The road to the Void did not give Nethnarel enough time to decide whether she regretted what she had done.
Perhaps no amount of road could have done that.
The Gathering remained behind them in the mountains: the ancient temple, the broken mosaic, the dead priests, the rows of bodies in the pews. Kaylor had spoken little since leaving. Isamu spoke little under the best circumstances. Fendor seemed to understand that there were subjects humor could improve and subjects it could only make smaller. Hexen watched all of them and, for once, did not try to force conversation into the spaces where silence belonged.
They had learned what they needed.
That was the defense Nethnarel returned to whenever memory became too loud.
The Naked Goddess could not be killed by mortal weapons. The ancient staff shattered when she fell from the heavens. Its pieces had scattered with the impact. Reassemble it, the mosaic had warned, or face something their strength could not touch.
And the place where a goddess had struck the world had a name.
The Void.
No one suggested returning home first.
There were victories after which people deserved a meal, a bed and enough distance to become ordinary again.
This was not one of them.
The cult had been trying to bring something into the world. Whether they had stopped the goddess herself, a servant or only the first movement of something larger no longer mattered. The staff fragments remained scattered. The being they had been warned about remained alive.
So they went.
What happened between the ruined temple and the bottom of the Void survived only in pieces afterward.
They reached the crater.
That much remained certain.
Nothing in the mosaic had prepared them for its scale.
The land simply ended.
There was no mountain rim worthy of the name, no tidy circular depression like the impact craters left by falling stars. The Void looked as if some enormous hand had pressed into the world and removed what lay beneath its palm.
Rock walls fell away into distance.
Mist lived below.
Clouds moved inside the crater.
Fendor stood near the edge for a long time.
“Well.”
Nethnarel looked at him.
“That is not analysis.”
“I learned it from you.”
The joke barely survived its own delivery.
Even Isamu did not move immediately.
The old stories said things went into the Void.
Nothing came back.
Animals avoided the surrounding land. Travelers knew better than to approach the rim. Explorers entered legend in the particular way people did when no body was ever recovered.
Kaylor looked down.
His wings were not natural.
Neither was Nethnarel's fire.
Hexen could become creatures for whom a drop of several thousand feet represented inconvenience rather than death.
Fendor now possessed a flying carpet.
Isamu could fall distances that should have turned a man into a memory and rise irritated.
They had reached the stage in their lives where the warnings designed for sensible people mostly served to describe where they were going next.
They descended.
The first things came out of the weather.
Storms, if storms could hunt.
Small vortices spun through the crater air, each one moving with purpose independent of the greater currents around it. They twisted toward the heroes, vanished into mist, appeared from other angles.
The battle that followed became fragments in memory.
Wind.
Lightning.
Something screaming through the air that had no mouth.
Kaylor getting too far ahead.
That detail everyone remembered.
He flew below the others, discovered that the Void contained predators willing to reward initiative, and returned to the group considerably less interested in scouting alone.
“Good plan,” Fendor had told him.
Kaylor had been bleeding badly enough that sarcasm required no reply.
Something dragon-like came for them afterward.
Not the impossible mithril beast from the ancient mosaic.
Smaller.
Still large enough.
The details had vanished with the lost hours of that descent, but the result had not.
The dragon-like creature died.
The storm-things died.
The heroes continued downward.
By the time they reached the bottom, the last remnants of Hexen's Insect Plague still swarmed through parts of the crater, black specks circling where combat had left them.
They found no piece of the staff.
No altar.
No ruined celestial weapon conveniently embedded in the earth.
Only deeper darkness.
That was where the surviving story resumed.
At the bottom of the Void.
The crater opened beneath itself.
Nethnarel had expected a floor.
Instead the descending walls flared outward into an immense cavern, the open throat of the Void giving way to stone shadowed beneath the earth. Far above them, the shaft of the crater remained visible as a distant source of gray-orange light.
Beyond it, darkness spread horizontally.
The ceiling rose high enough that even Nethnarel's fire could not illuminate it completely.
Stalactites hung like teeth.
Stalagmites rose beneath them.
Water covered sections of the cavern floor but rarely more than ankle-deep. It moved continuously, running through natural grooves in the rock toward round depressions scattered across the chamber. At each of those holes, the water spiraled downward and vanished.
Drainage.
Into somewhere deeper.
Fendor looked at one of the swirling openings.
“No.”
Nethnarel followed his gaze.
