The town had never earned a name the maps respected, so everybody called it Crossroads, which is less a name and more an apology.
It sagged where the east road kinked around a boulder older than kings, pushed up against a band of forest that spilled autumn down into shallow ravines, with the Encircling Mountains hunched beyond like a jury that had already made up its mind. A ring of feeder farms clung to its flanks; a mill sulked by the stream; a low palisade pretended it could stop anything more determined than a goat.
When wagons rattled out of Lindell and followed the east road toward Mind Flayer's Wood, they stopped here because horses demanded oats and drivers demanded beer. Gods, when they glanced down from whatever passes for altitude in their line of work, saw a smudge under their grand designs and felt justified in their indifference.
One god was watching now anyway, fingertips worrying a die that never quite finished its roll.
Months had passed since Hrast.
Months since a dead dragon had to be persuaded to remember that state. Since a woman with too many opinions and not enough self-preservation burned herself into a footnote in theology. Since a single egg the color of unsupervised decisions had been smuggled out under somebody's cloak and ferried back to the old granary outside Lindell, there lowered into a brine tank ringed with ward-staves and chalk circles and whispered titles to the Crown's high fire.
The granary had become a redoubt by boredom and necessity. Its stone belly held cots, weapon racks, Isolde's mutinous books (which kept rearranging their own margins as if refusing to admit their author had stopped turning pages), and the egg: a smooth, heavy presence asleep in a tub, pulsing slow against Tamsin's spores like a second thought.
That was "home," for some very strained value of the word.
The adventurers were not at home. They were here, in Crossroads' one tavern, under smoke-blackened beams and antlers yellowed to the color of old regrets.
Riona sat where any sensible villager would expect a knight sponsored by the Crown to sit: back straight, armor bearing the Ember Crown's crest, sword within an easy reach that still looked polite. Branna had stacked her spear against the wall by habit and could reach it in less than a breath anyway. Kel had taken the seat with the best view of the room and the door and the coinpurses. Tamsin leaned near the hearth like they were listening to the air. Lyra had found the table with line of sight to both windows and a corner, because there are only so many times in your life you want to be surprised from behind.
Across from them, Crossroads' reeve kneaded his hat into rope.
He was a man bleached by weather and worry, a little too well-fed to be poor, a little too poorly-dressed to be rich, stuck forever in that civic middle ground where you get yelled at from both directions. His mouth tried out optimism and kept failing.
"So you've already… ah… dealt with things like this," he said.
"We've dealt with things," Riona said. "Tell us what this is."
"Some trouble is all," he said, which was the exact thing you say when it isn't. "Folks gone missing out east. A few animals lost. Winter coming on early. Nothing to raise a banner over."
He didn't look at the notice board, where someone had written THAREN (miller's boy) and JOVA and OLD COB in big, angry charcoal, then underlined FIVE COWS; TWO SHEEP; ONE DOG (GOOD) as if that helped.
Riona watched his throat instead of his eyes. It bobbed whenever he skirted a particular word. Ravines.Forest.Lanterns. Shame, not deception. The shame of a man who knew how his own story would sound if he told it straight and could already hear the laugh.
"He's stepping around something," she said quietly, when he retreated behind the bar in search of nerve or beer. "Not lying. Walking the edge of a grave he doesn't want to name."
"Not just fear," Tamsin added, eyes hooded, listening the way other people watch. "Embarrassment. The kind you get when the thing underneath your bed is ridiculous and real."
Kel tilted his head, the dagger of his smile flashing. "Classic rural choreography, this. 'Something Ate Our Cows, Please Don't Laugh.' Seen it in six counties. Seven if you count the one that only exists when you're lost."
"Isolde would have a thesis," Tamsin said before they could stop themself. "And three footnotes arguing with it."
The word Isolde landed like a dropped mug. The place in the conversation where she used to stand yawned and carefully did not get filled.
Up above, the god nudged the die, enjoying the way it wobbled. Idiots, after all, keep the lights on.
Lyra did what rangers in small anxious towns do: she went to listen where people leak.
She made the first circuit of the room with a mug in hand and her hood pushed back and the expression of someone who might pay money for a good story and might pay more to leave quietly after hearing it. Ale does work priests dream of.
From the barmaid, all grey smudges under her eyes and wrists like twigs, she got the beginning.
"First cow was Old Man Rel's," the woman said, refilling a mug with the resignation of one who knows it will never stay full. "Found her in the pasture, neat as you please. Looked like she was sleeping off a sermon. But when they cut—" She mimed a slice across her own forehead. "Head felt wrong. Light. Like tapping an old gourd."
