The Story

The Wanderlust Revue rolled into Waterdeep on a cool autumn morning — a ragtag band of performers, their wagon loaded with costumes, props, and more instruments than any reasonable troupe should own. At its heart were two friends: Dustin Dwint, a Half-elf bard with red hair and a silver flute, and Don Juan, a Half-elf paladin whose swordfighting was as much performance art as it was combat.

Waterdeep, the City of Splendors — the greatest city on the Sword Coast. A maze of wards and markets, noble villas and dockside dives, all stacked on top of each other. For a travelling troupe hungry for an audience, there was no better place to be. Taverns, inns, and alehouses on every corner, each one a potential stage.

The plan was simple: book as many gigs as possible across the city's many establishments. The Yawning Portal, the Skewered Dragon, the Dock Ward dives — every venue that would have them. But first, they needed to draw a crowd. Dustin composed a lively, infectious anthem to be performed on the squares and market plazas of Waterdeep — to play in the open, attract curious passersby, and funnel them toward the evening's shows.

It worked. Dustin would set up on a busy square with his flute while Don Juan drew a crowd with a flashy display of swordwork. By the time the chorus hit, half the square was singing along, and the evening show was guaranteed a full house.

But after a few days, the reality of Waterdeep set in. The city was vast, and the competition fierce — every corner had its own busker, every tavern its house musician. The crowds at the Revue's shows were decent, but not what they'd hoped for. Waterdeep had too many distractions to give a travelling troupe the attention it deserved.

It was while wandering the streets between gigs that Dustin and Don Juan spotted a poster nailed to a notice board. An invitation — a call for performers to come to Nightstone, a small settlement south of Waterdeep, for a festival. The details were enticing enough to make them stop and read.

Nightstone Festival

Join us in the grand celebration of Lady Velrosa Nandar's 60th birthday at the Nightstone Festival!

Seeking talented bards and performers to grace our stage with mesmerizing acts and enchanting melodies.

Brave souls, we need your strength! Keep the order and peace throughout this jubilant occasion.

Save the date: Next full moon Location: Nightstone, between Waterdeep and Daggerford For inquiries: Contact Morak Ur'gray at Nightstone Inn.

Don't miss out on this unforgettable event! Let's make Lady Velrosa Nandar's milestone birthday a night to remember!

Back at the inn, they brought it to the rest of the troupe. The discussion was brief. The Wanderlust Revue had enough shows booked in Waterdeep to keep the rest of the performers busy — they could manage fine without two of their number for a while. Dustin and Don Juan would head south to Nightstone and see what this festival had to offer. The rest of the Revue would carry on in the city.

The journey from Waterdeep to Nightstone followed the Trade Way south toward Daggerford — a well-travelled road through rolling farmland and sparse woodland. Dustin and Don Juan made good time, but the road was long enough to warrant a rest.

They stopped at a clearing by the roadside. The air smelled of dry leaves and warm earth, the autumn sun low enough that the shadows had started to lean. Don Juan leaned against a tree, polishing his blade and musing aloud about what awaited them. A noble's birthday — Lady Velrosa Nandar herself. He grinned at the thought of performing swordwork before local nobility, maybe even earning a patron or a letter of recommendation. The good food and wine wouldn't hurt either. Before long, the musing trailed off and Don Juan dozed off against the tree, sword still in hand.

Dustin, meanwhile, sat cross-legged on a fallen log, his flute in hand. He'd been composing a piece for the occasion — something fitting for a lady's celebration. Bright, warm, celebratory. He ran through the melody again, refining the phrasing, letting it ring out across the empty road.

Dustin lowered the flute and frowned. Something about the last verse didn't sit right. Is this the right approach? he thought. Maybe there is no banquet. Maybe the celebration is more intimate, or maybe…

His train of thought was broken by movement on the road ahead. A huge silhouette came around a bend — impossibly tall, broad-shouldered, the stride familiar even at this distance. Not just the size, but the way he moved.

As the figure drew closer, the features came into focus. The grey skin, the strong jaw, the unmistakable build of a Goliath — and not just any Goliath.

Dustin's eyes went wide. He leapt to his feet, the flute nearly tumbling from his hands, and broke into a sprint down the road.

"Kürbis!!!"

"Aric!! You here!!!" Kürbis bellowed back, his deep voice carrying even further.

When Dustin reached the Goliath he jumped up and threw his arms around his neck, barely able to contain his joy. "Big friend, what a great surprise to see you! What in the heck are you doing here, so far away from the Ice Spires?"

"Just wandering around, heading to Daggerford," Kürbis said with a shrug. "Looking for a job. And you?"

"We are heading that direction too — on our way to Nightstone for Lady Velrosa's birthday. I'm planning to play there."

"Need some help carrying stuff?" Kürbis offered.

"This is just great! I can't believe my luck," Dustin laughed. "Actually, I think they are still looking for people for security at the festival in Nightstone. You can join us!" He gestured back toward the clearing. "I want to introduce you to my friend Don Juan. He's part of the Wanderlust Revue — you remember the travelling band of bards in the Silver Marches? But he seems to have dozed off while I was rehearsing. Let's sit down and catch up."

They walked back to the clearing and settled down. Kürbis eyed the sleeping paladin, then turned back to Dustin. "So, security — that's my cup of tea. Does it pay well?"

"I'm not the employer," Dustin said, raising his hands. "The poster said they need brave souls to keep order and peace. And talented bards with mesmerizing acts and enchanting melodies. I will provide the latter. My friend Don Juan is very good with a sword — he is, among other things, our sword juggler in the Revue."

"Oh, a sword juggler..." Kürbis said, unimpressed. "I'm more of a sword hack-and-slasher."

"Oh, don't let impressions fool you — he is also our most skilled fighter and best guard of our band of entertainers."

"Do you need protection with your band?"

"The rest of the band is still in Waterdeep. Just the two of us took a few days off to travel to the festival."

"Ah, the Wanderlust Revue," Kürbis nodded slowly. "Yes, it rings a bell."

"The band is doing fine — we grew quite a bit since we went our separate ways. But we can always use some more protection," Dustin said. "Let's go to the festival together and we can discuss employment with the others when we get back to Waterdeep."

"Sounds like a plan. Not that I have any appointments."

"No appointments — ha, good one. Have you been roaming around by yourself all these years?"

"Yes," Kürbis said. "In circles. Trying to set a speed record each time."

"I see you haven't changed — still as competitive as ever."

"Just faster."

A loud yawn interrupted them. Don Juan stirred against the tree, blinking awake. He looked up at the enormous figure sitting across from Dustin and his eyes went wide. "By Tyr's beard, who is that towering friend of yours, Dustin?"

Tyr did indeed have a glorious beard.

"Don, meet Kürbis!" Dustin said with a big grin. Turning back to Kürbis, he added, "Oh yeah — people call me Dustin nowadays. You know, music business and all."

They talked for a while — old memories, old roads, old jokes. Kürbis wanted to know everything about the Revue. Dustin wanted to know how fast the speed record was now. Don Juan, meanwhile, made sure to mention his sword skills at least three times.

It was Don Juan who first noticed the figure on the road. A lone traveller in a dark cape, walking slowly along the verge. As the cloaked stranger passed their clearing, they offered a silent nod of greeting.

Kürbis, ever curious, approached. "Greetings, traveller. What brings you to these roads?"

The figure paused and pulled back the hood. An old woman — frail but kind, with streaks of grey and white through jet-black hair and green eyes that sparkled with warmth despite the deep wrinkles around them.

"My my, by the gods!" she said, her voice thin but bright. "I can't tell I've ever seen so strong a fellow in all my years."

"I don't carry much at my old age," she continued. "I am just trying to get to Nightstone to meet an old friend in time for the festival. You must also be going there! Are you an adventurer?"

Don Juan was already on his feet, offering an elegant bow. "Allow me to introduce myself, good lady. The name is Juan Francisco Montoia De La Roja. My friend over there is called Dustin Dwint and is known far and wide for his musical talent. Together, we are members of the Wanderlust Revue. Please — you are welcome to travel with us. The roads are unsafe and bandits lurk around every corner. You would be safe with us."

"Let me carry the luggage," Kürbis said quickly, stepping forward before Don Juan could offer.

"Ha ha, by all means, my Goliath friend!" Don Juan laughed. "You look more than capable."

The old woman smiled. "True chivalry isn't as dead as they say, it seems. Thank you for your kindness, strangers. To tell you the truth, I wouldn't mind a bit of company."

As Kürbis leaned down to take her bag, she reached up and pinched his cheek gently. "Thank you, my dear boy."

Night was falling. They had reached the junction where a smaller road branched east off the Trade Way toward Nightstone, but the village was still miles away, and fate decided they would have to make camp here.

Kürbis, with the practiced ease of someone who had made a thousand camps, selected a spacious clearing surrounded by trees. He built a roaring fire while the others settled in. Don Juan produced wine. The old woman, whose name they still hadn't caught, seemed content to sit close to the fire and watch.

The fire spat sparks as Kürbis fed it pine. The smell of resin and woodsmoke settled over the clearing, and Don Juan's wine, when it came around, was warm from the ride.

Don Juan eyed Kürbis with sudden recognition. "Say, Dustin — is your friend the Kürbis? From your song? The famous hero you sing about in every tavern?"

Kürbis looked at Don Juan. Then at Dustin. "'Kürbis from the song?'"

Dustin cleared his throat. "Ahem. Who wants to hear a song?"

"Sí sí, Dustin, play a song, amigo!" Don Juan said.

And so Dustin set down his flute and took out his lute. By the flickering firelight, he played the ballad he'd written years ago — the song of Kürbis Kohl, a tribute to the towering Goliath and the journey they'd shared through the frozen mountains.

Kürbis listened in silence, his expression unreadable. Whether he was moved or mortified, it was hard to say. Probably both.

As the last notes faded, the road proved busier than expected.

First came an old male elf, stepping into the firelight with a polite "Hello, can I join?" Kürbis waved him over. "Of course. Come, warm yourself by the fire and share in our company."

The elf introduced himself as Mindartis — a High Elf from Waterdeep, also heading to Nightstone. He'd been invited to the party of Lady Velrosa, whom he knew from years past.

"Why, this road is busier than a potion shop on the day they hand out free samples of Elixir of Eternal Youth!" Don Juan exclaimed. "How come there are so many elderly folk up and about?"

Close behind Mindartis came another figure — an older human man, muttering to himself and looking thoroughly confused. Mindartis's face lit up. "Archibald! You have finally come from behind your desk!"

"Mindartheus! Is it you?" The old man squinted, struggling to place where he was.

"Yes, my old friend."

"Where are we going?"

"By Tyr's bloody balls," Don Juan muttered, "the entire geriatric ward of Waterdeep seems to have escaped." He raised his voice. "I guess we have some room left by our fire. Come join us, old man! Would you like some wine?"

Archibald looked behind him. After squinting his eyes and failing to see anything, he slowly turned back. "Ah. Yes. Clearly I am the eldest here present. If wisdom comes with age, I would certainly be one of the wisest wizards in all of Faerûn. But tell me, young whippersnapper — why do you still need a hand getting your armor on straight in the morning?"

The wine flowed, and Archibald launched into one of his stories — something about a vintner from Cormyr, a debate about magic in winemaking, and a competition that Archibald naturally claimed to have won. The tale went on. And on. Don Juan dozed off mid-sentence and woke with a start as silence finally fell.

"Uh... I'm sorry... your voice is so soft and gentle... like a succubus tongue gently caressing my brain!"

"I am sure she will be suffering from a sensation of emptiness then," Archibald replied dryly.

The night deepened. The fire crackled. The music drifted out across the road.

Dustin didn't know it, but out there in the shadows, someone was listening.

A Dragonborn warrior named Zarok Stormscale had been watching from behind a rotten log for some time. He'd left a merchant caravan near Daggerford — restless, hungry for purpose, drawn by the same festival poster that had brought them all here. Now he crouched in the dark, puzzling over this noisy campfire of apparently fearless strangers.

"They are not worried at all," he thought. "That hulky figure must be the reason. Or their wine was too strong."

He waited. He listened. And then Dustin picked up his lute and began to play something new — a song about Dragonborn, about scales and thunder and ancient kin.

His scales hummed. He gripped the edge of the rotten log.

He couldn't stay in the shadows any longer.

Hands held up, axe strapped to his back, Zarok stepped into the circle of light.

"Oghma!" Dustin exclaimed. "I did not know my music has the power to summon!"

"Greetings and well met," said the Dragonborn, his scales the color of dark blue skies before a thunderstorm. "I am Zarok Stormscale, axebearer and seeker of tales. I have walked realms where gods slumber and stars turn. But your song — it spoke of kinship, not conquest!"

Dustin set down the lute. "Well met, Zarok. You honor the song."

The old woman studied Zarok with fascination. "Your complexion, your posture, your colours — a fascinating portrait. Well met, Zarok."

"Well met, old woman," Zarok replied, though something about her scent didn't match the face — sharper, newer, like fresh leather. "What's the purpose of this gathering?"

"Are you going to the festival?"

"Why yes, my boy," she said. "I wouldn't miss it for anything. The beautiful faces — I can't wait."

Dustin looked around the fire. An hour ago, half of these people had been strangers. He'd played bigger crowds and finer stages, and enjoyed it less.

"Since we all seem to be heading in the same direction," Dustin said, "I suggest we set up camp for the night together. If anybody is up for it, I will play one last song."

"Play your tune, o bard, let your music resound," Zarok said. "Maybe my scales shall join, in harmony's line — a baseline strong, in this song of thine."

And he did. Dustin played "Battle for the Silver Marches" — a song about the recent troubles in his homeland, one that meant much to him. As he played, Zarok's scales hummed along, a deep rich tone that filled the spaces between the notes.

"Thanks, Zarok," Dustin said quietly when the last note faded. "You gave it another dimension."

Zarok nodded. "I like to think I did."

Dustin laughed softly. Then his smile faded, and he stared into empty space for a moment — as if listening to something no one else could hear. A slightly troubled look crossed his face. "Very well," he said. "I will play one last song. One that is a different mood, though. Then I will roll out my bedroll and retire."

The fire popped and crackled. The others listened as Dustin's music turned darker, more melancholic — a lament for someone lost, a friend who would never come home.

No one spoke when the song ended. One by one, they found their bedrolls, the fire burning low.

Dustin was half asleep when the storm rolled in. It came from the east — from the direction of Nightstone — first a shift in the air, then a flash through the leaves, then thunder close enough to feel through the bedroll. Rain found its way under the cloak, cold down the back of his neck. The fire hissed and spat.

Most of them pulled their cloaks over their heads and endured it. But Mindartis sat up. The elf's eyes — sharper than any human's, even in the dark — were fixed on the eastern horizon, where the lightning was brightest.

He said nothing that night.

In the morning, the old woman was gone. Bedroll empty, bag vanished, no footprints leading away from camp. As if she had never been there at all. Nobody could explain it, and after a brief search of the surrounding trees turned up nothing, they let it go. Perhaps she'd risen early and walked ahead. Perhaps she'd changed her mind about Nightstone. Strange, but nothing to dwell on.

It was only as they packed up the camp and turned east toward Nightstone that Mindartis mentioned what he had seen — carefully, almost reluctantly, as if unsure whether to trust his own senses.

"I saw something last night," Mindartis said. "During the storm. When the lightning lit up the sky." He paused. "A shape. Above the clouds. Stone towers. Battlements." Another pause, longer this time. "A castle. Floating."

The others looked at him.

"You're sure?" Dustin asked.

Mindartis shook his head slowly. "No," he said. "I am not sure at all. It was dark, and the storm was violent, and the mind sees what it wants to see in lightning." He picked up his pack and started walking. "But I know what I saw."

Nobody knew what to make of it. They filed it away as one of those things — a traveller's tale, a trick of the light, the kind of story that sounded better after a few drinks.

They smelled it before they saw it — smoke, faint but unmistakable, carried on the morning breeze. As the road crested a gentle hill, Nightstone came into view below them, and the group fell silent.

This was not the festival they had come for.

The village sat in a shallow valley, surrounded by a wooden palisade. Even from a distance, they could see the damage. Rooftops caved in. Walls crumbled. Massive boulders — far too large for any catapult — lay scattered among the buildings like a giant's dice. The keep on the hill beyond the moat had taken the worst of it. A boulder the size of a cottage had struck the tower, shearing off the upper floors and leaving the rest leaning at a sickening angle. Whatever authority had governed this place, it was in ruins.

And yet — the church bell was ringing. A steady, rhythmic toll, echoing across the valley. Not a call to worship or celebration. Something else.

"That is not a festival bell," Mindartis said quietly.

But it was Mindartis who noticed something else — something that troubled him more than the destruction. He had visited Nightstone years ago, when Lady Velrosa had hosted a diplomatic gathering. He remembered the village square, and at its center, the settlement's namesake: a tall, dark obelisk of obsidian-like stone, ancient and mysterious, around which the village had been built. The Nightstone itself.

It was gone. Where the obelisk had stood, there was nothing but a gaping hole in the earth.

"The Nightstone," Mindartis murmured. "It's been taken."

The drawbridge was down. The moat beneath it was still and grey. No guards. No voices. No festival banners. Just the relentless tolling of the bell and the low creak of damaged timber in the wind.

They crossed the drawbridge in single file, weapons drawn.

The village was a graveyard of stone and silence — except for that bell.

They moved through the streets carefully, stepping over rubble and around craters where boulders had landed. Houses stood open like broken teeth, their contents spilling into the road. Vegetables rotted on an overturned market cart. A dog's leash was still tied to a post outside a shattered home, the dog nowhere to be seen. Whoever had lived here had fled — or been taken.

The bell kept ringing.

It led them to the temple at the village square — a modest wooden building, one of the few structures still mostly intact. The heavy wooden doors were ajar. Inside, in the dim light filtering through cracked stained glass, they found the source of the noise.

A goblin. Alone, standing on a crate, pulling the bell rope with both hands in a steady rhythm. It hadn't noticed them yet.

Kürbis moved first. Before the goblin could so much as squeak, the Goliath had it by the scruff of its neck, lifting it clean off the crate. The creature's legs kicked uselessly in the air, its yellow eyes wide with terror.

"Keep the bell going," Don Juan whispered sharply.

Mindartis understood immediately. If the bell stopped, whoever — or whatever — had set this goblin to the task would know something was wrong. With a subtle gesture, he conjured an invisible hand and set it to pulling the rope in the same steady rhythm. The bell continued to toll as if nothing had changed.

The goblin squirmed and gibbered. They set it down — Kürbis's massive hand still clamped on its shoulder — and tried to get answers.

"Who sent you here?" Don Juan demanded. "What happened to the village?"

"Big-big ones come! Rocks from sky! Humans run, chief say ring bell, so I ring bell. You nice? You want treasure? I show treasure. Chief reward you, big reward—"

The goblin was eager to talk, which was the problem. It talked endlessly, breathlessly, in broken Common peppered with Goblin — gesturing wildly, contradicting itself twice in the same sentence, offering treasure that did not exist and rewards that would never come.

"Goblins," Mindartis sighed.

They got very little of use from the interrogation. The goblins had moved in after the attack, scavenging what was left. There were more of them — and worgs, the goblin added almost as an afterthought, as if the giant wolves were a minor detail.

The party decided to use the temple as a trap. If the goblins were scattered through the village, the bell was their signal — stop it, and they'd come to investigate. Better to fight them on their own terms, in a defensible position, than be caught in the open streets.

They prepared. Positions were taken behind benches and pillars. The goblin was tied up and gagged in a corner, making muffled sounds of protest. When everything was ready, Mindartis dismissed the Mage Hand.

The bell stopped.

For a long moment, nothing happened. The silence after so much ringing was almost worse — heavy and expectant. Then, from somewhere outside, voices. High-pitched, chattering. Goblin voices, growing closer.

A few came to investigate, creeping toward the temple doors with crude weapons drawn. The ambush worked — partially. The first goblins through the door were dropped quickly. But goblins are not brave creatures, and the survivors scattered back into the streets, shrieking warnings.

The element of surprise was spent. The party would have to go to them.

They emerged from the temple into chaos.

The worgs hit them before they'd made it twenty paces. Massive, dark-furred wolves — not natural beasts, but intelligent, cruel predators, each one large enough to carry a goblin rider. They came bounding from between the ruined buildings, snarling, coordinated, far more dangerous than the goblins they served.

The fight was ugly.

Don Juan met the first worg head-on, his blade flashing. Kürbis roared and charged into a pair of them, scattering goblins like leaves. Mindartis fell back, spells crackling from his hands. Dustin drew his rapier and did what he could — a shout to steady Don Juan's footing here, a quick melody on his flute to sharpen Kürbis's next swing there, then back to the blade when a goblin got too close.

But it was Zarok who bore the worst of it. A worg blindsided the Dragonborn, its jaws clamping down on his shoulder and dragging him to the ground. For a terrible moment, the paladin disappeared beneath a pile of snarling fur and snapping teeth. By the time Kürbis hauled the beast off him, Zarok was bloodied and barely standing, his armor torn, one arm hanging limp.

They won. That's what matters — that's what Dustin told himself afterward, sitting in the dirt trying to stop his hands from shaking. But it was close.

Zarok, propped against a wall while Don Juan tended to his wounds, looked up at the others with something between exhaustion and wonder.

"What a strange day it was," he said. "That worg had me good."

They were catching their breath when she appeared — stepping out from behind a collapsed wall with the casual ease of someone who had been watching the whole time.

It was the old woman. Except it wasn't.

As she walked toward them, her features shifted. The wrinkles smoothed. The stooped posture straightened. The grey hair shortened and changed colour. It was like watching a reflection settle in disturbed water — the image rippling, reforming, becoming something else entirely.

Where the old woman had been stood a slight, sharp-eyed figure with pale skin and an expression that suggested she found most things faintly amusing.

Zarok exhaled slowly. "Well. My nose was right."

"Gri," she said. "My name is Gri."

The party stared. Kürbis's hand tightened on his greatsword. Don Juan's mouth opened, closed, and opened again.

"The old woman," Dustin said. "On the road. That was you."

"That was me."

"You were watching us?"

"I was deciding," Gri said. "Whether you were worth travelling with." She looked at the dead worgs, the scattered goblins, the general carnage of the last half hour. "You'll do."

A Changeling. Dustin had heard of them — shapeshifters who could wear any face. He'd never met one. Or perhaps he had, and simply hadn't known it.

"I can help search the village," Gri said. "If you'll have me."

Don Juan looked at Dustin. Dustin looked at Kürbis. Kürbis shrugged — which, from a Goliath, was a gesture roughly equivalent to a small earthquake.

"Welcome to the group," Dustin said.

With the worgs dead and the goblins scattered, the party swept through what remained of the village. Most of the buildings were empty — doors hanging open, belongings strewn across floors, the signs of a hasty evacuation. The boulders had done their work. Some houses were simply gone, reduced to piles of timber and stone with a massive rock sitting in the middle like a grotesque headstone.

It was while searching one of the damaged homes that Dustin found something that gave him pause. The house was different from the others — herbs hung from the rafters in bundles too deliberate to be decorative, strange symbols were scratched into the doorframe, and the air inside carried a sour, musky tang that no amount of boulder damage could explain. This had been a hag's dwelling. Or something close to it.

On a shelf, half-buried under fallen plaster, sat a dark gemstone — deep red, almost black, smooth as polished bone and warm to the touch. A bloodstone. Dustin knew enough about the arcane to know he should leave it where it was. Hag stones carried intentions. They didn't end up on shelves by accident.

He put it in his pocket anyway.

The windmill at the edge of the village was another matter. It still stood, its sails broken but its walls intact, and from inside came the unmistakable sounds of goblins — chittering, arguing, the clatter of things being knocked over and rummaged through. A barricade of furniture and crates had been shoved against the door from the inside.

The goblins had found themselves a fortress. A poor one, but they didn't seem to know that.

Kürbis solved the problem with his usual elegance. One shoulder charge splintered the barricade and sent goblins tumbling. What followed was brief, loud, and decisive. The goblins inside fought with the desperation of cornered rats, but they were outmatched in every way that mattered. Within minutes, the windmill was cleared.

They found food stores — most of it looted from village homes — and a few trinkets the goblins had hoarded. Nothing of value. Just the sad evidence of a village picked clean by scavengers.

It was Gri who found her.

The Changeling had slipped away during the windmill assault — as Gri often did — to scout the remaining buildings. When the others caught up, they found Gri standing in the doorway of the Nightstone Inn, gesturing them inside with a finger to her lips.

A woman sat at one of the tables, tense, watchful, a crossbow within arm's reach. She was human, dark-haired, dressed in practical leather — not a villager, that much was obvious. She'd been here through the attack, she said. Trapped when the rocks started falling, hiding while the goblins moved in. She seemed relieved to see armed company, though her eyes moved a little too quickly, taking in their weapons, their numbers, their positioning.

She gave her name. She was grateful. She was helpful, pointing out which buildings had been searched and which hadn't. She was, in fact, a little too polished for someone who had just survived the destruction of a village.

Don Juan noticed it first — a certain practised ease in the way she handled herself, the way her story came out just a touch too smoothly. He filed it away and said nothing. There were more pressing matters.

It happened without warning.

One moment, Dustin was standing in the village square, looking at the hole where the Nightstone had been. The next, the world shifted. The colors bled out of everything — the sky, the buildings, his companions — as if someone had drained the light itself. A grey fog rolled in from nowhere, thick and cold, muffling all sound. The church bell, still tolling under Mindartis's spell, faded to a distant, ghostly echo.

Dustin looked down. His hands were translucent.

He spun around. Kürbis was beside him, looking equally confused, his massive form flickering like a candle in the wind. Around them, the village was still there — but wrong. Washed out. Insubstantial. Their companions moved through the square like shadows, oblivious.

"Kürbis," Dustin said. His voice sounded strange — thin, distant, as if coming from far away. "Can you hear me?"

"I hear you," the Goliath rumbled. "But I don't think they can hear us."

Dustin's hand went to his pocket — to the bloodstone. It had been warm since he'd taken it from the hag's house. Now his fingers closed on nothing. He looked down and saw it — the gem, tumbling through his translucent hand and falling to the ground. Except it didn't fall to his ground. It fell to the other one. The real one.

On the material plane, Archibald blinked. A small gemstone had appeared at his feet, seemingly out of thin air. He picked it up, squinting at it.

Dustin watched, helpless, as the old wizard pocketed his bloodstone. He understood now. The gem wasn't ethereal. He was.

Whether the bloodstone had caused this or merely been the first thing to slip through, Dustin couldn't say. But the timing felt like more than coincidence. He thought of the hag's shelf, the warmth in his palm, the whisper that told him to take it.

They were trapped in the Ethereal Plane — able to see the material world as a grey, muted shadow, but unable to touch it, unable to be heard, unable to do anything but watch.

Time moved strangely in the Ethereal Plane. After the grey mist settled and the reality of their situation sank in, a restless quiet took hold. There was nothing to do. Nothing he could do. His companions moved through the village like shadows in a lantern show, tending wounds, searching buildings, living a story he could only observe.

Kürbis handled it better. The Goliath found a spot, sat down, and waited with the patience of someone who had spent years alone in the wilderness. Waiting was something Kürbis knew how to do.

Dustin did not.

He wandered the ethereal echo of Nightstone for a while, testing the boundaries of this half-world. He could pass through walls. He could stand in the middle of a conversation and hear nothing but murmurs. He could wave his arms in front of Zarok's face and the Dragonborn wouldn't so much as blink.

Eventually, he found a quiet spot — a corner of the ruined inn that still had most of its roof — and sat down. He reached into his pack and pulled out the tome.

He'd been carrying it since the yak folk. An ancient leather-bound book, heavy for its size, its cover embossed with symbols he couldn't read. He'd taken it from their hoard when Kürbis had helped him escape — grabbed it on instinct, the way a bard grabs anything that looks like it might contain a story. He'd tried to read it many times since — cast translation magic on it more than once, hoping to crack its secrets. But the spell had never taken hold. The script remained stubbornly indecipherable, as if the tome itself resisted being understood. Dense, angular, old. Not Elvish, not Dwarvish, not any language he recognized. Protected, perhaps, by layers of magic older than the spell trying to pierce them.

But here, in the grey stillness of the Ethereal Plane, with nothing else to do and nowhere else to go, Dustin had time. The tome felt strangely heavy and cold in this place, as if it carried the weight of the dark secrets it held. He sat cross-legged, laid it across his knees, and began the ritual one more time — expecting nothing.

He spoke the incantation one more time.

The familiar sensation of understanding washed over him — but this time it was different. The spell caught, where it never had before, as if the Ethereal Plane made the barriers between things thinner.

The angular script shimmered and resolved. Slowly, impossibly, words formed — not in any tongue he knew, but in meaning, pouring directly into his mind. Much of it still remained obscured by protective magic too deep even for this place to strip away.

But he read enough.

The tome described connections to the elemental planes — pathways of power that could be forged between a mortal soul and the vast, ancient forces that shaped the world. Earth. Fire. Water. Air. And deeper still — the para-elemental planes, the quasi-elemental fringes, the spaces between spaces where genies dwelt and bargains were struck.

It was dark scripture. Devotion to a forgotten deity — or perhaps not a deity at all, but something older, something that predated the gods' claim on worship. It promised power in exchange for loyalty. Strength for sacrifice. Knowledge for surrender.

Dustin knew he should stop reading.

He turned the page.

The deeper he went, the more the tome seemed to respond to his attention. Passages that had been faded became clear. Illustrations that had seemed abstract resolved into diagrams — rituals, gestures, words of binding. Some sections were incomplete, their pages torn or deliberately obscured, and these gaps tormented him most of all. What was missing? What had someone tried to hide?

He read until his eyes ached. He read until the ethereal mist seemed to pulse in time with the words.

When he finally closed the tome, his hands were shaking.

He put it back in his pack, but his hand lingered on the binding.

Kürbis was fading.

Dustin found the Goliath near the village gate, his outline shimmering like heat haze over a summer road. The grey of the Ethereal Plane was loosening its grip on him, and something on the other side was pulling him back.

"Kürbis, wait—"

But the Goliath was already dissolving. His features thinned into the mist, the massive silhouette becoming transparent, and then—

Gone.

On the material plane, Kürbis reappeared among the others, solid again, confused but present. Dustin could see it — faintly, through the veil. Someone clapped the Goliath on the back. Life went on without him.

"Wait! Don't leave me here!"

No one heard.

He was truly alone. Whatever this place was, it was emptier than anywhere Dustin had ever been.

He wandered. He called out. He tried every trick he knew — spells, songs, sheer force of will — to push through the veil. Nothing worked.

It was hours — or what felt like hours — before he heard the snoring.

He followed the sound to a corner of the Nightstone Inn, where a familiar figure lay sprawled across a spectral bed, sound asleep and very much ethereal. Small, luminous orbs drifted lazily around him — memory spheres, the old wizard's method of storing experiences he couldn't trust his own mind to hold.

"Archibald?"

The wizard snorted awake, blinking in confusion. "Hmm? What? Who's there? Where am I?"

"Archibald, we're in the Ethereal Plane. Do you know how to get us back?"

The wizard squinted at him. Then at the grey mist. Then at his own translucent hands.

"Ah," he said. "Well. That would explain the décor."

One of the memory spheres drifted between them, pulsing with light. Inside it, images swirled — fragments of the day Archibald had recorded before slipping into the Ethereal Plane himself.

"You might want to see this," Archibald said, tapping the sphere.

The sphere bloomed open, and Dustin saw Nightstone through Archibald's eyes.

A massive hill giant lumbering toward the village, uprooting trees and hurling them at the walls. "Are these tree trunks he's throwing?!" — someone's voice, pitched high with disbelief. Mindartis and Gri at the gate, attempting to talk the brute down. The giant, uninterested in diplomacy, slumping against the windmill and falling asleep. Gri creeping forward — "Let's steal his bag while he sleeps." The giant waking, flailing with pieces of the windmill. Arrows sinking into its hide. Someone striking its knee with a quarterstaff. And then Gri, arrow nocked, waiting for the opening — "I stab her in the throat" — and the giant fell.

Then riders arriving at the gate. A flying snake, of all things.

The sphere dimmed. Dustin stared at Archibald.

"You missed quite a day," the wizard said.

The villagers of Nightstone hadn't all perished. Many had fled when the boulders began to fall, taking shelter in a network of caves in the hills north of the village. The party found them there — frightened, hungry, but alive.

Getting them out was another matter entirely. The caves had dangers of their own, and the villagers weren't the only things hiding in the dark.

This section is incomplete — to be expanded.

The return came the way Kürbis's had — without warning or explanation. The grey thinned. Colour bled back into the edges of things. Dustin heard voices — real voices, not the muffled echoes he'd grown used to — and felt solid ground press against his boots with a weight that nearly buckled his knees.

He was standing in the village square. Archibald was beside him, blinking in the sunlight, looking as though he'd been woken from a nap he hadn't asked for.

"Ah," the wizard said. "Much better."

With the village secured and its people returned from the caves, there was the matter of what came next. Lady Velrosa Nandar was dead — crushed in the initial bombardment, they were told, when a boulder struck the keep.

Her daughter, Daphne, had survived. She met them in what remained of the keep's great hall — a young woman standing in the shadow of a ruined throne, trying very hard to look like she belonged there. She did not yet look like she belonged there, and she knew it.

"My mother spoke of Urgala Meltimer," Daphne said. "In Triboar. She was my mother's mentor — a retired adventurer, runs an inn called the Northshield House. If anyone can advise me on what to do next, it's her." She hesitated. "I'm not asking you to fight my battles. I'm asking you to carry a message. Tell Urgala what happened here. Tell her I need help."

She paused, and for a moment the mask of composure slipped. She was young, grieving, and the weight of an entire village had just landed on her shoulders.

"I don't know how to do this," she said quietly. "Any of it."

Don Juan stepped forward and placed a hand on her shoulder. "You don't have to know yet," he said. "That's what mentors are for." He said it like a man who knew something about carrying weight he hadn't asked for.

Daphne nodded. She didn't cry, though she looked like she wanted to.

That evening, Zarok sat sharpening his axe by a low fire. His shoulder still ached from the worg's jaws. The fire smelled of dry pine and the remains of whatever Kürbis had cooked — something with onions, Zarok decided, charitably. He looked up at the others — the bard tuning his flute, the Goliath stoking the flames, the paladin polishing his blade, the wizards bickering about something arcane — and shook his head slowly.

"What a band of skilled adventurers I seem to have joined," he said to no one in particular.

He didn't regret leaving the caravans. Not for a moment.

Don Juan found Dustin by the fire later that evening, after the others had settled in. Dustin had his cloak pulled tight; his hands still wouldn't quite stop shaking when he thought of the worgs. Don Juan handed him a cup of wine without comment and stood there a moment, watching the flames.

"We should send word to the Revue," Don Juan said. He didn't sit down. "They'll be expecting us back in Waterdeep."

Dustin looked at him. "And?"

"And I don't think we're going back to Waterdeep."

Neither of them said anything for a moment. The fire popped. Somewhere behind them, Archibald had started snoring.

"Daphne's message won't carry itself," Don Juan said. "Triboar is west. The Revue can manage without us — they've done it before."

"You don't have to convince me, Don."

Don Juan smiled. "I know. I was convincing myself." He sat down. "We'll send a rider with a message in the morning. Tell them we've taken on a job. Extended engagement. Don't wait up."

The question of who was going to Triboar hadn't been formally asked, but it answered itself over the course of the evening. Kürbis had nowhere else to be — he'd said as much on the road, and nothing since Nightstone had changed that. Zarok wasn't going back to escorting caravans, not after this. Mindartis said little, but when Don Juan mentioned the route west, the elf quietly began packing his things. He had come to Nightstone for Lady Velrosa. The least he could do was carry her daughter's message.

Archibald was the last to weigh in, mostly because nobody was sure he'd been listening.

"Triboar," he said, looking up from whatever he'd been studying. "Yes. Fine. Are there libraries?"

"It's a frontier town," Mindartis said.

"Ah." A pause. "Well. The company is adequate."

Dustin couldn't stop grinning. Goblins in a bell tower, worgs in the streets, a Changeling shedding her disguise like an old coat, a hill giant felled by an arrow to the throat. He'd come to Nightstone expecting a birthday party. This was better.

He'd dreamed of the College of Valor — bards who rode with heroes. It hadn't occurred to him he might already be travelling with some.

At dawn, the village guard provided them with horses. Daphne Nandar watched from the ruined gate as they mounted up and turned west toward the trade roads. She raised a hand — not quite a wave, not quite a salute. Something in between.

At the crossroads where the Trade Way split toward Nightstone, Gri stopped her horse.

The Changeling sat in the saddle for a moment, looking north up the Trade Way, then back at the rest of them. Her expression could have been amusement or indifference or something else entirely — with Gri, it was never easy to tell.

"I'm not much for delivering messages," she said. "Triboar holds nothing I'm looking for."

No explanation. No apology. Just the flat certainty of someone who had been making her own decisions for a long time and saw no reason to justify this one.

Dustin nodded. He hadn't known her long — none of them had, not really, not even counting that one night on the Trade Way when she had been someone else entirely. But she had fought beside them in Nightstone, and that counted for something.

"Take care of yourself, Gri."

She smiled — or something close to it — turned her horse south, and rode off without looking back.

The rest of them continued west. They had a message to deliver.

The horses were a parting gift from the castle — fine animals, strong and well-fed, the kind of mounts that spoke of gratitude without needing words. The party had saved Nightstone. They had driven out the goblins, cleared the caves, brought the villagers home. No expenses were spared.

But Nightstone still needed help. Lady Nandar was dead, and her heir was young — too young to govern a village still pulling itself from the rubble. The party had been asked to ride west to Triboar and deliver a message to Urgala Meltimer — a retired adventurer who ran an inn there called the Northshield House, and the only person Daphne Nandar could think of who might know what to do.

The road wound through low hills and sparse woodland, the horses settling into an easy rhythm against the packed earth. The party rode in a loose column — rested, at least, if not entirely at ease. The memory of Nightstone sat heavy on all of them.

It was Don Juan who spotted it first. A shape on the horizon that didn't belong — too tall, too vertical, too still against the moving clouds. As they drew closer, the shape resolved into a tower. Not built on any hill or cliff face, but standing on a cloud, a thousand feet above the road. As if it had always been there, trailing wisps of white mist from its base like smoke from an extinguished candle.

From the middle of the road underneath, a staircase of impossible design spiralled upward. The steps were broad — far too broad for Human feet — and made of something that looked like compacted cloud, solid enough to hold weight but faintly luminous, shifting at the edges like fog that had forgotten how to drift.

"Well," Don Juan said, hand resting on his sword. "That is either a very large problem or a very large opportunity."

Kürbis was already climbing.

The tower was empty — or appeared to be. The party emerged into an enormous circular chamber, its walls lined with shelves that reached beyond sight, the ceiling lost somewhere in the mist above. Furniture built for someone three times their height stood in careful arrangement — a desk the size of a wagon, a chair that could seat the entire party. Wind moved through the space in soft currents, carrying the faint scent of old paper and mountain air.

But no giant.

"Hello?" Dustin called, his voice swallowed by the vast space. "We come in peace. Mostly."

Silence. Then — a shuffling. A creak of wood. The faintest tremor in the floor.

"Who... who is there?" The voice came from somewhere behind the bookshelves — deep as distant thunder, but thin with nerves. "Are you... are you small folk?"

It took some coaxing. Gentle words. Assurances that they were not here to steal, fight, or cause trouble. Slowly, with the hesitance of a creature utterly unused to company, a cloud giant emerged from behind a towering bookcase. He was enormous, even by giant standards, with a long, wispy white beard and eyes that darted between them with the anxious energy of a scholar interrupted mid-thought.

The tower was larger inside than it appeared from below — or perhaps it simply felt that way, built as it was for a creature three times their height. The ceilings soared. The furniture was enormous. A chair was the size of a small room. The cloud floor was strange underfoot — firm as packed stone, though every time Dustin looked down he half-expected to fall through it. It was colder than he'd expected too — not bitter, but the kind of thin high-altitude cold that settled into cloaks and cup rims. There were corners that felt almost cozy, though. Scaled-down alcoves where the party could sleep and eat without feeling like mice in a cathedral.

And then there were the griffons.

Zephyros kept a clutch of four in a roost at the very top of the tower — an open-air platform exposed to the wind and sky, half nest and half landing pad. Magnificent creatures with the bodies of lions and the heads and wings of eagles, their feathers a deep tawny gold that caught the light whenever the clouds parted. They were half-wild, territorial, and utterly uninterested in being approached by anything smaller than their keeper.

Most of the party learned this quickly. Don Juan attempted charm and received a wing buffet for his trouble. Archibald took one look at the bookshelves lining the walls, murmured "Well, well," and lost all interest in griffons.

Kürbis, however, was transfixed.

The Goliath stood at the edge of the griffons' perch for what felt like an hour, perfectly still, watching them preen and stretch and fold their wings. He didn't approach. Didn't speak. Just waited, with the same infinite patience he'd shown in the Ethereal Plane, the same stillness that came from years alone in the mountains where the only way to see a wild thing was to become part of the landscape.

Eventually, one of the griffons turned its head. Studied him. Took a step forward.

Kürbis extended a hand — palm up, fingers loose — and waited.

The griffon pressed its beak into his palm and held it there. A low rumble, almost like a purr, vibrated through its chest. The other three lifted their heads, watching — not threatened, not curious, just acknowledging that something in the roost had changed.

"Of course," Dustin muttered from a safe distance. "Of course the mountain man tames the griffon."

Kürbis said nothing. He was smiling — a rare, unguarded thing — and scratching the griffon behind the ear as if he'd been doing it his whole life.

The first evening in the tower, the clouds turned gold beneath them and the wind hummed through Zephyros's walls. Don Juan had produced wine from somewhere — he always did — and Kürbis sat close to one of the wide windows, watching the light shift on the cloud bank below. Zephyros perched on a cushion he'd built specifically for sitting without stooping, looking pleased to have guests at all.

Dustin reached for his flute.

It was instinct. A giant's tower, drifting among the clouds — if there was ever a moment for a song about giants, this was it. And he had one. An old ballad he'd picked up years ago in the Silver Marches, passed from bard to bard around campfires the way these things always were — half history, half legend, more melody than accuracy. The Age of Ostoria. It told of the ancient giant empire in broad, romantic strokes — mountains that soared, heroes that fought, glory proclaimed. The kind of song that sounded impressive and said very little.

He coughed to get the group's attention. "This is the song I've heard around campfires," he said. "Or how I remember it."

He played it through. The others listened — Kürbis nodding along, Don Juan tapping a rhythm on his knee, Archibald humming faintly in his sleep.

It was a good song. A crowd-pleaser.

But when Dustin looked up at Zephyros, the cloud giant's expression was polite. Kind, even. And entirely unconvinced.

He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. Dustin could read an audience, and this audience — the only one in the room who had lived through the ages the song described — was being generous.

The song was a sketch. And Dustin had just performed it for someone who had seen the painting.

"Zephyros," Dustin said the next morning, trying to sound casual and failing entirely, "do you have any books about giant history? The real history — not the campfire version."

The cloud giant brightened. It was the most animated they'd seen him — eyes widening, hands clasping together, the nervous energy redirected into something almost resembling excitement. Of course he had books. He had many books.

The problem was scale.

Zephyros's library was built for Zephyros. The shelves rose to heights that made Dustin's neck ache from looking up, and the volumes themselves were enormous — leather-bound slabs the size of tabletops, too heavy for a Half-elf to lift, let alone carry to a reading spot. Dustin tried once, gripping the spine of a promising-looking tome with both hands, and managed to slide it approximately two inches before his arms gave out.

"Perhaps," Zephyros said, with the careful diplomacy of someone trying not to embarrass a guest, "I could assist."

What followed was an arrangement that would have looked absurd to anyone watching. Zephyros, cross-legged on the floor to bring himself closer to Dustin's level, would carefully extract a volume from the shelf, lay it open on the ground, and turn the pages with a single enormous finger while Dustin sat on the edge of the book itself, reading with the help of a translation charm and occasionally asking the giant to slow down.

Zephyros didn't mind. If anything, he seemed to enjoy it — the chance to share knowledge he'd spent centuries collecting, with someone who actually wanted to hear it.

And the history was staggering.

Ostoria — not the vague legend of the campfire songs, but the real empire. Annam the All-Father, who had created giantkind and divided the world among his sons. Vilmos, who claimed the seas. Nicias, the skies. Ruk, the hills. Ottar, the tundras. Masud, the volcanoes. Obadai, the caverns. And Lanaxis, the eldest, who ruled the plains from Voninheim. The Thousand Year War against dragonkind. The slow, inevitable decline. Cloud cities that floated among the stars. Storm fortresses where the ocean met the sky.

Dustin read for hours. He took notes on scraps of parchment, sketching lyrical fragments between passages about empires that had risen and fallen before the smaller races had learned to write. The campfire song he'd played the night before felt embarrassing now — a child's rhyme compared to the real thing.

Archibald shuffled past at some point, squinted at the open page, and said, "Ah, Lanaxis. Made a terrible bargain, that one." He wandered off before Dustin could ask what he meant.

That night, while the others slept and the tower drifted through a sky full of stars, Dustin pulled the tome from his pack and laid it across his knees. He had been trying to translate it for years — spell after spell, the angular script refusing to yield. In the Ethereal Plane, something had finally given way, and now, with what Zephyros's books had taught him about the Yaksha and their bound Dao, the pieces were starting to fit.

He read deeper than he had before. The passages spoke of binding and servitude, of power offered and power taken, of connections to the elemental planes that ran deeper than any mortal spell. His hands trembled. His eyes burned. But he did not stop.

The next morning — the third day in the tower — Dustin asked a different question.

"Zephyros — do you have anything about yak folk? Or the elemental planes?"

The giant paused mid-page-turn. His eyes, usually scattered with nervous energy, focused on Dustin with an intensity that hadn't been there before.

"That is an unusual interest for a bard," he said.

Dustin shrugged. "I'm an unusual bard."

Zephyros studied him for a moment longer, then rose and moved to a different shelf — higher up, dustier, the kind of shelf where books were kept not for reference but for caution. He pulled down a smaller volume — smaller by giant standards, still the size of a shield — and set it before Dustin without opening it.

"Be careful with this one," he said. And the way he said it suggested he wasn't talking about the binding.

Dustin opened it anyway.

What he found was not what he had expected. The book spoke of the yak folk — the Yaksha, as they were properly called — and their ancient devotion to a Forgotten God, a being so old that even the giants had struck its name from their records. The Yaksha had enslaved other creatures to serve this deity, but chief among their tools were the Dao — earth genies of immense power, bound against their will and forced to toil in the deep places of the world. The Dao were creatures of stone and mineral, proud and ancient, and their enslavement was considered an abomination even by the standards of beings who measured history in millennia.