“We haven't even looked yet.”
“I am preparing.”
“For what?”
“For when someone says we should climb into it.”
Isamu was already walking toward one.
Fendor sighed.
“Prepared.”
They were hurt.
The descent had cost them.
Nethnarel's body felt as though it had been repaired too many times in too few days. The regenerative magic from the temple had done its work, but magic could restore flesh more easily than exhaustion.
Kaylor was worse.
His decision to fly ahead during the descent had left its mark across armor and scales.
Fendor moved like someone pretending that pain was a scheduling concern.
Hexen still had enough power to make the cavern regret attacking them, but even he looked tired.
Isamu appeared fine.
Everyone had accepted this as one of Isamu's more irritating traits.
“We should rest,” Nethnarel said.
Kaylor looked into the dark.
“Here?”
“That is currently where we are.”
“Excellent argument.”
The benefits of Hexen's earlier Heroes' Feast still lingered within them. The magic had not yet expired, but the temporary strength it had given them had been spent in pieces through the descent.
A short rest would not replace everything.
It might replace enough.
Kaylor remained standing while the others found defensible stone near the central portion of the cavern.
Fendor sat with his back against a stalagmite.
Nethnarel lowered herself more carefully.
Hexen dismissed the lingering Insect Plague. The distant swarm thinned, scattered and vanished into the immense chamber.
Isamu began walking the perimeter.
Fendor opened one eye.
“You are bad at resting.”
“I don't need much.”
“That does not make you better at it.”
Kaylor walked in the opposite direction.
Nethnarel watched him.
“Where are you going?”
“Looking.”
Fendor opened the other eye.
“Perhaps we should review the results of your last scouting attempt.”
Kaylor stopped.
For one moment Nethnarel thought he might actually listen.
Then he continued.
Fendor closed his eyes.
“I tried.”
There were remains in the cavern.
Not recent ones.
Kaylor found the first partly submerged in the shallow water: bone darkened by age, too large to belong to any ordinary humanoid. Another shape farther on might once have been a skull.
The Void kept its dead.
That fit the stories.
Nothing returned.
Nethnarel had just begun believing they might steal a few minutes of peace when the water beside Isamu exploded.
The creature struck before anyone saw it.
Metal.
Stone.
Dragon.
All three impressions arrived at once and none was entirely correct.
The thing came from beneath water too shallow to conceal its body, suggesting camouflage or magic rather than simple hiding. Its shape resembled a dragon stripped down to machinery and armored geology: claws, jaws, angular limbs, ridges along its back.
Its surface shone like worked steel in places and rough stone in others.
No breath.
No heartbeat Hexen could sense.
No life.
The claws hit Isamu.
Once.
Hard.
The monk slid across wet stone.
The thing followed.
Isamu rolled beneath the next strike, came to his feet and snapped the whip around one armored limb.
Hunter's Mark settled over it.
The construct turned.
Isamu struck again.
The whip's supernatural flame splashed across metal.
It barely seemed to care.
Fendor was already standing.
“So much for the rest.”
Another construct emerged behind Hexen.
Not from deep water.
There was no deep water.
One instant it was absent.
The next it surged upward as if the Void itself had assembled it from stone and steel.
Its chest expanded.
Kaylor saw the motion.
“Down.”
The roar struck them.
It was sound made physical.
A sixty-foot cone of crushing force ripped through the cavern, washing over Kaylor, Fendor and Hexen. Water flattened outward. Dust burst from stone. The heroes braced against it.
All three held.
The blast still hurt.
Fendor lowered the arm protecting his face.
“Those are new.”
Hexen examined the creature.
“No life.”
“Construct?”
“Yes.”
Fendor drew the Vorpal Longsword.
“Good.”
Hexen looked at him.
“Why good?”
“Less ethical complexity.”
After the temple, no one argued.
A third construct came through the water.
Then a fourth.
The rest was over.
The Void had waited until they tried to stop moving.
Fendor entered the nearest creature's reach before it could choose him.
The Vorpal Longsword hit steel.
Sparks flew.
The impact traveled painfully through his arms.
He struck again.
And again.
There was no flesh to open, only enchanted material that yielded by fractions.
The blade that had parted giants and demons found no neck worth taking.
Fendor smiled anyway.
“This is interesting.”
A steel jaw closed on him.
Teeth bit through armor.
Fendor's expression changed.
“Less interesting.”
Nethnarel's wings ignited.