From the drover—a man whose boots had more road than leather left—she got color.
"Lights over the trees," he muttered. "Not aurora. Aurora you can trust; this was violet and bile-green, drawing little right-angle lines over the forest like some bastard learning geometry. No mage out east we'd break bread with, but something's writing."
From the old woman in the corner, who sat on her stool as if it owed her rent, she got the thing that mattered.
"Tharen went out toward the ravine with his dog three weeks back," the crone said. "Ravine didn't spit him back. The dog came home three days later. Walked circles around the yard till its legs went out. Eyes wrong. Didn't know his own name when they called him."
Lyra listened and filed and never once let her face say weird, because if you give people that word they'll climb inside it and hide. She let them talk until the fear's edge dulled down to habit, then eased away.
At their table, Branna had acquired a crumpled wad of parchment from the reeve's office. She smoothed it with the same care she would have used for a confession.
"Reports he wrote and never sent," she said. "Didn't like how they sounded."
The script was cramped and furious. Shapes in fog, tall and wrong. Nosebleeds. Men who woke exhausted and empty of dreams. Voices from wells, promising things, or maybe just naming a debt. Something walking in the fields without leaving tracks, like a shadow under the soil.
"Textbook omens," Kel said cheerfully. "We walk toward them. It's our vocation."
Crossroads had tried to tell its story. It had failed to find a priest who would listen.
The last wizard they'd heard of, the barmaid added in a low voice, had burned herself hollow in a town called Hrast, killing a dragon someone had woken up wrong. That story had walked in on a trader's tongue and picked up three lies and a love affair for the road.
Lyra didn't correct any of it. She only noted where the rumor diverged from the reality still ghosting her ribs, and tucked those differences away the way some people keep coin: a private ledger of debt between history and truth.
Her fingers drifted to the little hard packet in her pouch. Dusk-ember root, wrapped in oilskin. An ugly knot of plant that sprouted where boundaries thinned—old graveyard walls, half-forgotten roads, places where memory snagged as it passed.
Ground with silver and bone under the right stars, burned at both ends, it made a rope of smoke the dead recognized by name. They could follow it. You could pull.
In Isolde's margins, someone had annotated: USEFUL. DANGEROUS. DO NOT DO THIS ALONE, YOU IDIOT.
Lyra's thumb pressed the outline of the root until the nail hurt. She did not announce that it was there. Rangers are entitled to little acts of treason against total group transparency.
Across the table, Tamsin's gaze flickered down to the movement, then away. If a friend's secret isn't actively bleeding on you, you let it breathe.
"Sleep and daylight?" Kel suggested. "Investigate when monsters are statistically less theatrical?"
"No." Riona's answer was the flat edge of a blade. "By morning there'll be another name up there."
She nodded toward the notice board, where the charcoal had not yet had time to fade.
Kel sighed the sigh of a man whose job description included walking into stupid on purpose. "Define 'lucky,' then."
Nobody obliged.
They left Crossroads under a sky trying to decide on snow.
The east road out of Lindell had thinned here to cart ruts packed hard by hooves and habit. The air had acquired a metallic tang, the way it does when the year is getting tired and wants to lie down under its own frost.
The first farm hunched about a mile out: crooked fence, sagging barn, a congregation of crows on the roof attending whatever service crows attend. The farmer met them with a look Riona recognized from Hrast and half a dozen battlefields: the expression you wear while waiting to find out how much of your life can be salvaged.
He led them to the carcass as if escorting them to a wake.
The cow lay where she'd dropped. Hide mostly intact, except where someone's desperate knife had searched for an answer and found only meat.
Lyra crouched and parted hair and skin with her gloved fingers. Beneath hide and bone there was give—springy, wrong. Not rot. Not infection.
"Skull's been hollowed from the inside," she said. "No tooth marks. No tool cuts. Just… missing."
Tamsin knelt beside, nose wrinkling at the layered stink of animal and old fear.
"Nothing local makes this kind of mistake," they said. "Predators eat. Parasites burrow. Even scavengers have manners. This looks like a thesis."
Kel studied the dried fan of blood. It had crept out and congealed in branching patterns, repeating itself in smaller and smaller echoes, pretty in the way frost on a window is pretty until you remember how cold the room is.
His vision blurred. A spike of pain rammed in just behind the eyes.
He hissed through his teeth. "Ah. Ambitious."
Riona's hand went to her shield. "Speak."
"It's upstairs," Kel said, rubbing at his temple. "Something pushing. Clumsy, but enthusiastic."
The pressure climbed—someone, somewhere, poking at his thoughts with all the subtlety of a drunk with a crowbar.