Dustin's hands trembled. The yak folk who had enslaved his village. The mines. The sacrifices to their Forgotten God. It was all here — not his story specifically, but the shape of it, the framework that explained what he had lived through without understanding.

And the tome he carried — the one he had stolen during his escape — suddenly made a different kind of sense.

The rewrite consumed him. For the next three days, Dustin worked feverishly — the history he'd read from Zephyros's books burning through him, demanding a song that matched its scale. The campfire ballad wouldn't do. He needed something grander. Something that did the story justice. He rewrote lyrics, scrapped them, rewrote them again. He restructured the melody from the ground up, weaving in the names he'd learned — Annam, Vilmos, Nicias, Lanaxis — giving each verse the weight of the empire it described.

When he finally played it through, he knew it was better. Leagues better. But something nagged at him — a gap he couldn't quite close on his own.

"Don Juan," he said one morning, "I need your help."

The paladin raised an eyebrow. Musical collaboration was not usually something Dustin asked for — the bard was protective of his craft, particular about his arrangements, the kind of artist who accepted compliments more easily than suggestions. But this was different.

"The history — it's too big for what I wrote. It needs more. A certain panache. A grandeur the giants invoke." He waved a hand vaguely. "You're generally better at these things. Can you give me a hand?"

Don Juan smiled. "I thought you would never ask."

And then Dustin turned to Kürbis.

"I saw you still carry your bagpipes," he said. "Do you feel like adding some dimension?"

The Goliath considered this for approximately two seconds before retrieving the instrument from his pack.

What followed was two days of practice. Kürbis had played before, but fitting bagpipes into a song written for flute and voice took effort. The drone wanted to swallow the melody. Dustin would cue the transition, Kürbis would come in half a beat late, Don Juan would wince theatrically at nothing in particular, and they'd start again. By the end of the first day, Kürbis had blown a note so sour that one of the griffons screamed back from the roost — which Kürbis took, generously, as a compliment. By the end of the second, the drone sat right beneath the melody, like a second heartbeat.

The final version — Don Juan's arrangements, Kürbis's bagpipes, Dustin's flute and vocals woven through the center — they performed for Zephyros on the sixth day.

The cloud giant listened in silence. His enormous hands rested on his knees. His eyes, usually darting and anxious, were still.

When the last note faded, Zephyros was quiet for a long moment.

"Ah, Dustin," he said. "It is as if Ostoria came alive again." He paused, and something shifted in his expression — surprise, perhaps, at his own emotion. "There's more to small folk than many giants would admit."

Don Juan nudged Dustin with his elbow. "This song we've crafted will surely be a hit!"

Dustin smiled, but said nothing.

In the quiet hours after the performance, while the others slept and the tower drifted through a sky full of stars, Dustin sat alone with his flute and played.

Not the Ode. Something else entirely — darker, rougher, built from the ground up. He wasn't sure why. His fingers found patterns they hadn't been taught. The flute's tone took on a darker edge, and he leaned into it, adding war drum rhythms he'd never used before, a bass undertone that hummed beneath the melody like something breathing underground.

It was about giants — the same subject, the same history — but nothing like the Ode. The warmth Don Juan had brought was gone, replaced by something rawer — heavier. Deep drums and a whispering bass voice that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than his chest.

He played it through twice, made adjustments, played it again. It felt right in a way he couldn't articulate. Like scratching an itch he hadn't known was there.

He put down his flute, stretched, and went to sleep.

The tower drifted on.

The griffons sensed it first.

From their roost above, the keening cry echoed down through the tower — piercing, urgent, the sound of creatures that had spotted something in the sky they did not like. The party was on their feet before the cry had finished.

Don Juan moved to one of the windows. "Something's out there."

They crowded around and looked. Enormous, silver-white, its wings catching the light like beaten metal as it banked in a wide, patient arc around the tower. A dragon.

Not attacking. Circling. Waiting.

Zarok stood frozen, his golden eyes wide, his breath caught somewhere between terror and reverence. He had spent his youth among Dragonborn who spoke of their draconic ancestors with pride and longing — but he had never seen a living dragon. The silver shape was immense, beautiful, and utterly indifferent to them.

"What a magnificent beast," he whispered.

Before anyone could answer, the air on the first floor changed. A chill mist seeped upward through the hole in the floor — not the natural fog of the clouds, but something deliberate, purposeful, moving against the air currents. It drifted through the chamber, pooling around the furniture, exploring the bookshelves, rising toward the ceiling. Methodical. Searching.

Then the shapes solidified.

Dwarves. Four of them, armoured and wary, bearing the insignia of the Lords' Alliance. They had ridden here in the silver dragon's talons and entered the tower as mist — the kind of tactical approach that spoke of military discipline and a generous budget for potions. They had come to investigate — a tower of unknown origin drifting across the Sword Coast was not the sort of thing that went unnoticed by those whose job it was to notice things.

The conversation was tense but civil. Zephyros explained himself — a scholar, a neutral party, troubled by the breaking of the Ordning and offering passage to small folk who had been caught in its consequences. The dwarves listened, asked pointed questions, received answers that satisfied them enough to leave without violence.

They dissolved back into mist, drifted down through the floor, and were gone. Through the windows, the party watched the silver dragon descend from the clouds, the dwarves climbing onto its back. Then it banked away and vanished.

Zarok stared at the empty sky long after it had gone, and the expression on his face was one Dustin recognised — the look of someone whose world had just gotten considerably larger.

The storm came that night.

The dwarves had left that morning, and the day had passed uneventfully — the party still talking about the silver dragon, Zarok still quiet with the weight of what he'd seen. By evening, the tower had drifted into a bank of heavy cloud. Zephyros retired early. The party settled into their corners on the first floor and slept.

Dustin woke to darkness and thunder.

Clouds boiled up from below like something rising from deep water, black and churning, shot through with veins of lightning that cracked and forked in silence before the thunder caught up, rolling through the tower hard enough to rattle the books on their shelves.

Zephyros stood at his window, and for the first time since they'd met him, the cloud giant looked afraid.

Two shapes burst through the wall — gargoyles, stone-skinned, bat-winged, already swinging. The party scattered and regrouped. Don Juan's sword flashed, Kürbis roared and swung, Mindartis's shields flickered to life. Archibald, startled awake from his latest nap, began hurling spells with the irritated precision of a man whose sleep had been interrupted one too many times.

Blades rang off stone skin. They were still fighting when something enormous struck the tower from outside.

The masonry didn't crack so much as detonate. Chunks of rock the size of barrels tumbled through the chamber. Wind screamed through the gash, carrying rain and the ozone stink of lightning, and through the ragged hole —

An eye.

Blue. The pupil was a vertical slit, wide as a man was tall, and it moved — tracking them, studying them.

A dragon. Not the silver that had carried the dwarves. Something else. Something worse.

Dustin moved on instinct. His hand found the tinderbox at his belt, and the warmth that pulsed through the brass was almost reassuring — almost enough to make what he did next feel planned rather than desperate. He whispered a word of binding, felt dark power coil through him and latch onto the dragon's mind like a burr. Then, before the eye could blink, before the enormous head could turn, he raised his flute and played.

The notes that came out were not beautiful. They were wrong — jagged, atonal, designed to burrow into a mind and tear at the seams. And they found their mark. He saw it — the way the eye widened, the pupil contracting, the enormous head flinching backward from the hole in the wall.

For one breathless moment, he thought it had worked.

Then the spell broke. The melody died in Dustin's fingers, and the eye that found him again was no longer curious — it was furious.

The roar that followed was not a sound. It was a force — a wall of thunder and rage that knocked Dustin backward and sent books tumbling from shelves.

Then the command pressed into their skulls. Ancient, absolute, delivered without words.

"Interfere not with Iymrith."

Zarok went rigid. Whatever the name meant to him, it was nothing good.

The tower lurched violently.

Mindartis raised his voice, calm but cutting. "We need to leave. Now."

They ran.

Not heroically. Not with dignity. They ran for the edge, for anything that would put distance between them and the thing that was now methodically tearing the tower apart from the outside. The sounds of destruction followed them — stone grinding, walls collapsing, the deep percussive booms of a creature that could reduce architecture to rubble the way a child kicked through sandcastles.

Zephyros was screaming something behind them — instructions, prayers, or simply the inarticulate terror of a creature watching his home destroyed around him. The party didn't stop to listen.

They reached the edge. The cloud beneath the tower's base still held, but beyond it — a thousand feet of empty air between them and the ground, the landscape spread out below like a map drawn by a careless god. The staircase that had brought them here was long gone, dissolved back into mist days ago.

"Jump," Mindartis said. His voice was steady. His hands were not. "I need the distance."

Dustin looked at him. Looked at the drop. Looked at the wizard's face, which held the kind of certainty that only came from having done the mathematics and knowing there was exactly one answer.

"You cannot be serious," Don Juan said.

"The spell needs time to take hold. If we wait, we won't have enough fall to slow down. Jump."

Dustin pulled the tinderbox from his pouch. "There are too many of us," he said. "I can see it in your face. Save the spell for the others."

He didn't wait for the argument he could see forming on Don Juan's face. He pressed his thumb against the brass, felt the warmth flood through him, and let go.

It was not like sleeping. It was not like dying. It was like being folded — gently, impossibly, every part of him compressed into a space that should not have held a thought, let alone a person. The tinderbox grew warm in the hand that was no longer holding it, because the hand was inside it now, and so was everything else — his body, his breath, his flute, the thundering of his heart.

The world went dark. And warm. And very, very small.

Kürbis caught the tinderbox before it hit the cloud. One hand — the same hand that had tamed a griffon, that had swung a longsword through goblin ranks, that had carried companions through darkness before. He tucked it into his belt, looked at the others, and jumped.

They all jumped.

The wind hit them like a wall. A thousand feet of empty air opened beneath them, the cloud shredding around their bodies as they plunged through it — blind, deaf, the world reduced to roaring white and the sickening pull of gravity.

Then Mindartis spoke a word, and the world went soft.

The spell bloomed outward — a shimmer in the air, a lightness that caught them like an invisible hand, slowing their fall to a gentle drift. They floated down through the howling wind and the rain and the distant sounds of a tower dying above them, the ground resolving slowly from a patchwork blur into fields and trees and the dark thread of a road.

Behind them, the cloud giant's tower tilted, cracked, and began its long collapse into the storm. Whether Zephyros survived — whether he fled on his griffons or fell with his books and his solitude — they did not know. The clouds swallowed everything.

They landed in a field. Wet grass. Dark sky. The sound of the storm fading to the east, taking the dragon and the ruins with it. It was the middle of the night, and they were soaked, bruised, and standing in farmland they didn't recognise.

Kürbis pulled the tinderbox from his belt and held it up. "Dustin," he said. "You can come out now."

A moment. Then the brass grew hot, and the Half-elf unfolded from nowhere — gasping, blinking, patting himself down as if checking that all the pieces had come back in the right order.

"That," he said, "was deeply unpleasant."

Don Juan looked at him. Then at the tinderbox. Then back at him.

"We are going to talk about that," the paladin said.

Dustin put the tinderbox away. "Later."

They made camp in a copse of trees at the edge of the field — no fire, no conversation. Don Juan peeled off his sodden boots and upended them one at a time, watching the water run out. Kürbis wrung his cloak over the grass like a man wringing a rag. Archibald, somehow, was already snoring. The horses from Nightstone were long gone, left on the road days ago when a cloud giant's tower had seemed like the better option. In hindsight, the horses might have been the safer choice.

Nobody slept well.

At dawn, the sky was grey and still. To the west, through the thin morning mist, they could see smoke rising from a settlement. Buildings. A road. Signs of life.

Triboar.

They walked into Triboar wet, bruised, and horseless — the mounts Nightstone had given them long abandoned on the road where a cloud giant's tower had seemed like a better option. In hindsight, the horses might have been the safer choice.

The town sat at the junction of the Long Road and the Evermoor Way — a frontier crossroads built on flat, fertile land, surrounded by sprawling ranches and farmsteads. The market square was busy with local farmers and peddlers, overlooked by the two-storey Tower of the Lord Protector, its entrance marked by a dusty banner depicting three black boars running toward the head of the banner on a blood-red field.

They hadn't made it fifty paces into town before a young man intercepted them — practically running, out of breath, eyes wide with the unmistakable look of someone who had just watched six people fall out of the sky and land in a field.

"I saw you," he said. "I saw the — you came out of the clouds. I was on the road and I saw —" He stopped. Collected himself. Tried again. "My name is Zaine Featherlance. I'm a fighter. I've been looking for — I mean, I want to —" He straightened up. "Take me with you. Please. Whatever you're doing. Wherever you're going. I can fight. I can help."

He was young. Eager in the way only someone who hadn't yet been stabbed, cursed, or dropped from a floating tower could be. His sword was clean and his armour was polished and his handshake, when Don Juan accepted it, was firm enough to suggest he meant every word.

Don Juan studied him. "Featherlance," he said. "Are you related to Edric Featherlance?"

The change in the young man's face was instant. "You knew my father?"

"I fought beside him once. Outside Daggerford, on the road south. Bandits hit a merchant caravan — your father was riding escort. Just him and two others against a dozen men." Don Juan paused. "He held the line until reinforcements came. Good fighter. Brave man."

Zaine stood a little straighter. "He died three years ago. Fever, not the sword. He would have preferred the sword."

"Most soldiers would." Don Juan looked at Dustin. Dustin looked at Kürbis. Kürbis shrugged.

"Welcome to the party," Don Juan said. "Try to keep up."

Their first stop was the inn. Northshield House sat on the eastern side of town — a sturdy, well-kept establishment that looked like it had been built by someone who expected trouble and had prepared accordingly. The sign above the door showed a shield, and the woman behind the bar looked like she could have carried one.

Urgala Meltimer was tall, broad-shouldered, and grey-haired, with the bearing of someone who had spent decades doing things considerably more dangerous than pouring ale. She listened to Dustin's message from Daphne Nandar — the girl's plea for help, for guidance, for anyone who might know how to hold a ruined village together — with the patient attentiveness of someone who had heard many such pleas before.

"I'm sorry," Urgala said, when he had finished. "For Velrosa. For the village. For the girl." She set down the glass she had been polishing. "But I'm retired. Nightstone is not my responsibility, and I am too old to pretend otherwise."

Dustin had expected the answer. It was written in the way she held herself — settled, rooted, the posture of someone who had made peace with the distance between who she was and who she had been.

"Daphne is alone," he said.

"Daphne has the village," Urgala replied. "And the village has survived worse." A pause. "I'll write to her. Advice, contacts, names of people who can help. But I won't go back. That road is behind me."

They took rooms for the night. Stew was on the fire downstairs — thick with beef and onions. The blankets were heavy. Kürbis's feet hung off the end of his bed. The quiet was the kind that came from an innkeeper who understood that adventurers needed rest more than conversation.

"Where can a bard perform around here?" Dustin asked before they settled in.

Urgala considered this. "The Triboar Arms is the respectable option. The Talking Troll is the other one."

They spent the rest of the day exploring Triboar's shops. After everything they'd been through, the simple pleasure of browsing a market town's wares felt almost indecent.

Mindartis was the first to go looking — and the first to be disappointed. He searched the town for anything resembling a magic shop or a library, and found neither. When he asked a merchant in the market square whether anyone in town dealt in magical goods, the man glanced around and lowered his voice.

"There are two mages living in town, but they don't sell their stuff. One of them — Kolstaag, up at Boar's Rest — nobody goes near him. Strange things happen around that estate. Gargoyles on the roof. Lights at odd hours. Folk are afraid of him, and he likes it that way." The merchant shook his head. "The other one, Draven Millovyr, he runs the Everwyvern House. Fanciest establishment in town. More money than magic, if you ask me. Nice enough fellow, but the wife gives me the creeps."

Dustin and Don Juan headed to Narth Tezrin's Lion's Share together — a general store on the market square that sold everything from feed to adventuring gear. No instruments, unfortunately. But Dustin found woodcarving tools and a quality block of ironwood, dense and dark and fine-grained — the kind of wood that would hold an edge and a tune.

"You're going to carve a flute?" Don Juan asked, watching Dustin turn the block over in his hands with the focused attention of someone who had just found a project worth caring about.

"I'm going to carve the flute."

Don Juan, for his part, bought ball bearings. A whole bag. One gold piece. He also inquired about a magnifying glass.

"A hundred gold?" He stared at Narth Tezrin as if the man had personally insulted him. "That's ridiculous! You can keep your low quality materials, good sir!"

Narth was unmoved. "I understand, sir. You can find cheap and shoddy ones for a much lower price, but we don't sell those here. We're proud of our crafting here in Triboar."

Don Juan took the ball bearings and left the magnifying glass where it was.

"What are the ball bearings for?" Dustin asked.

Don Juan smiled and said nothing.

Dustin also stopped at the Triboar gift shop and apothecary, where he picked up a tea set — a small pot, one cup, and a pouch of dried tea leaves. He'd been thinking about carving the flute, and the kind of quiet, focused evenings that would require, and decided that a warm cup of tea would make the work go better.

Dustin and Kürbis visited Othovir's Harness Shop — a skilled leather-worker whose designs were popular with the Waterdhavian riding set. Kürbis asked about heavier armor, but Othovir had nothing that would outperform the Goliath's bear hide — it was better crafted than anything a frontier town could offer, and Kürbis seemed quietly pleased by this. Dustin commissioned custom studded leather armour with iron spikes and purple accents, and a holster for the flute he hadn't yet carved. Othovir took his measurements, asked no questions about the design choices, and quoted a price that was fair enough to suggest he enjoyed a challenge.

Zarok visited Ghelryn Foehammer's forge — the dwarf smith was world-renowned, royal armourer for Citadel Felbarr, and grumbled about everything with the practiced ease of a craftsman who had earned the right. Zarok's plate armour was damaged and needed mending, and he had a request beyond the repair.

"Can you embed this?" He held up a dragon's tooth — a relic he carried close. "Over my heart."

Foehammer squinted at the tooth, then at the breastplate. "That's gonna weaken the breast plate. Maybe I can embed it in the shoulder?"

"You're the expert."

"Fifteen gold. Don't expect it by tomorrow."

Word of their arrival had reached the Tower of the Lord Protector before they finished shopping. A messenger found them at Othovir's — polite, formal, and carrying the kind of invitation that was not really an invitation.

Darathra Shendrel met them in her office on the upper floor of the tower. She was sharp-eyed, direct, and carried herself with the quiet authority of someone who had earned her position rather than inherited it. She asked questions — where they had come from, what they had seen, what they knew about the giants.

They told her about Nightstone. The boulders from the sky. The goblins. The villagers in the caves. They left out the cloud giant's tower and the dragon — it was too much, too strange, and they weren't sure yet what to make of it themselves.

Darathra listened without interrupting. "Giants," she said when they had finished. "We've been hearing reports. The Twelve — our militia — have confirmed attacks on outlying ranches. Caravans hit on the roads. And now Nightstone." She leaned back. "It's getting worse."

She studied them for a long moment — the kind of assessment that weighed not just what people said but what they were capable of.

"You seem like capable people," she said. "Would you be willing to help with a local matter while you're here?"

Don Juan glanced at the others. Nobody objected.

"Hyuth Kolstaag," Darathra continued. "A wizard who lives at Boar's Rest, the estate on the ridge. He's been a problem. A few weeks ago, assassins came for him in the night. The whole town heard the thunder and lightning. The assassins fled on stolen horses and killed a stablehand in the process. Kolstaag never compensated the family." She paused. "He's also enlisted gargoyles as sentries. Stone creatures that swoop down on townsfolk for amusement. I've spoken with him. He doesn't see the harm."

"You want us to talk to him," Don Juan said.

"I want you to resolve the situation," Darathra said. "However you see fit."

That evening, Dustin performed.

The Talking Troll was not the Wanderlust Revue's usual venue. It was a dim, low-beamed dive at the south end of town — the kind of place where the furniture had been broken and repaired so many times that no two chairs matched and the tables bore the scars of arguments settled with knives. Part of the roof had caved in two summers ago and had yet to be fixed, and the holes had attracted nesting birds whose contributions to the décor went largely unappreciated. The cellar, by contrast, was excellent.

The owner — Kaelen Sarssir, a struggling actor who had inherited the place and was doing the minimum to keep it standing — welcomed Dustin with the desperate enthusiasm of someone who hoped a bard might attract customers his tavern couldn't attract on its own.

The crowd was rough. Farmers, ranch hands, caravan guards, and a handful of characters who looked like they'd been barred from the other taverns and had settled here as a last resort. They were not, by any measure, an audience that had come for music.

Dustin assessed the room, chose his opening carefully, and played.

He opened with A Fool in the Abyss — a classic from the tavern circuit, the kind of song every travelling bard learned within their first year on the road. A jester stumbles through a portal into the Abyss and, rather than dying horribly, charms a succession of increasingly powerful demon lords with nothing but bad jokes and worse timing. It was impossible to dislike — the melody was bright and infectious, the lyrics ridiculous enough to cut through any amount of background noise, and the punchlines landed even if you'd heard them before.

By the second verse, the conversations nearest the bar had died down. By the chorus, a few ranch hands were tapping their mugs on the table. Not a standing ovation — but attention, which in a room like this was worth more.

Dustin read the room and adjusted. The first song had warmed them. The second would win them.

Asmodeus's Golden Arse was not a song you played at the Triboar Arms. It was not a song you played for nobility, or for children, or for anyone with pretensions of refinement. It was a song about a wanderer's journey through Avernus and the monumentally inappropriate statue he discovers there — six verses of escalating absurdity, each one more vulgar than the last, with a chorus that was impossible not to shout along to once you'd heard it twice.

It brought the house down. By the third verse, a table of caravan guards was hammering their fists in time with the beat. A farmer who had been nursing a single ale for the better part of an hour sprayed it across his neighbour. Kürbis, who had been sitting in the corner with his arms folded and a tankard that looked like a thimble in his massive fist, was laughing — a deep, booming sound that rattled the already questionable rafters. Even Zarok, who carried himself with the dignity of a paladin who believed presentation mattered, had given up trying to maintain composure and was grinning openly by the final chorus.

The room was his.

Dustin didn't let it cool. He rolled straight into A Hoop, Two Pigeons, and a Hell Hound — the story of a nobleman who attempts to train a hell hound using circus equipment and a pair of spectacularly uncooperative pigeons. It was a song tailor-made for exactly this kind of crowd: rough, rowdy, three drinks deep, and delighted to hear about a rich man making a fool of himself.

Kaelen Sarssir was beaming behind the bar. This was more customers than the Talking Troll had seen in weeks, and the ale was flowing. A grizzled woman near the door — who had looked ready to leave when Dustin started — ordered another round and settled back into her chair.

Dustin played two more songs after that. Lighter fare — a road ballad, a sailor's lament. The crowd stayed. Some sang along. Some just listened, which was its own kind of compliment in a place where listening was not the default activity.

When he finally set down the flute, the applause was genuine — rough and unpolished, like the room itself, but real. Kürbis raised his tankard. Zarok caught Dustin's eye and nodded — a small, deliberate gesture that from a Dragonborn paladin carried the weight of a standing ovation.

Dustin sat down at their table, accepted the ale Kürbis pushed toward him, and felt the particular satisfaction of a room well played. The Talking Troll was not the grand stages he'd dreamed of. It was better, in a way — honest, unfiltered, the kind of audience that would tell you to your face if you were boring them.

He'd held them. All of them. With nothing but a flute and three bawdy songs about demons, pigeons, and the underworld.

It was only later, walking back to Northshield House through the quiet streets of Triboar, that he noticed the feeling. A low hum beneath the satisfaction — not in his ears but somewhere deeper, in the part of him that reached for music. Something had shifted during the set. Not in the songs themselves — those were old standards, played exactly as written. But in the spaces between the notes, in the way the room had leaned toward him, there had been a pull. A current he hadn't put there.

He shook it off. Good performance. Receptive crowd. That's all.

They found the others in the yard behind Northshield House, around a fire that Don Juan had built with the methodical care of someone who needed his hands busy. Mindartis sat cross-legged on a low bench, reading by the light of a cantrip he'd set hovering above his shoulder. Zaine was cleaning his sword — again, from the look of it. The blade was already spotless.

"How was the Troll?" Don Juan asked.

"Still standing," Zarok said. "Barely."

"He brought the house down," Kürbis said, dropping onto a bench hard enough to make it creak. He jerked his chin toward Dustin. "The whole tavern was singing."

Dustin sat down by the fire and accepted the flask Don Juan offered. Spiced brandy, warming. "I really needed the distraction after what we went through."

Nobody spoke for a while. The fire cracked. The smoke smelled of oak, and the night air beyond the flames had gone cold. Somewhere beyond the inn's yard, Triboar was settling into night — doors closing, lanterns dimming, the sounds of a town that went to bed early and rose with the sun.

It was Zaine who broke the silence. "Can I ask something?" He looked around the fire, at the faces of people who had known each other for weeks and him for hours. "You fell out of the sky. I saw it. What were you doing up there?"

The question hung in the air. Don Juan looked at Dustin. Dustin looked at Mindartis. Mindartis closed his book.

"A cloud giant," Mindartis said. "Named Zephyros. He lived in a tower above the clouds. He gave us passage."

"A cloud giant," Zaine repeated.

"He was a scholar," Dustin said. "Gentle. Concerned about the Ordning — the old hierarchy of giantkin. Something broke it, and he was trying to understand what."

"And the falling part?"

"A dragon attacked the tower," Don Juan said. He said it the way he said most things — with the calm conviction of a man who expected to be believed and was rarely disappointed.

Zaine stared at him. "A dragon."

"She called herself Iymrith," Zarok said quietly. He had been watching the fire all evening, as if he'd been turning this over since the tower fell.

"The Doom of the Desert." He paused. "I am from Anauroch. The desert east of here, beyond the mountains. My clan grew up with her name. She was old when my great-grandfather was born, and he was old." He turned his hands over, studying them. Blue scales caught the firelight. "She is a blue dragon. Like me. Like my blood."

Nobody interrupted.

"There is another name for her. The Dragon of Statues. She creates stone servants — gargoyles — to guard her lair and do her bidding. Dozens of them, the stories say. An army of stone."

Mindartis looked up sharply. "The gargoyles at the tower."

"Yes," Zarok said. "I have been thinking about that all day."

Zaine had stopped cleaning his sword.

The silence after that was the kind that needed filling, but not with words. Dustin reached for his lute.

"I heard a song once," he said. "Years ago, around a fire not so different from this one. About a place called Klauthen Vale — a hidden valley in the mountains west of Mirabar, kept warm by ancient magic. The story says a great red dragon guards it." He tuned a string, turned a peg. "I always thought it was just a song. A good campfire tale and nothing more." He looked at Zarok. "Yesterday I saw two real dragons. And suddenly the old stories don't feel like stories anymore."

He played.

The melody was different from the bawdy tavern songs he'd played an hour ago — slower, more deliberate, the lute's warm chords winding through the night air like smoke from the fire. It told of mountains and hidden warmth, of a chasm so deep the cold couldn't reach it, of sheep grazing in a valley that shouldn't exist and a red dragon who chose solitude over conquest. The kind of song that made you lean forward and lower your voice.

When the last note faded, the fire had burned low. Zaine was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, the forgotten sword across his lap. Mindartis had closed his book entirely. Kürbis was staring into the embers with the expression of someone who was thinking about something far away.

"That's a real place?" Zaine asked.

"Supposedly," Dustin said. "West of Mirabar, past the River Mirar, east of Raven Rock. The song even gives directions." He smiled. "Whether anyone's ever followed them and come back is another question."

"Legends," Mindartis said, but the way he said it was not dismissive. It was the way a scholar said the word when he suspected the legend had footnotes.

Don Juan stretched and stood. "Two dragons, a cloud giant's tower destroyed, and now a tale of a third dragon in a hidden valley." He dusted off his trousers with characteristic precision. "Gentlemen, I suggest we sleep."

The fire burned low. One by one, they drifted inside — Zaine first, then Mindartis with his book, then Don Juan. Kürbis stayed longest, staring into the embers, until even he stood and went in without a word.

Dustin sat alone for a while. The lute was still warm in his hands.

The next morning, Don Juan was in the yard playing with two of Urgala's mastiffs — big, barrel-chested dogs that had taken to the paladin overnight and were now competing to see which of them could knock him off his feet first. He was losing.

Urgala watched from the doorway. "There's a third," she said. "Copper. Haven't seen her since yesterday morning. She doesn't wander."

Don Juan scratched behind one of the dogs' ears. "I'll take these two out around town. See if they pick up her trail."

The party tagged along — Dustin, Mindartis, Kürbis, Zarok, Zaine, and Don Juan being pulled down the street by two mastiffs who had caught a scent and did not care about his dignity. The dogs led them south through the market square, past the Lion's Share, down a lane that curved toward the east side of town — and stopped at the edge of the Everwyvern House estate, circling and whining, noses pressed to the ground.

The place looked like it had been lifted from Waterdeep and dropped into a frontier town that didn't deserve it. A beautiful stone building with lamps hanging from its eaves, a turret in one corner, and grounds that stretched back into private gardens, stables, and a meandering path through a small orchard — all landscaped with the kind of care that suggested someone paid other people to care on their behalf. Next door, the Pleasing Platter — a restaurant that had adopted the same pretensions — completed the picture of Waterdhavian excess transplanted to the frontier.

Mindartis studied it from the road. He remembered what the merchant had told him — Draven Millovyr, mage, and a wife who gave people the creeps. "I have an idea," he said. "I'll pose as a Waterdhavian noble looking to reserve a table for tonight. Zaine will be my guard. Dustin — I'll make you invisible. You come in with us and have a look around while I keep the staff occupied."

Zaine blinked. "Your guard."

"You have the armour for it. Just look serious and don't say anything."

"I can do that."

"The rest of you," Mindartis continued, "take the dogs around the property. See what you can see."

The party split. Mindartis spoke the incantation at the roadside — a word and a gesture — and Dustin's body folded into the light until he was nothing but a shimmer in the air. Then Mindartis walked up the path toward the front entrance with Zaine at his shoulder and Dustin beside them, unseen.

Two bouncers flanked the door — big men, arms folded, dressed well enough to pass as staff but built like men whose real job description involved throwing people into the street. They looked Mindartis up and down.

Mindartis didn't break stride. He introduced himself as a visiting noble from Waterdeep, inquired about availability for that evening, and spoke with the kind of casual authority that made bouncers step aside. They let him through. Zaine followed, looking serious and saying nothing, as instructed. Dustin slipped in behind them.

Inside, Everwyvern House was everything Triboar was not — floating plants, many-hued driftglobes, candlelight on polished wood, the faint smell of expensive wine. Mindartis played the part well. He inquired about the tasting menu, asked about wines, commented on the décor with the practised ease of someone who had actually dined in places like this.

While the staff attended to Mindartis, Dustin explored. A heavy curtain separated the entrance hall from the common room — he could hear the murmur of conversation beyond it, the clink of glasses, a woman's laughter pitched just so. But the curtain was the only way through, and pushing it aside while invisible would turn heads. On the other side of the hall, a closed door leaked the smell of roasting meat and fresh bread — the kitchen. Also no way in without raising suspicion.

He tried the turret staircase instead, and climbed.

The upper floor was a corridor lined with guest room doors, all closed. At the far end, a heavier door — the entrance to what looked like a private suite. He tried the handle. It gave.

Inside was a small antechamber — a sitting area with a settee, a side table, a window overlooking the gardens. Two doors led off it. The one on the right stood open: a bedroom, well-appointed, empty. Through the doorway he could see a four-poster bed, a dresser, curtains stirring in a draught from a cracked window. Whoever used this room was not here.

The door on the left was different. Heavier, darker wood, and something else. Dustin didn't need to touch it to feel the ward. The air hummed with a low, persistent energy — a glyph, etched into the frame, waiting for the wrong hand.

He studied it for a long moment. Whatever was behind that door, someone had gone to considerable trouble to keep it there.

He went back downstairs and rejoined Mindartis in the foyer. The elf had committed fully to the role — he'd booked a room. A hundred gold for one night, which he paid without flinching, because a Waterdhavian noble would not flinch. They left together, Mindartis carrying a brass key and the quiet satisfaction of a plan that had cost more than it should have.

Meanwhile, Don Juan, Kürbis, and Zarok had circled the property with the mastiffs. A bouncer had approached from the house — unhurried, hands at his sides, watching.

"Private property," the man said. "You'll want to move along."

"Have you seen another dog like these around here?" Don Juan asked. "Yesterday, maybe. A brindle."

Something shifted in the man's face — brief, controlled, gone. "No dogs come here. Lady Rosa does not allow dogs."

Don Juan noted the answer. And the way the man had given it.

When they regrouped, Dustin told them about the warded door. Don Juan told them about the bouncer.

They'd come back tonight. In the meantime, they could go and have a chat with Kolstaag.

Boar's Rest sat on a ridge overlooking the rest of Triboar — a stone mansion built by someone who wanted the town to know he was above it, in every sense. The path up was long and deliberate, the kind of approach that gave whoever lived at the top plenty of time to watch you coming.

The gargoyles watched them first. Four of them, perched on the rooftop corners like stone birds of prey, their heads tracking the party's ascent with the smooth, unhurried patience of things that had nowhere to be and all the time in the world. Stone eyes followed them up the path. Stone claws gripped the eaves. Nobody pretended they were decorative.

"They're not attacking," Mindartis observed.

"Yet," Kürbis said.

The front door was heavy oak, iron-banded, unremarkable. Dustin knocked. No answer. He tried the handle. It gave.

They filed inside — Don Juan first, then the rest, Zarok bringing up the rear. The entrance hall was dim, dusty, and furnished with the careless expense of someone who bought fine things and then forgot about them. A suit of armour stood in the corner near the door, posed with a halberd like a museum piece. A wide staircase led up to the second floor, and at the top, a single door.

The front door slammed shut behind them.

Zarok spun — and the door bit him. Not figuratively. The oak split along a seam that hadn't been there a moment ago, revealing a wet, ridged mouth lined with blunt teeth that clamped down on his gauntlet and held. The door's surface rippled, the iron bands flexing like tendons, and a pseudopod of wood and metal wrapped around his arm.

"Mimic!" Mindartis shouted.

The suit of armour in the corner jerked to life. The halberd came up, the visor swung toward them, and it stepped forward with the mechanical purpose of something that had been waiting for this.

"Upstairs!" Don Juan called. "The door — go!"

Kürbis didn't move. He was already at Zarok's side, hands on the mimic's jaw, trying to pry the teeth apart. The adhesive held his grip too — his fingers stuck to the surface, and for a moment both of them were caught.

The rest broke for the stairs. Two gargoyles crashed through the windows as they ran — stone wings folding as they landed on the entrance hall floor, claws scraping stone, circling between the party and the staircase. Don Juan cut past one, Dustin ducked under a wing, and they made it to the steps.

Behind them, the animated armour started climbing.

Don Juan looked down the staircase at the suit of armour ascending toward them, turned back to the others with a look of pure satisfaction, and upended his bag of ball bearings. The tiny steel spheres cascaded down the stone steps in a glittering wave. The armour, mid-stride, hit the ball bearings and went down — hard. Metal crashed against stone as it tumbled back to the bottom in a clanging avalanche of limbs and halberd.

"The ball bearings," Dustin said.

"The ball bearings," Don Juan confirmed.

Below, Zarok had stopped struggling. "Go," he said to Kürbis, his voice steady despite the mimic grinding against his gauntlet. "I'll get there my way."

Kürbis wrenched his hands free — the adhesive tearing away with a sound like ripping leather — and ran for the stairs. Zarok closed his eyes, spoke a word, and vanished. He reappeared on the staircase halfway up, free, his armour smoking faintly with the residue of the spell.

At the top, a locked door. Zaine pulled lockpicks from his belt and went to work — hands steady, jaw set.

The pick snapped. He swore, pulled another, tried again. The armour was getting up. The gargoyles were climbing.

The second pick broke in the lock.

Zaine stared at the door. "I'm out."

Dustin knelt beside him and took the broken picks. He whispered a word — a simple mending charm, the kind of cantrip any apprentice learned in their first week — and the metal knitted itself back together in his palm.

He'd never picked a lock in his life. But something — instinct, or a feeling he couldn't name — made him slide the pick into the keyhole anyway. He closed his eyes and listened with his hands, feeling for the mechanism the way he felt for a melody, following the shape of the thing until it made sense. A tension wrench. A half-turn. Something clicked.

The lock opened.

They piled through and slammed the door behind them.

Then the bloodstone took them.

It hit all at once — Dustin, Mindartis, Zaine, the shimmer at the edge of vision, the crawling wrongness, and then the grey swallowed them whole. Dustin saw Don Juan's face turning toward him, mouth open, hand reaching out. Then nothing.

Everything looked the same, but nothing was solid.

Zaine was panicking. He was turning in circles, hands passing through walls, his voice — if he was making sound — swallowed by the grey. His eyes were wide, his breathing fast, and he kept reaching for things that weren't quite there. First time. Dustin remembered his own first time. It didn't get better, but you learned to stop reaching.

Mindartis stood with his arms folded, jaw tight.

The room at Boar's Rest was still there — the others in it, moving, talking — but muted and distant. They could see. They could not hear.

Dustin watched Don Juan talk to Kolstaag. The wizard was sitting in a chair behind the door they'd just broken through, legs crossed, utterly unbothered. Don Juan was gesturing — expansive, theatrical, the full performance. Kürbis stood behind him with his arms folded. Zarok looked confused. Whatever Don Juan was selling, he was selling it hard. Kolstaag's expression shifted from irritation to suspicion to something that might have been amusement. Then he waved a hand — dismissal or agreement, impossible to tell without sound.

They left Boar's Rest. Dustin followed, drifting through walls because there was nothing else to do.

The next evening, he watched the three of them walk into the Pleasing Platter, the restaurant beside Everwyvern House. Don Juan had dressed up. He moved through the entrance with the bearing of a man who belonged there, Kürbis and Zarok flanking him in what looked like a deliberate arrangement. Servant guards. Don Juan was playing noble.

The dining room was beautiful and wrong. Driftglobes cast warm light across tables spaced far apart, each screened by floating plants. Guests sat in pairs and small groups, flushed and smiling, leaning toward each other with the glassy attentiveness of people under a spell. Which, Dustin realised, they were.

He watched the wine being poured. He couldn't see the bubbles from the Ethereal Plane — colour didn't carry — but he could see the effect. Kürbis's posture changed within minutes. The Goliath, who normally sat like a boulder, was leaning toward Zarok with an expression Dustin had never seen on his face. Soft. Open. Zarok, for his part, couldn't take his eyes off Draven Millovyr, who was circulating the room with the practised charm of a host who seemed to know exactly what his wine did.

Don Juan barely touched his glass. He watched the room the way Dustin watched the room — reading it, cataloguing it.

Rosa moved through it all like a current. Dustin couldn't hear her voice, but he could see the way people turned toward her — involuntary, magnetic, their eyes following her across the room. She touched a guest's shoulder and the man shivered. She whispered to a woman and the woman laughed too hard, too long. Whatever she was, she was feeding.

Dustin watched all of it, unable to do anything but watch.

When the bloodstone finally released him — back at Northshield House, morning light, the smell of breakfast — he found Don Juan at the table, looking entirely too pleased with himself.

"You missed quite a lot," the paladin said.

Don Juan told it well. He always did.

Kolstaag had been sitting in a chair behind the door — unbothered, as if armed strangers crashing through his home were a minor inconvenience. Don Juan had pivoted.

"I told him we were accountants," Don Juan said. "Freelance accountants. I told him the town was going to come after him for the stablehand and the gargoyles, and that we were the only ones who could save him."

Dustin stared at him. "He believed that?"

"Twenty gold to the city. Ten to the stablehand's family. Ten a year in insurance."

"You ran a protection racket on a wizard."

"I ran a public service on a wizard." Don Juan sipped his drink. "This morning, I went asking around town about Everwyvern House. At the Triboar Arms — the tavern on the south road — Nemyth, the owner, told me one of his regulars had gone to dinner at the Pleasing Platter and never come back. A man named Oboyo." He paused. "So this evening, we went to see for ourselves."

Dustin nodded slowly. "I saw that part. The wine. The guests."

"Heart-shaped bubbles," Don Juan said. "In every glass. I noticed them in the first pour and barely drank after that. Kürbis and Zarok were not so careful."

Kürbis, who had been listening from across the room, said nothing.

"The charm wore off after we left the grounds," Don Juan continued. "Neither of them remembers much. We found no sign of Oboyo, but the whole evening made the place suspicious enough. We decided to go back at night."

"Tonight," Dustin said.

"Tonight," Don Juan agreed.

They went after midnight. Dustin, Don Juan, Kürbis, Mindartis, Zaine, and Archibald — who had been dozing in a chair at Northshield House and needed to be told twice where they were going.

Mindartis's hundred-gold room turned out to be the best money they'd spent in Triboar. He walked them through the front door without breaking stride — a Waterdhavian noble returning to his room with his entourage. The bouncers had his name on their list and nobody who paid a hundred gold a night was questioned about the company he kept.

Upstairs, Mindartis let them into his room. From there, the corridor stretched in both directions — guest room doors on either side, numbered brass plates catching the faint light from a window at the far end. They moved in single file, boots on carpet, past doors behind which paying guests slept off enchanted wine. Archibald stopped to study a landscape on the wall and had to be coaxed onward.

At the end of the corridor, the suite door. Dustin tried the handle and frowned. "This was open during the day." He knelt and studied the lock. "I can try this, but the door I found behind it — the one with the glyph — that's on the left inside."

Kürbis looked at the suite door, then at the last guest room on the left. He tried the handle. It opened onto an empty room with a window overlooking the side of the building. Beyond that window, fifteen feet along the wall, would be the study window — the room behind the glyphed door.

"I'll go around," Kürbis said. He was already climbing onto the sill.

"Kürbis —"

But the Goliath was gone, easing himself out into the night, fingers finding holds in the stonework. The window frame creaked once, then silence.

Dustin turned back to the lock. He slid the pick in and listened with his hands, the way he'd done at Boar's Rest — feeling for the mechanism, coaxing the tumblers. It worked. Eventually. By the time the lock clicked open, he'd been kneeling long enough for his knees to ache and Don Juan to start shifting his weight from foot to foot.

He made a mental note. Find someone who could teach him to do this properly.

Inside, the antechamber was as he remembered it — the settee, the side table, the window overlooking the gardens. But both doors were closed now. The glyphed study door on the left, heavy and dark. And on the right, the bedroom door that had been standing open during the day.

From behind the right door came a sound. Low, rhythmic, wretched. Moaning.

Mindartis pressed his ear to the wood. His expression hardened. He looked at Dustin, then at Don Juan.

"We're not waiting for Kürbis," Don Juan said, and opened the door.

The bedroom was lit by a single driftglobe, its light turned low and sickly. Draven Millovyr lay on the four-poster bed, eyes open but unfocused, staring at the ceiling with the blank contentment of a man who had been somewhere else for a very long time. In the centre of the room, a man was bound to a heavy chair — wrists tied, head lolling, his shirt dark with sweat. He was the one moaning.

And standing over him, one hand resting on his cheek like a lover's touch, was Rosa.

She turned when the door opened. For a heartbeat she was still the beautiful woman from the dining room — dark hair, pale skin, eyes that caught the light and held it. Then the mask fell. Her shape rippled and split. What stood in its place was fox-like and wrong — sharp-featured, nine tails fanned behind her like a peacock's display, each one tipped with pale light. Her eyes were amber and slitted and old.

She hissed — a sound that was not a word but carried the weight of one — and the air in the room thickened with charm. Dustin felt it hit him like a warm wave, a sudden urge to lower his weapon and listen, to trust, to kneel. He bit the inside of his cheek hard enough to taste blood and shook it off.

Dustin cursed her before she could strike again — a hex, whispered under his breath, the warlock's mark settling over her mind like a veil. She flinched. Her tails stuttered, their rhythm breaking for just a moment.

Don Juan was already moving. His sword came up and he closed the distance in two strides, but Rosa was fast — inhumanly so, all coiled muscle and fey reflexes. She twisted away from the blade, tails lashing, and raked claws across his arm that left lines of cold fire. Mindartis threw a bolt of energy that caught her in the shoulder and she snarled, lips peeling back over teeth that were too sharp and too many.

The fight was brutal. Rosa was fast and cruel. She struck and retreated, used the furniture as cover, threw bursts of draining magic that left Dustin's limbs heavy and his vision swimming. Don Juan took the worst of it — planted between her and the bound man, too stubborn to move, taking hits that should have dropped him. Zaine flanked her, finding gaps when Rosa overextended. Mindartis and Archibald hung back — Mindartis precise and controlled, Archibald less precise, no less dangerous.

They were winning, but slowly, and bleeding for every inch of it. By the time Rosa staggered — truly staggered, one of her tails flickering and dimming — Don Juan had a gash across his ribs and Zaine was favouring his left leg and Dustin's reserves were nearly spent.

Then glass shattered in the room across the corridor.

Kürbis. He'd made it. Dustin heard the heavy thud of the Goliath landing inside the study, heard the creak of floorboards as he crossed the room — and then the unmistakable sound of a door being wrenched open.

From where Dustin stood in the bedroom doorway, he was the only one with a line of sight into the antechamber. He saw the study door fly open. He saw Kürbis in the frame. And he saw the glyph flare — a pulse of violet light that burned along the doorframe and discharged into the air between them.

The creature that materialised was dark, feline, and wrong in a different way than Rosa. A massive cat-like shape with six legs and two barbed tentacles rising from its shoulders, its outline shimmering and shifting so that it seemed to occupy a space slightly to the left of where it actually stood. It turned toward Kürbis with the slow attention of something that had been summoned hungry.

Dustin didn't think. His hand came up, the warlock's power surging through his fingers, and he fired — a crackling bolt of force that punched through the antechamber and caught the beast in the flank, snapping its attention away from Kürbis.

"What are you doing?" Don Juan's voice, raw with frustration. He'd been bracing for Dustin to finish Rosa. Instead, Dustin had turned his back on the fight.

"There's another one!" Dustin shouted.

In the heartbeat of confusion — Don Juan turning to look, Mindartis pulling back from the doorway — Rosa moved. She crossed the bedroom in three strides, seized Draven from the bed with a strength that belied her wounded frame, and threw herself at the window.

Glass exploded outward. Rosa's body twisted mid-air, Draven clutched to her chest, nine tails streaming behind her like a falling banner.

Archibald raised his hand. The spell was quiet — no flash, no thunder, just a focused lance of psychic energy that found the cracks Dustin's hex had made and drove through them. Rosa jerked. Her tails went rigid, then limp. Her grip on Draven loosened, and they hit the courtyard stones below with a sound that carried across the grounds.

In the antechamber, Kürbis was already on the beast. The Goliath had taken the moment Dustin's blast bought him and closed the distance, grappling the creature with both hands. It was fast and hard to track — every strike seemed to pass through a space it had just vacated — but Kürbis didn't need to be precise. He needed to be close. He got his arms around it and squeezed, and when it thrashed free he caught it again, and when Mindartis found an angle for a spell that wouldn't hit the Goliath, the beast finally went still.