Fire cast enormous shadows across the cavern walls as she rose ten feet above the water.
She saw Isamu's opponent.
Saw what the monk's strikes had already done.
Saw the angle.
Then pointed.
Disintegrate crossed the chamber.
Green light struck the construct.
Metal ceased existing.
Not all of it.
Enough.
Half of the creature's face vanished in molten ruin. Spines along its back dissolved. One shoulder sagged as the material supporting it became glowing slag.
The construct turned its damaged head toward Nethnarel.
Its remaining eye looked remarkably offended for something Hexen insisted was not alive.
Nethnarel smiled.
“That worked.”
Isamu struck it again.
The creature disagreed with her assessment by remaining upright.
Another construct charged Kaylor.
Claws struck against the shifting image created by his Cloak of Displacement.
The first passed through a false dragonborn.
The second found the real one.
Final Word remained at Kaylor's side.
Its curse was gone.
The weapon had become itself again—holy, ancient and brutally direct.
He drew it.
The blade met steel.
The sound rang through the cavern.
For a moment Kaylor thought of the hidden rack beneath the dead guardian's farm.
The sword had waited generations for someone to carry it toward this place.
It had reached the Void.
That had to mean something.
Or perhaps after everything that had happened, Kaylor simply needed it to.
He attacked.
The construct gave ground.
Nethnarel changed weapons.
The Staff of Power came into her hand.
A straight line opened between her and one of the damaged constructs.
Lightning Bolt tore across the cavern.
White-blue light reflected from the shallow water.
The construct convulsed.
Metal glowed.
Then the magic holding it together failed.
Its body collapsed into separate pieces, joints no longer joined by anything visible.
Nethnarel's clothes ignited around her with harmless infernal flame, the old Rings of Fire responding to the magic and destruction.
Fendor glanced over.
“One.”
Isamu moved Hunter's Mark.
“Three.”
“I know how subtraction works.”
“Good.”
The remaining constructs attacked.
One went after Hexen.
Claw.
Claw.
Bite.
Hexen avoided all three with a combination of movement and luck so improbable that Fendor briefly stopped fighting to look at him.
Hexen noticed.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You stopped.”
“I was appreciating your technique.”
Hexen struck the construct.
His weapon rang against metal.
The creature had no blood for Grim Harvest to read.
No living vitality for several of Hexen's stranger abilities to exploit.
It was simply enchanted matter.
Durable enchanted matter.
Kaylor attacked the one nearest him with increasing irritation.
His sword cut through an armored foreleg.
The limb came away.
The construct dipped violently to one side.
Hexen was beside him.
Kaylor looked at the ruined machine.
Then at Hexen.
“All yours.”
Hexen sighed.
He attacked.
Missed.
Fendor laughed from across the cavern.
Hexen attacked again.
This one landed.
The construct shuddered but remained upright.
“Almost,” Kaylor said.
Hexen looked at him.
“You cut its leg off.”
“I prepared it.”
“You are very generous.”
On the far side of the battle, Isamu had decided that whipping steel was insufficient.
He moved closer.
The construct tried to follow him.
It discovered, as countless enemies had before it, that Isamu occupied space as a temporary arrangement.
He struck.
Moved.
Struck again.
Flame from the demon whip streaked across metallic hide.
The thing turned.
Isamu was behind it.
Another blow.
The construct reeled.
Fendor's opponent hit him again.
Claw.
Then teeth.
He felt every point of it.
The injuries accumulated with those from the descent until some internal accounting suggested he had lost an absurd amount of blood for someone still standing.
Fendor attacked harder.
The Vorpal blade sparked across the construct's chest.
No clean decapitation.
No miraculous enchanted execution.
Just experience, strength and steel.
Sometimes that had to be enough.
Nethnarel rose higher.
Two constructs remained close enough.
She had been saving sorcery.
There was less reason to save it now.
Two black-green points of necromantic energy formed around her hands.
Finger of Death.
One spell.
Then another copy of the same impossible intention, forced into existence through sorcerous manipulation.
Twinned.
Nethnarel pointed with both hands.
Death struck things that had never lived.
For a moment she wondered whether the magic would object.
It did not.
Dark force crossed the cavern and slammed into two constructs simultaneously.
Both shuddered.
Enchantment flickered through their seams.
Pieces of metal fell into the water.
Neither collapsed.
Fendor stared.
“Apparently death is flexible.”
Nethnarel lowered her hands.