Inside him, something old and precise lifted its head.
No jurisdiction, that interior presence observed, not in words but in principle, smooth as a signed decree. This mind is already spoken for.
The pain skittered sideways and drained.
Kel exhaled, put his mask back on. "Psionics," he announced. "Think gith with delusions of grandeur. Or a squid that's read too many self-help pamphlets."
"Or both," Branna muttered. "World's had an abundance problem lately."
They moved on.
Two more farms. Two more wrongnesses.
A sheep with its eyes imploded like popped blisters, the rest of it perfect, wool still thick and soft under Lyra's fingers.
A dog still alive, paws describing tight perfect circles in the yard, tail tucked, whining nothing. The animal made a wounded orbit around Lyra's boots without ever quite making contact, as if it had forgotten where bodies were supposed to be.
Tamsin caught themself reaching toward the beads woven into their hair—little polished seeds from around the egg's brine tub—and stopped. Too far to hear the egg clearly. Close enough to worry that the egg might hear them.
"Burn the carcasses," Branna told the farmers. "Stone over the ash. Lid your wells. No one sleeps alone if you can help it."
She delivered it like liturgy because rules are what you pray with when you've run out of prayers.
By the time they reached the forest line, the sun had saucered itself against the Encircling Mountains and was sliding off the edge.
The trees of Mind Flayer's Wood rose ahead in ranks: trunks black with sap and age, crowns flushed copper and rust, rooted in a mess of ravines that clawed out toward the feeder fields. The forest sat squatting against the eastern slope like a cathedral that hadn't yet decided whether to forgive trespassers.
"The land hates this," Tamsin said softly. "Something's been teaching the roots someone else's song. With a knife."
Kel squinted at the dark between the trunks.
"On the bright side," he said, "no dragon, no blizzard, no suicidal genius with a lightshow."
"We're not short on suicidal," Riona said. "We're short on genius."
A raven watched from a birch limb as they stepped under the trees, blinked its bright dark eye, and then, a little while later, watched them again from three trunks deeper. Kel did not notice. The forest did.
Under the canopy, the air thinned and cooled. The ground went soft with leaf-litter and the smell of water you couldn't hear yet.
Charms hung from the lower branches. Bundles of sticks bound into impossible angles. Stone discs with rough circles scratched into them, strung on red twine. A twig figure with a cow's eye stitched into its chest swung gently, turning to watch them pass.
"Boundary work," Lyra said. "Folk saying no to something they can't name."
She did not look at her own hands just then. She concentrated on the world instead: the way the light fell, the patterns of moss. At each fork she tore a strip of red cloth from an old scarf and knotted it around a trunk, leaving a little blood-bright echo of their path behind.
Breadcrumbs nailed to the world. Hrast had taught her about blizzards that ran in circles. She was not interested in a forest version.
They came to a shallow hollow where no leaves lay.
Wind had pushed a drift of color almost to the lip. Not one had settled inside. The bare soil was inscribed with rings, concentric and smugly perfect, like some deity's target practice.
Lyra's scar flared along her cheek, a hot line of memory.
"Do not step there," she snapped, harsher than intended.
Everyone paused. Tamsin stared at the hollow, at the circles that lay like smug geometry across the dirt, and felt nothing except the weight of Lyra's fear and the faint hum of old circles in Hrast's bones, a town away and a chapter ago.
They stepped carefully around.
The forest's geometry kept cheating.
Stones wore spirals no village carver would have the patience or tools to make. Fallen leaves arranged themselves in tidy halos around tree trunks when disturbed. Shadows obeyed some other light source, some second moon hidden under the soil, drifting in directions that didn't line up with the sun.
Twice they came upon constructions of twig and vine dangling from branches: crude mobiles that hummed on a frequency too low to be sound, vibrating against the sensitive places in their teeth.
Something pushed back.
Without warning, Lyra's world lurched.
One breath she was watching the next red scrap of cloth flutter on a pine. The next, she was standing in a tower made of glass and thought.
The city below her was laid out like a diagram: streets curving in concentric rings, plazas and lecture halls aligned as neatly as sigils on a spell circle. Towers stabbed up into a violet sky, and between them hung thin bridges of light. She looked down at her hands and they were not her hands at all, but long-fingered and ink-stained, holding cards of light with proofs on them.
"Elussen," someone said behind her in a warm, amused voice. "You bend thought like water. Very good."
The sky split.
Not with lightning; with concept. The violet dome peeled back like wet paper and something the size of a small ocean rolled through: folds of slick grey, veins pulsing, a million faint lights winking and going out as if someone were tossing handfuls of souls into a stew.