The silence after was the loudest sound in the building.

The air in the bedroom still tasted wrong — sweet and cloying, like overripe fruit. Dustin stepped over broken glass and knelt beside the chair. The man bound to it was conscious, barely. His wrists were raw where the rope had cut in, and his eyes had the unfocused look of someone surfacing from a long, bad dream.

"Are you Oboyo?" Don Juan asked. He was leaning against the doorframe, one hand pressed to the gash across his ribs.

The man blinked. "I am. Why am I tied to a chair?"

Don Juan untied him while he talked. Oboyo's story came out in fragments — a wonderful evening at the Pleasing Platter, a woman named Rosa, love at first sight. "Have you ever experienced love so strong you'd do anything?" he asked, rubbing his wrists where the rope had been.

"Ah yes, amigo, I have," Don Juan said. "But love — love will tear you apart."

From the antechamber, where Zarok had just materialised — blinking, disoriented, taking in the wreckage with the expression of a man who had missed something significant — came a quiet voice. "Yes."

Nobody asked him what he meant.

Dustin rolled his eyes at Don Juan. That was just what bards sold to the public. There was no such thing. "I'm sorry to have to tell you," he said to Oboyo, "but it wasn't real. You were charmed by a powerful spell."

Oboyo's gaze drifted to the window. He stumbled over and looked down at the courtyard. A long silence. "A fey creature indeed," he said. "And yet, still now with some beauty. Alas."

Dustin took his flute and played a gentle melody — a few soft notes that carried warmth into Oboyo's bruised body. Some vigour returned to the man's eyes. "I don't know how I can repay you," he said.

"Don't worry about it," Dustin said. "I couldn't stand the idea of somebody being captured and tortured." Something flickered behind his eyes — brief, private, gone. "We need to search the bodies before anyone else arrives. And we should get our story straight — Mindartis is a guest here, he asked us to help investigate. Draven was under Rosa's spell. We barely survived."

He tied a rope to the bedpost and climbed down into the courtyard, using the dark and his Half-elf eyes to pick his way along the wall. Zarok followed, keeping watch from the window above.

Rosa's true form lay on the stones — a fox, small and broken, nine tails splayed around her like wilted petals. Whatever glamour she had worn in life was gone. Beside her, Draven. His face in death looked peaceful, which seemed wrong given everything.

Dustin searched the bodies. Rosa carried nothing. Draven's robes held two keys — a hefty bronze one and a small silver one. He palmed them just as torchlight rounded the corner of the building.

A guard. Wide-eyed, torch trembling. "Is that master Draven? Who's that vile creature beside him?"

Zarok stepped into the torchlight, putting himself between the guard and Dustin. "Don't be alarmed. We have all been deceived. Your lord Draven was under a spell of this vile creature — the one you knew as Lady Rosa. We managed to slay her, but she took your master with her when she fell."

The guard stared at the fox. A long pause. "I knew something was off with her. Things changed since he met her. Not all for the worse — we made good coin — but it all felt unnatural."

"Secure the perimeter," Dustin said, climbing to his feet with the keys safely in his pocket. "Make sure nobody leaves the grounds until we're done with the investigation. Don't touch anything."

The guard nodded. He was turning to go when Zarok tried one more thing. "Go fetch the dog."

"Dog?" The guard looked blank. "Lady Rosa did not allow dogs." His gaze dropped to the fox body on the stones. "I'm starting to understand why."

Back upstairs, Dustin went straight for the study. The bronze key fit the suite door's lock — so that was what had changed since his daytime visit. He tried the study door. No glyph flared. Kürbis had taken care of that from the other side.

The study was small and orderly — a desk, a chest, a cupboard. The silver key opened the chest. Inside was more gold than Dustin had ever seen in one place. Thirteen hundred pieces, neatly stacked.

"Don," he called. "You might want to see this."

Don Juan appeared in the doorway, holding three sets of fine clothes he had taken from the bedroom dresser. He looked at the chest and raised an eyebrow. "Not bad." He folded the clothes into the bottom of his pack with a care that did not quite match the moment. "Never hurts to have something to change into."

Dustin pocketed the gold and checked the desk. One large drawer in the middle, full of papers — letters from a family member in Waterdeep, asking Draven to tell them more about his "fool-proof way to make money." He ran his fingers along the bottom of the drawer and found a bump. He pushed it. A click. A hidden compartment opened inside the larger one, revealing a ring and two scrolls.

"Dustin, are you finding anything special?" Zarok called from the corridor. "People are starting to ask what's going on."

"Almost done." He slipped the ring and scrolls into his coat and checked the cupboard. Potion-making equipment — vials, a burner, dried ingredients. A flask with just a trace of liquid left. He held it up to the driftglobe light and recognised the faint shimmer. Philter of love. Rosa had been brewing her own supply.

Kürbis appeared in the study doorway, took one look around the room, and shook his head. "Did I doze off? You've cleaned the place out already."

"You broke a window and summoned a monster," Dustin said. "We searched a desk. I think we're even."

Mindartis had retreated to his guest room down the corridor to meditate, his magical reserves spent. But Archibald was still awake, and Dustin brought him the ring and scrolls. The old wizard squinted at the ring, muttered the words of an identification ritual, and turned it over in his fingers.

"Ring of Animal Influence," he said. "It holds a limited reserve of power — enough to speak with animals, charm them, or frighten them." He handed it back. "Useful for someone who spends time outdoors."

Dustin looked at Kürbis. Kürbis looked at the ring. The Goliath took it without a word and put it on.

The first scroll Archibald identified as a divination spell — it could conjure a floating, invisible eye to scout ahead. The second defeated him entirely. "Beyond me, I'm afraid," he muttered, turning the parchment upside down as if that might help.

Dustin took it and studied the arcane notation. A spell that reached into a creature's mind and shaped its worst fears into something that could stop a heart. He thought of Rosa's charm, of Oboyo tied to a chair, of the hex he had laid on her mind hours ago.

He rolled the scroll carefully and put it in his coat.

Past midnight, Darathra Shendrel arrived with two of the Twelve. She took their statements, examined the bodies, and told them she would handle the investigation from here. Her expression when she looked at the fox on the courtyard stones was the expression of someone adding a new entry to a very long list of problems.

They walked back to Northshield House in the dark. Nobody spoke much. Dustin's hands were still shaking — the last of the adrenaline working its way out — and his mind was turning over something that had nothing to do with foxes or enchanted wine.

By morning, half of Triboar knew. The other half found out over breakfast.

The story spread through the market square in fragments — a werefox, a dead innkeeper, a rescue, bodies on the courtyard stones — each retelling a little wilder than the last. Dustin heard three different versions before he'd finished his porridge at Northshield House, all of them wrong in interesting ways. In one, Kürbis had wrestled the fox barehanded. In another, Don Juan had cut down a dozen guards. The one about Archibald killing her with a single spell was, improbably, the closest to the truth.

Urgala listened to the chatter from behind the bar with the expression of someone who had heard plenty of tall tales and knew the real ones were usually quieter. She refilled their mugs without asking and left them to it.

Don Juan found her later, away from the common room. They spoke quietly. When he came back, he said only that she'd taken it well. Urgala spent the rest of the morning with her two remaining mastiffs.

The day unfolded slowly — the kind of unhurried morning that follows a night where nobody sleeps enough. Darathra had taken over the Everwyvern investigation, her officers combing the grounds, and the party had no pressing reason to be anywhere.

It was Zarok who pushed back his chair first. "My plate should be ready at Foehammer's."

Don Juan looked up. "The dwarf smith? I'll come with you." He adjusted his chain mail with the critical air of a man who had already decided he deserved better. "I have questions about armour."

Ghelryn Foehammer's forge sat at the west end of the market square — a squat stone building that radiated heat even from across the street. The dwarf was at his anvil when they arrived, the rhythmic clang of hammer on steel carrying through the open door like a second heartbeat.

Zarok's plate was waiting on a stand near the door — the dragon's tooth set into the right shoulder, gleaming white against dark steel. He ran his gauntleted hand over the work and nodded. Foehammer acknowledged this with the smallest possible grunt, which from a dwarf smith of his reputation was high praise.

Don Juan had been studying the forge, the tools, the quality of the metalwork on display. He made his decision with the swiftness of a man who had already been thinking about it and only needed to see the craftsmanship to be sure.

Splint armor. The emblem of Tyr worked into the breastplate. And — he paused here, making sure he had the dwarf's full attention — castagnettes embossed along the pauldrons.

Foehammer set down his hammer. "Castagnettes guy, are you?"

Don Juan's face lit up. He drew his longsword in a single fluid motion, executed a spinning flourish that sent firelight dancing off the blade, and finished with a bow so deep his nose nearly touched the forge floor. "Juan Francisco Montoia De La Roja," he said, still bent double. "At your service."

Foehammer watched this performance with the unblinking patience of a craftsman who had seen a lot of things but possibly not this. "Two hundred and twenty gold," he said. "Give me a few days."

"Worth every coin." Don Juan sheathed his sword and glanced down at his chain mail. "Would you take this off me as well? Once the splint is ready."

Foehammer looked the mail over without touching it. "Sixty gold. Bring it when you pick up."

"Done." Don Juan patted the chain mail with the fondness of a man already thinking about its replacement. "I'll wear it until then."

Foehammer picked up his hammer, then paused. "Fought any orcs per chance?"

Don Juan straightened. "Not yet. But if Tyr permits, I will find glory fighting orcs."

Foehammer turned back to the anvil. "They don't venture out this far west," he said. "Heard they attacked many a Dwarfhold east from here in the war." The hammer came down. The conversation, apparently, was over.

Meanwhile, Dustin found Mindartis in the common room, the elf sitting by the window with a book open on the table and a cup of tea going cold beside it. He looked rested — or as rested as Mindartis ever looked, which was the difference between tightly wound and slightly less tightly wound.

"I wanted to ask you something," Dustin said, sitting down across from him. "About enchanting. Specifically — musical instruments."

Mindartis closed the book, one finger holding his page. "What kind of magic do you mean? To make it louder, higher?"

"Something more than that." Dustin turned his flute over in his hands. The ironwood was still rough — he'd barely started carving it. "I heard about a staff of charming. Something like that, but then a flute. An instrument that could —" He hesitated. The words he wanted were somewhere between captivate and compel, and he wasn't sure which one he meant. "That could hold a room. Really hold it."

Mindartis studied him for a moment with the particular attention of someone who had noticed the question wasn't entirely academic. "Enchanting an instrument is not a trivial undertaking," he said. "The item must be crafted with the enchantment in mind from the start — you can't simply pour magic into an existing object and hope it takes. The materials matter. The craftsmanship matters. And the enchanter needs to understand both the instrument and the school of magic involved."

"Could you do it?"

"I could research it." Mindartis opened his book again. "That is not the same thing as saying yes."

Dustin nodded and left him to his reading. It was not a yes, and it was not a no, and from Mindartis, that was practically enthusiasm.

Before midday, with the conversation still turning in his head and nothing else claiming his time, Dustin took the tinderbox from his belt and went upstairs to his room. He sat on the edge of the bed, pressed his thumb to the brass lid, and stepped inside.

The first visit had been a blur. This time he looked. A round chamber of smooth stone, twenty feet across, walls the warm colour of polished bronze. Cushions and low tables covered the floor, laid out like a desert tent. The air was still and warm and smelled of deep earth after rain. All of it inside a brass box that fit in his palm.

He had bought the tea set for this. Not for Northshield House, not for campfires — for here. The small pot, the single cup, the dried leaves from the apothecary. He set them out on one of the low tables, boiled water over a candle, and poured. The steam curled upward and the smell filled the chamber the way it never could in an open room — completely, like the space had been waiting for it.

Then he took out the ironwood block and his carving tools.

The flute was past the shaping stage but nowhere near finished — the bore half-drilled, the finger holes marked but not yet cut. Ironwood was dense and unforgiving, and every stroke of the chisel required patience. Dustin gave it that, turning the block slowly, feeling for the grain, letting the wood tell him where to cut. From outside — through the stone walls, muffled but present — he could hear Kürbis's heavy footsteps somewhere below, the clink of mugs, voices that never quite resolved into words. The world carried on. He was simply not in it for a while, and that was the luxury.

He carved until his hands cramped, then set the tools down and picked up a quill. The melodies came easier in here — something about the stillness sharpened the music in his head. He scratched notes on parchment, hummed phrases, played fragments on his old flute and listened to how they bounced off the stone walls. A verse about the road south from Waterdeep. A waltz that kept changing time. A drinking song about a fox that he wasn't sure was funny or bitter, and suspected it was both.

When the warmth in the air began to thin and the walls started to feel less solid — the vessel's way of saying his time was up — he gathered his things and stepped back out into his room at Northshield House. The light through the window had shifted to late afternoon.

The rest of the party found their own ways to fill the time. Don Juan commandeered the north campground and spent the afternoon running drills — lunges, parries, the spinning flourishes he loved, performed with the intensity of a man who treated an empty field like a sold-out arena. Kürbis took Urgala's two remaining mastiffs for a walk along the Evermoor Way, which the dogs seemed to enjoy considerably more than the Goliath, who returned mud-caked and silent. Zaine tagged along with whoever would have him, eager and slightly too enthusiastic, asking questions about the Everwyvern raid that the others answered in decreasing levels of detail.

The next day passed much the same. Dustin spent another morning in the vessel — more carving, more composing. Notes played off the stone walls cleaner than they had any right to. The flute was slowly taking shape under his hands. The drinking song about the fox was coming together. The waltz still refused to settle into a single time signature, which he was starting to suspect was the point.

That evening, he played the Talking Troll again. Kaelen Sarssir had kept a spot for him, and the crowd — larger this time, word having spread — was ready. A woman near the door had been shouting for Asmodeus's Golden Arse since he'd tuned up. Dustin gave them what they wanted and tried a few things they didn't know they wanted yet, and by the end of the night the Troll felt less like a venue he was visiting and more like one he was building.

The morning after, he walked to Othovir's Harness Shop. The studded leather was ready — iron spikes along the shoulders, purple accents worked into the seams, and a holster on the left hip shaped to hold the flute he was still carving. He buckled it on in the shop, rolled his shoulders, and looked at himself in Othovir's mirror. The spikes caught the light. The purple was darker than he'd expected — almost black in the shadows, vivid where the sun hit it.

This was not the leather of a wandering bard.

The first boulder hit the market square. The second hit Othovir's shop.

Dustin was between the two — walking back from the harness shop, new armour still stiff at the joints — when the morning split apart. Stone on stone, wood splintering, horses shrieking in the riding yard behind him. He turned and saw the roof of Othovir's shop caved in on one side, dust rolling across the road like fog.

From the northeast, through the dust: shapes. Small fire creatures came first — no taller than children, burning from within, throwing themselves at anything wooden. Where they touched, flames bloomed. Orc riders on axebeaks swept in behind them, lances low, scattering through the streets. Five armoured figures in heavy plate marched in their wake, a column that smashed through fences and market stalls without slowing. And behind all of it, growing with every step — two fire giants, dark against the morning sky, wreathed in heat that warped the air, heading straight for the north campground.

Foehammer's forge sat on the hillside above Othovir's shop, and the fire creatures found it before Dustin did. He heard the dwarf first — a stream of Dwarvish that needed no translation, punctuated by the ring of hammer on something that wasn't metal. Dustin crested the hill and saw the forge under siege. Half a dozen of the creatures swarmed the building — two on the roof trailing flame across the shingles, three scaling the walls, one latched onto Foehammer's left arm while the dwarf tried to crush it against the anvil. His forearms were blistered raw. The air reeked of singed hair and hot iron.

Dustin raised his hand and a bolt of force struck the creature off Foehammer's arm. It hit the ground, flickered, and came back. He blasted it again. This time it burst — a spray of embers and heat that caught him across the face and hands. These things didn't die easily. Another dropped from the roof onto his shoulder. The pain was instant — a white-hot handprint through the leather, searing into skin. He grabbed it and threw it, and the iron spikes on his armour tore it open as it went.

They fought like that for what felt like a long time — the dwarf swinging and Dustin blasting, neither of them fast enough, both of them burning for it. One of the creatures set the forge roof fully ablaze and Dustin had to blast the burning beam apart before the whole structure caught. Another clung to his leg and he kicked it into the quench trough, where it died with a hiss and a plume of steam. Foehammer cornered the last two against his own anvil and hammered them flat, one at a time, with the methodical fury of a craftsman who'd waited years for a war and was discovering it was mostly about putting out fires.

When the last one burst into cinders, the forge was standing. Barely. The roof was scorched through, the walls blackened, tools scattered across the floor. Foehammer sat down on his anvil — the first time Dustin had ever seen him sit on anything. His forearms were a mess of blisters layered on burns, some cracked and weeping. His beard was singed short on one side. He was breathing in a way that suggested ribs.

"Come on," Dustin said. "The campground —"

"I know where the giants are." Foehammer's eyes were on the northeast road, where two enormous shapes were still visible beyond the rooftops. His hands were shaking, and not from fear. "This is the fight I've been waiting for."

"And you got one." Dustin crouched in front of him. The burns on his own hands were throbbing, the skin tight and red where the creature had landed on his shoulder. "You stopped them from burning this whole hillside down. That matters. But you walk out there against those things looking like this, you don't come back."

Foehammer looked at the giants. Looked at his hands. Looked at Dustin.

"You did enough," Dustin said.

The dwarf didn't answer. He didn't get up, either. Dustin left him there, sitting on his anvil in his ruined forge, watching the battle he couldn't join.

At Northshield House, the fight was already ending. Urgala had met the orc riders in the inn yard with an axe and the composure of someone who had done this before — not recently, not in years, but the body remembered. Two axebeaks lay dead in the dirt, their riders beneath them. Mindartis was straightening his robes, a cut on his cheek he hadn't noticed yet. Archibald was looking at his own hands with the expression of a man who had just done something violent and was still catching up to it.

"The tower," Urgala said, pointing with the axe. "Find the Lord Protector. Seek higher ground — you'll do more from up there than you will down here." She looked past them to the street, where more riders were circling. "Go. I'll handle the rest."

Mindartis nodded once. He took Archibald by the elbow — the old wizard was still studying his palms — and they ran.

In the streets between the market square and the Evermoor Way, Kürbis and Zarok had found each other the way fighters do — by following the sound of the worst of it. Two orc riders on axebeaks, bearing down the road toward them. The birds were the real problem — taller than a man, beaked and clawed, snapping at anything in reach while the riders jabbed with lances from above. Zarok planted his feet, drew breath, and lightning tore across the width of the street — a crackling arc that hit the lead bird and sent it stumbling sideways, its rider thrown. Kürbis was on the second one before it could turn, longsword catching the orc across the chest. The axebeak, riderless, raked at him with its talons and he stepped back, let it overextend, and put it down.

They were catching their breath when a third rider came around the corner at a run. Zarok met it head-on — a single precise thrust that took the orc clean off the saddle and left the axebeak unharmed, stamping and snapping on the cobbles with no one to tell it what to do.

Kürbis looked at the bird. The bird looked at Kürbis. He held out his hand, and the ring on his finger — the one from Rosa's study — pulsed with a faint warmth. The axebeak's feathers settled. Its head tilted. It went still.

Kürbis swung up onto it — the saddle was made for an orc, which meant it was made for someone half his size — and kicked it north.

Zarok watched him go, then turned south toward the campground, where the sounds were getting worse.

When the boulders fell, Don Juan and Zaine had been sparring.

The north campground was the only flat ground in Triboar wide enough for Don Juan's morning drills — a fenced field of packed earth where caravans parked their wagons and travellers pitched tents. That morning it was empty except for the two of them, Darz Helgar raking the far end, and Narth Tezrin, who had walked over from the Lion's Share with a delivery and was sitting on a crate watching Don Juan run Zaine through a parry sequence that involved considerably more flourishes than the situation required.

The first boulder struck the field thirty feet from where they stood — a chunk of stone the size of a cart that cratered the earth and sent a shockwave through the packed dirt. The second hit the fence line and shattered it. Don Juan didn't pause. Practice sword down, longsword drawn, feet already moving toward the northeast edge of the campground where the dust was thickest. Zaine was half a step behind him, both scimitars out before the debris had stopped falling. Darz dropped his rake. Narth stood up from his crate and looked around for something to hold — Darz pressed a short blade into his hand without a word.

Orc riders on axebeaks came first — two of them sweeping across the open ground, lances low. The birds were the real danger, taller than a man, snapping and clawing at anything in reach while the riders jabbed from above. Don Juan sidestepped the first lance, caught the shaft, and used the rider's momentum to haul him off the saddle. Zaine took the second — darting inside the bird's reach to cut the straps, sending the orc tumbling. Both axebeaks fled riderless once the orcs were down, and the campground was briefly quiet enough to hear what was coming from the northeast. It was not good.

At the Lord Protector's tower, Mindartis and Archibald found Darathra shouting orders at people who weren't there. She'd sent the Twelve south that morning — riders had come in from the ranches reporting attacks, and she'd dispatched her entire mounted militia to respond. Now the real attack was here and she had no one. She was halfway through organising a bucket line with two frightened shopkeepers when the wizards arrived.

"We need height," Mindartis said. "What can you tell us?"

"Nothing. Boulders, fire, screaming — that's all I know." Darathra looked past them to the smoke. "Get up the tower. Tell me what you can see."

They climbed. The tower was two storeys of plain stone, open at the top, and from the upper platform the battle laid itself out below them. Smoke rising from at least four points — Othovir's shop, Foehammer's forge, the market stalls, a row of houses along the northeast road. The campground to the north, where Don Juan's group was fighting. And approaching from the northeast, two shapes that dwarfed everything around them — fire giants, wreathed in heat haze, heading for the campground. Ahead of them, still in tight formation, five armoured figures in heavy plate marching toward the centre.

Archibald stood at the edge and stared. He was a man who had spent his life reading about violence in comfortable rooms, and the distance between the page and the thing itself was proving considerable. His mouth moved but nothing came out.

Mindartis studied the armoured column. Five of them, shoulder to shoulder, matching stride. "Perfect," he murmured.

He waited until they cleared the last building and entered the open ground. Then he raised his hands, and fire bloomed above the formation — white-hot, expanding outward in a sphere that swallowed all five of them. When it cleared, the cobblestones were scorched black. Nothing in the column was moving.

Three streets away, Dustin saw the fireball — a burst of orange light above the rooftops, there and gone. Someone was on the tower. Good.

He was running north from the forge, and the route took him past Othovir's shop. The riding yard was torn open — the fence smashed flat, the building's east wall half-collapsed where the armoured column had marched through. Othovir was in the yard. Face down, one arm outstretched, his hand still wrapped around a set of reins. The horses were gone. The man who'd handed Dustin his armour that morning was not getting up.

Dustin didn't stop. Couldn't.

The giants were on the northeast road ahead of him, close enough that the air shimmered with their heat. He spoke a word as he ran — sharp, guttural, old — and felt the curse take hold on the nearer giant, settling into its mind like a hook. Then he levelled his hand and force crackled across the distance, striking the same giant in the ribs. It turned toward the source of the pain, and Dustin hit it again.

The other giant kept walking.

From the tower, Archibald had found his focus. Whatever paralysis the scale of the battle had put on him, the sight of Dustin's curse marking a target had broken it. He raised a hand toward the giant Dustin had hit, and something reached across the distance — no light, no sound, just a pressure that found the cracks the curse had opened in the giant's mind and pushed through. The giant stopped mid-stride. Its eyes went vacant. It turned, slowly, back the way it had come, and began to walk away from the campground.

At the campground, the fire creatures arrived.

Half a dozen of them came across the open ground in a loose swarm, small and fast and burning from within. Don Juan killed the first one clean — longsword through the centre — and it burst in his face. Embers sprayed across his cheek and hands, clinging to the skin, still burning. These things didn't just die. They punished you for killing them. The next one latched onto Zaine's arm and he couldn't shake it — had to prise it off with his scimitar blade, the heat searing through his sleeve. A third attached itself to one of the supply wagons and Darz smashed it with his shovel, then beat out the flames it left behind. Narth kicked one away from the crates and it skittered back, still burning, still coming.

Zarok arrived from the south at a run, armour clanking, blood on his shoulder guard from the street fighting. He didn't ask questions — he saw the creatures and started killing them. Between the five of them they got them all, but not cheaply. Don Juan's hands were blistered. Zaine had burns up both forearms. The campground smelled of scorched earth and hot metal.

And the ground was shaking. The first giant walked onto the field carrying something — a rod, four feet long, iron, pronged at one end. It held the rod out ahead of it as it walked, and the rod pulled downward, straining toward a patch of earth near the centre of the campground. The giant stopped where the pull was strongest, tossed the rod aside, drew its greatsword, and started digging.

On the northeast road, the cursed giant shook its head. The vacancy left its eyes. It turned back toward the campground, roared, and came.

"That one," Don Juan said. "Leave the digger."

Zarok and Zaine moved with him. The second giant's greatsword swept in a low arc that cleared ten feet — Don Juan rolled under it, struck at the ankle, and was gone before the backswing came. Zarok took the next blow on his shield and held. Zaine found the gap on the flank, both scimitars quick across the back of the calf.

Dustin hit it once more from the road — a bolt of force that cracked against the giant's jaw — then reached the campground at a sprint, burned hands throbbing. Darathra was at the edge of the field, near the base of the tower. Narth was with her — pale, gripping his borrowed blade, watching the fight he had no part in.

"What's happening out there?" Darathra asked.

"Foehammer's alive. The fires are under control." Dustin caught his breath. "Othovir didn't make it."

Darathra closed her eyes, briefly. Narth didn't move. Didn't speak. His eyes went to the digging giant — the one that had come through Othovir's end of town, through the shop where his business partner had worked — and something behind them went very still.

He was running before anyone could stop him. Across the open ground, borrowed blade out, straight for the giant tearing the earth apart with its greatsword. Darathra shouted his name. Dustin reached for him and missed.

The giant's greatsword came up out of the hole and caught Narth across the chest without breaking rhythm. He fell and didn't move. The blade went back into the earth.

Dustin stood where he was and watched Narth die, and couldn't think of a single thing he could have done differently. Darathra, beside him, said his name — quietly, the way you say the name of someone who is already gone.

Then the temperature dropped.

On the road between Boar's Rest and the campground, a figure stood with both hands raised. Kolstaag. Even from the campground his silhouette was unmistakable — tall, rigid, arms outstretched against the morning sky. Frost erupted around both giants — hail and wind and ice that came from nowhere and everywhere, focused and deliberate, shaped less like weather and more like a weapon. The digging giant staggered out of its hole. The fighting giant, for the first time, took a step back.

They looked at each other. Something passed between them. Then they turned and went the way they came — not running, but pulling away with the slow weight of things that had decided this wasn't worth the price.

Nobody followed.

An axebeak trotted up beside Dustin and stopped. Kürbis was on it, longsword resting across the saddle, grinning.

Dustin stared at him. "Where did you —"

"Boar's Rest." Kürbis swung down off the bird. "Reminded Kolstaag that his insurance includes a binding clause to assist in the defence of the town."

Darathra looked from Kürbis to the ridge and back again. Dustin laughed, shook his head, and laid a hand on the Goliath's shoulder.

Silence came slowly — in patches first, then settling across the town like dust after a collapse. The fires had burned themselves down. A boulder had punched clean through the Talking Troll's roof and was sitting in the common room like it belonged there.

Don Juan walked to the edge of the field, found an orc, and cut off its head. He carried it back through the streets without a word. Foehammer, still sitting on his anvil in his ruined forge, watched the paladin set it down at his feet. He looked at the head for a long time. Then he looked at Don Juan. Neither of them said anything, and neither of them needed to.

The Twelve rode in from the south not long after. The ranch attacks had been diversions — every one of them — and they'd ridden hard to get back. Darathra met them at the road. She walked through the town with her militia behind her, counting the damage, counting the dead.

They found Othovir in the riding yard of his shop, face down, reins still in his hand. The horses were long gone. His building was half-collapsed where the armoured column had come through on their way to meet Mindartis's fire. Two of the Twelve carried him out.

Alaestra found them at the campground. She'd come from the Lion's Share, walking quickly, searching faces. "Has anyone seen Narth?"

Mindartis, who had come down from the tower, met her eyes. "He died a glorious death," he said, "and will remain as a legend to this town."

It was the sort of thing bards said. Whether it was true or merely kind, nobody there contradicted him.

The rod was still lying where the giant had tossed it — four feet of dark iron, pronged at one end, heavier than it looked. Zarok picked it up and his arms dipped with the weight. Giant runes were etched along the shaft. Don Juan leaned in and traced them with a finger.

"Dragon's Death," he read.

The hole was four feet deep and rough — gouged out with a greatsword, not a shovel. Dustin started digging. The rod had pointed here for a reason, and whatever the giants had come for was still in the ground. Mindartis watched him work for a moment, then said: "You're five metres off."

Dustin looked up. Mindartis was holding the rod, which he had taken from Zarok with the quiet authority of someone who understood instruments. The prongs were straining toward a spot just south of the hole. Dustin moved.

Kolstaag arrived at the campground not long after — walking down from the road at his own pace, surveying the damage with the detached interest of a landlord visiting a property he didn't much care about. Dustin asked if he could move the earth. Kolstaag looked at the hole, looked at the rod, and raised a hand. Dirt peeled away in neat layers, faster than a dozen shovels.

They hit metal at eight feet down. A curved band of something dark, two inches thick, partially buried in the clay — too large to be armour, too precisely shaped to be natural. Dustin brushed the dirt away with his hands. The metal was warm to the touch and harder than anything he'd ever felt. His chisel would have bounced off it.

"Adamantine," Mindartis said. He was on his knees at the edge of the hole, studying the surface. "This is a fragment. Part of something much larger." He was quiet for a moment, then: "Zephyros had books about this. The Vonindod — an enormous construct the giants built during the war against the dragons. Adamantine, enchanted, designed to kill wyrms. It was destroyed thousands of years ago." He looked at the rod, at the runes Don Juan had read. "Dragon's Death. That's what the rod was for — to find the pieces."

The fragment was C-shaped, roughly eleven feet long, and far too heavy to move. It sat in the clay like a bone from something ancient and vast, and the hole they'd dug around it made the campground look like a grave.

While the others helped Darathra organise the cleanup, Dustin retreated to the vessel. The lyrics had been forming since the campground — since the boulders, since Foehammer's forge, since Narth. He wrote them down before they could change into something less true.

That evening, the Talking Troll was full.

Not the usual crowd of lowlives and drunks — everyone. Farmers who'd fought fires, shopkeepers who'd barricaded their doors, militia riders still covered in road dust from the diversions they'd fallen for. Kaelen Sarssir was pouring drinks as fast as he could manage and not charging for any of them. The boulder that had crashed through the roof sat in the middle of the common room, too heavy to move, too absurd to ignore. Someone had put a mug on it.

Foehammer stood on a chair — the only way the dwarf could address a room — and raised his tankard. His forearms were wrapped in bandages. His beard was still singed short on one side. "No orc," he said, "or giant, or —" He paused, searching for the word. "— magmin will destroy this community."

The room erupted. It wasn't eloquence. It didn't need to be.

Dustin climbed the boulder.

The stone was rough and uneven under his boots, and the hole in the roof above him let in the evening sky. He could see stars. He lifted the flute and played a slow intro — just melody, letting the room settle.

Don Juan was on his feet before the applause died. He grabbed a chair, dragged it next to the boulder, and sat down with his castagnettes. "Walk on Waterdeep," he said. "You know it."

They played it as a duet — Dustin on the boulder, Don Juan below him keeping rhythm, the two of them falling into the song the way they'd fallen into a hundred performances with the Wanderlust Revue. The crowd sang along by the second chorus. Someone was crying, which in a room full of people who'd nearly died that morning was not the same thing as sadness.

Later — much later — a villager in the back called out for the Waltz of the Myconids. Dustin laughed and played it, because after a day like this you play what people ask for.

They stayed a few days. Burns needed tending. Buildings needed patching. Don Juan's splint armour needed finishing. The town put itself back together with the grim efficiency of a place that had survived worse — or at least told itself it had.

They tried to find Othovir's family. Nobody in Triboar knew anything about his past — where he'd come from, whether he had relatives, who to write to. The man had run a harness shop for years and kept the rest of himself locked tight. They searched his house and found a letter from a brother in Waterdeep. It mentioned House Margaster, a prominent family, and something about Asmodeus worshippers within it. It seemed Othovir had fled to Triboar to put distance between himself and whatever was happening in that house. He'd done a good job of it. Nobody had known.

During that time, the party told Darathra the truth.

All of it. Zephyros's tower, the cloud giant's research, the broken Ordning, the dragon that had attacked them in the sky. Information they'd held back since arriving in Triboar — because it sounded insane, because nobody would have believed them, because a town that hadn't been attacked by giants had no reason to care about giant politics. The siege had changed that.

Darathra listened without interrupting. When they finished, she reached into her coat and set something on the table — a platinum badge, small and heavy, stamped with the Triboar insignia: three boars charging forward. "Take this east on the Evermoor Way," she said. "Everlund. There's an inn called Danivarr's House — ask for the innkeeper, a Half-orc named Dral Thelev. Show him the badge. He'll know what it means."

Urgala had a name for them — Hartos Dawnflower, a former adventuring companion. "He has a giant slayer greataxe," she said. "Last I heard he was in Yartar. Mention my name. He might part with it."

Darz Helgar, still rebuilding his campground, mentioned a griffon riding school in Fireshear — a woman named Dasharra Keldabar, in case they ever needed to fly.

Don Juan collected his splint armour from Foehammer's forge. The Tyr emblem was worked into the chest plate, the castagnette holsters exactly where he'd asked. Foehammer watched him buckle it on, then handed him a folded letter.

"What's this?"

"Letter of recommendation." Foehammer picked up his hammer. "You'll know when you need it."

That evening, they sat around the table at Northshield House and spread out everything they had. Darathra's badge pointing to Everlund. Urgala's name pointing to Yartar. Darz's griffons in the far north. The rod on the table between them, heavy and inscribed with runes none of them fully understood.

"Everlund," Don Juan said. "Directly. The Harpers will know more about the giants than anyone. I'd rather not stop in Yartar."

Nobody argued. The axe could wait. The Harpers couldn't.

They left Triboar on a clear morning, heading east on the Evermoor Way.

The Evermoor Way was straight and old and dull. Flat moorland on both sides, the grass long and wind-flattened, the sky wide and grey. They rode east in a loose group — Zarok and Kürbis at the front, Mindartis and Archibald somewhere in the middle having a quiet argument about ley lines, Zaine bringing up the rear. Don Juan rode beside Dustin and said very little, which for Don Juan was unusual.

The argument about ley lines did not resolve. It was not the kind of argument that resolved. Mindartis would propose a precise objection; Archibald would forget what they were discussing, then remember it three miles later and answer the wrong question with such enthusiasm that Mindartis would feel obliged to start over. By the second evening, even Kürbis — who never weighed in on academic matters — had begun looking pointedly at his own boots whenever the words convergence point were uttered.

The road ran east through the Evermoors. Damp wind came off the moor in gusts, smelling of peat and rotted grass. They camped at night beside whatever stand of trees they could find and ate what they could heat over a small fire, and in the mornings the canvas was always wet and the grass silver with dew that froze halfway up the saddles.

On the first night, before any of them had thought of turning in, something large moved through the underbrush off to the west. Not close. Not coming closer. A slow heavy crackle that did not match the wind. Whatever it was, it moved in the direction of Triboar, stayed there a while, and then it faded north. Kürbis said the word giant under his breath. They kept the fire down. In the morning they agreed: the road to Everlund went the other way, and they took it.

Zaine rode the rear in silence by the second day. He had been talkative on the road from Triboar. He was not talkative now.

By the third evening Kürbis was doing the cooking. Nobody had asked him to. The meals improved.

Dustin disappeared into the vessel for stretches of the ride. The others had stopped asking. He went, he came back. Sometimes he had a piece of woodshaving caught in his collar that he hadn't noticed. He brushed it off without explaining.

Don Juan did not disappear. He rode beside Dustin and watched the road.

On the fourth day the moor gave way to the broad flat of the Dessarin. The river ran wide and slow and grey, the same colour as the sky. Across the water the walls of Yartar rose like a smudge against the cloud — squat, businesslike, more like a fortress than a city.

The body was caught on a stone in the shallows.

Mindartis saw it first. He brought his horse up short and pointed without speaking. They all dismounted. Kürbis waded in — the water came to his knees, then to his thighs — and lifted the man out by his shoulders. "Light," he said. "Too light."

They laid him on the bank.

What looked like a cocoon was wound tight to him from his collarbones down to his knees — a translucent film dried hard against the skin, dull, crackled across his chest where it had begun to set. Where it had cracked the skin beneath was red — not sunburnt red but cooked, hot to the touch when Don Juan pressed two fingers to the man's neck. He held the gesture a moment too long, looking at the face. The swelling and the heat made it hard to read.

Mindartis crouched and laid his palm flat just above the cocoon without touching it. He held it there a long moment. "It's magical. I don't know what kind. He needs to be kept wet — the river was doing the work."

The man stirred. His eyelids fluttered, opened, did not focus.

"Artan," he breathed. "Rosolio."

His eyes closed. His head fell back.

Don Juan sat back on his heels.

"I know the house," he said.

He didn't elaborate. He looked at the walls across the river, then at the man on the bank.

They worked the cocoon loose with river water until it gave way and they could see his chest rise and fall properly. Mindartis wrapped him in cloth soaked from the river while Kürbis kept his head off the ground.

They made camp where they were that evening. Everlund and the Harpers would have to wait. Tomorrow they would cross the river.

They took watches in pairs through the night. Don Juan took both.

The morning came up grey. They packed slowly. Kürbis was already in the saddle by the time the others were finished with the camp, Artan slumped against him in front of the pommel, the wet cloth wound over his chest hot through to the touch.

Don Juan stood by his horse. He did not mount.

The others noticed at different speeds. Dustin first.

"This cesspit of a city is no place for me." Don Juan said it flat, not looking at any of them. He buckled the last strap on his pack with more attention than the buckle deserved. "People in there know my face. People who are not friends."

He didn't say more. Nobody pushed.

Dustin opened his pack and brought out the makeup case from his Revue days — old, road-worn, the lid scuffed soft from a hundred dressing-room tables. He set it on a flat stone and lifted the lid. Powders, brushes, a tin of grease, a coil of crepe hair, gum, a small mirror folded inside.

"Sit down."

Don Juan sat.

Dustin reached for the razor. Don Juan covered his moustache with a flat hand.

"Not the moustache."

Dustin didn't argue. He waxed it into a different curl — fuller, lifted at the corners, less like Don Juan's habitual neat one. He glued a small chin tuft below it. Worked paste and shadow into the cheeks until the jaw read broader. Threaded grey at the temples. Parted the hair against the way it usually fell. Coached, as he worked, the carriage: hold the shoulders a little high, look at people sideways instead of head-on, drop the heel of the hand when you walk.

Don Juan kept his eyes closed through most of it.

When Dustin was done he handed Don Juan a polished blade. Don Juan turned it slowly, studied the face he was wearing.

"I never liked him."

A pause.

"I should have played him better."

He stood. Picked up his shield. Even Kürbis, who did not as a rule notice such things, looked at him a little longer than he needed to.

They rode through the citadel on the west bank — past the inspectors at the gate, the smell of wet stone and horses, the long shadow of the curtain wall — and out onto the bridge. The Dessarin moved beneath them, slow and grey. The bridge was wide enough for two wagons abreast and old enough that the tread had worn smooth where the cart wheels rolled. On the far side the road bent up to Yartar's east gate. The guards saw the Goliath with an unconscious noble slumped in his saddle and the wizard riding beside, and they slowed. Mindartis gave the names that needed giving. The guards stood aside. The party rode through.

Yartar pressed in close. The streets were narrow and steep with people, the buildings stacked four storeys high where Triboar had managed one and a tower. Charcoal smoke and fish from the docks and the wet-rope smell of a working river port. Voices in three languages at once. Don Juan rode beside Dustin without seeming to look at any of it.

Kürbis kept Artan upright in the saddle in front of him, one broad hand splayed across the man's chest. Mindartis rode close on the other side. The wet cloth had warmed through and gone half-dry. He soaked it from the waterskin without dismounting and laid it back down.

The Rosolio townhouse stood on a quieter lane up off the main avenue — pale stone, an iron gate, ivy gone yellow at the edges. A servant was sweeping the steps when they pulled up. He looked at Kürbis. Looked at what Kürbis was carrying. Dropped the broom and ran inside.

The door opened. A woman came out — late fifties, grey at the temples, the face of someone who had been afraid for some days and was holding it close. She saw her son before she saw the strangers. That was the order of it. She crossed the courtyard at a pace that wasn't quite running.

"Bring him."

She did not ask anything else.

They followed her into a side room where a daybed had been laid out as if it had been waiting. Kürbis lifted Artan down with the care of someone who had carried wounded before. Mindartis stayed close and gave her, briefly, what he had seen on the bank. Magical wrapping. Unknown kind. Kept wet. She listened with one hand on her son's wrist, taking the pulse without seeming to. When Mindartis finished, she nodded once. "The house physician will manage the rest."

She came back to them in the entry hall a few minutes later. A man stood at her elbow now — middle-aged, plainly dressed, watchful.

"He spoke for a moment," she said, "while the physician was with us. Two things. The first was a golden goose. The second was a woman in a purple dress with a necklace of black stones at her throat. No name. He was gone again before we could press him."

She let the words sit.

"Khemed. My butler. He knows the streets and knows the houses. He is yours for as long as you are in Yartar. He will see you to a place to stay tonight and return at first light."

Khemed inclined his head. He did not speak.

"One more thing." Her hand moved at her side, a small gesture toward her own throat as if reaching for something that wasn't there. "When they took him they took something else. An onyx in pale silver — a chain, the stone the size of a hawk's eye. It belongs to this house. He had it on him that night." She paused. "It was not on him when you found him?"

They told her no.

She nodded once, slowly. "If it surfaces, bring it back to me. I will pay separately. My son is one thing. The chain is another."

Lady Rosolio looked at each of them in turn. "Whatever did this to my son," she said, "I would like to know what it was. So would the city." She paused — measuring a thing she had been measuring for days. "If I were going to start where I would start, I would start with the Hand of Yartar. The Hand has the routes and the boats and the men for this kind of work. They have not been in this kind of work before that I know of. But a man pays them enough, and there is very little a man cannot buy in this city."

She inclined her head. "We will speak again."

Khemed led them out through the gate. He did not say much on the walk through the streets — he pointed out a watch rotation at one corner, a doorway at another, in a tone of voice that suggested this was the city he lived in. The Coin Toss stood on a square not far from the docks: lamps lit, a board over the door painted with a coin in mid-spin. He saw them in, spoke a word to the innkeeper, and took his leave for the night.

They had rooms before they had answers. They sat down at a table near the back and let the warmth of the common room settle on them, and for a few minutes nobody said anything at all.

The Coin Toss filled up that evening the way good rooms do — slowly at first, then all at once. Travellers off the river, dock workers on a half-day, locals come in from the rain that had started somewhere over the Dessarin and was now beating on the shutters in a steady patter. The room smelled of woodsmoke and stewed mutton and the wet wool of cloaks pulled off and hung over chairbacks.

Dustin took his first cup at the bar before he took the platform. The innkeeper was a heavy-built man in his fifties — balding above the ears, thick forearms from years at the tap, a face that had seen most of what a Yartar dock crowd could put it through. He set the cup down without asking what Dustin wanted.

"The Coin Toss," Dustin said, lifting it. "Where does it come from?"

The innkeeper jerked his chin upward. High above the bar, hung from a beam by a length of rusted chain, a battered helmet hung at an angle. The crown was caved in and dark with age. Whatever had bashed it had pinched the eye-slit nearly shut — what was left of the opening was no wider than a finger.

"Land a coin in," the innkeeper said. "Beer's free for the night. Not the half-night. The night."

"How often does that happen?"

"Not in a while."

Dustin turned the cup in his hand. Set it down. Fished a copper from his belt pouch and weighed it on his palm.

He flicked it.

The coin spun in the lamplight, arced, and dropped through the slit with a small tinny clink. The bar went quiet for a beat. Three tables of dock men who had been only half listening turned and watched it land.

The innkeeper looked up at the helmet. Looked at Dustin.

"Hasn't happened since a while."

"I'll try to earn my pay, then."

He stepped up onto the platform.

He played a few bars of flute alone — clean, no preamble — and let the room come to him. The talk under the music quietened. He stopped at the end of the line and looked toward the back table.

"This next one wants bagpipes. Friend at the back, would you do me the honour?"

Heads turned. The Goliath looked up from his cup. Set it down. Stood.

The dock crowd watched the Goliath cross their room with the careful quiet that crowds reserve for people who could break their tables in half. He had the bagpipes under one arm — the small set, mouth-blown.

Kürbis stepped up onto the platform beside Dustin. He set the bag, drew the air in, settled the chanter against his fingers, and waited.

The room was watching the Goliath. The strap was cut.

Dustin counted Kürbis in with a glance. The drone came up first — a low fat sound that filled the room from the floor up — and the chanter took the line, and Dustin came in over the top.

Mid-song, Zarok reached for his cup and found the pack gone with it. He turned in his chair, caught the back of a small figure just slipping out the door, and was on his feet before he had decided to be. Don Juan and Mindartis read it off him without a word and were on their feet a half-second later, chairs scraping, cloaks coming off the backs as they pushed through the room toward the door.

Zaine looked up to ask. Don Juan shook his head once on his way past. Zaine sat back down.

Dustin saw it from the stage. He kept the line going. He met Kürbis's eye, briefly. Kürbis lifted his chin a fraction.

They finished the song.

The applause was full and warm. Dustin let it go. He glanced once at the door — three empty chairs at the back table now — and pivoted into something slower to hold the room.

Outside, the rain had thinned. Zarok took the corner first — barrel-chested, scale armour creaking, the Dragonborn's nose up like a hound off a leash. The thief was still in sight, just past the second crossing.

Don Juan was a half-step behind him. Mindartis another half-step behind that — one hand already moving, the other gathering his cloak against the wind.

There were two of them, both light on their feet, weaving through dock workers and barrel haulers with the easy speed of people who knew which corners offered cover. Zarok lost them at a crossing, found them again at a torchlit doorway, lost them at the mouth of an alley between two warehouses. Don Juan went in after.

The alley was narrow and wet, and there was nobody else in it. The thieves came up short halfway down, turned to face them, and drew long thin knives in matched motion. Both women. The taller one had Zarok's pack slung across her shoulder.

"This isn't —" the shorter one started.

Don Juan didn't let her finish. He drew the longsword in a single sweep that took the lamplight along its edge and laid the point under her jaw before she could shift her grip on the knife.