“Very.”
Kaylor returned to the construct he had crippled.
It attacked him.
He shifted aside.
Final Word struck.
Metal split.
The creature staggered.
Hexen stepped in.
His blow landed.
The construct came apart.
Not dramatically.
Its magic simply failed.
A body that had been one thing became dozens.
Steel and stone crashed into the shallow water.
Hexen looked at Kaylor.
Kaylor nodded solemnly.
“You did it.”
“I hate you.”
“Dragon slayer.”
“That was not a dragon.”
“Details.”
Isamu destroyed another.
Fendor and Nethnarel finished the next.
The last construct remained near Hexen, battered almost beyond function.
Its movements had become jerky.
One limb dragged uselessly.
Half its head was missing from Disintegrate.
Scorch marks covered what remained.
Hexen struck.
The final enchantment broke.
The construct collapsed.
Then the Void changed.
The other destroyed bodies remained piles of enchanted material.
This one did not.
Its pieces moved.
Kaylor raised Final Word.
Fendor brought the bow up.
Nethnarel gathered magic instinctively.
The fragments slid toward one another.
Not rebuilding.
Refining.
Steel folded into steel.
Stone crumbled away.
The mass shrank.
What had been a creature became a long metallic cylinder lying among the remains.
No one moved.
Isamu approached first.
Of course.
He crouched beside it.
The object was roughly the length of a substantial portion of a staff or spear shaft. Both ends looked incomplete, designed to join with something missing.
Hexen stared.
Fendor lowered his bow.
“No.”
Nethnarel landed.
“Yes.”
Kaylor came closer.
The ancient mosaic returned to all of them at once.
The goddess falling.
The impact.
The staff breaking.
Pieces scattering outward.
They had come into the Void looking for pieces.
The Void had put one inside something built to kill them.
Fendor looked at Hexen.
“You killed it.”
Hexen nodded cautiously.
Fendor gestured toward the fragment.
“So technically you found it.”
“I suppose.”
“Dragon slayer and treasure hunter.”
Hexen picked up the staff piece.
It was heavier than it looked.
Metallic but not like ordinary steel.
Nethnarel touched it.
Magic lived inside.
Old magic.
Not the spellcraft she knew.
Something denser.
Closer to the rules underneath spells.
She withdrew her hand.
“This is it.”
Kaylor looked toward the darkness beyond their little battlefield.
“One.”
Isamu examined the ends.
“How many?”
No one knew.
The mural had shown several pieces.
Three.
Four.
Perhaps more depending on how one interpreted the ancient image.
Nethnarel looked at the fragment again.
“Enough that we're not done.”
Fendor stared at the wreckage of the constructs.
“Do we have to kill something for every piece?”
Kaylor looked into the cavern.
“Probably.”
Fendor sighed.
“Good. I'd hate for this to become easy.”
They carried the fragment toward the central portion of the cavern.
The interrupted rest seemed more necessary than before.
Bodies—or what passed for bodies—lay scattered behind them.
Ancient remains occupied other sections of the Void.
Water continued draining through the circular holes.
Nothing about the cavern suggested safety.
Still, the center offered better sightlines.
Isamu reached it first.
Then stopped.
Something on the ground had changed.
Earlier, Nethnarel had noticed lines carved into the stone beneath the water.
A symbol.
Too large to understand from one angle.
Now part of it shone.
Liquid metal filled one section of the carving.
Not water.
Not molten steel.
The substance moved with the smooth brightness of quicksilver, but its color carried a pale metallic quality closer to the impossible dragon they had seen in the temple mosaic.
Mithril.
Or something that wanted to look like mithril.
The symbol formed a broad circle divided into several sections around a central space.
One portion was full.
The others remained dark.
Fendor looked at the staff fragment.
Then at the glowing design.
Nethnarel did the same.
Isamu counted the divisions.
Kaylor's hand tightened around Final Word.
Hexen stared toward the unreachable cavern ceiling.
One piece.
One section filled.
The message did not require translation.
The staff fragments were not merely hidden somewhere within the Void.
Finding them was doing something.
Activating something.
Completing something.
Fendor looked down at the liquid metal.
“This feels ominous.”
Nethnarel folded her arms.
“At least this time that's analysis.”
No one laughed.
The metallic light spread through the carved line until the first section was completely filled.
Then stopped.
The rest of the symbol waited.
Somewhere above them, far beyond the reach of their light, something moved.