Minds screamed. Entire classrooms of thought went to their knees, not from devotion.
Lyra tried to breathe and tasted brine and static—
—and slammed back into her own body on her knees in the leaf-mould, someone saying her name as if from very far away.
"Lyra. In. Out. With me."
Tamsin had a hand on her shoulder, grounding. Riona knelt close, shield angled across her.
Lyra spat leaves, swallowed bile. "Glass city," she managed. "Towers that tune thoughts. An elf—Elussen. Then sky tears. And a gigantic… brain. Falling on everything. Everyone screaming in their heads."
"Elder Brain," Kel said, the words coming out thin and dry. "Mind flayers. Illithids, if you want the version that fits in schoolbooks. They come with a salad bowl full of stolen minds."
Branna eyed him. "You speak as if from experience."
"Devils hear things." Kel's tone tried for lightness and landed half an inch short. No one called him on it, but everyone added another pebble to the scale where they kept things Kel has seen that he will not yet name.
"Good," Riona said. "Now we know roughly how far above our pay grade this sits."
"You walked under that city's shadow," the voice in Lyra's memory whispered, something echoing from Elussen's vantage, but she slammed the door on it. Later. Or never.
They pushed on.
The forest narrowed, toyed with them, opened again. A figure stepped out into the path ahead, lantern held up at an oddly high angle.
He—it—wore a young man's body like borrowed clothes: farm shirt, trousers, boots caked in old mud. The smile on his face had been nailed there too long. His eyes were not so much unfocused as focused on a different room entirely.
"Evening," he said in a voice that matched the clothes but not the mouth. The skin at his throat fluttered once, remembering gills.
Lyra's bow had an arrow on the string before the word finished.
The lantern swung. The glass was full of pale filaments, not flame—thin nerve-threads writhing gently in a fluid that caught the violet light in wrong angles.
He opened his mouth wider than it should have gone and sang a single, pure note that skated over the meat behind their ears.
Thralls, said a word in Riona's mind, falling with the weight of an iron nail.
"Don't kill him," she snapped, already moving.
Kel's knife pinned the lantern arm to a tree with a wet sound. The man—no, the body that still remembered being a man—screamed, but not like someone in pain; like someone whose music had been interrupted.
Tamsin's staff cracked across his knees and the legs remembered their job and went down.
Branna's spear butt kissed his temple; he slumped, lantern dangling, filaments stroking the glass as if disappointed not to have reached a brain.
More bodies crashed in sideways from the underbrush. A woman in an apron, eyes filmed. A boy not much younger than Tharen should have been, mouth working soundlessly.
Lyra shot coats to trees, sleeves to ground. The third arrow hung for half a heartbeat, the easy shot right through a throat presenting itself like a clean solution. Her hand twitched; the arrow slammed into a shoulder instead. Flesh, not artery.
There, in the quiver of those tendons, is where the crack began. Not the big cinematic break. The hairline fissure in glass that foretells the rest.
"Binding," Tamsin snapped. They slammed their palm into the soil and whispered better instructions into the buried roots. Vines surged up with indecorous enthusiasm, wrapped thrall ankles and wrists, and lay down on their chests with the patient weight only plants can manage. "They'll live," Tamsin added, panting. "If we do."
The conditional tasted right and ugly.
"Forward," Riona said. It came out like a command to the chapter as much as the party.
The ravine opened like a throat.
The path they had been following shrugged and wandered off. What remained was a spiral stair hacked into the rock, descending along the edge of a long, narrow gash in the earth. Bone fragments crunched under their boots: deer, cattle, something that might once have been a human jawbone smiling up without context.
At the ravine's bottom, ferns draped a cave mouth, black behind sprigs of damp green. A faint phosphorescent glow pulsed from within, too regular to be any honest bioluminescent fungus.
The air smelled of wet stone and old blood and something like overboiled squid in a laboratory no one had cleaned in ten years.
"Left," Lyra whispered, already drawing. "On the wall."
It clung there like a grotesque spider whose god had not been consulted.
Limbs too long, too thin, sunk into the stone. Skin the grey-mauve of something that has never seen a kind sun. Head bulbous, crowned with a fringe of fleshy ridges. Where a face might have been, a cluster of tentacles drooped around a vertical mouth. The eyes were milky, unfocused, and yet somehow they saw through what they looked at, like a scholar bored with his own notes.
The tilt of its head was a locksmith's tool.
Pressure hit.
Branna's fingers went numb; her spear clattered down the steps. Lyra's vision slammed to white; she dropped to one knee, a hand braced in bone gravel. Tamsin clung to themselves by reciting the names of trees under their breath. Oak. Ash. Birch. Elder. Names that belonged here.