"Drop it."

She dropped it. The knife rang on the cobbles.

Behind them, Mindartis raised one hand. The mouth of the alley filled with a sheet of pale shimmering air — silent, opaque, a wall the colour of moonlight on water. Anyone passing on the street would see nothing of what was happening inside.

The taller thief did not move. Her eyes went to the rooftops.

Zarok looked up. So did Don Juan. So did Mindartis.

There were five of them up there. Maybe six. Crouched along both eaves of the alley, hand crossbows raised, bolts nocked and held steady. One of them — nearer the lamplight than the others — gave them a small ironic salute with two fingers off her brow.

Nobody moved for a long beat.

The taller thief slid Zarok's pack off her shoulder and set it down on the cobbles between them. "Take it. We weren't keeping it."

"Then what were you doing?" Don Juan said.

"Getting your attention."

He kept the sword at the shorter one's throat. "Talk."

The taller one spoke, then — quickly, professionally, the way you talk when you have rehearsed something. The Hand of Yartar had nothing to do with the missing nobles. The Hand of Yartar would, in fact, prefer the missing nobles came home and the city resumed its usual quiet rhythms of taxation and theft. The party should look at the Grand Dame — Lord Khaspere Drylund's casino boat, captained by one Nelvin Storn. And on that boat, a woman: purple dress, a necklace of black stones at her throat. Lady Atalia. She was the one to watch. There were people on that boat who answered to nobody in this city. Some of them, the Hand suspected, answered to something further out than that. She did not say what further out meant.

Mindartis caught Don Juan's eye. The lady in purple had a name now.

"Who do we ask for next time?" Don Juan said.

"Scimitar Sally." The taller thief gave it the way you'd give a watchword. "They'll know."

"Who runs the Hand?" Mindartis said.

She smiled. "Not your business."

Don Juan held the sword a moment longer, then drew it back. The shorter thief stepped away from him and rubbed her throat. The taller one held Don Juan's eye a beat past the others. Her gaze rested on the disguise, then on what was under it. She gave him the smallest nod, and she did not say his name.

The pale wall at the mouth of the alley dropped — Mindartis lowered his hand without ceremony — and when they all looked up again, the rooftops were empty.

Zarok shouldered his pack and tested the strap. The cut had gone neatly through the leather and stopped exactly where the buckle began. Surgical work.

"They could have killed us," he said, more to himself than to anyone.

"They didn't want to kill us," Don Juan said. "They wanted to send a letter."

Mindartis was already turning back toward the street. "Then I would like to read what is on that boat."

Dustin had spun the slow piece into a slower one and was halfway through that when the chase party came back through the door. Zarok first, the pack back on his shoulder, the cut strap held in place by his hand. Don Juan a step behind him. Mindartis third, hood pushed back, hair dripping rain.

They went to the back table. They sat down. Zaine looked between the three of them and read it off their faces — pack back, nobody bleeding, the rest could wait. He did not ask. He filled their cups from the pitcher and slid them across the table.

Dustin watched them settle. Then he turned back to the room.

He let the last note hang. Stepped back from the edge of the platform. Glanced at Kürbis once.

"Some of you may know me," Dustin said — and the room, which had been talking again at the back tables, quieted — "from one of my more famous songs. The Ballad of Kürbis Kohl."

Heads turned. Kürbis lifted his eyes from the floor for the first time since the steal.

"Tonight you are lucky. The man himself is on this stage. And there is a version of the song I have been working on recently — different from the one you may have heard — that has not yet been played for any room. So take it kindly. We are giving it away."

He gave Kürbis a small nod. Kürbis filled the bag, the drone steadied, and Dustin came in over the top.

The applause was warmer than the last. The dock men at the front were on their feet. Kürbis was looking at the floor again. Dustin let it run, then raised a hand for quiet.

He did not announce the next one.

He played a slow line. Not announcing — testing. The way a fisherman drops a stone in the water to feel how deep.

Something was different. The Coin Toss was not a polished room and did not want to be played as one. He felt the sound shift mid-verse and let it. The melody came out lower than he would have given a Sea Ward audience. The roughness in his voice was something he usually kept tucked, and he let that go too. The dock crowd leaned in for it.

Rock, he thought, almost embarrassed by the word. Seems fitting, with an earth spirit pulling the strings.

Then he stopped thinking about it and went.

The applause came in a rush and held longer than the song had any right to earn. Dustin let it. Bowed. Lifted a hand for quiet.

"I'm very happy to see you enjoyed this so much," he said. "The last one was a new version of one of my old favourites — Walk on Waterdeep. I was especially pleased to notice you liked it. Thank you very much, and until we meet again."

He stepped down off the platform. Kürbis followed.

The innkeeper had a tankard waiting on the bar. Dustin took it. The man behind the bar looked at him, looked up at the helmet, and gave him a single short nod.

"Earned your pay," he said.

"I did."

"You'll do."

Dustin drained half the cup. Kürbis took the other and drained more. They went to the back table, where Zarok was already telling Zaine the alley scene in the short clipped sentences he used when he did not want to embellish. The bowl of stew the innkeeper had sent across without being asked sat steaming between the cups.

"Five on the roof," Zarok was saying. "Two below. A name and a boat."

There was no more performance in Dustin that night. He sat with his friends, and the room around them stayed loud at its own pleasure, and the rain started up again somewhere above the shutters, and the lamps burned low.

They went after midnight.

Dustin had been expecting it. He had read it on Don Juan over supper — the way he sat with his back to the wall and barely touched his cup. By the time the lamps in the common room had burned down and the others had gone up to their rooms, Dustin had moved a chair into the dark corner by the inn door and was sitting in it with his cloak across his knees and his boots already laced.

Don Juan came down the stairs in a dark cloak over the disguised face — the careful step of a man trying to leave a building without being seen leaving it.

Dustin stood up.

Don Juan stopped.

"No," he said.

"Yes."

Don Juan looked at the door. Then back at Dustin.

"It is my house."

"It is your house and your trouble and your night. I am coming."

A pause. Don Juan turned to the door without saying anything else, and they went out into the wet streets together. The rain had stopped. The lamps were guttering low. Yartar was as quiet as a city of its size ever got.

The estate stood up the hill from the river — pale stone behind a wall, ivy thick enough that the gate was almost lost in it. No light at any window. No torches at the gatehouse.

"Two staff," Don Juan said, looking up at the dark front. "When my father lived there were twenty."

He didn't go to the gate. He went to the lane that ran along the side of the wall and stopped beside a section of ivy that looked the same as any other. He hooked one boot on a stone that wasn't quite flush. He looked at Dustin once. Then he was over.

Dustin followed less elegantly.

The garden inside was overgrown — fruit trees gone wild, a fountain dry, a stone bench tilted where a root had pushed it up. Don Juan led the way without lights. He knew the path the way a man knows the shape of a room he grew up in. The service door at the back of the kitchen was unlocked. He paused at it for a moment, hand flat on the wood.

"It used to be locked at night," he said. "Always."

Inside, the house smelled of cold stone and old wax and the stale of rooms that were not being used. They moved through the kitchen and into a hallway. Two of the doors stood open. In one of them, a writing desk had been pulled away from the wall and the panelling behind it pried back. The drawer had been emptied onto the floor and left there.

"Recent," Don Juan said. "A week. Maybe less."

He stood there a long moment looking at the desk. Then he turned and led Dustin up the stairs.

They were halfway along the upper corridor when a door opened ahead of them and a woman stepped out holding a small candle in one hand and a fire poker in the other.

She was older than Don Juan had ever described her — silver in the dark hair, fine lines across the bridge of her nose. The candle lit her face from below. She looked at the two cloaked figures in her hallway with the steady measure of a woman who had been waiting for someone to come up that stair for a long time.

The candle moved a little. She saw the disguised face under the hood.

She lowered the candle slowly. The poker did not lower.

"Take it off," she said.

Don Juan did. He pulled the chin tuft away first, then ran the heel of his hand across his cheek hard enough to smear the shadow paste. The moustache lifted back into its true curl. The grey at the temples did not come away — Dustin had set it well — but the rest came off, and the face that came out from under it was the one Elena had known since he was a boy.

Elena set the poker down against the wall.

She did not embrace him. She crossed the corridor, took his face in both hands, looked at him for a long beat, and then — once, quickly — touched her forehead to his. Then she let him go.

"You came back."

"Not by choice."

"I know. I have been watching the road."

Don Juan glanced back at Dustin. "Mother. This is Dustin Dwint. We met in the Revue. He has been my friend since."

Elena turned to Dustin. The poker had been set down by then; the candle was lower. She gave him a small formal nod. "Then you are welcome in this house," she said.

She led them to a small sitting room at the back of the upper floor — the only room in the house with a fire still going, a low one. She closed the door. She poured them each a cup of something warm from a kettle on the hearth without asking what they wanted. She sat down. She started talking.

There had been searches. Three in the last six months — clumsy at first, surgical the most recent. They were looking for papers. She did not know what papers, only that they had not found them, because she had moved the ones that mattered years ago to a place she would not name even now. Two of the older servants had taken jobs elsewhere and the others had left without giving notice. She had not replaced them. The estate ran on her and on a girl from the laundry who had stayed.

Don Juan listened without interrupting. He held the cup in both hands and did not drink.

"It is the same hand that took your father," Elena said. "I was sure of it after the second search. Now I am sure of it for another reason." She set her cup down on the table beside her chair. "Have you heard the names Rosolio? Dawnflower?"

Don Juan looked at Dustin. Dustin looked at Don Juan.

"Artan Rosolio," Dustin said. "We brought him home this afternoon. Half drowned. Wrapped in something that wasn't natural."

She closed her eyes. "Then you understand. Two sons of houses loyal to the Waterbaron. Three if we count yours, and we should. The Waterbaron's seat comes up for election inside the year. Someone is making certain the families that would oppose Lord Drylund have no heirs left to inherit the seat."

Don Juan was quiet for a long while.

"Who," he said.

"I do not know. There are stories the merchants tell when they drink too much — a faction off the coast, with reach into this city. Whether they are Drylund's people or only working with him I cannot say. I know the search of this house was professional. I know the man who killed your father knew the layout of the wine cellar. I know I have been alone in this house too long."

She looked at him directly.

"You will go now," she said. "Out of the city, by the road I will tell you to take, and I will not see you again until this is done. That is what I would have said yesterday. It is not what I am going to say tonight."

Don Juan waited.

"Tonight I am going to ask you to stay until you find out who they are. Because you are not alone now. You came in over the wall with a friend."

Dustin set his cup down very carefully on the table.

Don Juan looked at his mother for a long time. He did not say yes. He did not have to. He set the cup down beside Dustin's, leaned forward, and put his hand briefly on the back of his mother's hand on the armrest of the chair.

They left before dawn. Dustin worked the disguise back onto Don Juan's face by candlelight before they went out — chin tuft, shadow paste, the moustache curled back up. They left the way they had come.

Don Juan did not say anything on the walk back to the inn. Dustin did not push him.

Morning came grey through the shutters. The party gathered in a back room of the inn over hot bread and a thin coffee. Don Juan sat at the head of the table.

He started at the beginning.

His name was Juan Francisco Montoia De La Roja, fifth and youngest son of Duke Ernesto Montoia De La Roja of the De La Roja house — a Yartar seat in the Lords' Alliance, until the night his father and both his older brothers were killed within days of each other and his mother put him on the road. The Wanderlust Revue had come through some weeks later, and he had joined it, and Dustin had known him as Don Juan since.

In the kitchen down the hall, a pot rang on stone. Nobody at the table moved.

He told them about the Order of the Gauntlet, and his oath to Tyr. He told them about the night at the casino. He laid it out in the same flat tone he had used for everything since they had crossed the river — no flourishes, no apology, no waiting to see how it would land.

When he was done he looked at each of them in turn.

Kürbis set his bread down for the first time. Mindartis was looking at his cup. Zarok said nothing. Zaine was watching Don Juan's hands.

"My mother told me last night what I would not have known on my own," Don Juan went on. "Rosolio is not the only one. The Dawnflower boy is missing too — Hartos Dawnflower, who Urgala asked us to look in on when we passed through Triboar a week ago. Both sons of houses loyal to the Waterbaron, and three if you count mine. The seat is up for election inside the year. Lord Khaspere Drylund — who owns the boat we were told to look at last night — is the natural opposition candidate. He has reasons to want those families weakened. He has the men to do it."

It fit too neatly with what the alley women had told them the night before. Mindartis nodded once.

Khemed arrived at first light, as Lady Rosolio had promised. He carried a sealed note and a small leather purse. The note thanked them in a hand that looked accustomed to thanking people. Five hundred gold for whatever they could learn about the manner of Artan's near-drowning, the same again on the return of the chain.

Mindartis folded the note into his coat.

They had two stops of their own that morning. The Waterbaron's door would not open before mid-morning, so the Dawnflower house would be first. In Triboar, Urgala had told them to look in on Hartos Dawnflower if they were passing through Yartar — an old companion of hers from her younger days. After what Elena had said the night before, the visit had become more than a courtesy.

Yartar was waking around them as they walked east. Hartos lived in a townhouse on the upper market — a thick-set man, fifties, hands scarred at the knuckles in the old places. The mention of Urgala softened him.

He listened to what they had to say about Artan, and his face did things in slow stages. By the end he had to set his cup down.

"My boy hasn't come home in eleven days," he said. "I sent a man to ask in every tavern from here to Triboar. He came back with nothing. Now you tell me Rosolio's son washed up half dead and that Lord Drylund is spending his winter making Lords' Alliance children disappear." He looked at Zarok for a long moment — the way an old fighter looks at a younger one to gauge what he can be. "Bring my Jacob home. Alive. And there is a greataxe in the back room of this house I have not lifted off its hooks in twelve years. It was made by giant smiths to cut giants. I will pull it down with my own hands and put it in yours."

Zarok bowed his head, once, the way Dragonborn bowed when they accepted a thing that mattered.

They walked back to the inn in silence. By the time they reached it the long bell from the citadel had stopped ringing and the streets were full. They sat down at a table and made a list.

Two names. One ship.

The Waterbaron's office was in the citadel on the west bank, behind a set of doors that opened more easily for them now that they had Lady Rosolio's seal in their hand. Nestra Ruthiol was a woman in her late fifties, sharp-eyed, dressed in plain dark wool of a quality that did not need to announce itself. She received them in a small wood-panelled room with a fire that had been built up to take the edge off the river chill.

She listened to what they had to say. She did not interrupt. When they finished she sat for a moment with her hands flat on her desk.

"Three," she said. "I had two. The third is news to me."

"Two?" Mindartis said.

"Artan Rosolio. And Timothy Salsberg — a son of one of my keeper-wardens. Vanished six days ago between his mother's house and a friend's. No body, no demand, no witnesses." She paused. "Now you tell me about the Dawnflower boy, and you bring a name I have been trying to attach to this for some time without proof. Drylund."

She did not say Lord Drylund. The omission was deliberate.

"What I cannot do," she went on, "is move on him publicly with what you have brought me. Suspicion is not evidence. The election does what the election does. What I can do is leave you alone to look. Officially I have not heard your names. Officially I do not know you have been to the Rosolio house. Unofficially, the river watch will find reasons not to be in your way."

She rose. The audience was over.

By the time they came back across the bridge the afternoon was thin and bright and the wind had picked up off the Dessarin. They walked down to the docks to look at the ship.

The Grand Dame did not look like a casino at four in the afternoon. She looked like a riverboat — a long flat-decked vessel painted green and red and gold, two stacks midships, a paddlewheel housing at the stern, the kind of working craft that became something else when the lamps came on. There was a placard at the foot of the gangway: Gentlemen aboard at dusk. Hands at the upper pier.

They walked back to the inn and made their plan.

Three to board as paying guests — Mindartis, who never needed coaching on how to dress, and Dustin and Don Juan, who had Don Juan's pack to thank for it. Fine clothes out of Draven Millovyr's wardrobe in Triboar had been folded into the bottom of his saddlebag on the small chance they would come in useful. Tonight they came out. Don Juan would keep the disguise. Three to board at the upper pier — Zarok, Kürbis, Zaine. The Grand Dame paid in copper for the night to anyone strong enough to pull an oar. The foreman did not ask questions of men who could.

They were on the ship by separate ways an hour after the lamps came on.

Below decks, the rowers' bench was lit by two greasy lanterns and smelled of sweat and river. Zarok pulled with his back. Kürbis pulled with his arms. Zaine kept the rhythm and watched between strokes — the boys carrying buckets, the foreman pacing behind them with a knotted rope, the bulkhead at the bow that none of the regulars ever looked at. By the time the boat made her first turn they had counted what there was to count, which was very little. The men below decks did not know who was on the cards deck. The men above did not know there were men below.

The afternoon-empty deck of earlier had become something else. The roulette wheel ran. A string quartet had set up near the bar and had a singer with them now. The crowd was the nobility of Yartar at half-strength and the merchant class at full — silk against wool, the smell of perfume thick over the smell of money. Footmen in green coats moved between the tables with trays of red wine. Captain Storn — thin, long-jawed, the unblinking attentiveness of a heron — stood near the bar with his hands behind his back, watching the room. A second figure made her own circuit between the tables. Shou, the dark hair pinned high. A long dark robe, snakes embroidered up the sleeves in thread that caught the light only when she turned. She did not stop at any table for long.

Don Juan crossed the deck the way a man crosses a room he had not stepped into since the night he left Yartar. The cup the dealer set into his hand was the same cut of glass. The room smelled the same — perfume over money over river water. The dealer at the corner table was older now but it was the same man. Don Juan was glad of the disguise.

She was at a card table along the starboard rail.

She wore a dress the colour of dark wine — deep purple in the lamplight, the necklace at her throat catching the light when she turned her head. Black stones, close-set against the line of her throat. She held a hand of three cards and was laughing at something the dealer had said. The chair across from her was empty.

Don Juan took it.

Mindartis and Dustin drifted in along the rail — a glass each, postures of well-fed disinterest. The dealer welcomed Don Juan politely, the way you welcome a stranger you do not yet have a reason to remember. The chips slid across the felt to him in stacks the colour of old gold. Don Juan turned one between his fingers.

A golden goose. Stamped clean on both faces.

He set the chip down with the rest without looking at anyone.

The game was a quiet variant — Yartar Hold, the dealer called it. Don Juan knew it. Atalia was good. Don Juan let her be. Tonight he was here to lose. Atalia laughed when she ought to and apologised when she ought to and did neither when she ought not. By the time the third round of wine had been brought, the stack of golden geese in front of Don Juan had dropped by something like a hundred and thirty gold, and Mindartis and Dustin had each given away a fistful more from the rail.

The woman in the snake robe passed their table between hands. Her glance went across Don Juan, then Mindartis at the rail, then Dustin. She moved on to the next table without breaking her circuit.

She lifted her glass to him between hands. Across the rim, her eyes caught his. Held them. Did not let go.

A voice arrived inside his head, and inside Dustin's, and inside Mindartis's. It was hers and not quite hers.

The quay. When the ship docks. Quietly.

She set the glass down. She did not look at any of them again until the next deal.

They lost three more hands, mostly on purpose. They thanked the dealer. They thanked her. They left.

Below them, through the bulkheads, an oar rose and fell with the others as the Grand Dame turned for her run back upstream.

It was full dark by the time the gangway came back down. The dock was a different kind of crowd now — late workers, late drinkers, two of the river guard at the foot of the next pier sharing a brazier and a long careful conversation about somebody's brother. The rowers had filed off the upper pier without looking up and were waiting in the lamp shadow with the rest of them.

She came down the gangway alone. Without Storn. Without the necklace. Wrapped in a long cloak the colour of the dress, her dark hair pinned up under a hood, walking quickly, half-glancing back over her shoulder.

She came to them. She did not pretend not to know them. She did not pretend the words at the table had been somebody else's.

"I have very little time."

"Then talk fast," Don Juan said.

She talked fast.

She did not deliver them, she said. She led them. There was a difference. Whoever had picked her had picked her because she was the kind of woman young men of certain houses became reckless about. She had not chosen the role. A wizard called Oosith had a hold on her family that she would not name and could not break. He was handsome — that was the first thing she said when she let herself think of him at all. Tall. Dark-haired. Careful with his hands and his voice. He told her which young man and on which evening, and she went where she was sent and made herself unforgettable for an hour, and the next morning the young man would walk to where Oosith told him to walk and would be put into a room from which he would not come out.

"How does he hold them?" Mindartis said.

"I do not know what he does to them. I have never been in the room."

"Where is the room?" Don Juan said.

She looked over her shoulder. The wind off the river took a strand of dark hair across her cheek and she did not push it back. "There is a grate in the back wall of the Sailmaker's Yard. It should be locked and is not. It goes down into the sewers. Past the third junction, there is a door with no handle. That is as much as I am ever told."

"Artan Rosolio," Dustin said.

For the first time her face moved. Not much. Enough.

"I led him," she said. "It was not — what we did, it was not. I was supposed to lead him. We — " She stopped. She did not finish the sentence. "It was not."

"Will you come with us?" Zarok said.

She looked at him with something close to gratitude. "I would not survive the night if I did. Go to the grate. Do not give him my name."

She went past them without looking again.

They watched her go until she turned the corner of the warehouse and was lost in the dock crowd. The lamps were coming on along the wharf. Somewhere out on the water a bell rang once.

"Sailmaker's Yard," Don Juan said.

Kürbis was already moving.

The Sailmaker's Yard was empty at that hour and smelled of tar and damp canvas. The grate was at the back wall behind a stack of broken spars, set into stone and hinged at the top. It should have been locked. It was not.

Kürbis lifted it. The hinges did not creak. Somebody had oiled them recently.

The drop on the other side was about ten feet onto a stone shelf. They went down one at a time, with Mindartis last so he could pull the grate quietly closed behind them. Khemed had said nothing when they reached the yard. He had gone down third, between Zarok and Dustin, without a sound. Then they were in the dark, with only Mindartis's small drifting light to see by — a pale blue mote that stayed at his shoulder and washed the walls in a colour that did not belong underground.

The sewer ran east. The water was ankle-deep and moving slowly, fed by a hundred small pipes from the city above that cut across the ceiling at intervals and dripped without rhythm. The smell was less terrible than they had braced for. Yartar, whatever else it was, was a city that took its drainage seriously.

They counted junctions. The first was a four-way. The second was a T. They moved without speaking, weapons drawn, Kürbis at the front and Don Juan at the back and the others in a tight line between them. Past the second junction the channel narrowed and the ceiling lowered until even Dustin was ducking. The water deepened to mid-calf. Zaine kept catching his hand on the wall to steady himself and kept apologising under his breath.

The third junction opened into a wider chamber. Three channels fed into it, and a stone walkway ran around the inside above the waterline. The light from Mindartis's mote caught the door on the far wall — a panel of dark metal flush with the stone, no handle, no visible hinge, no keyhole.

That was when the water moved.

They came up out of the channels in a rush — six, eight of them, hard to count in the moving light. Tall, narrow-shouldered, eyes that caught the blue light flat and silver. Webbed hands gripping spears made from sharpened bone and rusted river-iron. They did not speak. They did not bellow. They rose out of the water and came.

"Kuo-toa," Mindartis said, half over his shoulder.

Kürbis met the first kuo-toa shoulder-first and put his longsword through its chest. It folded around the blade and slid off it and went under. The second one came under his guard with a spear and got him in the ribs through the seam of his armour — a clean shallow cut that bled instantly. He took its head with a backhand stroke and did not slow.

Don Juan turned to the channel behind them where two had come up at the rear and cut off retreat. He took the first under the jaw. The second drove a spear into the stone where his ankle had been a half-second before, and he answered with a flourish that took the spear-arm at the shoulder and the head a beat after.

Zarok held the centre. He had his battleaxe gripped in both hands and he sang as he fought — short low notes, almost under his breath, the kind of formal battle prayer Dragonborn paladins were taught. One of the kuo-toa faltered when the sound hit it. Zarok put the axe through its chest and turned to the next.

Off to Zarok's left, Khemed had drawn a short blade nobody had seen him carry. He moved through the shallows the way a man moves through a familiar room. The kuo-toa that came at him went down with the knife between the gill slits and did not come back up. The next one tried to flank him; he stepped inside the spear-thrust, took the wrist with his off hand, and put the blade up under the jaw before the creature could correct. Khemed straightened. He did not raise his blade past his ear.

Mindartis had moved up onto the stone walkway above the channel. From there he had angles. He raised one hand and the air in a five-foot radius around two of the creatures cracked down to a temperature that should not have existed — frost flowering on their bone spears, on their grey skin, on the water around their feet. They went stiff. Don Juan took them both before they could shake it off.

Zaine fought beside Kürbis. He was good — fast scimitars, a fighter's economy of motion — but the sewer was tight and the footing was wrong and the creatures were stronger in the water than out of it. One of them caught his off-hand wrist and pulled him almost off his feet before Kürbis severed the arm at the elbow and Zaine staggered back, breathing hard, his sleeve dark to the elbow with somebody's blood. He got his guard back up. He kept fighting.

Dustin held back near the entrance and worked from range. Eldritch fire snapped down the channel in twin beams that burst against grey ribs and sent two creatures sliding back into the dark water. He set the curse on the largest of them — the one Kürbis was wading toward — and the next strike Kürbis landed split it from collarbone to hip.

It took less than two minutes. The water in the chamber was darker than it had been. The kuo-toa lay where they had fallen — some on the stone, some still floating in the channel, two of them throwing up clear water from their gill slits as they died, in silence.

Kürbis pressed the heel of his hand against his ribs. The blood came through his fingers, but slowly. Don Juan tore a strip from his cloak and tied it tight under the armour. Zarok knelt beside Zaine and laid a hand briefly on his shoulder. Zaine nodded without looking at him.

They stood there for a minute, breathing.

Zaine straightened slowly. He looked at the water. He looked at the door with no handle on the far wall. He looked at his hands, then up at Don Juan.

"This isn't for me," he said.

The others were quiet.

"I knew it on the road from Triboar. I thought I could get used to it. I haven't." He wiped his mouth with the back of his good hand. "You're going through that door. I am not going through that door. I'm going up."

Nobody argued. Nobody told him to think about it. Don Juan offered his hand, and Zaine took it, and held it a moment, and then let it go.

"Take care of each other," he said. He nodded once at Kürbis, who nodded back. Then he turned and went up the channel the way they had come, the sound of his steps fading slowly until the sewer gave him back to its own dark.

Mindartis turned to the door.

It was as featureless as it had looked from across the chamber — no seam wide enough to fit a knife, no resonance when he tapped it, no visible runes. He laid his palm flat against it. He frowned. He laid his ear against it. He shook his head.

"It is not opened from this side," he said.

There was a narrow archway off the main chamber that they had not noticed in the fight, low enough that Kürbis had to duck under it. The side room behind it was small and dry. Three iron levers were set into the back wall at waist height — older than the chamber by their look, the metal pitted and dark, no markings beneath them.

Mindartis tried the rightmost one. Something thudded in the stone somewhere below them — a long way below — and was quiet again. He pulled the middle one. Nothing they could see or hear. He pushed the right back to neutral and tried the left. Water moved somewhere — a brief rush, then nothing. He worked through the combinations the way he worked through anything, methodically. Don Juan stood at his shoulder. Nothing they tried opened the door across the way.

"It is not these," Mindartis said eventually. "Or not these alone."

They came back to the main chamber.

Dustin walked the perimeter. Behind a fallen pillar at the eastern end, where the floor dropped a step into deeper water, he found it: a circular hole in the stone, four feet across, with iron rungs set into the side going down. A current of cold air came up out of it that smelled of rust and of something else underneath the rust — a sharp mineral note he could not place.

"There," he called.

Don Juan came over. Looked down. Looked up at Dustin. "Order."

"Kürbis first," Dustin said. "He's the one of us least likely to fall off a ladder."

Kürbis did not laugh. But he put his sword over his shoulder and started down.

The shaft came out into a chamber that was not meant to be looked at.

It was circular, perhaps thirty feet across, with a domed ceiling and walls of dressed dark stone that the lantern barely reached. Six iron valve wheels were set into the chamber, big as cartwheels — four mounted along the central walkway that led to the door on the far wall, and one each at the foot of the side walls, reachable only by a narrower stone path that hugged the perimeter. Below each valve a brass mouth gaped at floor level above the standing water. The water was knee-deep at the foot of the ladder and deeper toward the centre.

A door stood on the far wall. This one had a handle.

Kürbis got down off the last rung first and waded a step out into the chamber. The others came down behind him in a quiet line — Zarok next with the axe across his back, then Khemed, then Dustin, then Don Juan, dropping off the rungs into the knee-deep water. They moved out onto the central walkway and let their eyes adjust.

The water moved. Not from any of their steps. It moved on its own — a slow shift across the chamber.

He picked the left wall and went for the side valve.

The first merrow came up out of the water in his path before he had taken three steps. Brute-built and slick with scale, trident raised. Behind it, the brass mouth at the foot of the side wall was already discharging — the merrow had cracked the side valve open as it surfaced. The water in the chamber lifted a hand's width.

Kürbis met the trident with the longsword and split the shaft. The merrow lunged with bare hands — claws like sickles. Kürbis took it under the jaw on the backswing. It folded sideways into the water.

He waded to the valve and put his weight on the wheel. The wheel did not turn fast. It was made not to. By the time he had cranked it closed, the water in the middle of the chamber was at their belts, and the second merrow had broken the surface on the opposite wall and opened the right-side valve.

Kürbis swore and started across.

The second merrow did not stay on the wall. It moved through the centre toward Don Juan and Khemed in the long even strides of something that did not mind the rising water because the water was its element.

Khemed met it first. He went in low under the trident sweep, the short blade up — but the merrow was bigger than the kuo-toa above and the first strike skidded off scale. Khemed gave ground. Don Juan came in on the merrow's flank, and the two of them worked it the way two men work a thing with more reach than they had — Khemed feinting low, Don Juan stepping in on the high beat, the longsword finding skin between scale plates and drawing dark blood.

A pressure entered the chamber that had nothing to do with the water.

Zarok stopped fighting. He stood with the axe loose in both hands and his eyes on the door across the chamber as if somebody had spoken his name from the other side of it.

He started walking. Through the rising water. Toward the door.

Don Juan called his name. Zarok did not turn.

"I have him." Dustin pushed off and waded after.

The merrow had used the moment they were giving it. It slammed a webbed hand down on one of the four wheels along the central walkway. The valve beneath the wheel juddered open. The water in the chamber lifted again. Past the belt now. The rise was going faster than what Kürbis was closing.

The water at the centre of the chamber shifted. Something long and pale came up out of the deep — a tentacle, only, heavy and ribbed and the colour of a wet bruise. It snapped across the surface, caught Don Juan across the back of the shoulders with the flat of it, and was gone before he could turn. The water settled. The thing under it did not show itself.

Don Juan staggered, caught his footing, came back with his blade up.

Khemed and Don Juan took the merrow together a beat after. Khemed inside, Don Juan over the top. The longsword went in under the collarbone and came out the back of the throat. The merrow's grip slackened. It went under in a slow turning fold.

Across the chamber, Kürbis had reached the right-side wall. He put both hands on the wheel and cranked it closed.

The water did not go down. It did not rise as fast either. Three of the four middle valves were still shut. One was still discharging, and that one alone was filling the chamber faster than the four closed ones could drain it. The water was at Dustin's chest.

Then the centre of the chamber moved properly.

What came up out of the deep water was the size of three men but not shaped like anything men had seen. Long. Bluish-grey. A head lobed and finned, a mouth that opened wider than its skull should have allowed, three eyes set vertically along the centre of its skull. It did not speak. It did not need to. The pressure of its presence pushed outward into the chamber like a held note.

The handle on the door turned by itself. Zarok pushed it open and went through. Dustin caught the edge before it swung shut and went through after him.

The room beyond was higher than the chamber and dry — a step up, water lapping at the threshold and going no further. It was small. Stone-walled. There was a young man asleep on a low stone bench, hands folded across his chest. He was breathing. He was not waking.

The room around him held its history. Boots in pairs along one wall. Folded coats on a low chest. A walking stick. A small pile of jewellery on a shelf — rings, a clasp, a chain. The leavings of men who had walked in and not walked out.

Zarok had walked past Jacob. He was at the back wall of the small room with his hand flat against it and his head bowed, listening to something that wasn't there.

Dustin caught him by the shoulder and turned him. Zarok's eyes were entirely white.

He pressed his will against the pull on Zarok — soft, careful, more like damping a vibrating string than breaking it — and the charm loosened enough. Zarok blinked. Saw Dustin. Saw the room. Saw the boy on the bench.

"What —"

"Get him. We're going."

Zarok took Jacob Dawnflower in his arms with the same unthinking care he had used for the children at Nightstone. Dustin went to the shelf. The chain caught his eye first — pale silver, an onyx on it the size of a hawk's eye. He pocketed it.

Then the studded leather caught him. It hung on a peg between two of the coats — not noble-cut, fighter's, the studs blackened with use. He laid a hand on it and felt the small still hum of something magical under the surface. He did not know yet whose body it was meant to fit. He folded it under one arm anyway.

They turned for the door.

Out in the chamber the fight had become something else.

Don Juan was on the aboleth. He had climbed onto the thing's back. His longsword was buried to the hilt at the base of its skull and he was riding the convulsion. Kürbis had reached him by then, in the water beside the thing with both hands on his sword's grip, taking the throat from below. Khemed was working the flank where Don Juan's blade had opened a seam between scale plates — methodical, unhurried, the water past his chest now. The water around them was not water any more — it was water and aboleth blood and the two dead merrow drifting in it, all of it churning. The open middle valve was still discharging. The chamber was loud with it.

The aboleth folded.

It did not die quietly. It went under and came up and went under again, and the third time it stayed down. Don Juan rolled off into the rising water and caught his footing. Kürbis pulled his sword free and stood there breathing.

The aboleth's voice arrived in their heads.

It came as pressure first, then as words — old, slow, full of a cold patience that did not match a creature dying.

Such capable people.

Don Juan looked sharply at Kürbis. Kürbis looked at Dustin. Dustin had heard it too.

The Kraken Society would welcome you. Think on it. There is room at our table for hands that strike as cleanly as yours.

The voice did not wait for an answer. It thinned and went out, and the chamber was only the chamber again, with the valves and the rising water and the dead.

"The Kraken Society," Don Juan said, half to himself.

Nobody answered.

The water was shoulder-deep. It was still rising.

Zarok came out of the small room with Jacob in his arms. Dustin waded to him. Kürbis and Don Juan came across the chamber, fighting the current. The brass mouths were running fast now and the level was at Dustin's chin.

"Up," Don Juan said. "The valves close when the chamber seals. We have to be at the ladder when it does."

They made the foot of the ladder with seconds to spare. Kürbis went up first with Jacob slung over one shoulder. Zarok went next. Khemed went after — fast, silent — and Dustin behind him. Don Juan came last with the water at his throat, hauling himself rung by rung as the chamber sealed itself behind them and the discharge cut off and the noise stopped.

At the top, in the upper chamber, they laid Jacob down on the dry stone shelf and looked at each other.

Don Juan's face was different.

The water had taken everything off it. The shadow paste, the chin tuft, the grey at the temples, all of it run together into pale streaks down his neck and gone. Under his soaked hair was a face that nobody in Yartar had seen since the night he had left.

He saw Dustin look. Dustin's hand went to his pack.

"Leave it," he said.

Dustin's hand came back empty.

They lifted Jacob between them and started up the channel toward the surface.

The grate at the Sailmaker's Yard was where they had left it. They came up out of it into a dawn that smelled of smoke from the bakers' fires and of the river. Yartar was waking around them. Nobody had been waiting at the grate. Whoever had oiled the hinges had not stayed.

Khemed turned to Dustin and held out his palm. "The necklace, if you would." Don Juan stood beside Dustin, face bare. Khemed's glance passed him without remark. Dustin fished the chain from his pocket and laid it across the palm. Khemed closed his fingers without looking at it. "She will want it at once. I will go ahead. She will receive you when you arrive." He inclined his head once and turned up the lane, the chain already tucked inside his coat.

Jacob Dawnflower was conscious by the time they reached the Dawnflower house. Not lucid — but his eyes opened and stayed open and he asked, twice, where his father was. They knocked at the door. Hartos opened it. He saw his son in Kürbis's arms. He did not say anything. He took the boy from Kürbis and went inside with him and closed the door.

He came back out a quarter-hour later with the greataxe.

It was as long as Don Juan was tall. The haft was darker wood than Dustin had ever seen, the head a curve of pale grey metal etched with runes that looked older than the city. Hartos held it across his palms and looked at Zarok.

"I cannot lift this any more," he said. "I could lift it once. It does not matter who I was. It matters who you are."

Mindartis was reading the runes. Kürbis was watching the haft.

Zarok knelt and took the axe across his own hands and held it for a long moment without speaking. Then he stood and slung it across his back.

"It will be carried where it is needed," he said.

Hartos nodded and went back into his house and shut the door.

They returned to the Rosolio townhouse next. Lady Rosolio met them in the entry hall this time without ceremony. The onyx chain was already on the side table.

"Artan is awake," she said. "He will not speak yet. The physician says he will. You have brought my house back to me twice now."

She paid the gold without making a moment of it. She looked at Don Juan as she did. The disguise was still off; he had not put it back on. She looked at him a long beat.

"De La Roja," she said.

He did not deny it.

"My husband knew your father." She set the second purse on the table beside the first. "I will not say it again. Go in peace."

They went.

The Waterbaron received them that afternoon at her own request. She had heard the night's events in pieces from her river watch by the time they walked in. She heard the rest from them at her desk. The aboleth. The valves. The voice. She wrote nothing down.

When they finished she sat for a long moment with her hands flat in front of her, the way she had the first time they had sat with her.

"The investigation is mine now," she said. "You have given me what I needed. I will not pretend that what comes next will be quick or that what I find will be all of it. But it is mine to find. You have done your part."

She rose.

"Lord Drylund will be a more careful man tomorrow than he was yesterday, and a quieter one at the next council. That is what you have bought me. That, and three sons of houses I serve." She paused. "And the Hand of Yartar will not feature in any report I file. They have their own quarrel with what we found under the city. That is their business." She inclined her head. "Go where you were going."

It was meant kindly. They took it as it was meant.

Dustin had one more errand of his own.

He left the inn alone after the Waterbaron audience. Don Juan did not ask where he was going and Dustin did not say. The errand had been sitting with him since the alley with the rooftops. The party had been without a rogue for some time, and the road ahead had locks on it that nobody was going to leave open.

The Wink and Kiss was on a side street off the timber market — three streets and a doorway, the innkeeper had said. He went in the late afternoon. The place was half-full and warm in the way taverns get an hour before the supper crowd. He took a table near the wall and asked the woman with the apron whether Scimitar Sally took meetings. She did not blink. She filled a cup he had not asked for and took it back to the bar.

Three of them came in together a quarter of an hour later.

Sally was in the lead — older than she had been in the alley, or carrying herself older for a public room. She sat down opposite him and put her hands flat on the table. The other two took the corner chairs. The one to Dustin's left was tall, quiet, still in the way people are still when stillness is part of the job. The one to his right was a gnome, small and quick-eyed, who did not sit so much as perch.

"I won't take long," Dustin said. "We sat with the Waterbaron this afternoon. She has the rest of the story now — Drylund, the boat, the room under the city. The Hand had nothing to do with the missing nobles, and the Hand will not be hearing about the missing nobles again from her river watch. You can check that with whichever of her people you usually check things with."

Sally tilted her head. "Why are you telling us?"

"Because I want a favour in return. We have a road full of locked doors ahead of us and no rogue to open them. I'm a fast learner. I'll trade the time."

The gnome on the right laughed. "A bard," she said, "who runs with men in armour, sitting in a Hand back-room asking for lockpick lessons. As favours go, that one is wearing a costume."

Sally said nothing. She had been the one in the alley. She had passed the intel that broke open the casino. Her hands stayed flat on the table.

"Fast learner," the gnome said. "Quick of wit?" She tapped the table once. "If you're as quick of wit as you claim, surely you can just play me a song about me right now. Here. Sitting in this chair. Hold me through the whole of it and we'll talk."

The tall one to Dustin's left did not laugh, but the corner of her mouth moved.

Dustin took the silver flute from his pack. He did not ask the room for quiet. He did not pause to compose. He laid the instrument on his lower lip and played.

When he stopped the gnome had not moved her cup. The tall one to her side had been looking at her — sidelong, careful — for most of the second verse. Sally was leaning forward slightly. The table nearest to theirs had gone quiet and was pretending not to be listening.

"That's not fair," the gnome said.

"You set the bar. I cleared it."

"I set it as a joke."

"I know."

She drank for the first time. She set the cup down with the same flat care Sally had used on her hands. "Myriam," she said. "My name is Myriam. Come back here at the eleventh hour tomorrow. Bring small fingers and patience."

She slid a folded leather case across the table. He opened it: a set of thieves' tools, beautifully made and well-used and demonstrably not bought from any shop a Hand woman would have walked into willingly.

"For the song," Myriam said. "Don't tell anyone you got them from me."

She stood. The other two stood with her. They were gone before he had got the case back into his pack.

Their last evening in Yartar fell on a clear cool dusk. The Coin Toss was full again — fuller than the first night, because word had gotten around. They had heard Dustin once. They had come back for more.

The room smelled the same — woodsmoke and stewed mutton and wet wool. Only the crowd was different.

He took the platform with the flute in one hand and a small leather drum slung at his hip. Kürbis came up behind him. Don Juan stayed at the table this time, undisguised, and when one of the dock men recognised the De La Roja line in his face the man froze halfway through lifting his ale and lowered it again very carefully and said nothing. Word would move. It was already moving. Don Juan let it move.

Dustin played the new one first. It had been turning in him since the sewers — the weight of the stone, the pulse he had felt under the floorboards on the first night, the thing that had spoken in his head from beneath the city. He had not written it down yet. He played it now.

The crowd took it the way crowds take a song they did not know they wanted. Loud at first, then very loud at the chorus, then a kind of foot-stamping rolling chant by the end that the floorboards of the Coin Toss were not built to absorb. He let the last note hold. He let them shout. He waited until the noise had its own shape and then he lifted a hand for quiet, and the room gave it to him.

He did not announce the next one. He just played it.

What came out of the flute was nothing the room had heard from him before. Cold. Slow. The second verse was about a black diamond at a throat.

When he stopped this time, the crowd did not shout. They did not applaud at first. The room held.

Then somebody at the back set their cup down and started to clap, slowly, and the rest came in around it — quieter than the first song, longer than the first song, the kind of applause a room gives when it is not sure what it has just heard but knows it heard something.

Dustin bowed and stepped down off the platform. Kürbis followed.

They left Yartar in the morning.

The sky was clear. Don Juan rode out at the head of the column on his own horse with his own face on, the disguise kit packed away in the bottom of Dustin's saddlebag and his longsword at his hip. He did not look back at the citadel as they crossed the bridge. He did not look at Dustin either. He looked east, at the road that ran out across the moorland toward Everlund, and he set his pace.

The conspiracy that had pulled them into Yartar was the Waterbaron's now. The road and the Harpers and Danivarr's House in Everlund were ahead.

Kürbis pulled even with Dustin. He did not say anything. He did not need to. They rode east together as the moor opened in front of them.

They left Yartar on horseback, heading east along the Evermoor Way.

The road was old. East of Yartar the stonework gave way to gravel and packed dirt, rutted by wagon wheels and softened by rain into something that was more suggestion than surface. The horses didn't mind. The riders, bouncing in their saddles with the graceless determination of people who were better at fighting than riding, minded quite a lot.

Darathra Shendrel had been clear. Take the Evermoor Way east to Everlund. Find Danivarr's House — an inn near the Bell Market. Ask for the half-orc innkeeper, Dral Thelev. Show him the platinum badge. He would know what to do.

She had not explained what "what to do" meant. Dustin had noticed that Harpers rarely did.

The landscape changed as they rode east — open farmland giving way to rolling moors, the grass longer here, the sky wider, the wind carrying the damp, peaty smell of the Evermoors to the north. They passed merchant caravans heading west, their drivers nervous and tight-lipped, offering little more than curt nods and warnings about the road ahead. Giants had been seen. Everybody had a story. Nobody wanted to linger long enough to tell it.

They camped the first night off the road, in a copse where the fire wouldn't be seen. Don Juan unsaddled in silence, then sat down hard.

"The horse," he said, to nobody, "is the problem."

Dustin sat beside him. "It's been a while since the Revue."

"The Revue had carts."

Later, by the fire, Dustin worked at the ironwood with a small knife. He'd been at it for weeks. Tonight there were only a few cuts left.

He hollowed the last finger hole. Smoothed a ridge along the lip. The shavings curled into the embers and were gone.

Then it was done.

They found the hill giant on the fourth morning, not far from Everlund.

It lay beside the road like a felled tree — enormous, sprawled across the grass, its body already beginning to attract crows. Its head had been severed. Cleanly — a single cut, precise and devastating, through a neck as thick as a barrel. The head lay ten feet from the body, face down in the mud, its expression hidden.

The party dismounted and approached carefully.

"That wasn't done by a human," Don Juan said, studying the wound. "No man swings a blade wide enough to do that in one pass."

"Something bigger," Kürbis agreed. The Goliath crouched beside the corpse with the clinical interest of someone who had grown up around things that were large and violent. He worked a tooth loose from the giant's jaw — a yellowed, fist-sized thing — and threaded it onto a length of rope. Then he pried the drinking horn from the giant's belt, sniffed it, grimaced, and kept it anyway.

Zarok stood a step back from the body, one hand on his axe. "Single stroke," he said. "That is not skill. That is mass."

They left the corpse where it lay. There was nothing to be done for it, and nothing to be learned from it that they didn't already know — the North was at war with itself, and the bodies were getting bigger.

Everlund rose from the banks of the Rauvin River like a city that had been built by people who valued straight lines and thick walls. A stone wall enclosed it, pierced by five gates, and broad avenues led from each gate toward the Bell Market at the city's centre. The streets were clean and wide — wide enough for the large caravan wagons that were the city's lifeblood, and wide enough that the party on horseback didn't have to jostle for space. After weeks on the road and in the wilderness, the simple act of riding through a city that functioned felt almost luxurious.

Danivarr's House was easy to find — a rambling, sprawling inn near the market, the kind of place that had been expanded so many times it had lost any sense of its original architecture. The sign above the door was freshly painted. The common room inside was warm, busy, and smelled of roasting meat and spilled ale. After days of road dust and wet bedrolls, the warmth of a busy room hit like a hand on the back of the neck — the unembarrassed pleasure of being indoors.

Dral Thelev stood behind the bar — a half-orc with one eye and the build of someone who had spent his youth doing something more violent than pouring drinks. He watched them come in with the quiet assessment of a man who was used to sizing up strangers.

Dustin placed the platinum badge on the bar. Three boars charging forward — Triboar's insignia.

