could be described as merely useful.
There were potions.
A rolled carpet radiating obvious magic.
Fendor stared at it.
“No.”
Nethnarel examined the enchantment.
“It flies.”
Fendor looked from the carpet to Nethnarel’s wings.
Then to Hexen, who could turn into flying creatures.
Then to Kaylor’s Pegasus.
Then to Isamu, who often crossed terrain faster than creatures with wings.
“Of course it does.”
They kept it.
The strangest object was small.
Metal.
Five-sided in a way that seemed unnecessarily complicated for something intended to open a door.
Isamu held it up.
Kaylor looked at the key.
Then back toward the passage.
“The wall.”
Exactly.
They returned through the starry cavern.
The dead beholder remained behind.
Fendor did not look back.
The mechanical wall waited where they had left it.
Isamu compared the key to the concealed mechanism.
It fit.
Almost too precisely.
The key contained movable sections, small tabs that could be rotated into different positions. Whoever had built the door had wanted more security than possession of the object alone.
They studied it.
Turned one section.
Then another.
Tried the mechanism.
Nothing.
Adjusted it again.
The strange key clicked.
Kaylor looked at Isamu.
“That sounded right.”
Isamu turned it.
Something enormous moved inside the wall.
Stone ground against stone.
Dust spilled from the seam.
The hidden panel began sliding aside.
Behind it lay a chamber.
Not another cave.
A room.
Old.
Sealed.
Deliberately preserved.
Their light entered first.
An armor stand stood against one wall bearing a complete suit of heavy plate. Nearby rested an ornate helm set with gems that caught the light and returned it in deep reds and pale crystalline flashes.
Potions and books covered a table.
A chest rested farther inside.
And beside the armor stood a weapon rack.
Empty.
The rack had been built for a large two-handed sword.
Kaylor stopped.
Fendor looked at the empty stand.
Then at Kaylor.
Then at the long, unfamiliar scabbard strapped across the dragonborn’s back.
The sword from beneath the cow.
The sword carried by the murdered farmer.
The sword that returned from the mountain settlement knowing names that summoned demons.
No one spoke.
They had thought the farmhouse hid a cavern.
Then they had thought the cavern hid monsters.
Now they understood that beneath both had been something else entirely.
A place kept secret.
A place deliberately locked.
A place where a sword was missing.
Kaylor slowly reached toward the weapon across his back.
Fendor caught his wrist.
“Don’t draw it.”
Kaylor looked at him.
“I wasn’t.”
“Good.”
For once, Fendor believed him.
The heroes entered the hidden room.
On the table, beneath years of undisturbed dust, lay a journal.