Kel's laugh curdled into a hiss. Inside him, the infernal lawyer unrolled a scroll and cleared its throat.
Riona lifted her shield. Instead of reaching for the easy heat her order offered—the bright, showy burn of judgment—she cracked her oath open sideways, looking for the map instead: the skein of bonds and vows and names she carried with her. Responsibilities, not permissions.
The illithid burned in that view like foreign policy in someone else's borders. There, threaded through the alien pattern, a human-shaped color. Distant, kicking upward through glue.
"Something of him remains," she said. "Elussen. He's drowning and arguing."
"Wonderful," Kel said. "We'll yank him out after he finishes trying to puree our frontal lobes."
The illithid moved in three directions at once.
Hands flared. Stone bulged under invisible force and popped. A trickle of pebbles leapt obediently into a slide aimed at sweeping their footing out from under them. Riona stepped into it, lowering her shield and taking the brunt; Branna braced to her side, becoming the wedge that kept the whole party from going down.
Kel let the slide take him, turn it into a controlled fall. Gravity flicked him sideways onto a narrow lip a few feet lower, closer to the underside of the creature, daggers already in his hands.
Tamsin slammed the butt of their staff into the ground. Roots woke in the cracks and got offended. They lashed out along the ravine wall, blind and clever. Some unraveled under an invisible hand, fibers twitching as if plucked out of existence one by one. Others got home: wrapping around one of the creature's limbs, its torso, pinning slick skin to cold rock.
Lyra drew and loosed. The arrow hissed through air that felt thick as glass and sank to the fletching in a pale shoulder. The ichor that welled out smoked when it kissed the air, smelling of seawater gone bad in a jar.
Branna retrieved her spear with a curse, drove its tip along the thing's flank. The blade skittered on a field of crackling blue-white, leaving only a shallow groove.
One tentacle lashed out like a striking serpent, going for the gap under Branna's visor.
Riona dropped her sword, grabbed the tentacle in her bare hand, and wrenched. Armor creaked. The illithid's bulk came down with it, slamming into the bones underfoot hard enough to make ribs complain.
"Eyes!" Lyra shouted. Her voice was thin, but it held.
She put an arrow dead on the notch where humanoid instincts insisted an eye ought to be. It kissed the psionic field and ricocheted, spinning off into the ravine wall, showering sparks.
Kel came up on the illithid's blind side, daggers stabbing for the places the shield looked thinnest. One blade bounced with a jarring shock that lit up his whole arm. The other bit in—there, where the field had fluttered under Riona's wrench—drawing a spurt of ichor and a mental shriek like feedback.
The creature's invisible hand reached back along the line of contact and clamped around Kel's mind.
To Kel, the world became distance. His limbs were suddenly opinions belonging to someone else. Fingers opened of their own accord.
Not yours, said the lawyer inside him, not unkindly. Prior claim.
Two authorities crashed together in the small space of his skull: Elder Brain issuing a simple, total command—submit—and a much older, thornier contract refusing to relinquish its asset. For a heartbeat his body jerked between the two. Then the infernal claim dug in its heels.
The grip slipped. The illithid's attention wavered.
For that instant, the shield thinned.
Branna drove her spear through robe, flesh, and on into stone. The haft vibrated with a sound like a bow being drawn too far across a cracked string.
The cave exhaled.
The second wave wasn't a clean blow like the first. It came dirty and low, around armor and wards, aiming straight for guts and knees and the primitive places that always listen.
For a moment, they were all drowning.
Bone walls pressed in, vertebrae knitting themselves into cages around their ribs. Water—no, brine—climbed to their throats, full of the faint phosphor glow of trapped thoughts.
Lyra tasted Hrast's smoke and dragon-fire, heard Isolde's last curse, saw the square again—but this time everyone in it turned to look at her, eyes hollow and expectant, waiting for her to decide who died first.
Riona stood in the Ember Crown's sanctuary and watched the central flame go out. The great sigil of her order flickered, not extinguished, just… uninterested, leaving her in a cathedral full of suddenly mundane stone.
Tamsin's fingers went dead. They felt their hair-spirals burn out, the spores crisping into dust. The green hush that had always been there behind their thoughts disappeared, leaving silence where a chorus had been.
Branna sat at a desk with her ledger open, writing reports in a careful hand. On each page, the town's name—Crossroads, Hrast, a dozen others—faded as she wrote, until the paper was nothing but neat black lines and empty space where lives should have been.
Kel felt his contract tear.