Dral looked at the badge. Looked at them. Pocketed it without a word.

Then he reached under the bar and produced a flask and a collection of small wooden cups. He uncorked the flask — the smell that rose from it was rich, complex, unmistakably elven — and poured a measure into each cup.

"Silverymoon's finest," he said. "Drink up."

The party looked at each other. Looked at the cups. Looked at Dral, who offered no further explanation and did not appear to think one was necessary.

Kürbis raised his cup, sniffed, and looked unimpressed. "It's wine."

Mindartis sniffed his too. "Silverymoon Highwater. Aged in oak from the High Forest. Rare."

Dustin drank first.

The wine was extraordinary — light, floral, with a warmth that spread from his throat to his chest to the tips of his fingers. And then the common room dissolved. The bar, the noise, the smell of roasting meat — all of it folded inward like a closing book, replaced by silence and cool stone and the soft sound of wings.

He was standing in a parlour. Stone walls, austere furnishings, the faint smell of old parchment and candle wax. And cats. Cats everywhere — except they had wings. Small, delicate, bat-like wings that carried them from shelf to shelf and mantelpiece to chair with the lazy, entitled grace of creatures that had long ago decided the laws of nature were more of a suggestion.

The others appeared one by one — each blinking in the sudden quiet, each taking a moment to process the transition from busy inn to silent tower. Don Juan's hand went to his sword. Mindartis's went to the nearest cat. Zarok counted exits.

"Tressym," the wizard said, already scratching one behind the ears. "Extraordinary. I've read about them but never—"

"Welcome to Moongleam Tower."

The voice came from the doorway. A man stood there — sun-dark skin, sharp eyes, robes that were expensive without being ostentatious. He carried himself with the easy authority of someone who was used to being the most powerful person in any room he entered, and who found the fact neither interesting nor important.

"Krowen Valharrow," he said. "Archmage of the tower. Darathra sent word you were coming." He looked them over with an appraising eye. "You look like you've had a long road."

"It's getting longer," Dustin said.

Krowen led them deeper into the tower — up a spiral staircase, past doors that hummed faintly with magical wards, past shelves of books and components and the accumulated clutter of a working wizard's stronghold. Tressym watched them from every surface, their wings folding and unfolding in idle curiosity.

He brought them to a circular, windowless room near the top of the tower. The floor was inscribed with a complex pattern of runes and sigils — a teleportation circle, its lines glowing with a faint, steady light.

"The Harpers maintain a network of these," Krowen said. "Six circles, six cities. Everlund, Yartar, Neverwinter, Waterdeep, Felbar, and Luskan." He produced a rolled parchment and spread it on a table. Six circles, each drawn with precise sigil sequences. "Memorise these, or keep the parchment. Either way, you now have access to the fastest travel network in the North."

"What's the catch?" Don Juan asked.

"The catch is that each circle is guarded by a mage who will kill you if you arrive unannounced and hostile. So don't." Krowen folded his arms. "The other catch is that the network is secret, and the Harpers would very much like it to stay that way."

The party studied the parchment. Six cities. Instant travel between them. After weeks of horseback and worse, it felt like being handed the key to a door they hadn't known existed.

"What can you tell us about the giants?" Dustin asked.

Krowen's expression darkened. "Less than I'd like. Reports are coming in from across the North — hill giants raiding farms in the Dessarin Valley, frost giants attacking ships along the Sword Coast, stone giants emerging from their caves to demolish settlements. There's no pattern to it that we can find. No coordination, no clear objective. Just violence, everywhere, all at once." He shook his head. "Something has changed among the giant-kind. We don't yet know what."

"We might," Mindartis said.

They told him everything. Nightstone — boulders falling from the sky, a cloud giant castle hanging above the village, the ancient monolith ripped from the ground and carried off. Triboar — fire giants marching into town with a rod the size of a tree, using it to dig up a massive fragment of metal buried beneath the streets. The party had fought them off, but the giants had seemed less interested in conquest than in excavation. And on the road here, not half a day's ride west — a dead hill giant, its head taken off with a single stroke.

Krowen listened without interrupting, his expression sharpening with each detail. When they finished, the archmage was quiet for a moment.

"Cloud giants stealing ancient stones. Fire giants digging up relics with purpose-built tools. That's not raiding — that's organised." He paced the length of the room. "The rod you describe — the Vonindod. It's a giant artifact. A dowsing rod of sorts, built to locate fragments of a colossus. An adamantine war construct the fire giants tried to build during their ancient wars. If they're digging up pieces of it again..." He left the thought unfinished.

"And the dead hill giant," Dustin said. "Something bigger than us killed it."

Krowen nodded slowly. "That would be Harshnag."

The name meant nothing to most of them, but Mindartis straightened. "Harshnag the Grim? He was part of Force Grey — the adventuring company that defended Waterdeep. I've heard stories in the city. A frost giant, of all things, fighting alongside small folk."

"The same," Krowen said. "He's old — centuries old — and he's been a friend to the people of the North for longer than most of them have been alive. Wears plate armor and a white dragon skull for a helm. Carries an axe that makes your greatsword look like a letter opener," he added, glancing at Kürbis. "Word reached me that he's been in the area, looking for a group of adventurers who've been making trouble for the giants. Looking for you, I suspect."

"A frost giant is looking for us," Don Juan said flatly. "And we should be pleased about this."

"You should," Krowen said. "Harshnag knows more about what's happening among the giant-kind than anyone alive. If he's seeking you out, it's because he thinks you can help — and because he has somewhere to take you."

The decision was not difficult. The frost giants were the most immediate threat — raiding the Sword Coast, attacking coastal settlements, growing bolder with each passing week. Luskan sat at the edge of the frozen north, a port city with access to the icy waters where the frost giants operated. From there, they could reach Fireshear — a coastal village that had been hit hard.

"Fireshear," Kürbis said. He had been quiet through most of the conversation, but at the name he sat up.

"There's a griffon riding school there," Mindartis said. "We heard about it in Triboar — a dwarf woman who trains riders and breeds them."

"Worth a stop," Kürbis said.

"Harder to hit something in the air," Zarok said. "I'll fly anything you put in front of me."

The prospect of flying instead of riding settled the matter. Luskan first, then north along the coast to Fireshear.

"Luskan," Don Juan said, and nobody argued.

Krowen showed them the sigil sequence. The circle on the floor pulsed — the runes brightening, the air inside the ring thickening.

"Step in," Krowen said. "And try not to antagonise anyone when you arrive. Luskan is not Everlund."

They stepped into the circle. Krowen raised a hand. The light rose. The tower dissolved.

The portal dropped them in Luskan. The city seemed to resent the delivery.

Everlund's portal network was old magic, and it worked. One moment the warm halls of the scholarly city, the next the salt-stained docks of the City of Sails, where the wind off the Sea of Swords cut through cloaks like it had a personal grudge against warmth.

Luskan was not a place that invited lingering. The party purchased horses, supplies, and directions north, and left before the city could give them a reason to stay.

The road to Fireshear was long. North along the coast, past the Spine of the World's western foothills, through country that grew harsher with every mile — the trees thinning to wind-bent scrub, the grass giving way to frost-hardened earth, the sky greyer the further they rode. The horses were sure-footed but unhappy, snorting plumes of white breath and flicking their ears at every sound.

It was Kürbis, predictably, who seemed most at ease. The Goliath rode with the quiet contentment of someone returning to familiar territory — the cold, the stone, the vast empty spaces where the only company was the wind. He'd grown up in mountains worse than this.

They made camp the first night in a shallow valley between two ridges, sheltered from the worst of the wind. The fire was small — large enough to cook, not large enough to be seen from a distance.

Kürbis had snared a hare on the ride in. They ate it from a single pot with bread gone hard enough to use for tools.

"I miss Yartar," Don Juan said.

"You hated Yartar."

"I miss the bread there."

By the time Dustin's hands had warmed enough to feel his own fingers, the others were bedded down.

Dustin took the late watch. The others slept — or tried to, wrapped in cloaks and pressed close to the dying fire. The cold was the kind that found gaps in armour and clothing with malicious precision, and the wind carried sounds that might have been wolves or might have been nothing at all.

He sat with his journal on his knee, working on a melody that had been rattling around his head since Everlund. The flute was too loud for a night watch — he'd learned that the hard way — so he hummed, scribbling notes by the fading firelight, trying to pin down a chord progression that kept slipping away from him like a fish in shallow water.

Then he saw it. Not close — a quarter mile out, maybe more — but his Half-elf eyes caught what human eyes would have missed in the dark. A glow. Faint, orange, moving steadily across the frozen moor. Not a campfire. Campfires didn't walk.

He nudged Kürbis awake with his boot. The Goliath's eyes opened instantly — no grogginess, no confusion, just immediate alertness. Dustin pointed. Kürbis looked.

"Stay here," Dustin whispered. "Wake the others."

He moved out into the dark before Kürbis could argue. This was what he was good at — not the fighting, not the big swings and the holy smites, but this. Quiet feet on frozen ground. Shadows that welcomed him rather than revealed him. He'd spent years slipping through places he wasn't supposed to be, and the frozen moor at night was simpler than most.

He circled wide, keeping downwind. Whatever was out there, if it had dogs — and something about the way the glow moved suggested company — he didn't want to find out what happened when they caught his scent.

He crept close enough to see it clearly. A fire giant — red-skinned, its hair and beard like smouldering wire, enormous even by giant standards. It carried a rod in one hand — long, iron, covered in runes that pulsed with a dull orange light. The same kind of rod the fire giants had used in Triboar. It swept the rod across the ground as it walked, the runes flaring brighter whenever the tip passed over something metallic beneath the earth. Searching. Not hunting.

Two hell hounds flanked it — lean, coal-black beasts with embers glowing in their mouths and eyes that burned like forge coals. They moved with the disciplined heel of trained hunting dogs, which would have been almost endearing if they hadn't been the size of ponies and visibly on fire. Downwind had been the right call.

Dustin watched the giant's trajectory. His stomach sank. It wasn't heading for their camp — it didn't know they were there — but its path would take it straight through their valley. Blind luck. The worst kind.

He slipped back to camp. Kürbis had the others up and armed, moving with the practised quiet of people who had done this too many times.

"Fire giant," Dustin breathed. "Rod like Triboar. Two hell hounds. It's heading right for us — doesn't know we're here yet."

"How long?" Don Juan asked.

"Minutes."

They didn't have time to break camp or move the horses. They spread out, found positions among the rocks, and waited.

The glow grew brighter. The frost on the nearest stones began to hiss. Then the giant crested the ridge and saw the horses, and its expression shifted from concentration to contempt. It barked two words in Giant — sharp, guttural commands — and the hell hounds lunged.

The fight was vicious. The hounds breathed gouts of flame that turned the frozen ground to mud and steam. The giant fought with the rod in one hand and a fist the size of a barrel in the other, swinging with the mechanical efficiency of something that had crushed smaller creatures before and expected to do so again.

But they had fought giants before. They knew the rhythm now — the long reach, the slow recovery, the gaps between swings where a fast blade could find its mark. Don Juan and Kürbis pressed the giant while Mindartis worked from range, spells cutting through the firelight in arcs of frost and force.

Dustin dropped one of the hounds with a bolt of violet force that caught it mid-leap — the creature hit the ground, tumbled, and didn't get up. Kürbis finished the giant with a blow that would have made Harshnag raise an eyebrow.

The second hound tried to bolt. It didn't make it far.

They stood in the wreckage of their camp, breathing hard, the fire giant's body still radiating heat like a dying forge. The rod lay in the mud beside it, its runes fading from orange to black.

"What did it shout?" Dustin asked. "At the hounds. Right before they charged."

Kürbis wiped his blade. "Names," the Goliath said. He spoke Giant as fluently as Common. "Fluffy and Sparky."

Dustin looked at the two smouldering corpses. "Of course they were."

They didn't sleep again that night.

Fireshear was not a town that welcomed travellers. It tolerated them.

The Silver Vein sat near the harbour, low and stone-built like everything in Fireshear. Inside, the ceiling was low, the air thick with pipe smoke and lamp oil and the warm fat-smell of cooking meat. The hearth threw heat into the room with the steady authority of a thing that had not been allowed to go out in a generation.

It was the first proper warmth they'd had since Luskan. They stood inside the door for a moment just to feel it.

Dustin found the innkeeper at the bar — wiry, wiping cups with a cloth that had given up on the work some time ago — and asked about rooms. Two coppers a night, bedding included. The innkeeper did not blink at the Goliath or the Dragonborn. In Fireshear, anyone who could pay was welcome enough.

Then Dustin asked about the griffon school. Triboar had given them the name of the town and the trade. It had not given them a road.

The innkeeper jerked his chin at a man drinking alone at a corner table. "Works up there. Try him."

The man at the corner table did not look up.

He sat with both hands around a tin cup, hood half-down, a heavy cloak still on his shoulders. Dark complexion, dark hair, the kind of weathered face the north made of anyone who stayed in it long enough. Don Juan led with his usual flourish — the smile, the half-bow, the warm voice that had opened more doors than his sword.

"Friend. A moment —"

"No."

A pause. The smile held. "I haven't yet —"

"No."

The man drained his cup in one long pull, set it down, and stood. As he pulled his cloak across his chest, the sleeve of his right arm rode up an inch above the wrist. A small dark mark on the inside of his forearm — a serpent, wings folded along its body, inked clean and old.

Zarok saw it. So did Mindartis, a step behind.

The man pushed past them and out into the street. The door swung shut on a gust of cold air that found every gap in the room.

The innkeeper resumed wiping cups. After a moment, without looking up, he tipped his head toward the door. "Cliff road, north end of town. Can't miss it. Ask for Dasharra."

Dustin lingered at the bar. "Heard anything? Giants on the move?"

The innkeeper glanced up for the first time. He took a breath, let it out slow. "Frost giants. Coming off the water in longboats. Hit a couple of fishing camps east of here last tenday. Coast watch saw the sails from the cliffs."

"And here?"

"We've held so far." He went back to his cup. "Anything else?"

"One more. Do you take players?"

The innkeeper looked at him properly now — at the flute on his belt, the road dust, the look of a man who knew his trade. He shrugged. "If you don't clear the room, you can have the corner. Tips are yours."

They sat at the table in the heat.

"I have seen that mark before," Zarok said, quietly.

Dustin looked at him.

"Nightstone," Zarok said. "The inn."

Dustin hadn't been there for that. He waited for Zarok to go on. Zarok didn't.

For a few seconds no one said anything. Then Don Juan reached for the bread on the table, broke off a corner, and ate it with the solemnity of a man who had just survived an indignity.

"Cliff road," Kürbis said.

They went.

Fireshear sat at the edge of the world — or close enough that the distinction didn't matter. A mining town carved into the frozen coast, where the land met the Sea of Moving Ice in a jagged line of cliffs and ice shelves. The buildings were low and sturdy, built to endure rather than impress, their roofs weighted with stone against the winds that came screaming off the ice. It was the kind of place where people didn't ask why you'd come — only how long you planned to stay.

The school sat at the edge of town where the cliff road ran out. It was run by a dwarf woman named Dasharra Keldabar, with the build of someone who arm-wrestled for sport and the temperament of someone who won. She regarded the party with the flat, measuring gaze of a professional evaluating amateurs, and was clearly unimpressed by what she saw.

"You want to ride griffons," she said. It was not a question. "Any of you done this before?"

Silence.

"Right." She turned and walked toward the paddock. "Try not to die."

The griffons were magnificent — and they knew it. Proud, territorial creatures with the keen intelligence of eagles and the raw power of lions, they did not suffer fools and had strong opinions about who was worthy of sitting on their backs. The school's birds were trained, but trained the way a warhorse was trained — cooperative when respected, dangerous when not.

Kürbis, of course, was a natural. Whatever bond he'd formed with Zephyros's griffons in the tower had not been a fluke — he had an understanding of the creatures that went beyond technique. He mounted with ease, moved with the griffon's rhythm rather than against it, and within the first hour was executing turns and dives that made the dwarf raise an eyebrow in what might have been approval.

Dustin managed. It was not graceful, and there were several moments where the griffon made its displeasure known through sharp banking turns that seemed designed to test his grip, but he held on. His musical instincts helped — the same sense of rhythm and timing that guided his fingers on the flute guided his weight in the saddle, anticipating the griffon's movements a half-beat before they came.

The others struggled. Don Juan approached griffon-riding with the same theatrical confidence he brought to everything, which the griffon interpreted as a challenge and responded to accordingly. Zarok's bulk made balance difficult — the Dragonborn was built for standing his ground, not shifting it. Mindartis observed, analysed, and applied his findings with methodical precision, which produced competence but not comfort.

After a few days, most of the party could stay airborne without immediate risk of death. Kürbis was clearly enjoying himself — taking longer flights, climbing higher, testing the griffon's limits and his own with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had found a thing they were born to do. Zarok, watching him from the ground after a particularly rough landing, shook his head.

"Remind me," the Dragonborn said, "why I agreed to this."

Dustin took the corner stage that night. The room was full — miners off shift, fishermen with frost still on their beards, a crowd that drank hard and would listen to anything that wasn't the wind.

Dustin played the usual set. Songs from the road — crowd-pleasers, drinking songs, the kind of material that worked in any tavern from Waterdeep to the Spine of the World. The crowd stamped and clapped and bought him drinks, and for a while it was exactly what he needed — the simple, honest pleasure of performing for people who wanted to be entertained.

But he'd come to Fireshear for a reason, and the reason wasn't applause.

He waited until the crowd was warm. Until the ale had loosened shoulders and the room had settled into that comfortable hum between songs where people leaned back and listened rather than shouted requests. Then he picked up his flute and played something different.

Purple Rocks. An old song — older than Dustin, older than the Wanderlust Revue. He'd learned it years ago around a campfire in the Silver Marches, passed from bard to bard the way all the best stories were — half legend, half warning, wrapped in a melody that stuck in the ear long after the words had faded. It told of mysterious islands far to the west, beyond the Sea of Moving Ice, where strange lights burned on the shore and ships that sailed too close never returned.

It was the kind of song that sounded like fiction in Waterdeep. Here, at the edge of the frozen sea, with the wind howling against the shutters and the ice shelf visible from the harbour — it landed differently.

Dustin watched the crowd as he played. Not performing now — studying. A bard learned to read a room the way a sailor read the wind, and he was looking for something specific: a flinch, a glance, a drink set down a fraction too quickly. Anyone who knew more than the song told.

The crowd listened. Some nodded along. Some stared into their cups with the distant expression of people remembering things they'd rather not.

But if anyone in that room knew the truth behind the Purple Rocks, they kept it to themselves.

Dustin filed the silence away. Silence, in his experience, was often more interesting than answers.

The days at the griffon school settled into a rhythm. Morning flights along the coast, where the wind off the ice shelf tested grip and nerve in equal measure. Afternoon drills — formation flying, emergency landings, the specific terror of a banking turn at speed when the ground was a hundred feet below and made of frozen rock.

On the third evening they ate at the Silver Vein again. The party took a corner table, bruised and hungry. Mindartis sat on a folded cloak. Zarok wouldn't sit at all. Don Juan worked his way through a bowl of stew with the slow, methodical irritation of a man who would rather have been somewhere else.

"The griffon," Zarok said, "does not like me."

"The griffon," Kürbis said, "doesn't like anyone."

"It likes you."

"It tolerates me."

Kürbis was smiling. He'd been smiling more than usual all week — small, private, the kind of smile he wore when he was trying not to. Dustin watched him over the rim of a cup.

Then he stood up, took the flute from his belt, and went looking for the platform.

The Silver Vein knew him by now. The room quieted on its own.

"Something new," he said. "Wings of the Wild."

The miners listened. He had two more in his pocket — The Frozen Coast, and one without a name yet, all rhythm. He didn't play those tonight. They would wait.

Back at the corner table, Don Juan raised his cup.

"Better than Yartar."

"Yartar paid better."

"Yartar lied about the bread."

By the fourth day, even Zarok had stopped complaining. Not because the flying had become comfortable — it hadn't, and likely never would for someone whose centre of gravity was built for a battlefield rather than a saddle — but because the view was worth the discomfort. The coastline from above was staggering: ice shelves stretching to the horizon like broken glass, the sea dark and restless beneath, the mountains of the Spine of the World rising to the south in a jagged white line that looked painted against the sky.

On one of those flights, Dasharra took them out for a final test. She rode with them on Screecher — her own bird, battle-scarred and grey — and didn't warn them it was a test until they were a long way out over the ice.

They were over the open shelf when Kürbis pulled up short.

The Goliath's griffon banked hard, circling, and Kürbis pointed down toward the ice shelf's edge. The others followed his gaze.

A longboat. Just beached — the hull dark, scarred from the sea, still scraping a long black trough through the ice where it had ground ashore. The sails were down. Frost giants were already disembarking, swinging from the prow onto the shelf in a steady stream.

They didn't stop at the boat. They formed up loose on the ice and broke into a hard run inland — axes and spears slung across their backs, heading straight for the dark smudge of Fireshear on the coast. The innkeeper hadn't been wrong.

Dustin counted as they went. Eight, maybe more. Two stayed at the boat, leaning on long spears as the others left them behind — sentries set to the cargo.

"That's not good," Dustin said.

Dasharra was already going. Screecher folded its wings and dropped. Kürbis dove half a beat behind.

The party split without discussion — the kind of instinctive tactical division that came from months of fighting together and knowing, without words, who was best suited for what.

Zarok banked toward the charging giants, Mindartis behind him, already preparing spells. They would intercept — slow them down, buy time for the town to mount a defence. It was the sensible play. The brave play.

Dustin, Don Juan, and Kürbis flew for the ship.

Two giants had stayed behind — sentries, or perhaps too slow to keep up with the war party. They stood on the ice near the ship's prow, enormous figures wrapped in furs, their breath rising in plumes that the wind tore apart as soon as they formed. They saw the griffons coming and reached for their weapons with the unhurried confidence of creatures who had never been attacked from above.

That confidence lasted approximately four seconds.

Don Juan hit the first one like a thunderbolt — diving from height, sword blazing, the impact driving the giant back three steps before it understood what was happening. Kürbis was half a breath behind, his griffon pulling up at the last moment while the Goliath simply let go, dropping from the saddle with his greataxe already swinging. The giant he hit didn't stagger. It folded.

Dustin landed on the ship.

The deck was wood and salt and old frost. Long benches down the centre, oars stacked, rope coiled stiff against the cold. The hull groaned faintly where it had ground onto the ice. The hatches were sealed with frost but not with time — the boat had not been here long.

A chest sat near the stern, lashed to the deck with hemp rope frozen hard as iron. The lid was crusted shut. The lock was seized solid.

Dustin didn't pick it. He pulled the flute from his belt and held it in both hands. Something old in him reached down into the ironwood, found the grain, and woke it. The flute grew heavier in his grip, balance shifting, the weight of an oak haft where there had been a musician's instrument a breath before.

He swung.

The flute struck the chest in a wash of pale green fire — hungry, fast, eating at the frozen wood the way a hot iron eats frost. The chest groaned and held.

On the ice below, Don Juan and Kürbis had finished the sentries. The two giants lay still, the ice around them cracked and stained. Don Juan was already mounting his griffon, eyes on the distant shapes of the war party along the shore.

"Dustin —"

"Working on it."

"We can't wait."

"Then go."

He swung again. The green fire flared, leapt up the chest's side, sank into the lid. The wood went black at the edges, then white, then powdered. On the third strike the lid split clean across the lock and fell open.

Kürbis pulled a roll of oiled hide from one of the dead giants' packs and tucked it inside his cloak. Then he was on his griffon. Don Juan lifted, Kürbis a beat behind, and they banked toward the fight along the shore.

Inside the chest, nestled in frozen straw like something waiting to be found, was a horn.

Not a war horn. Not the crude instruments the frost giants carried — those were functional, ugly, designed for volume rather than craft. This was art. Silver, polished despite the cold, with inlay work that caught the thin northern light and threw it back in patterns that seemed to move. The patterns were octopuses — tentacles winding around the bell, curling along the rim, rendered in silver so fine that the detail held even at arm's length.

Dustin picked it up. It was lighter than it looked, and warm — impossibly warm, as if it had been sitting by a fire rather than packed in straw on the deck of a giants' boat.

He knew what it was. Not specifically — not yet — but he knew what it felt like. The same way he'd known the tinderbox was more than brass. The same way he'd known certain melodies held power before anyone taught him why. A bard's instinct.

He tucked the horn into his belt and climbed onto his griffon. The bird took the wind and turned for the shore.

He was already late.

By the time Dustin cleared the longboat and the coast widened out below him, the fight on the shore was already on.

The advancing giants had reached the strand — six or seven of them, running across the last of the open ice toward the first row of fishhouses at the edge of town. Townsfolk shouted in the streets behind, defenders rallying with whatever they had to hand.

Above them, the intercept team was working.

Mindartis was on griffon-back, hands moving. A bead of red light dropped from his fingertips, fell into the running giants, and bloomed. The shelf cracked open beneath them in a black ring of melted water — and at the heart of the bloom, three of the giants went down screaming, beards and furs alight, crashing into the broken ice.

The rest staggered. A few of them turned to look up.

One stooped, broke a slab of jagged ice off the rim of the new hole, hefted it in one hand, and hurled it.

The slab caught Mindartis's griffon mid-banking. The bird folded with a sound like a wet sail tearing, and Mindartis went off the saddle.

For a moment he was vertical, fingers tracing something fast, and then he wasn't falling so much as drifting — sinking through air gone heavy. The slow descent did not save him. The hole was directly beneath. He hit the water and went under.

Behind him, another giant whirled and threw — a rock this time, a lump of coastal stone — and caught Screecher across the flank just behind the wing. The grey griffon shrieked, faltered, and could not hold the air. Dasharra rode the bird down hard. They came in between the boat and the shore. Neither rider nor griffon got up.

Don Juan and Kürbis were already pushing for the hole.

The paladin's griffon hit the broken ice at a hard angle, sliding to a stop with one wing dragged through the water. Don Juan was off the saddle before it had finished moving, blade out, head turning between the giants and the water. Kürbis came down behind him, dropped from his griffon's back with the same easy fall he'd used on the sentries, and went for the hole.

He didn't pause to look. He reached down into the water with one long arm, found cloth, and hauled. Mindartis came up grey and choking, soaked through, eyes half-closed. Kürbis dropped him on the ice well back from the hole.

Zarok was on the strand, axe wet to the haft, a giant down at his feet. The rest weren't fighting him. They were going past — three of them at a hard run, straight for the houses, axes already up. A door splintered ahead. A fishhouse wall went in under a shoulder.

Zarok turned and went after them. Don Juan was moving before he'd finished the turn, sword up, sprinting up the broken shore. Kürbis came behind, shaking water off his cloak.

Then the trees broke.

Not from the direction of the charging giants — from behind Fireshear, from the forest to the south, where the pines grew thick and dark and nothing should have been moving. Something was. Something enormous, shouldering through trunks that snapped like kindling, each step shaking the ground hard enough to rattle shutters in the town.

A frost giant. But not like the others.

This one was bigger. Taller. Broader across the shoulders than any giant Dustin had seen, and he had seen more than his share. It carried an axe that could have felled a watchtower in a single swing, and its face — scarred, weathered, set with an expression of grim purpose — was not turned toward the town.

It was turned toward the other giants.

The first one it hit didn't see it coming. The axe caught the raider mid-stride and sent it sprawling across the ice, and before the others could react the newcomer was among them — swinging, roaring, fighting with the focused fury of someone who had chosen a side and intended to make the choice count.

The raiders faltered. Whatever plan they'd had — whatever coordination had driven their charge — dissolved in the face of one of their own turning against them.

Dustin circled above the chaos, the horn warm against his hip, and made a decision that was approximately ten percent tactical and ninety percent inevitable.

He couldn't help it. He was a bard. And the horn was the most beautiful instrument he had ever held.

He landed on a rooftop at the edge of the fighting and pulled the horn from his belt.

He didn't know what it would do. Not really. He'd felt its weight, its warmth, the hum of something old and powerful coiled inside the silver like a sleeping thing. A sensible person would have studied it first. Consulted Mindartis. Read the runes. Tested it cautiously.

Dustin put it to his lips and blew.

The sound that came out wasn't a note. It went through the ground and the ice and the bones of anyone close enough to hear it, and it rolled across the battlefield and kept going — past the town, past the cliffs, out over the frozen sea.

Then they came.

They rose from the ice like heat shimmer — translucent at first, then solidifying, their outlines sharpening into shapes that were unmistakably human but not remotely alive. Warriors. Dozens of them, clad in armour from an age that predated anything Dustin could name, carrying weapons that flickered between solid and spectral with each step. Vikings — or whatever these figures had been before death had claimed them and the horn had bound their service.

They stood in silence, spectral eyes fixed on Dustin, waiting.

He stared back. The horn was still warm in his hands. The ghostly warriors watched him with the patient stillness of soldiers awaiting orders.

"Well," Dustin said. His voice cracked slightly. "Go help."

They went.

What followed was less a battle than a rout. The spectral warriors hit the remaining giants from the flank — tireless, fearless, unbothered by the cold or the blood or the frost giant weapons that passed through their ghostly forms like wind through fog. Between them, the friendly giant's axe, and the party fighting on the ground, the raiders didn't stand a chance.

It was over in minutes. The last giant fell, the spectral warriors faded like morning mist, and the horn went cold in Dustin's hands.

Silence. Then — the slow, uncertain sounds of a town realising it was still standing.

They found him sitting on the remains of a collapsed wall, wiping frost giant blood from an axe that gave off a faint, steady glow. He was enormous — even by frost giant standards — clad in plate that had seen its share of fights, and the helm beside him on the stones was the bleached white skull of a dragon. He sat with the easy stillness of someone who had fought many battles and did not feel the need to celebrate any of them.

The party approached cautiously. Don Juan's hand rested on his sword. Zarok's posture was rigid with the tension of someone who had spent the last twenty minutes fighting frost giants and was not yet ready to trust another one.

The giant looked up. His eyes — pale blue, intelligent, faintly amused — moved between them.

"You fight well," he said. His voice was deep enough to feel in the ribcage. "For small folk."

Common. He spoke Common — clearly, without the halting syntax most giants used when deigning to address smaller creatures. That alone set him apart.

"I'm Harshnag," he said, as if that explained everything.

Zarok stepped forward, still wary, and held up the carved ivory statue they'd taken from one of the fallen raiders — an intricately worked figure, heavy in the hand.

Harshnag glanced at it. "Thrym," he said. "Frost giant god. The others pray to him for strength." A pause. "I prefer to rely on the axe."

His gaze settled on Zarok's weapon — the Dragonborn's greataxe, battered from the fight but still whole.

"Pretty formidable axe you have," Harshnag said. The faintest hint of a smile. "For a humanoid."

Zarok blinked. Coming from a frost giant, it might have been an insult. Coming from this frost giant, it was something rarer — respect, delivered in the only language a warrior truly trusted.

"Seems like you know how to handle it," Harshnag added.

Then his eyes moved to Dustin. To the horn at his belt. The amusement deepened.

"You blew that yourself, did you."

"I did."

"Bold," Harshnag said. "Possibly stupid. But bold."

The tension broke. Not all at once — trust was not something that formed in a single conversation, especially not between creatures who had spent the day killing each other's kin. But something shifted. An acknowledgment. A beginning.

Dustin looked at the horn at his belt. Then at Harshnag. Then at the ruined wall, the fallen giants, the spectral footprints already fading from the ice.

"So," he said. "What happens now?"

Harshnag's pale eyes found the horizon — north, toward the Sea of Moving Ice, where the map they'd taken from a dead giant's pack marked an island with a careful X.

"Now," the frost giant said, "we talk."

The Eye of the All-Father, Harshnag had said, was deep in the Spine of the World. East. High up. Harshnag could walk it. The small folk could not.

They needed griffons.

Dasharra heard them out in the dim of the riding school's stable, hands in her apron, expression flat. She listened to the bard. She listened to the paladin who had the diplomatic words for it. She watched Mindartis lay out the route on a scrap of parchment in his small, precise hand.

"You want my birds," she said. "To carry you east into the high passes, where the wind tears the wing off a fool, and likely will not come back."

"Likely will," Don Juan said.

She gave him a look. Then she looked at the rest of them.

"Only if I come with you."

Kürbis grunted something that might have been approval.

"Done," Don Juan said.

They left Fireshear before dawn.

Harshnag went on foot — because of course he did. The frost giant's stride covered more ground per step than the griffons covered in three wingbeats, and he moved through the frozen landscape with the easy, tireless gait of a creature for whom the Spine of the World was not a destination but a neighbourhood. He carried his glowing greataxe across one shoulder, his massive frame cutting a path through snowdrifts that would have buried the rest of the party to their necks.

Dasharra flew alongside Kürbis at the front of the formation, her own griffon responding to commands so subtle they were invisible, making the party's riding look like children bouncing on ponies by comparison.

The rest of the party flew. Griffon-back, bundled in every layer they owned, the wind finding every gap in their cloaks.

Below them, Harshnag walked. The giant kept a steady, tireless pace — uphill, downhill, through ice fields and rocky passes. The Spine of the World unfolded beneath the formation: peaks, frozen rivers that hadn't thawed since before the founding of Waterdeep.

The mountains grew higher as they flew east. The peaks were not the rounded, weathered shapes of the western foothills — they were sharp, thrust upward like broken teeth. Ice on their ridges glared in the thin sunlight. The air thinned. The griffons laboured. Even Kürbis, who had taken to flying with the natural ease of someone born for it, looked uncomfortable at the altitude.

Harshnag did not look uncomfortable. Harshnag looked like he was going for a walk.

They made camp on a frozen ridge as the light failed — a shelf of rock jutting from the mountainside, sheltered from the worst of the wind by a natural overhang that Harshnag had to duck to fit under. The griffons huddled together at the far end of the shelf, their feathers ruffled against the cold, occasionally clicking their beaks at the darkness beyond the firelight.

The fire was Mindartis's work — arcane flame that burned without fuel and gave off heat without smoke, which was necessary given that there was nothing to burn within a day's march in any direction. The party gathered around it in a loose circle, eating trail rations and watching the stars appear one by one in a sky so clear and so dark that it felt less like looking up and more like looking through — as if the atmosphere had simply given up and the void beyond was right there, close enough to touch.

The rations had frozen in the saddlebags. They thawed slow in fingers and tasted mostly of leather.

Dustin took out his flute.

Not to play — not yet. He turned it in his hands, feeling the familiar weight of the ironwood, and watched the firelight catch the grain. Then he looked at Harshnag, who sat cross-legged on the bare rock with his axe across his knees, his massive frame silhouetted against the stars.

"Harshnag," Dustin said. "Can I ask you something?"

The giant's pale eyes moved to him. "You can ask."

"Klauthen Vale." Dustin let the name hang in the cold air. "I heard stories, years ago. Campfire tales — the kind bards pass around when they're trying to impress each other. A hidden valley in the mountains, magically warm, green in the middle of all this —" He gestured at the frozen waste around them. "Guarded by a dragon. A great red wyrm."

He paused. "I wrote a song about it. Seemed like a good story. The kind of thing that's too interesting not to be true, but too convenient to actually be true."

Harshnag was quiet for a long moment. The fire crackled. The wind moaned through the rocks above them.

"It exists," the giant said.

The words landed like stones dropped into still water. Around the fire, heads turned. Don Juan's hand paused halfway to his waterskin. Kürbis, who had been sharpening his greatsword with the methodical patience of a man performing a nightly ritual, went still.

"It exists," Harshnag repeated. "West of Mirabar, in the high peaks. A valley warmed by old magic — older than the Ordning, older than the kingdoms of men. Green, as you say. Warm. Full of life in a place where nothing should live." He shifted his weight. "And yes. There is a dragon. An ancient one. It has been there longer than anyone can remember, and it does not welcome visitors."

"So the song was right," Dustin said.

"Your song," Harshnag said, with the careful emphasis of someone choosing words precisely, "would be wise to remain a song. The vale is not a place for small folk. It is not a place for any folk. The dragon guards it because the dragon wants it, and what an ancient wyrm wants, an ancient wyrm keeps."

"Noted," Dustin said.

"I am being serious, bard."

"So am I." Dustin tucked the flute back into his belt. "I write songs about things I find interesting. Doesn't mean I'm stupid enough to go looking for them."

Harshnag studied him for a moment with an expression that might have been amusement. "Good," he said. "Because if you did, I would not follow."

The fire burned. The wind howled. The Spine of the World stretched around them in every direction.

Dustin played the song anyway — quietly, for the fire and the stars and the giant who listened without comment. Klauthen Vale. The melody winding through the frozen air like smoke, the notes falling into the darkness and disappearing.

When he finished, Harshnag said nothing. But he nodded, once, and that was enough.

The second day was worse.

The peaks grew sharper, the passes narrower, the wind more vicious. The griffons flew in tight formation now — not by choice but by necessity, the updrafts between the peaks violent and unpredictable, throwing the birds sideways without warning. Dasharra led them through it with the calm efficiency of someone who had flown these mountains before, calling out course corrections that the party followed with the desperate obedience of people who knew they were out of their depth.

Harshnag kept pace below. The giant navigated crevasses and ice fields that would have stopped an army, finding paths through the frozen maze with the instinctive certainty of a creature who had walked these mountains for centuries.

It was mid-afternoon when Dustin saw it.

A flash of colour — wrong for this landscape, impossible in this altitude. He banked his griffon without thinking, dipping below the formation, and there it was: a valley, nestled between two peaks like a secret kept between clenched teeth. And it was green.

Not the muted grey-green of alpine moss or the pale green of lichen on rock. Proper green — the deep, impossible green of a summer forest, the kind of green that had no business existing within a hundred miles of where they were. Trees. Grass. A stream catching the light. All of it tucked into a valley that the mountains hid from every angle except directly above.

Warm air rose from it — Dustin could feel it even at altitude, a thermal that his griffon caught and circled without being told, the bird's head tilting with the sharp-eyed interest of a predator that had spotted something alive.

Dustin stared. The song played in his head — In the mountains high where the cold winds wail, lies a secret place, a hidden vale — and for the first time, the melody felt less like art and more like a map.

"Don't," said a voice below him.

He looked down. Harshnag had stopped, his head tilted upward, watching Dustin's griffon circle the thermal with an expression that was unmistakably a warning.

"I know," Dustin called back. "I'm looking, not landing."

"Look quickly," Harshnag said. "And then look somewhere else."

Dustin pulled the griffon up and rejoined the formation. He did not look back. But he thought about it — the song, the valley, the casual confirmation that the world was full of things that were supposed to be impossible and simply weren't.

He'd written a song about a dragon's lair. And flown over it. And lived.

That, he decided, was enough.

They saw it from a distance — a shape cut into the mountainside that was too regular, too deliberate, to be natural. As they flew closer, the shape resolved into architecture: a causeway, forty feet wide, spanning a chasm so deep that the bottom was lost in shadow. At its far end, an entrance carved from the living rock — a massive archway framed by columns of dark stone, the lintel carved with runes so large they were legible from the air.

The Eye of the All-Father. Temple to Annam, father of giants, built in the age of Ostoria when the giant kingdoms stretched across the world and the small races had not yet risen to challenge them.

Harshnag stopped at the foot of the causeway. His expression — usually unreadable — showed something that might have been reverence.

"This is the place," he said. Not a revelation. A confirmation.

The causeway was broad enough for the giant to walk comfortably, its surface dusted with fresh snow that no one had disturbed. On either side, the drop was absolute — hundreds of feet of empty air, the mountain wind singing through the gap with a low, mournful note that sounded almost like a voice.

They landed the griffons at the near end of the causeway. Dasharra began securing them — hobbling their legs with practiced ease, checking harnesses, murmuring to the birds in the rough, affectionate tone of someone who trusted animals more than people.

"Stay with the griffons," Kürbis told her. She gave him a look that suggested she had not been planning to do anything else.

The party started across.

They were halfway across the causeway when the first bolt hit.

It struck the stone two feet in front of Don Juan — a crossbow bolt, thick as a tent peg, burying itself in the rock with enough force to crack the surface. The sound was flat and hard, like a hammer hitting an anvil, and it echoed off the walls of the chasm in a way that made it impossible to tell where it had come from.

Everyone froze.

A second bolt. This one closer — passing between Zarok and Mindartis, close enough that the Dragonborn felt the wind of its passage. It came from above. From the entrance. From somewhere in the shadows between those dark stone columns.

"Archers," Mindartis said, in the calm, analytical tone of someone cataloguing threats. "At least two. Elevated position. We're in the open."

A third bolt proved his point by shattering against the causeway at Dustin's feet. Stone chips peppered his boots.

"Move!" Don Juan shouted, and the party scattered — which on a forty-foot causeway with a death drop on either side meant pressing themselves against the low stone balustrade and trying to present as small a target as possible.

Harshnag did not scatter. Harshnag raised one massive arm to shield his face and kept walking, the bolts pinging off his armour and bare skin with the efficiency of someone who had decided that crossbow bolts were beneath his attention.

Another volley. The shooters were good — not military-precise, but fast, persistent, firing from cover with the discipline of people defending a position they considered theirs.

Dustin pressed himself against the balustrade, watching the entrance, calculating distances. Forty feet to the pillars. Open ground. No cover. The shooters had the high ground and the patience to wait them out.

He thought about it for approximately two seconds.

Then he stepped through space.

The world blurred — a brief, disorienting lurch, like falling sideways through a door that wasn't there — and he was standing in the shadow of the domed entrance, between two carved pillars, close enough to touch the stone. The air here was different. Still. Cold in a way that had nothing to do with the wind.

He pressed himself against the nearest pillar and looked inside.

A corridor. Enormous — thirty feet wide, the ceiling lost in darkness above. The walls were smooth stone, carved with friezes that depicted scenes from an age so distant it felt mythological. The floor was flagstone, each slab the size of a dining table, worn smooth by feet that hadn't walked here in millennia.

"Clear!" Dustin called back. "There's a corridor — come on!"

On the causeway, the rest of the party was making their move. Don Juan sprinted, his armour clattering, weaving as another bolt shattered the stone behind him. Zarok followed, greataxe across his chest, the Dragonborn's bulk making him the largest target and his oath making him incapable of caring. Mindartis moved with the efficient, unhurried pace of someone who had calculated the bolt trajectories and was walking between them.

Harshnag was still on the causeway — not because he was slow, but because a frost giant crossing a forty-foot bridge presented a target that even the worst marksman couldn't miss. Bolts bounced off his armour and skin in a steady rhythm, and while none did real damage, they were persistent enough to force him to shield his face and pick his path.

Behind them all, Kürbis hesitated.

The Goliath stood at the near end of the causeway, looking back toward the griffons. Dasharra had them under control — the birds were nervous, wings half-spread, but she was calm, talking them down with the steady authority of long practice. They would be fine.

But Kürbis didn't move.

"Kürbis!" Don Juan called from the entrance. "Come on!"

The Goliath looked at the griffons. Looked at the corridor. Looked at the griffons again.

Then the stone began to fall.

A block — enormous, carved to fit the entrance like a stopper in a bottle — descended from the ceiling with the grinding, inexorable certainty of a mechanism that had been waiting centuries for this moment. Not fast. But not slow enough to think about.

"GO!" someone shouted — multiple voices, overlapping.

Don Juan, Zarok, Mindartis — all of them diving forward, sliding under the descending slab with the desperate, ungainly speed of people who had exactly one chance to not be on the wrong side of a very large rock.

They made it. Barely. Mindartis's robes caught the edge and tore, leaving a strip of fabric pinned beneath a hundred tons of stone.

The block settled into place with a boom that shook dust from the ceiling. Behind it — Kürbis, Harshnag, and Dasharra. Outside.

"Find another way in!" Dustin shouted at the stone. He didn't know if his voice carried through four feet of rock. "There has to be another entrance!"

On the other side, Kürbis heard enough. He nodded to himself, turned, and headed back toward the griffons and whatever alternatives the mountain had to offer.

The corridor stretched a hundred and twenty feet ahead of them. Stone balconies ran along either side at about twenty feet up, accessible by broad stairs carved into the rock. At the far end, a set of steps rose to a pair of doors — giant-scale, carved from stone so thick and so precisely fitted that no seam was visible.

They were not alone.

Movement in the corridor ahead — shapes stepping from the shadows of the balcony stairs with the careful, deliberate pace of people who had been waiting. Four of them. Uthgardt, by the furs and the symbols painted across their faces — broad-shouldered, wild-eyed, armed with crude but heavy weapons. Three were warriors. The fourth was a woman, taller than the rest, wrapped in pale furs and bone, her face marked in lines of white pigment. A shaman.

The air around the shaman bent the wrong way — a faint, sickly distortion shimmering at the edges of her shape, like heat above a road, but cold. Even at this distance Dustin could feel it: a pressure, a wrongness, like standing too close to a fire that burned cold.

And behind her, something else. Low along the stone, white-scaled, ridge along the spine, wings folded close to its body. Not large — barely the size of a wolf — but obviously not what it would one day be. A dragon. Young. Cold breath rising from its nostrils in twin plumes that hung in the corridor air. A wyrmling.

The Uthgardt charged without warning and without words. The shaman followed at a walk, the distortion around her intensifying as she moved — a wave of something that wasn't heat and wasn't cold but hurt, radiating outward from her body like poison seeping from a wound. The wyrmling came low along the floor, claws scraping stone.

The fight was brutal and close. Without Harshnag or Kürbis — both trapped outside behind four feet of stone — the party fought with what they had in a corridor too narrow for tactics and too long for retreat. Don Juan in the thick of it, blade blazing with divine light. Zarok anchoring the line, his greataxe sweeping in arcs that kept the warriors at distance. Mindartis weaving shields and counterspells with the methodical precision of a man working through a problem.

The wyrmling's breath caught Zarok across the legs — a cone of grey-blue cold thick enough that the air froze inside it, frost forming on his scales in a sheet. The Dragonborn grunted, planted his feet, and brought the axe down on the creature's flank. The wyrmling shrieked, twisted away, and snapped at his arm with teeth like splinters of frozen glass.

The Uthgardt fought like people with nothing to lose — wild, reckless, throwing themselves at the party with a ferocity that went beyond courage into something that looked very much like compulsion.

And when they fell, they drowned.

The first — a broad-shouldered man with an axe — went down to Don Juan's blade and hit the stone floor convulsing. His mouth opened, and water poured out. Not blood. Water — clear, cold, salt-tinged, flooding from his mouth and nose as if his lungs had been full of ocean all along. His body arched, thrashed, and went still, the stone around him darkened with seawater.

"What the —" Zarok started.

The second drowned the same way. The third the same. Each one choked and spasmed and expelled impossible quantities of water, dying not from their wounds but from whatever had been inside them all along — drowning on dry stone, hundreds of miles from the sea.

Dustin had seen this before.

Yartar. The sewers. The fight beneath the casino boat, where the creatures they'd killed had coughed up water in exactly the same way — the same salt smell, the same convulsions, the same terrible wrongness of watching someone drown in a place where drowning should not have been possible.

"It's the same," he said. He didn't need to explain. Don Juan's expression said he remembered too.

That left the shaman and the dragon.

The shaman turned her full attention on the party — and the aura around her surged. The pressure became pain, a crushing force that radiated from her body and filled the corridor like floodwater. Dustin felt his vision blur. His skin burned. Staying close to this thing was not an option.

He stepped through space.

The world lurched — and he was on the left balcony, twenty feet up, gasping in air that was merely freezing rather than actively wrong. From above, the shaman looked worse — the distortion around her visible now as a shimmer in the torchlight, warping the air the way heat warped a road in summer. The wyrmling circled below her, breath fogging.

He raised his flute and played. Dissonance became damage, the notes finding the shaman the way a blade found flesh, while below Don Juan pressed in from one side and Zarok from the other. Mindartis's spells struck from behind, precise and devastating.

The shaman died hard. It took everything they had — steel and faith and arcane fire — before she finally buckled and hit the flagstones. And she drowned. The same convulsions. The same impossible flood of salt water, dark and steaming where it pooled around her painted body.

The wyrmling did not drown.

With its handlers down it pulled back against the wall, hissing low and wet, frost rising from its open jaw. Zarok's axe had already opened its flank; it was bleeding ordinary blood, slowing. Don Juan stepped in with the blade. Mindartis's last working struck from behind. The dragon shrieked once, fought once more, and went still.

A small white dragon, dying as dragons did. No flood. No theatre.

They stood in silence, bleeding, exhausted, surrounded by seawater and dead Uthgardt and one small dead dragon on the stone. The questions could wait.

Kürbis watched the stone block settle into place and made his peace with it in the space of a breath.

He was a Goliath. His people did not waste time on things they could not change. The entrance was sealed. His companions were inside. He was outside. The next question was not why but what now.

He turned back toward the griffons. Dasharra was already on her feet, one hand on her bird's harness, reading his expression with the professional efficiency of someone who could distinguish between "problem" and "catastrophe" at a glance.

"There'll be another way," she said. It was not a question.

Kürbis looked at the mountain. The Eye of the All-Father was carved into the rock — a temple this size, built for giants, would have more than one entrance. Service tunnels. Ventilation. Emergency exits. The mountain would provide, the way mountains always did, if you knew how to listen.

They flew. Low, hugging the cliff face, the griffons' wings nearly brushing the rock as Kürbis and Dasharra circled the mountainside. The wind tried to peel them off the stone. The cold was absolute. Dasharra flew with the calm precision of someone who had done this a thousand times, and Kürbis followed, trusting the dwarf's instincts the way he trusted the mountain itself.

They found it on the northern face — a cave mouth, half-hidden by an overhang of ice, large enough for a giant to pass through but angled in a way that made it invisible from the causeway. Natural, or close to it — the rock around the opening showed tool marks where someone had widened a natural fissure into a passage, the work old enough that the stone had weathered smooth.

They landed on a ledge below the opening. The griffons were unhappy — the space was tight, the wind was brutal, and something about the cave made them flatten their feathers and click their beaks in the agitated rhythm that meant wrong.

Kürbis dismounted and looked into the darkness.

The tunnel sloped downward — steeply, the floor worn smooth by water or time or both, the walls narrowing as it descended. The air coming from inside was different — warmer, damper, carrying a faint mineral smell that reminded him of hot springs in the mountains of his childhood. And underneath that smell, something else. Something organic. Something alive.

He listened.

Clicking.

Not the griffons — something deeper in the tunnel, faint but distinct. A rhythmic, chitinous sound, like mandibles working, or legs moving across stone. Fast, then slow, then fast again, with the irregular tempo of a living thing.

The trainer heard it too. Her hand went to the short axe at her belt — not drawing it, but resting on the handle in the way of someone who wanted to be ready.

"Spiders," she said. Flat. Certain. "Ice spiders. The big ones."

Kürbis looked at her. "How big?"

"Big enough to matter."

He drew his greatsword. The tunnel swallowed the sound of steel clearing leather. The clicking continued — louder now, or closer, or both.

They went in.

The tunnel descended in a long, curving slope, the walls glistening with frost that reflected their torchlight in crystalline patterns. The floor was treacherous — smooth ice over stone, with patches of something that might have been webbing frozen into the surface. The air grew warmer as they went deeper, the mineral smell intensifying, mixed now with the unmistakable musk of something large and predatory.

The first spider came from above.

It dropped from the ceiling without sound — a pale, bloated thing the size of a horse, its legs the translucent white of deep ice, its body covered in fine bristles that glittered like frost. Eight eyes caught the torchlight and threw it back as eight points of cold blue light.

Kürbis's blade met it in midair.

The impact was enormous — the spider's weight driving him back a step, his boots sliding on the ice, the greatsword biting deep into the creature's thorax with a sound like cracking timber. The spider shrieked — a high, keening sound that echoed down the tunnel in both directions — and its legs lashed out, fast and sharp, catching Kürbis across the arm and tearing through his armour.

He didn't flinch. He wrenched the blade free and swung again, and the spider came apart.

"Big enough," Kürbis said.

"Told you," Dasharra answered.

"More," she said behind him.

She was right. The sound of the first spider's death cry had carried, and the tunnel ahead was alive with answering clicks — dozens of them, overlapping, the sound building like a wave.

They came in pairs. The tunnel was too narrow for more, which was the only thing that kept the fight manageable. Kürbis held the centre, his greatsword sweeping in arcs that used the confined space to his advantage — the spiders couldn't flank him, couldn't climb past him, could only come forward into the killing zone of a Goliath who had been fighting things larger than himself since he could hold a weapon.

Dasharra fought beside him — not with the raw power of a barbarian but with the efficient, economical strikes of someone who knew exactly how much force a spider's joints could take before they gave. Her short axe found legs, eyes, the soft places where chitin met flesh, each blow precise and devastating.

They pushed deeper. The spiders kept coming — not in the organised waves of an army but in the frantic, territorial surges of creatures defending a nest. Each encounter was sharp, violent, and over quickly, the tunnel floor gradually becoming a carpet of pale legs and cracked chitin.

And then, abruptly, the tunnel opened.

The passage widened into a natural cavern — broad, high-ceilinged, connected to the worked stone of the temple by a rough-hewn archway that marked the transition from mountain to architecture. Beyond the arch, Kürbis could see carved walls, flagstone floors, and the faint glow of magical light.

He was inside.

The cavern gave way to a room that had once been sleeping quarters — giant-scale, with stone platforms that served as beds and alcoves carved into the walls for storage. The space was cold and long abandoned, dust thick on every surface, the air carrying the dry, mineral stillness of a place that had not been disturbed in centuries.

Two exits. A tunnel leading upward — or it had, once. The ceiling had come down at some point, filling the passage with a wall of collapsed stone and rubble so thoroughly settled that it might as well have been solid mountain. Whatever route that tunnel had connected was gone.

The other exits were two doors, one on either side of a stone giant statue that stood in an alcove at the far end of the room. The statue was life-sized — for a giant — its arms lifted with palms outstretched, carved with the patient stillness of something waiting. Both doors were heavy, stone, giant-proportioned, and covered in thick sheets of ice that had crept across their surfaces like a living thing, sealing every edge, filling every gap.

Kürbis looked at the ice. He looked at Dasharra.

"We go through," he said, picking the nearest door.

It took time. The ice was old and stubborn — not the brittle frost of a cold snap but the dense, blue-white ice of something that had been freezing for centuries, layer upon layer, until the door was encased in a shell thick enough to turn a blade. Kürbis's greatsword did the work — not elegant, not quick, but effective, each swing sending chips of ice spinning across the stone floor until the door's surface emerged, slick and dripping.

He pushed. The door ground open, reluctant, the hinges protesting with a sound like a giant clearing its throat.

Beyond it was something else entirely.

The battle was over, but the temple was not done with them.

The corridor stretched around them in the aftermath — silent except for the faint drip of seawater finding cracks in the flagstones. The air was thick with the mineral smell of old stone and the salt-tang of the water still pooling around the fallen.

At the far end of the corridor, the steps rose to the great doors. Don Juan tried them first. Then Zarok. Then both together, shoulder to shoulder, armour scraping against stone.

The doors did not acknowledge the attempt.

"There's no mechanism," Mindartis said, examining the surface with the clinical thoroughness of someone looking for a puzzle. "No lock. No handle. No hinge. They're simply... doors that don't open."

"Helpful," Dustin said.

He was still on the left balcony from the fight. From up here, details emerged that the ground floor had hidden. The balconies were flanked by pillars, and set into the pillars were braziers — great stone bowls, blackened by use, clearly designed to hold flame.

Mindartis climbed the stairs to join him, while Don Juan and Zarok took the right side.

The braziers were interesting. They were empty — no fuel, no oil, no kindling. Just stone bowls worn smooth by ages of use. But there was something about them. A faint hum, barely audible, the kind of sound you felt in your teeth rather than heard with your ears.

Magic. Old magic. The kind that didn't need to announce itself.

Dustin lit one. A flick of Prestidigitation, and flame erupted from the empty bowl — bright, steady, burning on nothing. The stone beneath it didn't blacken. No heat rose from it. The flame simply was, as if the brazier had been waiting for permission.

He lit the next. And the next. Four braziers on his side, each igniting with the same effortless, magical obedience.

Nothing happened.

He looked across the corridor to Don Juan, who had been watching from the opposite balcony with the barely contained excitement of someone who had figured it out.

"My turn!" the paladin called, and began lighting his side with the theatrical flair of a man performing a ritual he was certain would change everything. First brazier — flame. Second — flame. Third — flame. Fourth —

Flame.

Nothing happened.

The corridor remained exactly as it was. The great doors remained exactly as closed. Don Juan stood among his four perfectly lit braziers with the expression of a man whose grand theory had just been disproven by reality.

"Seriously?" he said.

"Maybe they're decorative," Dustin offered.

"They are not decorative. They're clearly part of a mechanism —"

"A mechanism that does nothing."

"It does something. We just haven't —"

"Don Juan. They're decorative."

The paladin made a sound that was not quite a word and turned away from the braziers with the wounded dignity of someone choosing to ignore evidence.

Behind the balconies, back toward the entrance, each side had a smaller chamber — still giant-scale, but utilitarian, with bare stone walls and a single prominent feature: a lever. Enormous, set into the wall at a height meant for giant hands, the mechanism disappearing into the stonework with the solid engineering of people who built things to last.

On Dustin's side, the lever was up. And frozen — coated in a thick crust of ice that had built up over centuries, welding the mechanism in place with the patient, irresistible grip of deep cold.

"What's your lever doing?" Dustin shouted across the corridor.

"It's down!" Don Juan called back. "Trying to —" A grunt. A scraping sound. Another grunt. "It won't move!"

Zarok tried. The Dragonborn threw his weight against the lever with the determination of someone who solved problems through force, his armour scraping against the stone, his boots digging for purchase on the frozen floor.

It didn't budge.

A silence from the other side that lasted a beat too long.

"Zarok?" Dustin called.

"It won't move," the Dragonborn said. His voice was carefully neutral — the tone of someone processing the fact that a mechanical problem had defeated his considerable strength and choosing not to discuss it.

Meanwhile, Dustin was staring at his own lever — frozen, locked, immovable by any conventional means. He looked at his flute. He looked at the lever. He looked at the flute again.

"Right," he said.

He spoke a word. The ironwood flute hummed, its surface rippling with the earthy green light of the Dao's magic — the wood hardening, thickening, becoming something that was simultaneously a musical instrument and a weapon that could crack stone. A second word, and emerald fire licked along the flute's length, hissing where it met the cold air, throwing dancing shadows across the frozen walls.

He swung.

The flute hit the lever with a sound like a bell — a deep, resonant clang that echoed through the chamber and sent chips of ice spraying in every direction. The frost cracked. Dustin swung again. And again. Each impact shattered more ice, the green flame melting what the force didn't break, until the lever stood bare and gleaming in the torchlight.

He grabbed it. It moved — smoothly, heavily, with the oiled precision of a mechanism that had been waiting to work again. He pulled it down.

A grinding sound filled the corridor. Deep, mechanical, coming from the walls themselves — the sound of counterweights shifting, of stone moving against stone, of engineering older than kingdoms doing what it was built to do.

At the entrance, a second stone block slid down from the ceiling.

It settled into place with a boom that shook dust from the carvings — a second slab of rock, dropping directly in front of the block that had already sealed the entrance, doubling the barrier. The way in — their only known way in — was now blocked by eight feet of mountain.

"DUSTIN!" Don Juan's voice came across the corridor at a volume that would have carried through a siege. "WHAT DID YOU DO?!"

"I MOVED THE LEVER!"

"THE WRONG WAY!"

"IT WAS THE ONLY WAY! IT WAS FROZEN!"

"WELL MOVE IT BACK!"

Dustin grabbed the lever and heaved it up. The same grinding, the same mechanical certainty — and the second block rose, slowly, back into the ceiling. The entrance was still blocked by the original stone block, but at least not by that and a fresh four-foot slab.

"It's back!" Dustin called. "Your turn! Move yours up!"

A pause. Then Don Juan's voice, carrying the forced patience of a man explaining something obvious: "It won't. Move. We told you."

"Try again!"

More grunting from the other side. Zarok's boots scraping stone. A creative string of Elvish from Don Juan that Dustin was fairly sure wasn't from any prayer book.

Then silence.

"Don Juan?"

"I'm thinking."

What Don Juan was thinking, it turned out, was that the mechanism on his side was also frozen — not visibly, but internally, the cold having worked its way into the gears and joints hidden inside the wall. And if cold was the problem, then heat was the answer.

"Heat Metal," Don Juan announced, with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had solved the puzzle.

Dustin heard the spell — felt it, almost, the faint pulse of divine magic crossing the corridor. Then Don Juan grabbed the lever.

The scream that followed was not a word in any language.

Don Juan had magically heated the lever. Then he had grabbed the lever. The heated lever. With his bare hands.

"GODVER —"

The sound of armoured gauntlets being frantically shaken. More Elvish, this time definitely not from a prayer book. Zarok said something too quiet to hear. Don Juan said something very loud in response.

"What's happening over there?" Dustin called.

"NOTHING!"

"It doesn't sound like nothing."

"IT'S FINE. THE LEVER IS — THE LEVER IS VERY HOT."

"You heated the lever and then grabbed it."

A pause.

"...Yes."

Dustin pressed his forehead against the cold stone of the wall and took a breath.

"Don Juan."

"Don't."

Eventually — after the metal cooled, after Zarok wrapped his hands in thick leather, after more swearing than any temple of the All-Father had likely heard in its entire existence — they got the lever up.

The grinding came from the entrance. The block — the original, the one that had fallen and trapped them inside — began to rise. Slowly, the slab lifting into the ceiling with the inexorable patience of machinery that worked on geological time.

Light spilled in from the corridor. And filling the corridor, with an expression that was either patience or contempt, was Harshnag.

The frost giant ducked under the still-rising slab and straightened to his full height inside the corridor. His pale eyes swept the scene — the dead barbarians, the salt water on the stone, the lit braziers, the party scattered across two balconies looking exhausted, burned, and sheepish.

"Took you long enough," he said.

The room beyond the sleeping quarters was enormous. Square, the ceiling vaulting upward into darkness, the floor a single expanse of polished flagstone that stretched a hundred feet in every direction. The scale was wrong for humans — everything built for creatures three times their height, the proportions making Kürbis feel appropriately sized for the first time in his life and Dasharra look like a child who had wandered into a cathedral.

Six enormous statues knelt in two rows of three, facing inward — giants, each carved from a different stone, each depicting a different race. They towered even above Kürbis, rendered with a precision that went beyond craftsmanship into something that felt devotional, each figure holding a weapon appropriate to its kind. They were kneeling, heads bowed, in the posture of worship or supplication.

And the thing they knelt before was larger still. At the centre of the hall, an eighty-foot statue dominated everything — a robed giant, arms outstretched, its face hidden beneath a stony cowl that revealed nothing. No features. No expression. Just smooth, blank stone where a face should have been, as if the sculptors had not dared to guess what the god looked like. The statue faced the glowing archway on the east wall, its outstretched arms encompassing the kneeling six like a shepherd over its flock.

To their left, a glowing archway set into the wall — forty feet wide, forty feet tall, its frame carved with six runes inlaid with mithral. A faint, churning mist filled the arch, and the whole thing hummed with a subsonic vibration that Kürbis felt in his chest rather than heard with his ears. The runes pulsed with a dim, dormant light, waiting for something to wake them.

Across the hall from where they stood, two sets of double doors flanked the far wall — both closed, both covered in a thick crust of ice that sealed every seam and rendered them immovable. Whatever lay beyond them had been frozen shut for a very long time.

To their right, a massive stone doorway — arched, giant-scale, its surface smooth and unbroken by any handle, lock, or visible mechanism. The door was simply a wall shaped like an entrance, offering no suggestion of how it might be convinced to open. On either side of it, broad stone stairs climbed to elevated landings, each one leading to a smaller doorway — still giant-sized, easily fifteen feet tall — sealed shut with heavy metal grates. The bars were thick as a man's arm, set close together, the ironwork ancient but sound.

And from behind the metal grates — voices.

Kürbis heard them first. Muffled by stone and distance, but unmistakable. He looked at Dasharra. She nodded.

They climbed. The steps were giant-scale but manageable for a Goliath — less so for a dwarf, though Dasharra hauled herself up each one with the grim efficiency of someone who refused to be inconvenienced by architecture. At the top, the landing opened onto the grated doorway, and through the bars, lit by torchlight from the passage beyond —

The rest of the party. Dustin, Don Juan, Zarok, Mindartis, Archibald — battered, singed, standing in a corridor that smelled of salt water and violence. And behind them, filling the passage with his enormous frame, Harshnag.

"About time," Kürbis said.

Relief was brief and practical. The grate had no mechanism on either side — no lock, no latch, no lever. Just iron bars in a stone channel, held in place by gravity and the engineering of people who had built for permanence.

They discussed it. Dustin examined the frame for hidden catches. Mindartis analysed the metalwork for magical locks. Don Juan suggested force, which earned him a look from Zarok that said we just tried that with a door.

Harshnag watched them talk for approximately ten seconds.

"Let me have a look," he said.

Then he stepped forward, gripped the bottom rail with both hands, and lifted. The grate rose — not easily, not quietly, the metal groaning in its channel, centuries of corrosion protesting the indignity — but it rose, because when a frost giant decided something should move, it moved. He slid it up until it locked into a recess in the ceiling, the mechanism catching with a deep, resonant clunk that echoed through the hall.

Kürbis clasped Dustin's arm as the Half-elf stepped through. No words. No need for them.

They decided to seal the entrance behind them — no uninvited visitors while they explored. Dustin pulled the lever on his side back down. The grinding filled the corridor once more, and the stone block descended into place with the same inexorable certainty, sealing the causeway entrance behind a slab of mountain. Whatever was in here, they would deal with it. Whatever was out there would have to wait.

Together, the full party descended into the hall.

They explored the hall properly now, the full party moving through the space with the cautious attention of people who had learned that this temple did not reward carelessness.

The six kneeling statues drew them first. Harshnag moved among them with a reverence the party had not seen from him before — slow, deliberate, his pale eyes moving from one carved face to the next with the quiet intensity of someone greeting old acquaintances.

"The gods of my people," he said. He stopped before each one in turn, naming them with the careful weight of a prayer. "Grolantor, father of hill giants." A squat, heavy figure clutching a bone greatclub. "Skoraeus Stonebones, keeper of the stone giants." A gaunt shape holding a massive boulder against its chest. "Thrym, lord of frost." A towering figure, kneeling, its hands —

Harshnag paused.

"Surtur, the fire lord." He moved on — an enormous shape gripping an iron greatsword. "Memnor, the cloud giant." A regal figure with a mithral spear. "And Stronmaus, the storm king." The last, holding an adamantine trident.

He looked up at the great statue in the centre — the eighty-foot robed figure with its featureless face and outstretched arms.

"Annam," he said. "The All-Father. Father of all giants. This is his temple."

Dustin had read about them — hours spent in Zephyros's tower, the cloud giant's library chaotic and vast, its scrolls and tomes scattered across surfaces that floated at heights requiring creative climbing. He recognised the names, the weapons, the hierarchy. But hearing Harshnag speak them here, in this place, was different. This wasn't scholarship. This was worship.

"Harshnag," Don Juan said. The paladin was standing before the frost giant statue — Thrym — with his head tilted, studying the carved hands. "This one's missing something."

Dustin joined him. The statue's hands were positioned to hold a weapon — the grip carved, the stance set, the empty space between its stone fingers unmistakable.

"A greataxe," Dustin said. "Judging by the grip."

They both looked at Harshnag. The frost giant's expression was unreadable.

"Thrym's axe," he said. "It should be here."

The portal archway hummed on the far wall — the six runes pulsing with their dim, patient light, waiting.

Harshnag crossed the hall and studied the archway with the unhurried attention of someone reading a familiar text. Six runes, inlaid with mithral, arranged in an arc around the glowing mist. He examined each one, his massive head tilting from symbol to symbol.

"This one I know," he said, pointing to one near the bottom. "Ise. Ice. The frost rune." He moved to the others, slower now. "The rest... I do not know them."

"Can you touch it?" Dustin said. "The ice rune. See what happens."

Harshnag considered this for a moment. Then he reached out and pressed his fingers against the Ise rune. Light bloomed from within — a cold blue-white glow that pulsed once and held steady.

"Interesting," Mindartis said, already at the archway, studying the other runes. "What about the rest?"

Harshnag shook his head. "I do not know what they do. I would not touch what I do not understand."

"Let me," Don Juan said, and pressed his palm against one of the dark runes with the confidence of a man who expected results.

The rune pulsed — and the hall twisted. Not physically. Inside. A wave of something ancient and spiteful washed through the room, settling into every mind like fog filling a valley. Dustin's thoughts went blank. His legs locked. He stood where he was, staring at nothing, aware that something was terribly wrong but unable to remember what or why or how to make it stop. Around him, the others had frozen too — Don Juan mid-step, Zarok with his hand on his greataxe, Kürbis motionless, Mindartis blinking at the ceiling as if he'd forgotten what it was.

Only Archibald moved.

The old wizard — caught in whatever broken logic the enchantment had substituted for reason — turned and launched a spell at Harshnag's back. It struck. The frost giant staggered — less from damage than from surprise — and swung around, one enormous arm sweeping the air. The backhand caught Archibald and sent him tumbling across the flagstones like a dropped puppet.

Then it passed. The fog lifted as suddenly as it had come, and the party stood blinking at each other — stiff, disoriented, trying to piece together the seconds they had lost. Archibald was picking himself up from the floor, bruised and bewildered. Harshnag looked down at the wizard with an expression that was not quite apology and not quite amusement.

"Perhaps," Mindartis said carefully, "we should not touch the runes."

Nobody argued.

The missing greataxe. That was the logical next step — find whatever weapon belonged in the frost giant statue's hands and see if it activated the ice rune properly. They spread out through the temple, searching side chambers and alcoves and the kind of dead-end passages that giant architecture seemed to generate in abundance.

It was Dustin who stopped them.

He had been thinking — which, in his experience, was usually more productive than searching, though the rest of the party would have disputed that claim. The frost giant rune had lit up when Harshnag touched it. Nothing else had worked. No other rune had responded to anyone, in any way, except to scramble the minds of people who tried.

The rune didn't need the missing greataxe. The rune needed a frost giant's axe.

"Wait," Dustin said. "Before we waste our time searching this whole temple — Harshnag, touch the ice rune again. With your axe."

The party stopped. Looked at him. Looked at each other.

"That seems —" Mindartis began.

"Harshnag." Dustin cut across the wizard. "Go on. Push it."

The frost giant regarded him for a moment. Then he shrugged — a gesture that, on a creature his size, moved enough air to flutter cloaks — unslung his glowing greataxe, and pressed its blade against the ice rune.

The rune flared.

Not the steady glow of before — a blinding, searing white that filled the hall like a flash of lightning. The ground shook. The carvings on the walls seemed to move, their frozen figures twisting in the sudden light.

Then it started raining.

Acid — burning, hissing, falling from the darkness above in sheets that sizzled where they hit stone and raised welts where they hit skin. The party ran for cover. Don Juan dove behind a statue's base. Mindartis threw up a magical barrier. Zarok ducked behind a pillar.

"Under the statues!" someone shouted, and they scrambled for the kneeling giants, pressing themselves beneath the massive carved figures like children hiding under tables. The statues provided cover — partial, imperfect, the acid finding gaps and seams and the spaces between carved limbs to reach the people crouching beneath.

Then the hailstones.

Not hail — boulders of ice, the size of skulls, falling from the same impossible height with the random, merciless rhythm of a thunderstorm designed by something malicious. They shattered on the flagstones, sending shrapnel spinning across the hall. One struck Zarok's pauldron hard enough to drive him to one knee. Another clipped Don Juan's shoulder and spun him sideways.

The hail stopped. For a breath — one breath — the hall was silent.

Then the lightning came.

It struck from above without warning — white-blue bolts splitting the darkness, lashing the flagstones with cracks that left the air tasting of copper and ozone. The thunder was instantaneous, deafening, the sound slamming off the stone walls and multiplying into a roar that made thought impossible.

Archibald caught a bolt square in the chest. The flash was blinding — a column of white light that connected ceiling to wizard in one searing instant. The old man's body arched, lifted, and crumpled. He hit the stone and didn't move. Smoke rose from his robes in thin, acrid wisps.

"ARCHIBALD!" Dustin shouted from beneath Thrym's statue — the irony of sheltering under the one with the missing axe not lost on him, even now. He couldn't reach the wizard. Couldn't cross the open floor without catching a bolt himself. But he didn't need to cross the floor.

He needed to be heard.

The spell left his lips as a melody — a single phrase, bright and warm, cutting through the chaos like a candle in a storm. The magic found Archibald across the hall, threading between the lightning strikes, and settled over the old wizard like a hand on a shoulder.

Archibald gasped. His eyes opened. His fingers twitched. Barely alive — but alive.

Then it stopped.

Not gradually. Not a tapering off. One moment the hall was a killing floor of acid and ice and lightning — the next, silence. The rune on the portal dimmed to its steady glow. Drops of acid hissed quietly on the stone, chunks of melting ice steamed in the suddenly quiet air, and the smell of ozone lingered like a warning.

Dustin stood up. His cloak was ruined. His left arm was burned from wrist to elbow.

He looked at the party.

The party looked at him.

"Don't," he said.

"Dustin." Don Juan's voice was very, very calm. "What exactly made you think —"

"It worked."

"ARCHIBALD ALMOST DIED."

Dustin looked at Archibald, who was sitting upright now, blinking, patting himself down with the dazed caution of someone checking whether all his pieces were still attached.

"He's alive," Dustin said.

"By your Healing Word. Because your idea nearly killed him."

"And my Healing Word saved him. So it balances out."

The silence that followed was the specific silence of people who wanted to kill someone but recognised that they might still need him.

Harshnag, who had weathered the acid and ice and lightning with the mild inconvenience of someone caught in drizzle, looked down at the party from his full height.

"The bard is not wrong," he said. "The rune holds."

"The bard," Don Juan said, "is going to get us killed."

"Not today," Dustin said.

While they argued, Mindartis had not been listening. The wizard had drifted across the hall toward the frozen double doors on the left wall — the ones sealed behind centuries of ice — and was studying them with the quiet, focused intensity of someone who had identified a problem and was already three steps into solving it.

"Stand back," he said.

Nobody heard him.

"Stand back," he said again, louder, and something in his tone made the argument stop.

Then he cast.

The detonation filled the hall — a roaring sphere of flame that slammed into the frozen doors and erupted outward in a blast of heat and light and noise. The ice didn't melt. It evaporated — flash-boiled into steam that billowed across the flagstones in a scalding cloud, the doors emerging from behind it blackened but clear, their surfaces steaming in the suddenly warm air.

Mindartis stood in the aftermath with an expression that had no business being on the face of a School of Abjuration wizard. It was the expression of a man who had just done something deeply, thoroughly satisfying — the quiet, radiant contentment of someone who had been carrying that spell around for exactly this kind of moment and had finally been given permission to use it.

He turned to face the party. His eyes were bright. His hands were still faintly smoking.

"The doors are clear," he said.

The rest of the party stared.

"Stop!"

Two voices — simultaneous, sharp, cutting through the steam like blades. Kürbis and Zarok. The Goliath and the Dragonborn had spoken at exactly the same moment, with exactly the same tone, and now they looked at each other across the hall with the surprised recognition of two people who had arrived at the same conclusion independently.

They nodded.

"Everyone," Kürbis said. His voice was calm. Deliberate. The voice of someone who had watched his companions nearly die three times in the last hour and had decided that the dying was going to stop. "Stop. Stop doing things. Stop touching things. Stop casting things. Sit down."

Nobody argued. Nobody even tried.

"We rest," Kürbis continued. "We recover. We think. And then we continue."

They made camp in the hall — if you could call it camping. No tents, no fire, no comfort beyond the stone floor and whatever bedrolls they had carried through salt-water corpses and acid rain and lightning to get here. The statues of the six giant gods loomed above them in the dim light, their stone faces impassive, watching the small people arrange themselves on a floor built for creatures that could have stepped on them.

Before settling in, Dustin walked to the doors Mindartis had cleared. The ice was gone, but the doors themselves were still closed — heavy, dark wood banded with iron, giant-scale, the kind of doors that suggested whatever was behind them had been sealed for a reason.

He pressed his ear against the surface.

Clicking.

Not the wind. Not the settling of old stone. Something alive — small, fast, rhythmic. A lot of it. The sound of many legs moving across a hard surface, faint but persistent, with the irregular tempo of a living thing. He had no idea what it was, but whatever was making that sound had more legs than he was comfortable with.

He stepped back.

"Something's behind these doors," he said. "Don't know what. But probably a lot of legs."

The party looked at him. Looked at the doors. Looked at each other.

"Harshnag," Kürbis said. It was not a question.

The frost giant understood. He moved to a position beside the cleared doors — not blocking them, but close enough that anything coming through would meet him first. He settled his greataxe across his knees, leaned his back against the wall, and regarded the doors with the patient, unhurried attention of a creature that could stay awake for days without consequence.

"Sleep," he said. "I will watch."

Bedrolls came out. The flagstones were giant-scale — each slab a small house, the seams a foot apart and deep enough to catch a hip if you didn't pick your spot. Don Juan tested three positions. Kürbis put his back against a column and didn't bother with a bedroll. Mindartis lay flat on his back and looked up at Annam, who looked back.

They slept. Or tried to. The hall was cold and the clicking behind the doors continued — faint, irregular, never quite stopping. But exhaustion won, the way it always did, and one by one the party drifted into the uneasy rest of people sleeping in a place that was not safe, guarded by a giant who did not need to sleep.

Nothing came through the doors. Nothing stirred in the hall. The statues watched, and Harshnag watched, and the temple held its silence through the long hours until the party woke — stiff, cold, bruised, but alive and whole and ready for whatever came next.

They formed up at the doors — Kürbis and Zarok in front, shoulder to shoulder, the Goliath's greatsword and the Dragonborn's greataxe forming a wall of steel that filled the doorway. Behind them, the rest of the party in the loose, watchful arrangement of people who had learned that the first thing through any door in this temple was likely to be unpleasant.

Kürbis pushed the doors open.

The room beyond was vast — far larger than the hall they had slept in. Two hundred and forty feet wide, four hundred and forty feet deep, the vaulted ceiling supported by six stone pillars, each twenty feet across and sixty feet tall. The air was different here. Warm. Not the damp, mineral warmth of the spider tunnels but genuine heat, dry and steady, radiating from the centre of the chamber where a massive bowl-shaped basin sat in the floor. Inside it, a fire — real fire, fed by natural gas escaping through cracks in the stone, the flames bright and steady and impossibly old. It had been burning since before anyone in the party had been born. Possibly since before anyone in the party's species had been born.

Around the fire pit, six tables of carved granite with matching benches, giant-scaled, their surfaces stained dark with blood and grease from feasts that had ended centuries ago. Neat stacks of plates and goblets — beaten copper, green and black with age — sat on the nearest slab. Against the far wall, a deep alcove stretched back into the rock, two hundred feet wide and dark beyond the firelight's reach.

The walls were lined with niches and sconces, identical to the ones in the entrance corridor. The room was warm and dry and brightly lit, and after hours of sleeping on frozen stone in the dark, it felt almost welcoming.

Almost.

Kürbis heard it first — a shift of weight in the alcove, the scrape of something heavy moving across stone. Then a sound like metal dragged over gravel, low and rhythmic.

Breathing.

Something in the alcove was breathing.

It came forward into the firelight, and the warmth of the room suddenly made sense.

The creature was enormous — thirty feet long, its segmented body the blue-white of deep glacial ice, but pulsing from within with a furnace-orange glow that seeped through the gaps in its chitinous plates like lava through cracks in rock. Translucent fins flared from the back of its head, glowing with the same internal heat. Its mouth was wide and full of jagged glass teeth.

It uncoiled from the alcove with the fluid, predatory grace of something that had been waiting to eat.

"Remorhaz," Harshnag said. His voice was calm, but his hand moved to his greataxe. "A young one. Where there is one, there is a nest. Do not let it touch you — its body burns. Fire and cold will do nothing to it." His expression shifted — just for a moment, something almost hopeful crossing the frost giant's weathered features. "If there is a nest, there might be eggs."

"Is it tasty?" Don Juan asked, raising his crossbow.

Nobody answered, because the creature lunged.

Kürbis was already moving. The rage took him the way it always did — not as madness but as clarity. He charged, greatsword arcing upward, and the impact when steel met chitin sent a shockwave up his arms. The creature shrieked — a sound like steam escaping from a cracked pipe — and snapped at him with that terrible mouth. Kürbis rolled clear, the teeth closing on empty air close enough that the heat singed the hair on his arms.

The rest of the party hit it from every angle they had — Zarok's lightning breath in the flank, a bolt from Don Juan at the base of the skull, a psychic spike from Archibald that left the creature uncoordinated, a sphere of lightning from Mindartis under the plates. The remorhaz was screaming now, and not the same shriek twice.

Dustin raised his hand. A bolt of green-black force lanced across the chamber and caught the remorhaz in the mouth.

The creature tried to swallow it.

Its jaws snapped shut around the energy, its throat working as if it could consume the blast the way it consumed heat — and for one absurd moment, the remorhaz stood perfectly still, its body swelling, its plates separating, the glow between them intensifying from orange to white —

It exploded.

The detonation was wet and violent and immediate. Chitin and ichor and the superheated slime of the creature's innards erupted outward in a spray that covered everything within twenty feet. Kürbis, closest, caught the worst of it — steaming remorhaz entrails coating his armour, his face, his greatsword, the slime hissing where it contacted metal and skin.

He didn't flinch. He wiped his eyes with the back of one hand and kept his blade up.

Good instinct.

A second remorhaz emerged from a hole in the alcove floor — smaller than the first but no less aggressive, its body glowing hot, its fins flared wide in the threat display of a creature defending its territory. It lunged for the nearest target.

The party converged on it — blades and bolts and spells finding the creature from every angle. Kürbis took the front, his greatsword carving lines of light through the dim alcove. Dustin circled wide, firing eldritch blasts from a distance he hoped was safe.

Then the ground shook.

Not the rune-trap tremor from before — this was deeper, closer, a vibration that came from directly beneath their feet. The flagstones cracked. The fire in the basin surged. And the floor between the granite tables split open like a wound.

What came through was not young.

The adult remorhaz erupted from the stone in a shower of rubble and dust — fifty feet of armoured, furnace-hot predator, its body twice the width of the young ones, its plates glowing so bright that looking at it directly was painful. The winglike fins behind its head spread wide enough to cast shadows across the entire chamber. Its mouth opened, and the heat that poured from it warped the air like a mirage.

The room went from dangerous to desperate.

The creature struck Zarok first. The Dragonborn had turned to face it — greataxe raised, oath burning in his eyes, the same stubborn, unbreakable courage that had carried him through every fight since Triboar — and the remorhaz hit him like a battering ram. Jaws closed around his torso, the teeth punching through plate and scale, and the creature shook. Zarok's body snapped sideways, his armour crumpling, his greataxe clattering to the stone. The remorhaz released him and the Dragonborn hit the ground, limp, his eyes closed, his chest barely moving.

"ZAROK!" Don Juan screamed.

Harshnag's greataxe came down — a blow that would have felled a tree, biting into the adult remorhaz's flank with a sound like a forge hammer on an anvil. The creature shrieked and twisted, its massive body sweeping the flagstones, scattering furniture, knocking a granite table sideways as if it weighed nothing.

Kürbis was still fighting the second young one — the smaller creature pressing its attack with the mindless aggression of something that didn't know it should be afraid. He dispatched it with a thrust through the skull, wrenched his blade free, and turned to face the adult.

Dustin was already singing.

The melody left his lips before the thought finished forming — the same bright, desperate phrase he had used for Archibald, threaded with every scrap of magic he had left. It found Zarok across the chaos, settled over the Dragonborn like sunlight through cloud.

Zarok's eyes opened. His hand found his greataxe. He was alive — barely, brokenly, but alive.

It wasn't enough.

The adult remorhaz was enormous, furious, and largely unharmed. Harshnag's axe had opened a wound in its flank, but the creature's internal heat was already cauterising the damage, the edges of the cut glowing white and sealing shut. It turned on the frost giant with the focused malice of something that had identified the biggest threat and intended to remove it.

The party looked at the creature. Looked at what it had done to Zarok — the Dragonborn who could take hits that would kill most men, reduced to a broken shape on the floor in a single bite. They felt it — all of them, in the same moment — the cold recognition that this thing was too big. Too fast. Too hot to touch and too armoured to hurt and too angry to reason with. This was the fight they might not walk away from.

Mindartis picked up a rock.

It was a chunk of flagstone — broken loose by the remorhaz's eruption, roughly the size of a fist, unremarkable in every way. The wizard hefted it, tested its weight, and threw it at the adult remorhaz's head.

It bounced off the creature's skull with a sound like a pebble hitting a wall. The remorhaz turned to look at him.

"Over here," Mindartis said. His voice was conversational. Calm. The voice of a man who had made a decision and was no longer afraid of it. "Yes, you. The ugly one. Come on, then."

The remorhaz lunged.

Mindartis did not run. He planted his feet, brought his quarterstaff up in both hands, and waited — waited — waited until the creature's mouth opened wide enough to swallow him whole, the heat from its throat blistering his skin, the teeth like a cage of broken glass closing around him —

And he jumped in.

The wizard leapt into the gaping mouth, quarterstaff extended, trying to jam it crosswise between the jaws. The staff caught — for half a second — then slipped, and the teeth came together. Mindartis disappeared into the creature's throat. A flash of robes, a glimpse of one outstretched hand, and then nothing. The remorhaz's mouth closed. The wizard was gone.

Silence. Absolute, horrified silence.

"MINDARTIS!" Dustin shouted.

The remorhaz swayed. Its body shuddered — once, twice — the glow between its plates flickering, dimming, changing. Its shape began to warp. The segmented body swelled in places it shouldn't, contracted in others, the chitinous armour cracking and splitting as something inside pushed outward against a form that was no longer the right shape.

Then the creature exploded — for the second time that day, remorhaz came apart from the inside — but this time, what stood in the ruin was not gore and slime.

It was a mammoth.

Twelve feet at the shoulder, tusks like curved swords, its massive body steaming where remorhaz ichor slid off thick fur. It stood in the crater of what had been the most dangerous creature in the temple, shaking chunks of chitin from its hide with the irritated dignity of something very large and very unimpressed.

And somewhere inside that mammoth, behind eyes that held a distinctly non-mammoth intelligence, Mindartis was having the best day of his career.

The wizard — swallowed alive, trapped in the burning gut of a creature that should have dissolved him in seconds — had turned himself into something massive. So fundamentally incompatible with the inside of a remorhaz that the remorhaz had simply ceased to be an obstacle.

The mammoth turned its head and looked at the party. If a mammoth could look smug, this one managed it.

Dustin stared. Don Juan stared. Kürbis, still dripping with the remains of the first remorhaz, lowered his greatsword and stared.

"Right," Dustin said, after a pause that lasted several seconds too long. "I think Mindartis just won."

Nobody disagreed.

The mammoth did not change back. It stood amid the wreckage, blinking slowly, its trunk swaying with the idle contentment of a creature that had no particular reason to be anywhere else. Somewhere behind those enormous brown eyes, Mindartis was clearly enjoying himself.

While the rest of the party was still catching its breath, Harshnag walked past them all — past the scattered chitin, past the smouldering remains, past the overturned granite table — and crouched beside the hole in the alcove floor where the second young remorhaz had emerged. He dug for a moment, enormous hands shifting rubble and broken flagstone with surprising care, and then straightened up holding something round and pale and roughly the size of a halfling.

A remorhaz egg.

The frost giant's face split into a grin — the first genuine, unguarded expression of joy any of them had seen from him. He cradled the egg against his chest like a newborn, brushing frost and dust from its leathery shell, and carried it to his pack with the delicate, reverent steps of someone transporting the most precious thing in the world.

"Is it tasty?" Don Juan asked. He had been waiting the entire fight for an answer.

Harshnag looked up from tucking the egg into the folds of his bedroll. "No idea."

Don Juan blinked. "So?"

"So what?"

"What do you want the egg for?"

"Ah." Harshnag's grin widened. "They make very good guard pets."

Don Juan opened his mouth, closed it, looked at the smouldering remains of the three creatures that had nearly killed them all, and decided not to pursue the line of questioning further.

With the remorhaz nest cleared, they explored the rest of the feast hall. Leaning against the southernmost stone slab — half-hidden behind the neatly stacked copper plates and goblets — they found a steel greataxe, giant-sized. Harshnag recognised it immediately and carried it back to Annam's temple, fitting it into the frost giant statue's empty hands. It slotted into place as if it had been carved to hold it.

They took a short rest by the fire pit — the ancient flames still burning steady and warm, fed by gas that had been seeping through the stone since before the founding of Waterdeep. They cleaned their weapons and their wounds. Zarok, propped against a granite bench, let Don Juan tend to the puncture marks where the remorhaz's teeth had punched through his plate armour. The Dragonborn said nothing about the pain. He never did.

The mammoth had settled by the fire pit, lying on its side with the boneless comfort of something that weighed several tons and did not care. It had spent the rest of the hour like that — occasionally flicking its trunk at passing embers, occasionally making a low, rumbling sound that might have been contentment or might have been Mindartis humming to himself. Nobody tried to rush him.

Near the end of the rest, the spell faded on its own. The mammoth shimmered, shrank, and Mindartis was sitting cross-legged on the warm stone, covered head to toe in dried remorhaz ichor, his robes plastered to his body, blinking as if he'd just woken from a very comfortable nap. He looked down at himself and sighed.

He cleaned his robes with Prestidigitation, which technically worked but did nothing to remove the haunted look that came from knowing exactly what the inside of a remorhaz smelled like.

Kürbis just sat and ate. Covered in gore, unbothered, methodical. The Goliath had a talent for compartmentalisation that the rest of the party quietly envied.

They gathered before the archway. Six mithral runes, six giant types, and now all six statues held their weapons. The decision was unanimous — Harshnag would take the greataxe and touch the frost rune.

The frost giant pressed the steel blade against the ise rune. The axe flashed with cold blue light and vanished from his hands, reappearing in the statue's grasp behind them. The glowing mist between the archway's pillars churned, thickened, and transformed — pale fog becoming a roiling mass of thunderclouds, dark and violent, shot through with flashes of lightning. The sound of rolling thunder filled the temple, and through the storm they could see the room beyond.

A hexagonal chamber. Vast. The walls rising fifty feet before tapering to a sharp apex high above. In each corner, a life-size statue of a giant holding a heavy iron lantern — hill, stone, frost, fire, cloud, and storm — their cold, magical light casting long shadows across the floor.

And in the centre of the room, on the frost-covered flagstones, a body.

A giant. Young, by the proportions — a cloud giant, perhaps, though it was hard to tell through the portal's flickering light. It lay on its back, arms at its sides, its skin pale grey beneath a thick shroud of frost that covered it like a burial cloth. It had been there a long time. Beside it, resting on the frozen stone, a morningstar — massive, frost-covered, untouched.

The party stared through the churning archway at the still, frozen scene beyond. The thunder rolled. The lightning flashed. The giant did not move.

There was a brief hesitation — the kind that lasts two heartbeats and feels like an hour. The kind where everyone is waiting for someone else to go first.

Don Juan went first. The paladin squared his shoulders, muttered something under his breath that might have been a prayer to Tyr, and stepped through the archway as if walking through a doorway he'd used a hundred times. The thunderclouds parted around him and closed behind, and then he was on the other side, standing in the cold light of the hexagonal chamber, hand on his sword, very much alive.

Kürbis followed — two strides behind, ready, because Kürbis was always two strides behind and ready.

Dustin took a breath and stepped through. The thunder swallowed him for a moment — sound and light and the sharp, electric taste of magic — and then he was through, standing on frost-covered stone, the cold hitting him like a wall after the warmth of the feast hall.

The others came after. Zarok, still moving gingerly. Archibald, leaning on his staff. Mindartis, who paused to study the archway's rune work and had to be pulled through by the sleeve. And Harshnag, last of all, ducking to fit his enormous frame through the portal, his footsteps cracking the frost as he straightened to his full height.

They stood in the Eye of Annam. The six lanterns burned with their cold, steady light. The giant lay motionless on the floor, preserved by centuries of frost, its morningstar beside it like a grave offering.

They approached the body. Up close, it was unmistakably a cloud giant — tall even by their standards, wearing a golden breastplate that was dented and scored but still beautiful. Around his neck hung an amulet set with an opal that caught the lantern light and scattered it in pale rainbows across the frost. His face was peaceful. Whatever had killed him, it had not been slow.

Dustin was the first to notice the circle. Etched into the floor beneath the thin layer of frost, a ring of mithral inlay twenty feet across, inscribed with runes in Dethek — the angular, precise script of the dwarves. He knelt and brushed the frost aside with his sleeve. The words read: Ask Your Question and Know Truth.

He was still reading when the air above the corpse began to change.

It started as a shimmer — like heat haze, but cold, the kind of distortion that came from magic older than anything Dustin had ever felt. The shimmer thickened, took shape, and the ghost of a cloud giant rose from the body like smoke from a dying fire.

He was enormous even in death — translucent, his features soft and indistinct at the edges, but his eyes sharp and present and very much aware. He looked down at the party with the expression of someone who had been waiting a long time and was not entirely surprised by what had finally arrived.

"You are small," the ghost said. His voice echoed strangely in the hexagonal chamber, the sound arriving from all six walls at once. "But you have come far. I am Eigeron."

Harshnag lowered his head — a gesture of respect that looked entirely uncharacteristic on the frost giant. "We seek the oracle's wisdom," he said. "We mean no disrespect to your rest."