His patron—a shape made mostly of implication and teeth—smiled with the tight amusement of a banker writing off a bad debt and turned away. The binding dissolved like paper in rain. He was left alone under an infinite, indifferent sky with nothing standing between him and the gods.
That was the lie that almost landed.
Tamsin, somehow, got there first. Maybe because plants are stubborn; maybe because this wasn't their kind of magic and so never sat quite right.
They dug their fingers into gritty dirt and bone and catalogued sensations: the cold of stone under their knuckles, the stink of ichor, the scrape of Branna's boot sliding half an inch. Things that did not match drowning in skulls.
"Not yours," they said aloud. "Not your land. Not your story."
The illusion wobbled.
Riona's nightmare flickered at the edges. A god abandoning its altar without ceremony was wrong; it offended something structural in her bones. Even the high fire, in its worst moods, did nothing quietly.
"This isn't how my god leaves," she said through her teeth. "This is how you imagine leaving."
She seized that mismatch and pulled.
Kel, stubborn in spite of himself, treated the hallucination like an insult.
"You don't get to fire me," he snarled at the empty sky in his head. "That's my nightmare, not yours to rent out."
He clung to spite the way some people cling to hope.
The bone cages cracked. Brine receded. The phantoms blinked and forgot what they'd been doing.
Reality clattered back in: ravine, spear, roots, slime, the illithid pinned in an obscene saint's pose against the wall, limbs skewered by wood and iron, field flickering in and out like a failing lantern.
From the cave mouth, more figures shambled.
Thralls, faces slack, hands gripping cleavers and chains and whatever instruments had been lying nearest when they got hollowed out.
Merrow—because they all knew, somewhere under the revulsion, that's who this was—tried to use them as both shield and weapon. A fresh surge of compulsion rolled out, an order shoved down spines: rush. Tear. Block. Die if necessary.
Lyra adjusted.
She did not shoot the first thrall in the throat, though it presented itself tidily. She took his bootlace instead. He went down, weapon skittering.
The second arrow split chain links, jamming them into a crack in the rock; the third nailed a sleeve to the ravine floor instead of puncturing a lung.
Branna used the spear's blunt end to knock wrists away from weapons and temples away from consciousness. Tamsin thickened the lattice of roots near the cave mouth, turning the ground into a net that caught legs and took choice out of the equation.
Riona stayed where she was, hand fisted tight in tentacle and shield braced across slick skin, trusting that the others would manage the human fallout without adding new names to the notice board.
There came a moment—a breath between pulses—when everything stuttered.
The shield went thin. The thralls sagged in their bindings, movements going from purposeful to twitching. The illithid's tentacles drooped, not just from injury but from exhaustion. Its milky eyes focused for the first time, really looked at them—not as targets or tools, but like a man seeing the consequences of his own actions through a window.
Branna's spear was still in position. It would have taken one good, clean push.
"Kill it," she said. Sensible as gravity. "Finish it while we still have a say."
Riona hesitated.
There are pauses that only passersby notice and pauses that stories hinge on. This was the latter.
"Wait," she said.
Kel groaned like a man being told he needed to read terms and conditions. "You are allergic to simple roads."
Tamsin, breathing hard, nodded without looking away from the pinned creature. "If we pull one voice out of that choir, we learn the song. If we don't, we will hear it again with less warning."
Lyra's voice came out stripped of ornament. "When that big brain pushed him, he pushed back. A little. If he wanted to be just monster, he'd have hummed along."
Inside their skulls, the Elder Brain's attention landed.
YOU ARE FOOD, it boomed, with the smug confidence of something used to being the loudest voice in any room. YOU WILL SERVE. YOU WILL—
Another thought—sharp, cracked, familiar from Lyra's forced memory—cut across it:
I am not your instrument.
Riona dropped to one knee in the slimy gravel and set her bare hand on the illithid's chest.
The Ember Crown's scriptures had columns devoted to heat as punishment, flame as judgment. But deep in the older scrolls, in the clauses nobody carved on public altars, there were other articles: about consent, about oaths entered freely, about contracts voided when coercion had been the only pen available.
She reached along that quieter groove.
"Elussen Merrowe," she said. Names mattered. Elussen, the scholar whose eyes she had never seen and whose letters she had watched Isolde scrawl commentary around. "You lived in a glass city under a violet sky. You hated borders because they lied about what minds can do. You practiced your speeches in mirrors and pretended you didn't. You liked a girl in the archives and argued with her instead of admitting anything. You cheated at cards once and hated the way your hands looked after. You are not a utensil."
Tamsin's voice braided in, low. "You loved the way thought feels when it changes a room. You wanted to walk the mind where bodies can't go."