Eigeron's ghost regarded him for a long moment, then turned his gaze to the rest of the party. "You are welcome here. More welcome than the last giant who stood where you stand." Something shifted in the ghost's expression — not anger, exactly, but a deep and ancient sadness. "Sansuri."

He told them the story. How he and Sansuri — the Countess, lord of the cloud giants — had come to the Eye of Annam seeking divine wisdom. How the oracle had spoken of a great upheaval that would shake the ordning — the ancient hierarchy of giants — and give all giant-kind a chance to prove themselves to their gods. Eigeron had wanted to share the oracle's words with all giants, to warn them, to unite them. Sansuri had seen something else entirely — an opportunity. Knowledge that she alone would possess. An advantage over every other giant lord in Faerûn.

They had disagreed. Eigeron had been her adviser, and he had advised her that this was too important to hoard. That the upheaval would affect every giant, and every giant deserved to know.

Sansuri had disagreed more permanently.

The ghost spoke without bitterness, which somehow made it worse.

"When did this happen?" Dustin asked. He looked at the frost-covered body, the undisturbed morningstar, the thin layer of ice that had crept over everything. "How long have you been here?"

Eigeron tilted his translucent head. "Time is difficult here. The lanterns burn, and the frost grows, and nothing changes. But it was autumn when we came. The harvest moon had passed."

Dustin glanced at the others. The upheaval — the breaking of the ordning, the giants turning aggressive across the Sword Coast — that had been less than a year ago. The cloud giants had been here before any of it started. The oracle had seen it coming, and Sansuri had heard the warning, and instead of sharing it she had killed the one person who wanted to.

"More than a year," Archibald said, reading the same thought on Dustin's face. "She's had a head start on everyone."

Eigeron nodded. "The oracle still functions. It is a divine proxy of Annam the All-Father — this chamber was built to allow communion with him directly. The circle on the floor is the focus." He gestured to the mithral ring beneath the frost. "Step within it and speak your question, and the oracle will answer truthfully. It has six charges. Six questions before its power is spent. It replenishes at dawn."

"Six questions," Archibald repeated, already calculating.

"Use them wisely," Eigeron said. "The oracle's answers are truthful, but they are not always clear."

The ghost lingered for a moment, his gaze moving across each of them in turn. "One more thing," he said. "Sansuri retreated to her castle after what she did here. A flying castle — she is a cloud giant, and cloud giants build their homes in the sky. If you find her..." The sadness in his expression did not change, but something harder appeared beneath it. "She should answer for what she has done."

Then Eigeron's ghost faded — not disappearing entirely, but dimming to a faint shimmer above the body, present but no longer speaking, watching them with the patient, translucent eyes of someone who had nowhere else to be.

They stepped into the mithral circle together — the full width of it, twenty feet across, built for giants who came here alone. The seven of them barely filled a quarter of it. The ring hummed beneath their boots, and the air inside thickened — not unpleasant, but present, like standing inside a held breath. Six statues stood in the corners of the hexagonal chamber, each holding a torch that burned with a cold, steady flame.

Dustin went first. "What happened to the Ordning?"

The oracle's voice came from everywhere and nowhere — deep, resonant, ancient, with the weight of something that had been answering questions since before the founding of human civilization.

Annam the All-Father broke the ordning, to rouse his children from their complacency.

One of the torches went dark.

Don Juan next. "Why are the giants fighting?"

Because King Hekaton is no longer on his Wyrmskull Throne, in his home in the Maelstrom.

Another torch extinguished.

"Is Sansuri responsible?"

Sansuri is not the cause of the breaking of the ordning.

Three torches left.

Archibald adjusted his spectacles. "How do we reach the Maelstrom?"

Each giant lord has a conch to teleport to the Maelstrom.

Two.

Don Juan again. "How can we stop the giants? How can we fix things?"

Go to the court of King Hekaton. Root out the evil therein, and put him back on the throne.

One.

Dustin spoke last. "Is the Kraken Society behind all this?"

The kraken and the Kraken Society are working with the evil at the court.

The last torch went dark. Six questions. Six answers. The chamber fell to shadow, lit only by the faint glow of Eigeron's ghost.

"One more," Archibald said, and cleared his throat. "Where is the privy?"

Nothing happened.

Don Juan turned to look at him. "The old man really is losing his marbles."

"Just checking," Archibald said mildly. "Had to make sure it was really only six."

They stepped back from the circle and turned to the ghost, who had watched the entire exchange in silence.

"Is there anything else you can do to help us?" Dustin asked.

Eigeron looked down at his own body — the frost-covered corpse on the flagstones, the golden breastplate, the amulet around its neck. "My body is of no use to me," he said. "The armour is enchanted. The opal holds the ild rune — fire magic, old and strong. Take them. They will serve you better than they serve a dead man."

Kürbis didn't hesitate. The Goliath knelt beside the corpse with the practised efficiency of someone entirely unbothered by the dead and began working the amulet free. The chain came loose with a sharp tug, frost cracking and scattering across the stone. The breastplate took more effort — frozen buckles, stiff leather straps, the weight of a dead cloud giant's torso pressing everything flat — but Kürbis was patient and very strong, and after a minute of quiet, methodical work he pulled the armour clear.

It shrank in his hands.

The golden metal rippled, contracted, reshaped itself — the proportions adjusting, the shoulder plates narrowing, the chest piece compressing — until what Kürbis held was no longer giant-sized but Goliath-sized, the golden surface gleaming in the lantern light as if freshly forged.

Dustin looked at it. Looked at Kürbis. "That looks like it would fit you perfectly," he said. "And not just the size."

Kürbis turned the breastplate over in his hands, ran one thumb across the surface, and said nothing. Which, from Kürbis, was the same as enthusiastic agreement.

While Kürbis examined the armour, Archibald had drifted back toward the ghost. The old wizard's eyes had that particular gleam — the one that meant he was thinking about something that was probably a bad idea and definitely interesting.

"You've been trapped in this chamber since your death," Archibald said. It wasn't a question.

"I cannot leave," Eigeron confirmed. "I have tried. The walls hold me. The portal holds me. I am bound to this room and to my body."

"But you could possess a willing creature," Archibald said. "And that creature could carry you through."

The ghost studied him. "I could. But I would not do so without consent. And the host would be unable to force me out once I am within."

"That is the problem," Archibald agreed. He was quiet for a moment, calculating risks the way other people calculated sums. "Would you leave once we crossed the portal? Willingly?"

"I would. I have no desire to inhabit a body that is not my own. I simply wish to leave this room."

Archibald looked at Dustin. Dustin looked at Archibald. They had been travelling together long enough to have entire conversations in raised eyebrows.

"I can cast Zone of Truth," Dustin said. "Ask him again inside the zone. If he answers the same way, you'll know he means it."

So Dustin cast the spell. The familiar shimmer of compelled honesty settled over the area around the ghost, and Archibald asked his question again, and Eigeron answered exactly as he had before — simply, directly, without hesitation.

"So be it," Archibald said. He straightened his robes, set down his staff, and opened his arms in the universal gesture of a man who was about to do something he would either regret immensely or never stop talking about. "Come in, then."

The ghost flowed into him like water into a vessel. Archibald staggered — his eyes flashing with a light that was not his own, his body swaying under the weight of a presence far larger than the frame it occupied — and then steadied. He blinked. His eyes were his own again, mostly, though something vast and patient looked out from behind them.

"Interesting," Archibald said, in a voice that was his and not entirely his. "Very crowded in here."

He walked to the portal. The thunderclouds still churned in the archway, dimmer now but still passable. Archibald took a breath and stepped through.

He stumbled out the other side alone. The ghost had been ripped from him as he crossed — pulled backward, not forward, yanked out of Archibald's body and back into the hexagonal chamber as if the room had reached out and reclaimed what was its own. Archibald staggered into the temple, clutching his head, gasping.

"Forceful exit," the wizard muttered, rubbing his temples. "Not recommended."

Behind him, through the archway, they could see Eigeron's ghost reforming over his own body — disoriented, flickering, but intact. Still trapped. The room had pulled him back.

Archibald turned to look at the portal and frowned. "The light is dimming," he said. The thunderclouds in the archway were thinning — the lightning less frequent, the edges of the passage wavering, the mist losing its density. "I don't think it will hold much longer."

"Everyone out," Harshnag said. "Now."

The rest of the party stepped through quickly — Don Juan first, then Kürbis with the breastplate tucked under one arm and the amulet around his neck, then Dustin, Zarok, and Mindartis. Harshnag came last.

Dustin turned back toward the fading archway. Through the thinning storm he could just make out the ghost, hovering over the body, watching them go.

"We'll come back," he called.

The portal closed. The thunderclouds dissolved into pale mist, and the archway went dark.

They made camp in Annam's temple, between the massive statues and beneath the frost-covered ceiling. It was not comfortable, but it was defensible, and after the feast hall and the remorhaz nest they had a newly calibrated sense of what constituted an acceptable sleeping arrangement.

The party discussed their situation — the oracle's answers, the questions they still wanted to ask, the six charges that would replenish at dawn. They agreed to spend the night and return in the morning.

"Archibald," Dustin said. "What time is it?"

The wizard didn't check anything — no sundial, no candle, no spell. He simply knew, the way he always knew which way was north. "Half past three," he said. "Give or take."

Too early to sleep.

"I'm going to have a look around," Dustin said, nodding toward the doors opposite the feast hall. "We never properly checked the living quarters. Who wants to come?" A pause. "And who's cooking dinner? Remorhaz stew. Anybody know if that's edible?"

"I'll come," Don Juan said, already on his feet.

"Wait up," Zarok said, pushing himself off the stone bench with a wince he tried to hide. "I'm coming too."

They crossed the hall and through the doors into the living quarters — a long hallway lined with archways on both sides, each leading to a chamber with giant-sized stone beds draped in frozen furs.

Stairs led up to an upper hallway — the same layout, but partially collapsed. Ice had buckled the ceiling, and several archways were choked with rubble. They checked the rooms that were still accessible.

In one of the last — two stone couches, a frozen fur, and on the bed beneath it, a stitched leather sack. Giant-sized, left behind by someone who had never come back for it.

Dustin held up a hand. Don Juan and Zarok stopped in the archway.

"Found something."

He loosened the drawstring and upended the sack onto the stone couch. What fell out was not treasure.

Three human heads — preserved by the cold, their features frozen into expressions that suggested the preserving had not been the worst part of their day. One of them had a gold tooth that caught the lantern light. Beside the heads, a shabby cloak of giant hide — enormous, crudely stitched, the kind of thing a hill giant might wear and a human might use as a tent. And nestled among the folds, a smooth stone inscribed with a single rune.

Dustin picked up the stone. The rune was angular, precise — Dethek script, like the inscriptions in the oracle chamber. Cold radiated from it, not the ambient chill of the temple but a deliberate, magical cold that numbed his fingers through his gloves. The ise rune. Ice magic, old and deep.

He pocketed it.

Kürbis, who had followed them up the stairs with the quiet inevitability of a Goliath who didn't like being left behind, crouched beside the couch and studied the heads with the detached curiosity of someone who had seen worse. He gripped the gold tooth between thumb and forefinger and worked it free with a single, practised twist. It joined the giant's tooth on the cord around his neck.

Dustin looked at the cloak. It was too large to carry and too crude to wear, but the hide itself was thick and supple — better quality than the stitching suggested. He drew his knife and cut several long strips from the cleanest section, rolling them tight and tucking them into his pack. Material. You never knew.

They headed back down to the lower hallway. The first rooms were the same as above — stone beds, frozen furs, dust, silence. They worked their way along the corridor, checking each one, until Zarok stopped.

The Dragonborn was standing in front of an archway near the end of the hall, not entering, his head tilted back. "There," he said, pointing at the top of the entrance. A stone slab sat recessed into the frame — a door, or a gate, designed to slide or drop down and seal the room shut. The slot it sat in was precise, engineered, the edges clean despite centuries of frost.

Don Juan ran his hands along the frame, searching for a trigger, a latch, a pressure plate — anything that would explain the mechanism. Nothing. Dustin checked the walls inside. Nothing. Zarok examined the floor. Nothing.

"Yo, Harshnag!" Zarok called down the corridor.

The frost giant arrived with the unhurried pace of someone who had learned that urgency in this temple was rarely rewarded. He ducked under the lintel and studied the stone slab above the entrance, his pale eyes tracing the edges of the slot.

"Could you hold one of these open?" Dustin asked. "If it came down while someone was inside?"

Harshnag looked at the slab. Looked at the frame. "Perhaps," he said, which from a frost giant meant probably, but also meant I would rather not find out.

"All the doors have them," Zarok said. He wasn't looking ahead — he was looking back, at the rooms they had already walked through. Every single archway. The same stone slab recessed above each one. They had walked under a dozen of them without noticing. "And none of them dropped on us."

That was true. It was also, now that they were staring at several tons of stone poised above the doorway, profoundly unhelpful. The rooms had been safe before they noticed the doors. They were exactly as safe now. But nobody seemed keen to step under another one.

"I'll check the other rooms from the hallway," Dustin said. "Without entering them."

Dustin moved further along the corridor, past the last archway, past the rooms they had already checked from a safe distance. The hallway continued — wide, high-ceilinged, the same giant-scale proportions as everything else in this temple. He had gone perhaps forty feet when every door in the hall slammed shut.

Not fell. Not dropped. Slammed — stone against stone, all at once, the sound hitting him from every direction like a thunderclap in an enclosed space. The archways that had been open a moment ago were now sealed behind walls of conjured stone, smooth and featureless, as if the rooms behind them had never existed.

"Don Juan," Dustin called, keeping very still.

Don Juan was already casting, hands raised. The corridor lit up in his sight — a web of conjuration magic threaded through the stone floor where Dustin was standing, covering a forty-foot section of the hallway.

"Conjuration," Don Juan said. "The whole section you're standing on. You triggered something."

They investigated the area — carefully, without stepping onto the enchanted section again. There was no physical mechanism, no pressure plate, no rune they could see. Just magic, old and deeply woven into the stone itself.

Then, from the far end of the corridor, a sound. Low at first — a grinding, rolling rumble that built in volume and resonance until the floor itself was vibrating. Mindartis, who had been resting by the campfire in the main temple, heard the commotion and came running.

He arrived to find the others pressed against the walls, staring north. Something was coming.

The boulder was enormous — a perfect sphere of dark stone, nearly filling the corridor from wall to wall, rolling southward with the unhurried inevitability of something that did not need to be fast because it was already too large to avoid. The floor shook with each revolution. Frost cracked and fell from the ceiling in sheets.

Everybody moved. There was no discussion, no plan, no coordination — just the primal mathematics of a very large rock and a very narrow hallway. They pressed themselves into the corridor walls, flattened against stone, and the boulder rolled past with inches to spare, the displaced air tugging at cloaks and hair and the lingering conviction that temple architects had a deeply unpleasant sense of humour.

Dustin, once the immediate prospect of being flattened had passed, raised his hands and fired two beams of crackling force into the back of the retreating sphere. The beams struck true — and did absolutely nothing. The granite didn't chip, didn't crack, didn't slow. The boulder rolled on, indifferent.

When it reached the south end of the corridor, the stone giant statue came alive.

The movement was sudden and total — one moment carved stillness, the next a grinding lurch as the statue's outstretched arms caught the sphere and stopped it dead. The impact shook the hall. Stone dust rained from the ceiling. The statue held the boulder in its palms for a single, straining moment — and then began pushing it back.

Northward. Back the way it had come. Slowly, methodically, with the mechanical patience of something that had been doing this for a very long time.

Mindartis became a giant spider and scrambled up the side of the boulder, clinging to the stone as it rolled beneath him, legs working to stay on top. Don Juan threw a spell at the statue meant to set it laughing — nothing. Whatever magic animated it did not include the capacity for amusement. Mindartis got on top of the statue itself and spun webs across its shoulders and arms, trying to slow it down. The statue walked through them without noticing, trailing silk like a giant wearing a very inadequate scarf.

Dustin, meanwhile, had gone the other way. Past the trigger section, past the sealed archways, all the way to the north end of the corridor. There was nothing. Just a wall — the same wall the boulder had emerged from, now solid and featureless, as if the stone had never been disturbed.

The doors that the statue had passed reopened behind it, the conjured walls dissolving as silently as they had appeared. Everyone got out of its way. When the statue reached the north end of the corridor, it pushed the boulder into the wall. The granite met the stone and simply — merged. Melted. One moment a forty-foot sphere of solid rock, the next nothing at all, absorbed back into the wall as though it had never existed.

Dustin checked the rooms on either side. The last four chambers were not sleeping quarters. They were, unmistakably, latrines. Giant-sized, carved from the same stone as everything else in the temple, with drainage channels cut into the floor and basins that could have served as swimming pools. Functional. Ancient. Enormous.

"Toilets," Dustin said. "We nearly died for toilets."

Mindartis, still in spider form, dropped from the statue as it turned to walk back to its alcove. He had misjudged the speed — the return journey was considerably faster than the outward push, and he hit the flagstones with an undignified tumble of legs before shifting back to his elven form and pretending it had been intentional.

The statue lumbered back to its position between the two doors, settled into its alcove, and went still. The trap reset.

Dustin and Mindartis stood at the edge of the trigger section, staring at forty feet of enchanted floor.

"We could try to dispel it," Mindartis said.

"Or we could just run," Dustin said.

They ran. Forty feet at a full sprint, through the trigger zone and out the other side, and waited. The rumble came — distant, building — and by the time the boulder phased through the wall they were well clear, watching from the far end of the corridor with the comfortable certainty of people who had already solved this particular problem.

"That was the trap?" Mindartis said. "You just... run?"

"Giant-sized corridor," Dustin said. "Giant-sized trap. We're not giant-sized."

They returned to the main temple and made camp for a second night. The fire in the feast hall was still burning — it would burn forever, fed by whatever ancient magic sustained it — and the party settled into the routine of people who had grown accustomed to sleeping in places that were not designed for them.

Dustin sat cross-legged by the fire, the shard of the ise rune resting in his palm. The cold it radiated was precise and deliberate — not the ambient chill of the temple but something older, something that pushed back against the warmth of the flames as if offended by it. He closed his eyes and let the magic settle into him, feeling the rune's power align with his own like a key finding its lock.

Across the fire, Kürbis held the opal of the ild rune — the gem they had taken from Eigeron's corpse. Fire and ice, the two of them, attuning to opposite forces in a frozen temple while the rest of the party slept. The opal glowed faintly in the Goliath's massive hands, a warm amber light that made the shadows dance.

They sat across the fire and didn't speak. Dustin's breath fogged. The air above Kürbis's hands shimmered with heat. The eternal flames, for once, were the smallest fire in the room.

It took the better part of an hour. When it was done, the shard felt like it belonged — not warm, never warm, but familiar, its cold now a companion rather than an intrusion.

Dawn came without sunlight — deep inside the mountain, the only indication was the six torches in the oracle chamber relighting simultaneously, their magical flames flickering back to life as the divine charges replenished.

The party gathered in the hexagonal chamber. Eigeron's ghost hovered above his own frozen corpse, waiting with the patient stillness of someone who had been waiting for a very long time. They had six questions. They had discussed them the night before.

Dustin stepped into the circle. The rune on the floor pulsed with light.

"Where is the lord of the hill giants?"

The oracle's voice filled the chamber — deep, resonant, older than the mountain itself.

"Travel south over tree, hill, and vale. Let the great river be your guide. There, on one of its eastern arms, you'll find Grudd Haug — the den of the hill giant chief."

One of the six torches held by the statues went dark. Five remained.

"Where is the lord of the fire giants?"

"Travel east, o'er mountains and snow, to distant spires. There, on a cold mountainside, you'll find a village of yakfolk and below that, Ironslag — the forge of the fire giant duke."

Dustin went still. The colour left his face, and something behind his eyes shifted — not fear, exactly, but the shadow of it, dredged up from a place he kept locked. He shuddered visibly.

"I know where that is," he said quietly.

And then, for the first time in a long time — so long that Dustin had almost allowed himself to believe it was over — the voice came. Faint. Cold. Familiar as his own heartbeat and twice as painful.

You remember.

Jorlan. Standing at the edge of the mithral circle, visible only to Dustin — a translucent figure with hollow eyes and an expression that had not softened in all the time since his death. The ghost of a boy sacrificed on a yak folk altar, who had followed his best friend out of the mountains and refused to let him forget.

The mines. The altar. The chains. You remember all of it.

Dustin said nothing. His jaw tightened. The others couldn't see Jorlan — they never could — but Kürbis, who had been there in the mountains when the whispers first started, watched Dustin's face and understood.

Four.

"Where is the lord of the stone giants?"

"Travel southeast, o'er lands high and low. Cross the great forest to the gray peaks, and search for Deadstone Cleft, canyon of the stone giant thane."

Three.

"What is behind the evil at the court of the storm giants?"

"Hekaton was misled by his eldest daughters, Mirran and Nym, who covet his throne."

Two.

"Where is King Hekaton now?"

A pause. The two remaining torches flickered.

"Unknown."

The word settled over the chamber like frost. The oracle — a divine instrument that had just pinpointed three giant lords across the breadth of Faerûn — could not find the storm giant king.

One torch left. One question.

The party looked at each other. They hadn't planned a sixth. Dustin stared at the glowing circle, thinking. His mind drifted back — past the temple, past Fireshear, past Everlund and Yartar and Triboar — all the way to a cloud castle drifting above the road, and a blue eye staring through a hole in the wall. Iymrith. The name was still there, branded into his memory the way the dragon had branded it into his mind. A blue dragon had attacked Zephyros's tower, and they had never found out why.

"We still don't know what that dragon wanted with us," he said. "Iymrith. On Zephyros's tower. That was never explained."

The others nodded. It was as good a question as any.

He turned back to the circle.

"How are the dragons involved in the upheaval?"

The last torch went dark.

"A blue dragon named Iymrith infiltrated the court of the storm giants."

Silence.

Six questions. Six answers. The chamber was dark except for the faint glow of Eigeron's ghost.

They turned to the ghost. Eigeron hovered in the darkened chamber, his translucent form the only light now that the torches had gone out.

"You heard all of that," Dustin said. "What do you think?"

Eigeron was quiet for a moment. "I am impressed," he said. "You have learned things even I did not know. The daughters. The dragon." He paused. "I knew the court was troubled. I did not know how deep the rot went."

"What can you tell us about the cloud giant?" Dustin asked. "Sansuri. Her castle. Anything that might help."

Eigeron's expression shifted — not anger, exactly, but something colder. He had known Sansuri. He had reason to.

"Three things," he said. "First — do not approach from the air. The castle has battlements, ballistae, and her guards are trained to shoot down anything that flies. She has dealt with dragons before. She will deal with you."

"Second — Sansuri has little regard for small folk. She considers you puny. Beneath her notice. She will not see you as a threat." The ghost's mouth curved into something that was almost a smile. "Use that."

"Third — years ago, a beautiful creature landed on her castle. An aarakocra — a bird-person, bright-feathered, noble. Sansuri was taken by its beauty. So she imprisoned it. She used her magic to create copies of it from ice and snow — dozens of them, identical, obedient. They serve as her guards and decorations now." Eigeron's voice grew quieter. "When she had made enough copies, she killed the original. Had it stuffed and mounted above the fireplace in her lounge."

The chamber was silent.

"That is who Sansuri is," Eigeron said. "Do not expect mercy. Do not expect reason. Expect vanity, and plan accordingly."

Dustin stared at the space where the last torch had been burning. "That," he said, "is one cold bitch."

They left the Eye of the All-Father through the main entrance — back through the great hall, past the kneeling statues of the giant gods, through the boulderfall hall and out across the causeway to the griffons.

Harshnag stood at the edge of the causeway, his pale eyes squinting against the daylight.

"Grudd Haug," Kürbis said. He had been quiet since the oracle chamber, turning the name over in his mind the way he turned most things — slowly, thoroughly, until he was satisfied he understood it from every angle. "The great river. An eastern arm. I know the area. Hill country, south of the Dessarin Valley."

"You're certain?" Don Juan asked.

Kürbis shrugged — a gesture that, from a goliath, involved enough moving mass to qualify as a minor geological event. "Certain enough."

They had discussed it the night before. Three giant lords, three locations, three conchs. They needed only one to reach the Maelstrom and King Hekaton's court. The hill giants were the closest, the least organised, and — by giant standards — the least dangerous. It was not a difficult choice.

"Will you come with us?" Dustin asked Harshnag.

The frost giant shook his head. "My path leads to Everlund. The Harpers must know what we have learned — the daughters, the dragon, the state of the court. I will deliver your message and wait in the region. When you have the conch, send word."

Dustin nodded. It made sense. Harshnag in a hill giant den would be like bringing a battering ram to a burglary — effective, but not subtle.

"Take care of yourself, Harshnag," Zarok said.

The frost giant looked down at the dragonborn — a full twelve feet down — and something that might have been warmth crossed his craggy features. "You as well, small one. All of you." He paused. "You are better than you think you are. Remember that when things go badly."

"Encouraging," Dustin said.

They mounted the griffons. Harshnag watched them go, a lone figure on a frozen mountainside, growing smaller with every wingbeat until the clouds swallowed him and the Spine of the World fell away behind them.

Six days on griffon-back. South from the Spine of the World, over the frozen passes and the treeline and the long, rolling hills that marked the transition from mountain country to the lowlands of the Dessarin Valley. The griffons flew in formation — Dasharra at the front, setting the pace, the others strung out behind her like beads on a wind-blown string.

Nothing happened.

Six days of cold air and clear sky and the slow greening of the land below as winter loosened its grip. They stopped to rest when the griffons needed it, camped on hillsides and in forest clearings, ate trail rations and talked about what lay ahead. Kürbis studied the landscape with the quiet intensity of someone matching terrain to memory. The river appeared on the fourth day — a broad, dark ribbon cutting through farmland — and from there he navigated by instinct, following tributaries eastward until the hills began to rise and the farms thinned and the land took on the wild, overgrown look of territory that humans had decided was not worth the trouble.

On the sixth day, Kürbis pointed.

"There."

They landed in a copse of trees a mile from the den — far enough that the griffons wouldn't be spotted, close enough that the walk was manageable. The air smelled different here: mud, animal dung, and something sour and rotten that carried on the wind like a warning.

Don Juan gathered them in a circle. He had been thinking about this for six days.

"Zarok and I go in," he said. "Invisible. We find the conch, we get out. No fighting."

"I can only make two of us invisible," he added, before anyone asked.

"Take me with you," Dustin said. "I'll get in the vessel." He held up the tinderbox. "You carry it."

Don Juan considered this for half a second. "Done." He turned to Kürbis. "You stay outside. That horn —" he nodded at the Horn of Valhalla slung across the goliath's shoulder. Dustin had given it to him after the oracle, figuring that a goliath who'd grown up blowing war horns across mountain valleys was a better fit for it than a half-elf bard. "When I send you a Message, you blow it. The berserkers will be a distraction. Send them at whatever looks most threatening. While the giants are dealing with an army appearing out of nowhere, we slip out."

Kürbis looked at the horn. Looked at the den in the distance. Nodded.

Don Juan and Zarok stripped their armour and packed it into the Bag of Holding — the plate and splint that had kept them alive through a dozen fights, folded and stuffed into a bag that weighed the same regardless. Without armour they looked strange. Smaller. More human. Don Juan rolled his shoulders and winced at the absence of weight he'd grown accustomed to.

"Ready?" Don Juan asked.

Dustin climbed into the vessel. The tinderbox sat in the grass for a moment — small, brass, unremarkable — and then Don Juan picked it up and tucked it into his belt.

He cast Invisibility. The spell took both of them — Zarok flickering out of sight first, then Don Juan, until the clearing held nothing but a goliath with a horn.

They set off toward Grudd Haug. Kürbis watched them go — or rather, watched the grass bend under invisible feet and tried not to think about everything that could go wrong.

The first few minutes were fine. Don Juan's voice arrived in Kürbis's head at regular intervals through the Message spell — brief, clipped updates. Past the palisade. Moving along the south wall. Smells worse than it looks.

Then nothing.

Kürbis waited. One minute. Two. Five. He sent a Message back — Status? — and received no response. None of them had thought about the range of the spell. It had simply not occurred to anyone — not Don Juan, who had planned the entire operation, not Dustin inside the vessel, not Kürbis, who trusted that the people who understood magic had accounted for details like this.

The goliath sat in the tall grass, the Horn of Valhalla across his knees, and watched the distant shape of Grudd Haug. The afternoon sun beat down on the mud-and-timber structure, and the heat carried the stench all the way to his position — rot, animal dung, and something greasy and sour that he didn't want to identify. On the far side of the compound, in a muddy yard enclosed by a sharpened log palisade, figures sat around a campfire. Kürbis squinted. Not human — too broad, too hunched, moving with a heaviness that didn't belong to men. He couldn't tell what they were from this distance, even with the firelight. Behind them, pens full of sheep bleated in the heat.

He waited. The horn stayed unblown.

Don Juan and Zarok moved toward Grudd Haug invisible and reeking. Before leaving the copse they had smeared themselves with the foulest mud they could find — thick, black, stinking stuff from the riverbank that masked their scent under a layer of filth indistinguishable from the den's own atmosphere. It was, Don Juan reflected, the least dignified thing he had ever done in service of a plan.

The den rose ahead of them — a crude, enormous structure of packed timber and clay straddling the river, part farmhouse, part dam, part fortress. It looked like something a child might build from mud and sticks, scaled up to monstrous proportions. On a bluff overlooking the river, a log watchtower jutted sixty feet into the air, topped with a pointed roof. Figures moved in the tower — four of them, armed, facing in all directions. Hobgoblins, standing guard.

They gave the tower a wide berth, moving through the tall grass in a slow arc until they reached the far side of the compound. They found a small doorway on the western side — not the main entrance, something smaller, a side door half-hidden behind the bulk of the steading.

They heard it before they saw it — voices, high-pitched and arguing, and underneath them a sound that was unmistakably a halfling shouting for help. Don Juan held up an invisible hand. They stopped outside a doorway hung with a filthy curtain and peered in.

The room was filthy — mud, dirty pots, leftover food crawling with maggots. In the centre, a crackling fire raged in a dome-shaped fireplace. Four goblins surrounded a wooden spit, tying down a halfling who had not yet stopped fighting. Two more goblins crouched by the fire, stoking it and arguing about how long halfling took to cook. In one corner, a hole in the floor gaped open — twenty feet across, dark. The smell that rose from it was something else entirely — old blood, raw meat, and the buzzing of flies thick enough to hear from across the room.

Don Juan's instinct was to move on. They were invisible, they had a mission, and every second in this room was a second closer to discovery.

Zarok's voice arrived in his head through Message. We can't leave him.

We have to, Don Juan sent back. The mission—

They're going to roast him alive. I'm not walking past that.

A pause. Don Juan looked at the halfling on the spit — the ropes, the goblins' hands, the fire being stoked to roasting temperature. He made a decision he knew he would regret.

He reached out and pulled sleep down over them.

In the corner of his eye, Zarok flickered into view — the dragonborn's outline shimmering back into existence the moment the spell left Don Juan's hands. Invisibility, gone. Don Juan felt it fall from himself too, like a cloak slipping off his shoulders. Concentration. The spell required concentration, and he had just cast another. Of all the things to forget in the middle of an infiltration.

But the sleep took hold. The four goblins around the spit slumped where they stood — mid-knot, mid-prod — dropping to the floor in a tangle of green limbs. The halfling's eyes rolled back and he went limp on the spit, snoring gently.

The two goblins by the fire hadn't noticed. They were still arguing, still stoking, still facing the flames. Then the kitchen went quiet — no more squealing halfling, no more goblin chatter — and one of them turned. "Hey," it barked. "Get back to work."

Don Juan and Zarok were already behind the curtain.

The goblin squinted at the pile of sleeping bodies. Stood up. Started walking toward them.

Don Juan cast again. Both fire goblins dropped.

The room was silent except for the soft, collective snoring of six goblins and one halfling.

Don Juan looked at his mud-caked, very visible hands. Looked at Zarok. The dragonborn shrugged.

"We can't leave them," Zarok said.

"We can't take them with us," Don Juan said. "The Bag of Holding — it would take too long. Some would wake up before we finished."

"Tie them up?"

"Same problem."

A pause. The kind of pause where two decent men arrive at an indecent conclusion and wait for the other to say it first.

"They were going to roast a halfling," Zarok said.

Don Juan drew his sword.

It did not go well.

The first goblin — the one Don Juan stabbed — did not die. It woke up. The blade hit wrong, or not hard enough, or the goblin was tougher than it looked, and it lurched upright with a shriek that would have woken everything in the den if Zarok's axe hadn't ended the sound a half-second later.

Zarok looked at the remaining goblins. Three of them lay close together near the spit. He drew a breath — a deep, deliberate breath, the kind that meant lightning.

Don Juan saw what was coming. His mouth opened — wait, don't, the noise — but the breath was already leaving the dragonborn's jaws.

The lightning hit all three. One died. The other two woke up, singed and terrified, and bolted for the exit without looking back.

Don Juan caught one with a whisper that struck like a blow inside its skull — the goblin seized, screamed, and crumpled. He rounded on the other. "Stop. Right. There." His voice carried the full weight of a paladin's authority, amplified by the kind of cold fury that made even creatures with no concept of honour reconsider their choices. "Unless you want to end up like your friend."

The goblin stopped.

Inside the vessel, Dustin had been listening to muffled chaos — thumps, shrieks, the unmistakable sizzle of lightning breath, and now Don Juan's voice, clear enough to understand, talking to someone in a tone that suggested negotiations were not going well.

He climbed out. One moment the space next to Don Juan was empty, the next Dustin was standing there — a half-elf bard materialising in the middle of a goblin kitchen, taking in the scene of dead goblins, two survivors, a halfling tied to a spit, and two of his friends covered in mud.

He raised his hands and loosed a bolt of crackling force at the goblin Don Juan had been talking to. It hit. The goblin hit the wall. It did not get up.

He turned to the nearest sleeping goblin and aimed. Fired. Missed. The blast hit the wall and the goblin woke up, eyes wide, mouth opening to scream.

Zarok was there before the sound came out. The axe fell. The last sleeping goblin never got the chance to wake up.

They stood in the afternoon heat of a filthy kitchen, surrounded by dead goblins and the gentle snoring of a halfling who had slept through the entire thing.

"So much for no fighting," Dustin said.

The halfling stirred. His eyes opened on a ceiling he had not expected to see again, a pile of dead goblins he had not expected to see ever, and three armed strangers — two of them caked head-to-foot in riverbank mud — standing in the middle of the kitchen looking at him.

He took this in. He did not scream.

"Easy," Don Juan said, and started cutting the ropes.

Zarok lifted him off the spit and set him on his feet. The halfling rubbed his wrists and looked from face to face with the bright, working eyes of someone whose mind had decided to be useful before his body had caught up.

"Rodrick," he said. "My name. Rodrick." He glanced at the spit, at the fire, at the goblins on the floor. "I'll be quick. There are a few more of us. Held below — somewhere through that, I think." He nodded toward the hole in the corner — the wide, ragged opening that had been buzzing with flies since the party entered the room. The smell rolled up out of it like something with weight. "I don't know exactly. A few."

Zarok looked at the hole. He did not say anything. He did not have to.

The air beside Don Juan shimmered grey, and Mindartis stepped out of it.

"Ah," Don Juan said, without looking. "Glad you could join us."

Mindartis gave him a slightly annoyed look and surveyed the kitchen.

They worked the plan out fast. Don Juan and Zarok would go up the watchtower outside and take care of the hobgoblins on top. Mindartis would stay behind and burn the goblin corpses — six bodies in a kitchen would announce intruders to whoever walked in next. Dustin and Rodrick would step outside and watch the door, and not climb the tower.

"Invisibility on Dustin and Rodrick," Mindartis said. "Then me."

He gestured at Dustin, and Dustin watched his own legs become a thing only he could see. Rodrick blinked out next, with a small startled noise. Mindartis flickered out a moment later where he stood. Don Juan whispered his own version of the spell, and he and Zarok went too.

The kitchen, a few seconds later, contained six dead goblins, a fire, and the empty look of a room nobody was in.

Rodrick, made invisible for the first time in his short life, settled on a dry observation. "I see," he said. "Yes. Good."

Don Juan and Zarok left the kitchen, slipped along the western wall of the steading, and climbed the watchtower hand over hand on the rough log timbers. Sixty feet up, in afternoon sun, in nothing but mud and undershirts and the strange weightlessness of being unseen. At the top they paused below the lip of the platform, listening. Three voices in clipped Goblin, three pairs of feet on the boards, three guards facing outward at the points of a triangle.

They went up together.

What followed was brief and not honourable. Each of them grabbed the nearest hobgoblin by the ankles, hauled, and tipped him over the edge before the third could turn. The third turned. He had a moment to register the empty platform, the absence of friends, the suggestion of a hand at his ankle, and then he was over too. Three bodies fell sixty feet to the dirt at the base of the bluff in dull, heavy succession.

Rodrick was at the base of the bluff to receive them.

He had drifted there. The novelty of being made invisible for the first time in his life tended to push minor instructions like stay at the door and watch out of the front of a halfling's mind, especially a halfling who had spent the morning tied to a roasting spit. Rodrick had wandered out from under the kitchen curtain, stayed close to the wall as he'd been told, then — without quite meaning to — drifted around the side of the steading and up toward the foot of the watchtower, on the principle that the tower was where the interesting things were happening. He was standing at the base, deeply pleased with his own stealth, when a hobgoblin landed in the dirt three feet from him.

The scream that came out of Rodrick was not invisible.

Two more hobgoblins followed. Rodrick continued to scream.

Up on the tower, Don Juan registered the voice, recognised it, and sent a single line of telepathic instruction down to the halfling — Quiet. It's us. He realised, half a second after the words had left him, what he had just done. The magic holding him and Zarok unseen unspooled like a cut thread.

They flickered into view on the platform.

Zarok looked at Don Juan. Don Juan did not meet his eyes. Zarok shook his head, slowly, once, and went back to scanning the den below.

Outside the kitchen, Dustin had realised some minutes ago that the place where Rodrick was supposed to be no longer contained a Rodrick. He had spent some of the intervening time being concerned, some of it being annoyed, and was now picking his way invisible up the slope, working toward the screaming.

In the kitchen, Mindartis heard the noise from the bluff and resigned himself to the next thing. He was at the third corpse when the docks-side curtain twitched and a hobgoblin pushed through with a fishing rod over his shoulder, his face set in the determined irritation of someone going to find out who was making the noise. The hobgoblin glanced once around the kitchen, saw nothing of interest behind the table, and pushed through the bluff-side curtain heading uphill.

Mindartis followed him out.

On the slope, Dustin saw the hobgoblin emerge from the steading ahead of him with the rod over his shoulder. He held still. Behind the hobgoblin, on the same path, the air bent slightly around something Dustin could not quite see.

Mindartis raised his hands. Three rays of fire took the hobgoblin between the shoulder blades. He dropped where he stood, rod and all, and did not get up.

The spell holding Dustin and Rodrick faded with Mindartis's attention, and the two of them flickered back into the world on the slope. So did Mindartis. The bluff, in the space of a breath, contained five visible people and four dead hobgoblins, and the den had not yet — somehow — registered any of it.

Don Juan and Zarok came down off the tower, picking their handholds with care. Rodrick had stopped screaming. They worked fast. Don Juan, Zarok, and Mindartis dragged the four corpses across the bluff and rolled them down the slope into the river below. The bodies hit the water with heavy splashes, sank, then resurfaced. Mindartis took up the dead hobgoblin's fishing rod, stepped to the water's edge, and used it to push the corpses out from the bank into the current. The river took them downstream toward the bend in the gorge.

The voice came up out of the steading like something rolling out of a cave.

"Where is my halfling. I am hungry."

It carried across the bluff with the weight of something the ground felt before the ear did. Inside, the steading went quiet, the way a room goes quiet around the speaker of an unanswered question. Then it began to move. Curtains pushed aside. Bodies the size of houses getting up from where they had been sitting.

Mindartis was nearest the east-side curtain when the voice hit. He did not have time to think. He ran to the curtain, leaned in, and called back in his very best, very urgent goblin: "Almost, almost, coming right up."

It was in Common.

Don Juan turned to look at Mindartis. Zarok turned to look at Mindartis. Dustin turned to look at Mindartis. Mindartis did not meet any of their eyes. He stepped back from the curtain.

Inside the steading, the silence took a different shape — the shape of two large somethings deciding to come and look in person.

"Give me the rod," Dustin said. "Quickly. You guys, hide."

Mindartis handed it over. Dustin's armor rippled under his hands; the studded leather flattened into the dull look of hobgoblin gear, and the colours of his coat shifted muddy and grey. From a distance, in the wrong light, he was a hobgoblin holding a fishing rod.

The party hid fast. Don Juan and Zarok ducked behind the tower base. Mindartis put a stand of brush and the curve of the steading wall between himself and any line of sight from the front.

Dustin moved. He went down the bluff slope to the water's edge, closer to the docks, and sat on the bank with the rod in his hands. Rodrick had drifted along after him and tucked himself into a bush a few yards off, on the riverside. Dustin cast the rod into the water.

Then he raised his other hand and conjured a guard onto the tower platform sixty feet above him. The illusion took shape standing where the real ones had stood — a hobgoblin in chain mail, facing outward, watching nothing. Dustin held the image in his attention, his fingers half-curled.

Two ogres pushed through the front curtain.

They came out heavy-footed and squinting in the sun, clubs at their shoulders, looking everywhere at once. They saw the hobgoblin on the tower. They called up at him in a clipped grunt that wasn't quite a word. Down at the water, Dustin twitched a finger; on the platform, the guard lifted a hand, slow and bored, and waved. The ogres watched the wave. Dustin gave them a second one, on a different rhythm, after a beat. They scanned the bluff once more. Empty. No bodies. No noise. A guard at his post.

One ogre said something to the other. The second shrugged with most of the upper body, planted his club butt-down in the dirt, and stayed where he was. The first ducked the curtain and went back inside.

Dustin, at the water's edge, did not move. The rod in his hand was very still. The guard sixty feet above him kept watching nothing at all.

Inside the steading, the giants worked it out. The voice that had asked after a halfling went quiet, replaced by other voices — fewer, lower, conferring. Then footsteps. Then the kitchen's docks-side curtain pushed aside.

A hill giant came through, an ogre at his heels. They came out onto the docks with irritation thick on both faces.

They saw Dustin. A hobgoblin sat at the water's edge with a rod, back to them, watching the line.

The hill giant called something at him — short, half-Goblin half-Common, the kind of shout giants used when they couldn't be bothered to choose. "Halfling. Killed goblins. Escaped. Watch."

Dustin's lips did not move. A gruff hobgoblin voice came out for him anyway, short and irritated: "I watch."

"You see anything?"

"Nothing. No one. Just fish."

The ogre leaned forward. "Why your voice so strange?"

Dustin made a sound that was, in honest interpretation, a hobgoblin clearing its throat. He waved a hand vaguely at his neck and patted his chest, as if something had gone the wrong way down. He kept his back turned the entire time.

The hill giant said something to the ogre that sounded like agreement. They both looked at the rod a moment longer. Then they turned and went back through the curtain. The kitchen swallowed them.

Behind the steading wall, Mindartis pressed flat and listened.

Inside the kitchen, the hill giant was telling the ogre something. "That Watermaster — strange one. Not healthy. Should eat more meat, not fish all time. No good. See what come of it." The ogre made a noise that was probably yes. Then: "Down. Check downstairs." The voices moved away. Wood creaked under heavy boots; a ladder took the weight; the kitchen went quiet.

Don Juan's voice arrived in Zarok's head, and in Mindartis's, and in Dustin's. He's still by himself. We might overpower him quickly.

A beat. Mindartis came back: Coast clear. They've gone down the kitchen ladder. Nothing else moving inside.

Don Juan and Zarok worked along the back of the tower and around to the steading's blind side. The ogre had not turned; he was watching the river. Mindartis held his wall position.

Zarok closed first. He drew the Giant Slayer axe, settled the spell into his weapon hand, and the last twenty feet went under his boots fast. The ogre never turned. The first stroke caught him across the back of the neck — the axe bit deep, and a flash of golden light came off the steel as it landed, the radiance going through the ogre without sound. The second stroke landed clean and true through the same shoulder. The ogre was dead before he got his club out of the dirt.

Don Juan arrived a beat later, sword drawn, and found nothing left to do.

Down at the water's edge, Dustin set the rod against a stone and stood up. He turned for the first time since he had sat down. In a bush a few yards off — between him and the empty dock where the giant and the ogre had stood not a minute ago — Rodrick was trembling visibly.

The party gathered out of the steading's main sightline a few minutes later. Dustin had coaxed Rodrick out of his bush and walked him up to the others; the halfling had stopped trembling, mostly.

For a moment nobody spoke. Then Dustin said it.

"I don't know how the rest of you feel. But I'm not stealing the conch and leaving."

Don Juan looked at him.

"This place can't just keep being this place," Dustin said. "Not while we're standing here."

"Agreed," Zarok said.

Mindartis nodded once. He had been wearing the expression of a man counting the people they had already killed, and he wore it without comment.

"Then we need a better picture," Don Juan said. "We've seen the front. We've heard the voice. We don't know how many are on that ledge, where the windows sit, where the chief actually is. We need all of that before we move."

"Give me a minute," Mindartis said. "I'll go up."

A pause.

"As a hawk."

Don Juan opened his mouth. "Don't Messa—" he started, and stopped, having seen the look on Mindartis's face. "I probably don't need to remind you of this."

Mindartis did not dignify it with a reply. He spoke a high elf word, soft and precise, and there was no Mindartis. A hawk stood in his place — brown and white-banded, the size of his cupped hands. After a moment of standing where he had stood, it took two short steps and lifted into the afternoon air.

The hawk climbed. It cleared the steading roof, banked, and circled.

From above, Grudd Haug was uglier than from below. The hawk passed over the eastern yard — a tall log palisade enclosing a stockyard, a campfire in the middle, seven orcs around it lounging or arguing in postures that suggested neither vigilance nor speed. Penned alongside them, a herd of sheep, mostly facing the same direction, mostly chewing.

The hawk swung west and came around the long wall of the great hall. Through high windows it saw the goblins. Six of them, on a wide ledge that ran around the upper inside of the hall twenty feet above the floor, with bows.

It found a sill on the western side and landed.

The hall was bigger than it had any right to be. Iron sconces with oil lamps spaced along the timber walls. A floor that was mostly mud and bone. Eight long tables, most of them empty, some scattered with food and casks. Two pits in the centre, beam-covered, smelling of pigs.

At the west end of the hall, on a flatbed wagon that no longer had functional wheels, was the largest hill giant Mindartis had ever seen. She was easily three times the bulk of any male hill giant. The wagon under her sagged in ways no wagon ought to sag. Around her: two more hill giants, male, stacked against the support pillars, and two ogres standing within reach, ready to serve.

A goblin shouted. The hawk's eye caught the motion above — a goblin on the ledge had spotted it and was nocking an arrow.

The hawk did not wait for the arrow. It pushed off the sill and dropped down the outside of the wall, climbing back up only when it was clear of bowshot.

It returned to the party in a long arc.

Mindartis came back as Mindartis a few feet from where he had launched. He blinked once and reported.

"Seven orcs, stockyard, around a fire. Sheep in pens. Six goblins on a ledge running around the great hall — they have bows. Inside the hall, on a wagon at the west end, a female hill giant — I'd call her enormous — and two more hill giants with her, and two ogres. That is what I saw."

A beat. The others took a moment with the count.

"Right," Don Juan said.

"What about below?" Dustin said.

Don Juan turned to Rodrick. "How many of you were there?"

Rodrick shook his head, then nodded, then shook it again. "I — they kept us in different places. There were some of us. I think. I wasn't paying attention, I was —" He stopped. "I'm sorry."

"That's all right. Were any of them in any shape to help us?"

"I don't know." Rodrick looked smaller. "I don't think any of them were like me."

Mindartis was already considering the way down. "I'll go again."

He turned and was a hawk before the words finished settling.

The hawk went out wide and dropped into the eastern stockyard from above, weaving between the orcs at the campfire and a knot of milling sheep. None of them noticed. At the western wall, a wide opening in the log dam let the river through; the hawk took the same route, low to the water, and came out into a cavern lit by oil lamps and the dim river-glow of a stream that cut across the eastern half of the room.

Pigs. Dozens of them, fat and squealing and rolling in mud. Mud-covered bugbears moved among them, tossing slops into wooden troughs and pushing the bigger pigs back from the smaller. The hawk counted six bugbears.

In the centre of the room, taller than the rest by a margin nobody would mistake, stood an ettin. Two heads, two arguments, one body. The heads were disagreeing; the body kept feeding pigs.

The hawk did not approach the ettin. It found a high beam near the eastern wall and held still.

At the far end of the cavern, the hill giant and the ogre were walking down into the pen at slow, methodical steps, working their way through the pigs. The hawk watched them clearly enough. What it could not see was past them — whatever passage they had come down from was behind their backs. And the ettin's mass kept the river-side third of the cavern out of the hawk's view, a column of shadow it had no way to look into.

It was enough.

The hawk took off, banked low across the cavern, and slipped into a passage on the eastern side. The passage opened on two adjoining caves, both smelling of unwashed bedding. A hill giant slept on a filthy pallet in each, snoring with the slow rhythm of mountains breathing. The hawk passed close to the ceiling, slipped between them, and came out the other side, where a tunnel sloped up to the open air at the foot of the bluff.

It returned to the party in a long arc.

Mindartis came back as Mindartis. He blinked once and reported.

"Six bugbears in the main cavern, with an ettin. They're feeding pigs. Two more hill giants in an adjoining cave, sleeping. The search party — the hill giant and the ogre — were walking down into the pen from the far end while I was watching. I'd guess that's where the kitchen ladder comes out, but I couldn't see past them. And the ettin's bulk kept me from seeing the river side of the centre."

He paused. "I didn't see prisoners."

A beat. Don Juan looked at Rodrick.

"Maybe in side rooms," Rodrick said. "I don't — I don't know."

"That's all right," Don Juan said.

For a long time nobody spoke. Don Juan stared at the bluff with the look of a man counting again, hoping the second pass would yield a smaller number. It did not.

"In the hall," he said at last, "six goblin archers on the ledge. Two hill giants. Two ogres. The chief on her wagon. Seven orcs around the fire in the stockyard. Below — two more giants asleep, an ettin, six bugbears in the pen. The search party somewhere down there with them, a hill giant and an ogre. We're four. And a halfling."

"And Kürbis," Dustin said. "He's been alone in the grass for hours now. He'll be worried. We have to get him word — and when we want the horn we have to tell him when."

"Mindartis flies," Don Juan said. "Before the diversion. He tells him what's happening and where to wait."

Mindartis nodded once. "Save the horn for the hall. We don't blow it on a distraction we can run ourselves."

They sat down with their backs to the steading wall on the bluff side, out of the den's main lines of sight. Don Juan pulled trail rations from his belt pouch and passed them around. Mindartis took his and ate without looking at it, his other hand moving through the small leather pouch at his hip — checking pinches, counting feathers, the kind of attention a wizard paid to his components without thinking about it. Rodrick ate the way a man eats who had, an hour or two earlier, expected to be eaten himself. Don Juan watched him for a moment and quietly handed him a second ration.

The afternoon settled. Insects in the grass. The low breath of the river. Heat coming off the timber wall behind them. Somewhere inside the steading a giant laughed at something, and the wall vibrated faintly.

Mindartis straightened.

"Kitchen," he said. "I left a ward at the curtain after we put the ogre down. It just tripped. Someone came back through."

Don Juan worked it out fast. "The search party. Up the ladder, through the kitchen, into the hall. They're back inside."

"Which means nothing is between here and the kitchen," Zarok said.

"For the moment."

Dustin was already thinking about the stockyard. "We can't take the hall straight on. We have to thin it. The orcs at the fire — if they leave that post, the sheep behind them are nothing but a pen and a latch. Rodrick runs them out."

Rodrick made a small noise that meant can he, though. Nobody else heard it.

"To get the orcs to leave," Dustin went on, "we make them think they're needed. The dam opening — I plant an illusion at the mouth. Panicked screams from below. A bugbear stumbles out waving, gesturing for help, and ducks back in. The orcs run after to see what's happening."

"Sheep loose in the stockyard brings giants out," Mindartis said.

"The hall thins."

Rodrick cleared his throat. "About the sheep."

The others turned to look at him.

"There'll be quite a few of them. Running."

"You can keep them," Don Juan said. "All of them. If you get clear of here with the lot, they're yours."

Rodrick considered this. He looked at the bluff, the dam, the river. He looked back at Don Juan. "And you will not send anybody after me."

Zarok looked at the others, then at the halfling. "We will not."

A pause.

"And then," Dustin said, "we are not stealing the conch and leaving."

Don Juan looked at him for a beat. Then he reached down, settled his sword belt half an inch, and nodded.

"Agreed," Zarok said.

"One thing first," Dustin said. "The kitchen ladder. It joins the hall to the basement. We pull it up. Cuts the den in two — whatever we engage stays where it is. No reinforcements, no retreat down the ladder."

Don Juan considered this. Nodded.

"What's at the bottom?" he said, turning to Rodrick.

Rodrick swallowed his ration. "The butcher."

"Tell us."

"Hill giant. He cuts the pigs apart. Big knife. He stays down there mostly. He's the one — he's the one they bring you to, when —" He stopped.

Don Juan did not press.

"Pulling a ladder is loud," Zarok said. "If he's awake at the foot of it and we start working at the timbers, he shouts."

"So we don't pull it while he's there," Don Juan said. "We do what we did outside. Down quiet. Take him before he sees us. Then the ladder."

"And then the diversion."

"And then the diversion."

Don Juan stood and brushed grass off his trousers. The others stood with him.

They went back through the bluff curtain into the kitchen. The fire was still burning. The ash where the goblins had been was cooling. The hole in the corner of the floor was where they had not yet looked — a square mouth in the boards, a heavy timber ladder going down into lamplight.

Dustin went first. He moved on the rungs the way a thief moves, weight on the balls of his feet, hand only where it had to be. Mindartis followed and made a rung creak twice. Don Juan came down too quickly. Zarok came down last with all the care he could manage, which was not much — quiet had never been his gift, and the rungs knew it. By the time the third had complained, the room below had heard them.

It was a stone-walled chamber lit by an iron lamp and the bleed of light from the kitchen. A chopping block in the centre, scarred to splinters. Pig carcasses on hooks along one wall, the smell thick enough to taste. A small wooden door at the back. And at the chopping block, in a leather apron stained black to the knees, both hands red, a hill giant looking up at the ladder.

He had been working on a pig. He set the cleaver down. He took a small hammer down off a rack at his hip. He did not come at them.

Halfway down, Dustin let the blasts go. Two flares of cold light from the ladder. Both went wide — past the giant's shoulder, past his hip, into the stone wall behind him. Dustin stared at his own hands. He had not whiffed a target like that in a long time. He let himself down another rung.

The giant moved. He took up the half-butchered pig at his feet by a back leg and hurled it underhand at the bottom of the ladder. Zarok and Don Juan, both still descending, flattened themselves against the rungs. The carcass slammed into the stone behind them, dropped, and lay there.

He pulled a greataxe off the rack with his free hand.

The party reached the floor.

Dustin spoke a word under his breath and traced a sign with his free hand. The air at the giant's shoulder went a fraction cold. Then a colder syllable, and from somewhere below the floor a bell tolled, deep and short. The giant grunted and hunched, taking the toll badly inside.

Don Juan pulled a javelin off his belt — one of two he had taken from the dead ogre on the bluff — and threw. It went into the giant's thigh and stayed. He drew his sword and went in.

Beside him, Mindartis spoke a different word and folded forward into something else. Where the elf had been, a black-furred ape stood, knuckles to the floor, the giant's size. It charged.

Zarok closed first, the Giant Slayer axe in both hands. The blade went through the apron, through what was beneath, and a flash of golden light came off the steel as it landed. Don Juan's sword took the giant across the wrist of the hammer-hand. The small hammer fell. The giant turned to the next thing and took the second hit poorly.

The ape took it from there. The fists came down — once, twice, three times. The butcher folded against the chopping block and did not get up.

The room went quiet. A pig carcass on its hook swung once and stopped. The lamp guttered.

Don Juan walked to where the small hammer had fallen and picked it up. He turned it over. He turned it over again. Light from the lamp caught it from one side and then the other.

"Huh," he said.

"What."

"I think this might be part of the legendary Gamma Set." He looked up at the others. "The little hammer. There's supposed to be a chisel and a saw, too."

Nobody asked. He put the hammer in his belt.

Mindartis pushed open the small wooden door at the back. He came back out with a sack of coins on one shoulder and another sack twitching by his hand. He held the second one up. A chicken, head out through a tear in the bloody linen, looked at the lamp and then at Mindartis, and clucked once.

He set both down by the chopping block. The chicken looked at the lamp.

The cavern they had come down into widened toward the far end — a low ceiling, a wet floor, the chopping block at the back beneath the kitchen ladder, and at the front an open mouth as wide as a barn door, opening onto something brighter and bigger.

They moved up to the edge of that mouth in single file and stopped where the cavern's light still gave them shadow.

Beyond it lay the main cave Mindartis had described from the hawk. Wide and low and lit by oil lamps and the dim river-glow he'd warned them about. The smell came first — pigs, dung, wet straw, and under it the same butcher-stink that hung off the walls behind them. Pens of fat animals shifting in mud. A small stream cutting across the eastern half. And in the middle of it all, the ettin, two heads on one body, planted like a tree someone had grown wrong on purpose.

A bugbear was leading three pigs on a frayed rope toward him.

Don Juan eased back first. Then Zarok, then Mindartis, then Dustin. They withdrew across the cavern floor and stopped near the chopping block, where the butcher's body was still where they had left him at the end of the previous fight.

"The body," Don Juan said. "We need to hide it. If anything comes down and sees him on the floor, we lose everything we have done in here."

It took the four of them. Slub had been a hill giant; he was hill-giant-shaped dead weight now. They went under his shoulders and his ankles and dragged him in slow, ugly pulls toward the wide opening at the back of the cavern that led into the butcher's own quarters. The room beyond was sizable — wide enough to swing a club in, lit dim by a single oil lamp, with a stained pallet against the back wall and Slub's barrels and crates along the side. It was where Mindartis had earlier found the coin sack and the chicken. They laid the body beside the pallet, straightened, and stepped back to the opening.

"He'll come this way," Don Juan murmured. "The bugbear's bringing him the pigs. The butcher's not coming out to greet him."

Zarok set his back against the rock just inside the sleeping cave's wide opening and his axe across his knees. Mindartis lowered the chicken sack to the floor next to him. The chicken made a small noise and then was sensible enough to stop.

Dustin traced a slow figure with his fingers. At the chopping block in the cavern outside, the butcher stepped back into existence — apron and all, a fresh pig already on the block in front of him, his cleaver rising and falling in the slow rhythm of work a man had done a thousand times. Dustin set the image facing away from the sleeping cave, so the back of it was what anything coming through the cave-mouth would see first. From inside, they had a three-quarter view of it: the shoulders shifting, the cleaver swinging, the meat being parted.

They watched.

The cleaver kept falling. The meat kept parting. After a few minutes of this, the rhythm of the butcher at his block began to take on a quality nobody had asked it to take on. The cleaver fell; nothing made a sound. The pig parted; nothing was wet. The butcher did not breathe. He did not adjust his grip. He did not pause, he did not sigh. He kept working in the absolute silence of a man who was not there. Mindartis shifted a little and looked at the floor.

After long enough, Dustin moved his fingers.

Out in the cavern, the butcher set the cleaver down on the block and walked the few paces toward the wide mouth between the two caves. Dustin slipped out of the sleeping cave behind him, soft-footed, and tucked himself against the rock of the cave-mouth where he could see past the butcher's shoulder into the main cave beyond.

The image stopped at the threshold with its shoulders set as if it had merely stepped over to call across.

What Dustin could see of the main cave was thinner than he had been picturing. Three pigs on a rope. The rope tied off to a low rock at the spot where Mindartis's hawk had put the ettin the last time, the line still taut and the pigs still pulling at it. But no ettin. The bugbears were busy at the pens further in. None of them was anywhere near the pigs.

The butcher raised an arm — Dustin's fingers raised behind him — and waved at the nearest bugbears.

A voice came back across the pens — high, irritated, in the rough common of the den.

"What do you want? Oinke-Boinke is with the prisoners."

Rodrick had given them the name earlier on the bluff; it had sounded like a small joke at the time. It sounded less small now.

The voice added, almost as an afterthought, "He'll be with you soon."

Dustin held the image a moment longer, then turned it. The butcher took two heavy steps back from the threshold — back toward the chopping block and the kitchen ladder at the wall behind it — scratched at the side of his neck like a man losing interest in whatever he had been about to ask, and walked off the way a man walks off who has remembered he had work waiting at his table.

Dustin slipped back into the sleeping cave fast.

"It's the ettin," he said, voice low. "He's coming. Get ready for an ambush."

Zarok was already on his feet.

The wait was short. A heavy footfall in the main cave shifted direction, and the slow shuffle they had been hearing began to come across the pens, toward the wide mouth. A new sound joined it — the disgruntled chorus of pigs being pulled somewhere they did not want to go.

The ettin filled the mouth between the two caves.

He came through it side-on, two heads ducking in turn, three pigs tied at the leash and dragging behind him. He stepped a few paces into the cavern, wound the rope around the leg of a side table by the wall, and pulled the knot tight with the flat of his thumb. The pigs strained against it once, decided that was as far as the world went today, and gave up. Then he looked across the cavern at the butcher.

The butcher, now near the chopping block, looked at the block.

The two heads conferred. The left one — narrower, smaller in the eyes, mouth set in a permanent downward curl — said something short and impatient in a tongue that wasn't quite Common. The right one answered with the soothing patience of a man who had lived his whole life trying to keep his other half out of trouble.

The butcher gave no sign of having heard either of them. He picked up nothing. He turned, very slowly, and walked further toward the back wall — toward the foot of the kitchen ladder.

The left head said something sharper.

The butcher kept walking.

Dustin lifted a finger, and the butcher's hand came up over its shoulder — not a wave; a different gesture entirely, one bugbears and giants and most other creatures with eyes had recognised since the world had had hands to make it. The butcher made it without looking back.

The left head's mouth opened.

The right head's mouth opened too, but in a different way, with the look of a man watching a small fire become a larger one and finding himself unable to step between them.

The butcher reached the back wall, turned, and made the gesture again — slower.

Don Juan was tucked back into the sleeping cave with the others, sword drawn, an eye out around the corner. He had been watching the left head for some time now, the way a duellist watches the foot that will commit. He did not raise his voice. He let the words go across the cavern in the conversational register of a man making an observation at a dinner table.

"Your mother had only one head," he said. "And your father was a pig."

The left head flinched the way a man flinched when something landed inside his skull that had not gone through his ears. Its eyes watered. Its mouth worked.

The right head turned. It had not felt what the left head had felt. It looked at its twin the way a brother looks at a brother who has just been struck by a stone the brother did not see thrown — confused, half a question forming, a hand starting to come up.

The hand never got there.

The left head's mouth opened and a roar came out of the body that belonged to both of them.

The right head went where the body went.

He charged the butcher.

The ettin's charge took him past the sleeping cave's mouth without a glance toward it. The four of them pressed back into the dark of the recess and let him go.

He reached the butcher in three long strides across the cavern. The morningstar came up off his shoulder — a black iron head the size of a cooking pot, studs each the length of a finger — and came down in a swing meant to crush a man into the floor.

It went through.

The momentum carried him a half-step past where the butcher had stood. The morningstar hit the back wall, sparked, and rang against the stone. His left foot slid in the wet, and for a moment the body that had been a charge became a body trying to find itself again.

The right head looked at where the butcher should have been and was not.

The left head was still trying to understand the weight of a swing that had hit nothing.

Dustin broke first. He stepped from the sleeping cave with his hand already up, and a pair of cold streaks left it — two flares of crackling force that took the ettin between the shoulder blades. Mindartis came out beside him: a sphere of light gathered between his fingers and was gone in the same breath, crossing the cavern in a clean line, bursting against the ettin's ribs in a crack of thunder that rolled in the closed stone.

Zarok stepped clear of the recess and pointed.

A column of golden radiance fell on the ettin from above as if the ceiling were no longer there. It caught him across the back of the left head — the head that had begun the roar — and the roar broke off into something rawer.

The butcher dissolved like a held breath.

He turned.

The four of them were already out of the sleeping cave and spread across the cavern floor, weapons up, the kitchen ladder somewhere behind the ettin's back and nothing between them but stone. The ettin found them and chose them without thinking. The pigs were screaming at the leg of the side table, the rope drawn tight enough to creak. The lamps were swinging. He came.

Don Juan stepped wide as the ettin closed, sword drawn, the looted javelin held back in the other hand. Zarok took the centre of the floor.

The Giant Slayer axe was already in both his hands.

He met the charge with both feet planted and the blade going up to meet a shoulder that had no idea it was about to find an axe in its path. The hit landed on the same line the column of light had taken — same head, same shoulder, the steel finding what the radiance had marked. There was a flash of gold across the edge as the metal bit, and the left head's roar ended in a noise that was neither word nor shout nor anything Zarok had heard before.

The ettin went to his knees.

The right head looked at the left.

Then the body fell sideways, slowly, and lay still on the wet stone.

The pain-cry — that last broken sound — had been loud.

The four of them held their positions. Nobody moved. Don Juan's eyes were on the cave-mouth.

A pig squealed in the corner. Another joined it. The lamps swung. The cavern beyond the passage breathed its slow breath — pigs, water, the shuffle of bugbears doing bugbear work in another part of the room.

Nothing called back. Nothing came to look.

Zarok exhaled, slowly. "Heard nothing they wanted to investigate," he said.

"Or they heard him die," Mindartis said, "and assumed he had killed something."

"Either way," Don Juan said. "We don't wait."

They went for the wide mouth at the front of the cavern in a low, fast walk that kept their boots out of the worst of the wet.

They were halfway across when the first two bugbears came through it the other way.

Both parties saw each other at the same time. One of the bugbears had a hatchet hanging loose at his belt and a hand already moving toward it; the other had nothing in his hands at all and stopped dead, mouth opening, eyes going wide enough to catch the lamplight.

Don Juan was first. He closed the last steps in two long strides and his sword took the unarmed bugbear across the throat before the throat had finished its surprise. Zarok hit the second across the shoulder with the flat axe and tried for a clean knock-out blow that did not quite land — the bugbear staggered, kept his feet, and shouted.

"Intruders!"

The word carried into the main cave like a thrown stone.

Zarok's second swing came down before the third syllable could form. The bugbear dropped beside the first.

The two bodies were still falling when the rest of the main cave moved.

Two more bugbears, in different parts of the pen, broke at the same instant — going in different directions.

One bolted east, along the wall, toward a low opening in the rock the party had not yet had time to see properly. Captives, Dustin thought. The bugbear was already through it before any of them had a clean shot.

The other one ran for the closest hole in the ceiling.

In the middle of the main cave, beneath the highest point of the roof, a ragged hole went straight up into nothing. The bugbear planted himself directly under it, threw his head back, and started to shout.

Dustin loosed. The blast went wide — a streak of force across the bugbear's shoulder that hit nothing but the wet wall behind him. He stared at his own hand.

Mindartis raised his palm and three rays of fire crossed the cave. One missed. Two caught — one across the chest, one along the side of the neck. The bugbear took both standing.

Zarok pointed. The same column of golden light from before fell on him from above. He swayed under it. He did not fall.

He drew breath.

Zarok already had the hand crossbow up. He had drawn it on the way out of the sleeping cave and forgotten he was carrying it. The bolt left the string with the soft thock of a thing that costs less effort than it ought to, and crossed the cave faster than a shout could form.

It hit him in the throat.

The bugbear's mouth was open. No sound came out of it. He sat down against the wall under his ceiling-hole, slowly, the way a drunk sat down when he had run out of legs, and after a moment he stopped moving.

Above, through the ragged opening, the den breathed its slow breath. Nothing called back.

Four exchanged a look across the cave — the kind of look that did all its conversation in a single second.

"Ladder," Don Juan said.

He was already running back across the cavern toward the kitchen wall. The Giant Slayer, in Zarok's hands, swung once toward the low opening the running bugbear had taken.

"Prisoners," Zarok said.

Dustin and Mindartis were already moving with him.

Behind them, in the cavern, Don Juan reached the foot of the kitchen ladder.

It was a heavy timber thing, lashed and pegged into the stone. He set his shoulder against the bottom rung, looked up the length of it once to be sure of where the top went, and pulled. The ladder came over slowly at first, then all at once, and crashed sideways against the cavern wall in a roll of splintered wood and dust. The kitchen above the rim of the hole went very dark and very far away.

He turned to start running back across the cavern and saw Rodrick.

The halfling was standing near the chopping block, hands at his sides, looking a little at a loss in a room that had just emptied of the party. He flinched when Don Juan came at him.

"With me," Don Juan said, not slowing. "Run. Follow."

Rodrick fell in behind him without a word.

In the captives' cave, Dustin had already stepped through the low opening, Zarok and Mindartis at his shoulders.

It was a smaller room than he had expected. Three wooden cages lined the wall — heavy bars set into rough stone — and lamps on the wall threw long shadows. The first cage was empty. The second held a family: two adults, two daughters, a son. Their faces turned to the doorway in the same motion, the way faces in a cell turned to whatever the next sound brought. The third cage held a single man — broad-shouldered, dark-haired, weathered the way men weathered who had spent most of their lives outdoors and most of recent weeks indoors. There were old marks on his arms in the shape of something with antlers.

A bugbear stood between the cages — the one who had run. He was breathing hard and reaching for a club leaning against the wall.

Dustin loosed first. A pair of cold streaks took the bugbear across the chest. He staggered back into the bars of the empty cage, kept his feet, and did not drop his hand from the club.

Behind them, two more bugbears came in fast from the main cave at the party's back. They had not been on the floor when the party had crossed it; they had not come from any direction the party had eyes on.

The first reached Mindartis. He turned in time to take the blow on his shoulder rather than his back; the cudgel hit hard enough to rock him a step sideways. The second came at Zarok with a hatchet and met the same answer most things that swung at Zarok met. The axe came around in one motion. The bugbear's arm came off at the elbow. The bugbear lasted half a second longer than that.

Mindartis spoke a single word and his palm filled with light. The bugbear who had hit him took it across the face, rocked back, and Zarok closed the rest of the distance and finished him.

The wounded bugbear at the cages had decided this was no longer his fight. He was already turning back toward the captives, the club coming up — at Grihark, at the family, at whatever would buy him a heartbeat to think. Dustin's second blast hit him in the side of the head. He went into the bars and stayed.

The captives' cave went quiet.

The father in the family cage stood up against the bars. The mother held the smaller children behind her. The elder daughter had not moved from where she had been sitting; she was watching the door now.

"Please," the father said. "Us first. Please — there are children — please, sir —"

"You're safe," Dustin said. He held up an open palm in the universal sign for steady. He kept his voice low, the way he kept it low at the end of a long song when he wanted a room to come back to itself. "You are safe now. You'll be out before we leave this place. But him first — he can help me free you."

The father looked across at the third cage. The man inside had stood — silently, all at once, the way a tree stood up when there was no wind to lay it down. He filled the cage shoulder-to-bar.

The father took a breath, nodded, and sat back down with his arm around the younger of the two daughters.

The cage that held the bigger man was wooden bars on three sides, set into the rough stone, with a slab of dressed rock across the open top — out of reach of the man inside. He had been pinning at it from below for some unknown amount of time without ever quite shifting it.

Dustin walked up to the bars. The man inside looked at him through them. The lamp on the wall caught his face — broad, dark with grime, sharp eyes in a tired body.

"Common?" Dustin said.

The man's face did not change.

"Elvish?" Dustin tried Elvish. Then Dwarvish. Then Orc. Then, with less hope, Sylvan — the half-elf reach that had never quite worked the way the rest of his blood implied it should.

Nothing. Five languages and not a flicker.

The man tapped his own chest with two fingers and said one word.

"Grihark."

Dustin tapped his own chest. "Dustin."

Grihark gave a small nod.

Dustin slipped his hands between the bars and cupped them, palm up, low. He flicked his other hand to suggest step.

Grihark understood. He stepped onto Dustin's joined hands without a second's hesitation — heavier than Dustin had expected, but only for the moment it took to push up — and from that extra height got his shoulder under the slab and shoved.

The slab went off the top and dropped to the stone floor with a sound that everyone in the room felt in their feet.

Grihark reached up and pulled himself out. He was a head taller than Dustin and nearly as broad as Kürbis.

He made a series of quick, deliberate shapes with his hands — a flat palm, a closed fist over the heart, a sweep across the chest with two fingers.

A small voice from the family cage said: "He says he is grateful."

The elder daughter had come to the bars of her own cage. She was watching the man's hands the way a translator watched a speaker she wasn't sure she could keep up with. "I know a little," she said. Then, in apology: "Not much. We had a — there was a man in Triboar. He taught us some."

"That's enough," Dustin said. "Ask him where he is from."

Her hands moved, slow and careful. Grihark's answered, faster. She paused; she made him repeat the second part; he did.

"Of the Elk," she said.

Zarok looked at Mindartis.

"Uthgardt," Mindartis said.

Don Juan stepped through the low opening with his sword still drawn, took in the dead bugbears, the open cage, and the man standing beside it, and let the sword drop a fraction. Rodrick came in at his heel.

"Ladder's down," Don Juan said.

The halfling made directly for the family cage and began talking before he had quite reached it. The party caught fragments — "three hobgoblins, sixty feet, I'll tell you" and "the giant with the cleaver, I said, leave him to me" — and from there the volume rose, and in Rodrick's telling the heroics belonged less and less to anyone who had actually been there at the time. The mother managed a small polite smile she did not entirely feel.

"He doesn't have any of our languages," Dustin said. "Just sign."

Don Juan looked at Grihark, considered, and tried something quieter. He pitched a whisper from across the room — a whisper that did not travel through the air the way ordinary whispers did. "My friend. We are getting you out."

Grihark's eyes flicked, the way the eyes of a man flicked when a voice had arrived inside his head from a man whose mouth was nowhere near it. Then he made one more shape with his hands — a single sign, simple, that the daughter did not need to translate.

It meant yes.

They turned to the family's cage next.

Grihark crossed the room in three strides and read the slab the way he had been reading his own from below for however long he had been in there. He set his shoulder against it. Zarok set his beside him. The slab went off the family's cage in half the time Dustin's had taken.

Zarok reached down into the cage and lifted the younger daughter out first, then the son, then the elder daughter, setting each one on the floor beside him. Then the mother — hand under each arm, easy as lifting a bundle. The father came last. Grihark reached in for him and lifted him out the same way, and set him down on his own feet beside his family. They stood in a knot beside the cage with the children gripping cloth that none of the parents had washed in some time, and the father said, in a voice that was thinner than he had probably meant it to be: "Thank you."

"You're not out yet," Don Juan said. "Stay near the cage. Don't follow us further than this. We will come back for you."

The father nodded. The mother gathered the children in tighter.

From through the wall came a voice — polite, careful, a man trying not to startle his audience.

"Hello? Excuse me — is anybody there?"

The party looked at each other. Dustin let out a small breath that was half a laugh.

The adjacent room was lit by a single iron lamp on the wall, with a second opening on the far side that led back to the main cave. That answered the surprise pair.

Two more wooden cages.

One was empty. The other held a man — middle-aged, lean, leaner than the leather hanging on him suggested he had been the last time he had worn it. A green-grey tunic gone dark at the shoulders. Beard grown out past the point where a man kept it trimmed by habit. He was on his feet at his cage's wall with his eyes on the slab above him, listening.

"Down here," he said. "Thank you for coming."

His cage was the same as the others — wooden bars, slab on top. Grihark went to it without needing to be asked. Zarok set his shoulder beside Grihark's. Dustin slipped his hands through the bars and cupped them. Between the three of them — two on the slab, one giving the step — they worked the top off, and the man inside pulled himself up and out.

He set himself on the stone floor steadily. His hand moved to the place at his hip where a knife had been before they took it from him. The hand finished the movement, found nothing, and lowered.

"Ghalvin," he said. "Goldenfields. The ranger." He looked at each of them in turn, registering and filing.

"Dustin," Dustin said. "And the others."

"You came down for me?"

"Not specifically. But yes."

"Goldenfields was attacked." Ghalvin said this flat, the way a man said a thing he had already finished feeling about and had only the words left. "Hill giants. A raid. Several of us were taken. I don't know about the others. They put me down here and stopped coming." A pause. "I had begun to assume."

Grihark turned, walked back through the opening into the captives' cave, and went to the bugbear he had heard Zarok's axe end. He knelt by the body, dipped both hands in the dark pool under it, and stood. He drew two broad streaks across his own face, temple to jaw.

He came back through into Ghalvin's room.

Zarok first. The dragonborn met him with a steady look and held still while Grihark passed his bloody fingers across the scales above his brow. Dustin next, on his own. Don Juan after a breath of hesitation. Mindartis took a half-step back, held Grihark's eye for a long moment, then closed his own and stepped forward.

Grihark drew the lines on each of them in turn — same shape, same care.

Last he turned to Ghalvin and raised his bloody fingers.

The ranger raised a palm. "I will not," he said, quiet but firm. "No offence intended."

Grihark studied him for a beat, gave a small nod, and lowered his hand. He wiped what was left on the side of his trousers without ceremony.

"What's the plan?" Ghalvin said.

It was Dustin who told him. Quick, low. The basement cleared, the kitchen ladder downed, the hall above with Guh and her ogres and giants and the goblins on the ledge. The diversion they had worked out on the bluff — Rodrick, the sheep, the bugbear gesturing for help out of the dam mouth, the orcs running in to see, the hall thinning enough to attack what was left.

Ghalvin listened the way rangers listened — head still, eyes on the speaker, the kind of listening that took notes without writing anything down.

"It won't work," he said when Dustin had finished. "The orcs at the fire are not the giants' men. They are being paid. Sheep work, for coin the giants would rather not pay and pay anyway because nobody else in this country will sit in mud with sheep. They have no love for the giants. None for the bugbears. They look at the ettin like a man looks at a dog he would not own. A bugbear comes running out shouting for help and the orcs will watch him from their fire and not stand up. Push them and they will fight you. Leave them be — or better, pay them off — and they will go."

A silence.

Don Juan let out a breath he had been holding without quite realising it.

"Then we pay them off," he said.

"I would," Ghalvin agreed.

Dustin was already turning the thought over. "Two sleeping giants in the back cave. They have to be dead before we open any conversation. And quiet — there are still goblins on the ledge above."

"Quiet," Zarok agreed.

"Let me see them first," Ghalvin said. "Just to know nothing has changed since they put me down here. I will not be long."

He went.

He came back faster than Dustin had feared he might. He had a longbow in one hand, a longsword on his belt, a quiver across his shoulder, and a boot-knife pushed into his boot — his own gear, recovered from a heap in the cave between this room and the back. He held the bow up so the others could see it.

"Both still asleep. The corridor between is empty. Nothing has moved upstairs that I could hear. We are good."

"Then we move," Don Juan said.

They went back into the captives' cave. The family stood as the party came in — the children pressing against the parents, Rodrick taking half a step forward as if uncertain whether the next news was going to be the kind he wanted to hear or the kind he did not.

"You're coming with us," Don Juan said. "Through one more room, and then we set you down somewhere safe. Stay close. Stay quiet."

The father nodded.

They crossed the main cave together the way Ghalvin led — the party in the front, Grihark beside Don Juan with his greataxe across his shoulder, the family between them, Rodrick at the rear, Ghalvin sweeping behind with his bow strung. Past the pig pens, past the ettin's blood still dark on the stone, and through into a wider, warmer room than the captives' cave had been.

This one smelled of pig and old straw. Two wooden cages along one wall, six boars between them, rooting at the bars and grunting the resentful grunt of animals that had been somebody else's plan for too long. Ettin-sized pallet against the far wall, head-shaped grease-mark at the top. A side rack of crude tools.

By the wall, in an untidy pile, Grihark found what was left of his own. He dug through the heap and pulled out a greataxe — two-handed, the head heavy and dark and notched along the edge with use — and an antler ornament on a leather thong that he put around his neck without looking at it. He weighed the axe. The weight reached the rest of him; his shoulders changed.

Don Juan set the family against the wall furthest from the boars. "Stay here. Do not move."

The father nodded again. The mother held the children.

Past the boars, through a narrower passage, into the first of two adjoining caves.

Both smelled of unwashed bedding and old grease. A filthy pallet on the floor of each. A single hill giant on each pallet — on his back, mouth open, one arm thrown across his chest the way a man slept when he had drunk himself there. Their breathing came in the slow rhythm of something the world had not asked anything of in a while. The two chambers were connected by a low arch in the rock; from one pallet you could see the other.

Mindartis took a pillow from the foot of the first pallet — the cleaner of the two, which was not saying much — and weighed it in his hands.

"I will hold," he said quietly. "You will work."

Dustin set the lamp on a shelf where it would throw light without throwing it onto faces. Don Juan drew his sword. Zarok drew the long dagger from his hip. Grihark and Ghalvin stayed near the entrance, weapons up, eyes on the passage.

They went to the first giant.

Mindartis set the pillow on the face — wide enough to cover both eyes, the nose, the open mouth — and bore down with both hands and the weight of his shoulders. The giant's breathing changed. The arm on the chest twitched once.

Don Juan drove the sword in under the ribcage. Zarok set the dagger at the throat and worked it through. The giant went rigid under the pillow, then heavy, then still. The pillow muffled the small sound that came out at the end. Nothing carried.

Mindartis lifted the pillow off and looked at the face for a moment longer than the others did. He set the pillow down on the pallet beside the head.

They stepped through the arch into the second chamber.

He did it the same way. A fresh pillow from the second giant's pallet — there was no point being precious. Bore down with his shoulders. Don Juan under the ribs. Zarok at the throat. The giant did not wake.

When the second body had stopped moving, Mindartis lifted the pillow off and set it back where he had taken it from. He did not say anything. He stepped back from the pallet and stood with his hands at his sides for a moment that nobody filled.

Then he turned and started searching.

Under each pillow, in the seam between the cloth and the straw, a fat little pouch — heavy enough to make the pillow sag where the head had been. He pulled both out and weighed them in his hands. Coin, mixed: the dull yellow of gold under the duller grey of silver under more copper than either. A fair amount. The kind of fair amount a hill giant kept under a pillow without thinking about it, and would not have been able to use for anything in his life that mattered.

The rest of the bedding gave them nothing. A rack of crude handaxe blades against the wall, oily and unhung. A whetstone. A sack of something that smelled too bad to look in. They took the coin and left the rest.

In the doorway, Don Juan looked at the two bodies. Then at Dustin.

"Take the heads," he said. "When you go out to the orcs. They have to believe it. A man with a story is a man you argue with. A man with two giant heads at his feet is a man you listen to."

Dustin looked at the giants. He looked at the dagger Zarok was wiping clean on the pallet.

"Yes," he said.

By the time they were ready, dusk had finished settling. The light outside had gone from gold to grey to the deep blue that came just before the stars showed.

They moved everyone back to the sleeping giants' cave at the back of the den, with the two dead hill giants still on their pallets and the tunnel at the far wall that sloped up to open air on the foot of the bluff, on the side away from the orcs. The family Mindartis settled on the floor furthest from the bodies. Grihark and Ghalvin took the mouth of the escape tunnel, weapons up, with instructions to take everyone out the back the moment they heard the wrong kind of noise from the front. Mindartis would hold the room.

Don Juan and Zarok would not come this way. They would go out the front the way Dustin went — through the cave mouth between the sleeping giants' cave and the orc fire — and hold just inside it, in the shadow of the rock, close enough to hear and close enough to be there if the conversation went the other way.

Dustin stood alone in the centre of the cavern with the two heads on the stone in front of him. They were each as big as a barrel and twice as heavy as one. He hooked his hands into the long greasy hair of one in each fist, set his stance, and pulled.

Neither head moved.

He tried again, with more shoulder this time. The hair gave a little. The skull underneath did not.

He let go and looked at the rest of them.

"Can anybody do something," he said, "to help with this."

Zarok stepped over. He set a hand on Dustin's shoulder, spoke a low word of prayer in Draconic, and the muscle in Dustin's arms went steady and a little strange — the kind of steadiness that did not belong to him. He took up the heads again on the new strength.

They came up. Not lightly — nothing about this was going to be light — but liftable. Carryable. He weighed them experimentally and adjusted his grip.

"An hour," Zarok said. "Long enough."

"Long enough."

He worked his armor next. The Waterdeep he had never quite reached as a boy and only sometimes set foot in as a man came back to him in the only way it ever did — as a costume. The studded leather flattened and lightened. The colours shifted to the deep blue and silver of a city guardsman's coat, a band of grey-white at the cuff, a polished half-helm where there had been only his own hair. From the right angle, in low light, he would pass.

He took up the heads. He started for the cave mouth that opened on the orc fire.

Behind him the den stayed quiet. The wet stone took his footfalls, and the heads dragged with a sound he tried not to think about.

The cave mouth opened on a strip of open ground and the orc fire beyond it. He heard them before he stepped clear of the rock — laughter, low conversation, the clack of a stone game. Sheep in the pens off to the side.

He stepped out of the cave mouth and walked into the firelight without breaking stride.

Seven orcs around the fire. Two on their feet inside a heartbeat, axes coming up. The others stayed seated but stopped moving — the slow stillness of fighters who hadn't decided yet which way this was going.

Dustin reached the edge of their circle and dropped the heads.

They hit the dirt with the heavy, unmistakable thud of meat that had been bone before someone had taken the trouble. The fire jumped.

Dustin coughed once, the way a man cleared his throat before speaking in a hall.

"Listen up," he said. "I am here with a small army to clean this den of hill giants. We have no quarrel with you. Leave with half the sheep and don't turn back — we won't chase you."

The orcs did not answer for a long moment. The two on their feet looked at the heads. Looked at him. Looked at the heads again.

The one in the centre of the fire — broader than the others, a scar across the bridge of his nose, the only one wearing anything that could be called armour rather than hide — set his hand on the haft of an axe across his knees but did not lift it.

"Did you kill the hill giant lord?" he said.

"No," Dustin said. "We killed everyone below. Upstairs is next. If you don't get out of our way, you'll be next."

The orc with the scar looked into the fire for half a second. Then he looked back up.

"It's a reasonable offer," he said. He had a steady voice — not deep, but settled, the voice of a man who got asked questions and was used to giving the answers. "But five of our kinsmen are still up there. Including my wife."

"Your name?"

"Urzog."

"And hers?"

"Hilde."

Dustin nodded once and let the silence go on for two more seconds than was comfortable, the way you let a song breathe before the next verse.

"Is there anything," he said, "I could tell those five — something that would make them lay down their arms and not fight for the giants? If they do, I give my word, they will not be harmed."

Urzog leaned forward and started conferring, low, in their own tongue, with the two on his left. One of them suggested something. Urzog frowned. Another suggested something. Urzog frowned harder. They tried two more phrases. None of them convinced anybody at the fire, let alone five orcs upstairs being asked to drop axes by a stranger they'd never met.

"That is a problem," Urzog admitted.

"Is there anything," Dustin said, "that you could tell her alone — Hilde — that only she would know? A thing that you and she share. Something nobody else has heard."

Urzog's eyes did one slow movement at that, the way a man's eyes moved when a thing he had not expected to be asked had been asked.

"Yes," he said. "But only her. It does not reach anyone else."

"Come closer."

Urzog stood, walked the three steps around the fire, and bent until his mouth was at Dustin's ear. The others around the fire looked very deliberately elsewhere.

Urzog whispered.

"I really like it when she massages my feet."

He straightened. His face had not changed.

"I'll make sure the message only reaches her," Dustin said. He kept his voice flat. He had performed harder things in front of louder crowds, but he had not performed many things he had needed more not to laugh at.

Urzog sat back down by the fire. He looked at the men around him. They had all heard the murmur and none of them had heard the words; they were now looking at their chief the way men looked at a chief who had just done a thing they were going to tease him about for the rest of their lives, the moment it was safe to do so. None of them were teasing yet.

"There is one more thing," Urzog said.

"Yes."

"The giants owed us pay. For the sheep. They have not given us all of it. If we are leaving —"

"I think," Dustin said, in the conversational register of a man who had given the matter all the consideration it was going to receive, "that your lives and fifty sheep is pay enough."

Urzog looked at him. He looked at the heads. He looked at the rest of his men and saw that, on this question, his men were already with the stranger.

"Yes," he said. "Yes, I see that."

He stood up. The others stood up with him.

"We will take half. They are at the western end of the pen. We will count them as we go. Fifty head."

"Fifty," Dustin said.

Urzog turned to his men and barked an order. They began moving — collected packs from the edge of the firelight, kicked the embers apart, dragged crude saddles toward the pens. Two of them peeled off to start parting the sheep into halves; the rest moved with the practised efficiency of men who had broken camp under worse circumstances than a stranger in city colours and a giant's head at their boots.

Dustin stood by the fire with his arms at his sides and watched them work.

Behind him, somewhere just inside the cave mouth, two listeners exhaled.

The orcs took their fifty out through a slot in the side fence the giants had cut for them, and went west.

Dustin and Urzog parted with the briefness of men who had spent the part of the evening they meant to spend on each other and were not going to spend any more. Urzog touched two fingers to the side of his nose by way of a goodbye; Dustin gave him a small nod back, the kind of nod that contained the unspoken thing about the wife. Then the orcs were gone, and the fire was theirs, and the night smelled of mutton and wood-ash and the cold beyond.

Don Juan and Zarok came out of the cave mouth behind him.

"Well done," Don Juan said, and meant it.

Dustin let his shoulders drop the half-inch they had not been allowed to drop in front of seven orcs.

They walked back to the cave mouth and went straight in — a turn to the right and they were in the back of the sleeping giants' cave. Mindartis stood up at the wall when they came in. Grihark and Ghalvin lowered their weapons from the mouth of the escape tunnel. The family looked at the party the way a family looked at the people who came back from a thing the family had not been allowed to watch.

"Done?" Mindartis said.

"Done."

Rodrick stood up beside the family.

"I get my share now?" he said. It came out a little smaller than he had meant it to, and he tried again. "I mean — yes. Yes. Good."

"Yes," Don Juan said. "You get your share now."

They went back up to the sheep pens together — the four of the party plus Rodrick plus the family, leaving Grihark and Ghalvin to hold the back room with the bow strung and the greataxe balanced across one knee. Out at the pens, in the empty firelight, they did the practical work. Don Juan moved the gate, parted the remaining fifty into the loose herd that had been the orcs' half a few hours ago and was Rodrick's now. The father from the family worked the gate with him, awkwardly at first, then with the practised hands of a man who, somewhere in his life before the cages, had handled sheep before.

When the herd was clear, Rodrick stood in front of Dustin with the family behind him and gave him a small bow that was either a halfling thing or a Rodrick thing.

"I will not say thank you," Rodrick said. "I will say it later. I do not have the right ones right now."

"Go," Dustin said.

"Yes."

"South," Don Juan added. "South-east if you can manage it. The orcs went west. You will not want to be on their road."

"South-east," Rodrick repeated. He looked at the family. They looked back at him as if they had not yet quite decided whether to belong to him or merely to walk beside him for a while. The father nodded; the mother nodded; the elder daughter took her younger sister's hand.

Rodrick whistled at the herd.

The herd, with the easy resignation of beasts that had been somebody else's plan their whole lives and had stopped expecting otherwise, began to move.

The party watched them go. Rodrick and the family and fifty sheep, against the last light from the fire, becoming a slow dark shape that the grass swallowed in stages. Then they were gone.

Don Juan turned back toward the den. "Right," he said. "Back inside. We take the rear tunnel out. We're not walking back across this bluff with the whole upper hall watching."

They picked up Grihark and Ghalvin from the back room. Mindartis took up the lamp.

The tunnel sloped up gently from the back of the sleeping giants' cave and came out at the foot of the bluff, on the side of the den away from where the orcs had been. Cool air. Stars overhead. The smell of grass after the smell of stone and pig and blood was almost too much; Dustin stopped at the mouth of it and breathed for a moment just to remember he could.

They began the walk back to the copse.

"So," Grihark signed, watching the daughter on his left in the half-light, "the plan?"

The daughter caught it and translated for him in low Common. Dustin answered to her and let her hands carry the answer on.

"We rest," he said. "Two hours, three. We watch the front of the den from the grass. If a giant comes out looking for what happened, we see him before he sees us, and we decide then. Otherwise we wait. An hour before dawn, while the upper hall is still sleeping off whatever it drinks itself to, we come back. We hit the hall before it has its boots on."

"How?" Ghalvin asked.

"That is the part we work out when we have rested." Dustin glanced at Don Juan. "But the ladder is down. So we are going up the front."

"Up the front," Ghalvin said. "Yes. That is the part we work out when we have rested."

Don Juan smiled in the dark.

They walked the rest of the way without speaking — six of them now where there had been four, with two new shapes among them: one large and quiet, one wiry and ranger-light, both moving in step with the others as if they had done it for longer than they had.

The copse rose up out of the grass ahead.

It was where they had left him — Dustin recognised the bend of the trees, the rise of the low grass against the dark, the line where the field gave way to the wood. The Horn of Valhalla had been across Kürbis's knees the last they had seen of it. He had been a shape in the grass.

He was not.