Lyra, clinical again because that's how she didn't break: "You were proud of your hands. The work they could do. The proofs they could write."
Kel surprised himself. "You hate puppets."
The pressure surged.
STOP, roared the Elder Brain, across every cortex it currently owned.
Riona poured stubbornness into the space where a self still flailed. Not holy wrath, not properly licensed righteousness. Just the basic, indecent conviction that people ought to be allowed to be the authors of their own bad decisions.
"Choose," she said. "For one breath. That's all. Even a breath counts."
Inside the illithid, something tore.
The presence that had been sitting so smug and heavy around Elussen's mind tried to yank the leash, found something else in the way—a god's quiet clause about consent, an infernal fine print about prior claims, a mortal's sheer unwillingness—and recoiled in offended surprise.
The illithid sagged.
The eyes did not turn human. They did, however, turn particular. The tentacles drooped, twitching like a man flexing numb fingers after a cramp.
You are loud, a voice said in their heads. Singular now, if fractured. Mortal. Disorganized.
"Says calamari in a bathrobe," Kel muttered.
Something like a chuckle rippled through their skulls, awful and nearly charming.
I remember enough to resent, Elussen said. The Brain will try to reclaim. It will send others. You stand in the path of that decision. I do not… desire that. I desire less to go back.
"Then we need a leash that doesn't run to the soup," Branna said, practical as a hinge.
Kel sighed. "Fine. We were going to have this conversation eventually."
He stepped back and let the glamour he wore for public convenience peel away, not with fireworks but with a quiet desaturation of reality: skin warming to bronze-red, small neat horns curving back through his hair, eyes clarifying into polished-gold slits. A narrow tail flicked, frankly embarrassed to be here.
He remained precisely halfling-sized, because the universe enjoys jokes you have to explain twice.
Tamsin blinked. "You're… smaller than the literature suggests."
"That's racist," Kel said, pleasantly.
Riona's mouth twitched. "My order judges service, not species," she said. "Kel provides an excess of the former and an alarming amount of the latter."
Kel turned back to Elussen.
"I can offer a binding," he said, all the humor sliding under a professional tone. "Not a soul sale; those are tedious and you're already in breach in three planes. A compact. We anchor you out of the Brain's reach. You agree: no flossing our nerves, no selling us out to the choir, no quiet little side-channels back to the big bath of misery. You help us annoy it."
Devil, Elussen said. Fiend. Contractual parasite.
"Bureaucracy with teeth," Kel corrected. "Do we have a deal?"
Calculation happened behind those cloudy eyes. Survival, yes. Autonomy, a little. The residual ethic of a man who had once loved arguments more than conclusions.
Then: We have a deal.
Kel clapped his hands. Smoke coiled into parchment where there was no parchment, script that twitched if you tried to read it straight. A quill appeared that had never been carved from any earthly feather.
"Clause one," he recited. "No aggression toward signatories. Clause two, obedience to reasonable commands furthering your freedom from soup and our capacity to damage soup. Clause three, no sharing secrets with entities possessing more than a polite number of tentacles. Clause four, we do not sub-let what remains of your soul without consultation."
He pricked his thumb. The blood that welled up burned instead of dripping.
He signed.
The contract purred.
Elussen strained against the roots until one hand brushed the quill. Ink that was not ink spilled up his arm, wrote his name in characters none of them had seen and all of them understood.
The world shivered. Something cold and vast yanked on an invisible line.
The Elder Brain pulled.
The contract smiled in the slow, legal way only an infernal document can and said no.
For one tiny, satisfying instant, two absolute authorities felt each other's edges and realized they could not occupy the same point. The god with the die almost applauded.
The pressure receded, leaving a promise like sour aftertaste.
We are bound, Elussen said, exhausted and newly singular. I will serve this compact. You will keep me from becoming chorus. Together we will irritate the Brain.
"Welcome to the worst team in three counties," Tamsin said. "A knight, a devil, a druid, a ranger, a traumatized royal, and a brain-eater with ethics. May the bureaucracy that files our reports be drunk."
"Fortunately," Riona said, retrieving her sword, "sanity is not a hiring requirement in our line of work."
At the cave mouth, the bound thralls twitched as if someone far away was trying a different key in the lock. Elussen flinched; the contract hummed a warning—an almost musical no—and they sagged back.
They cut Elussen free enough to walk. The binding stayed, humming between them like a second pulse.
On the way up, Lyra plucked a little patch of faintly glowing fungus from a crack in the rock and tucked it into her pouch beside the dusk-ember root. It would make good smoke, combined with bone dust and poor judgment. Isolde's notes had opinions. Lyra imagined arguing with them again and felt the curious mercy of not being able to. Her fingers finally stopped trembling.
Halfway up, the ravine changed its mind about letting them go.
Stone shifted; a long crack wrote itself under their boots, the ledge dropping half a handspan.
"Move," Riona barked, and moved last.
Branna caught a wrist and hauled. Kel stabbed a dagger into a crevice and used it as a piton, teeth bared. Tamsin convinced a tangle of roots that now was a fine time to become a ladder. Lyra threw a rope with ugly efficiency and anchored it around a protruding stone.
Elussen, for one ridiculous heartbeat, forgot gravity and hovered. Old habits. Then he remembered the contract expected him to obey local physics and stumbled forward, tentacles flaring in offended dignity.
The crack sulked and stopped short of collapsing the ledge.
Not yet, murmured the god with the die. There are more elegant calamities on the schedule.
They climbed out into the forest again as night folded its lid over the canopy.
The thralls they'd left near the edge still lay where the roots held them, chests rising and falling. Fingers twitched on phantom tools. One man's mouth worked silently, forming words nobody here spoke.
"We come back for them," Branna said.
It was not a request. Duty, in her order, is a superstition that works only if you obey it.
Crossroads slept badly.
The sky above the palisade did an unconvincing impression of stars. Too few. Too dim. The tavern's sign creaked. The same antlers waited over the hearth. The same locals tried not to stare very hard at the strangers trying not to look like they'd just dragged a new category of problem into town by the hood.
Elussen chose a corner where the light didn't quite reach and folded himself into it, hood up, presence damped down until he felt like a pressure change in the room rather than another person. His mind, on the other hand, was an open balcony.
Branna commandeered a side table and turned it into a battlefield.
She laid out paper, ink, a ruler stolen from some forgotten clerk. Her pen scratched out incidents, numbers, recommendations with vicious tidiness.
"Report to the capital," she said without looking up. "Minimal details on the aberrant; specifics on the missing; suggestion to lid wells and burn stock."
Her hand drifted into a spiral in the margin, perfect and tightening. She stared at it for a second too long, then scrubbed it out until the paper tore.
She did not write the egg.
She did not write "Elussen Merrowe." Some truths needed to be marched to the Crown in chains. Others needed to be smuggled under a cloak and introduced later, gently, if at all.
Tamsin coaxed the hearth into remembering its job. With enough kindling and whispered promises of bigger logs later, flames woke and climbed. For a moment—three heartbeats and a half—the rhythm of the fire's flare matched the slow second pulse in Tamsin's hair, the one that came from brine and shell and a thing sleeping in the old granary's tub.
"Soon," they whispered into the coals.
Whether it was promise, threat, or just a statement of the obvious, even they weren't sure.
Kel had acquired a bottle whose provenance would not have stood cross-examination. He recorked it, put it back on a shelf as if he'd never borrowed it, palmed a silver ring from the bar, turned it over thoughtfully.
The ring had a nick where another hand had worn it for decades. The woman currently asleep with her head on the table three stools down had that same nick on her finger, raw and pale where the skin had gotten used to weight.
Kel slid the ring back onto her hand when he passed, light as dust.
"Look at me," he muttered under his breath. "Becoming an ethical hazard."
Riona rested her sword against the table and closed her eyes, which for her counted as prayer. Her idea of a litany was an inventory: Hrast. A skeletal dragon with too many opinions. One wizard burned down to ash and word. Crossroads. Missing names. Newly acquired calamari. Promises made to villagers and to things older and hungrier than villagers.
If the Ember Crown had saints, she suspected they were not the ones who knew exactly what to do, but the ones who stood up anyway because standing was the only decent verb left.
Lyra stepped outside.
The air bit lightly at her cheeks. The scar there hummed at the same frequency as the memory of Hrast's snow.
The sky above the eastern road was trying for stars and not quite getting there. Too much thin cloud, too much something else pressing down.
She unwrapped the dusk-ember root and turned it over in her hand. It was just a plant. Just a piece of dried thing that had once fed on borders and funerals. In the right ritual, it could become a rope between here and wherever Isolde was, if anywhere.
She could grind it tonight. Burn one end here, one at the granary. Drag a voice across the distance. Ask the dead for directions like this was a normal thing you did between tavern stew and bed.
Isolde would argue with her about it. Loudly. And then grin. And then argue better.
Lyra wrapped the root back up before she could talk herself into a rehearsal.
"Not tonight," she told the dark. "Not yet."
She pinched thumb and forefinger together hard enough to sting until the urge to light something—anything—passed.
Inside, Elussen watched the room the way a scholar watches an ant farm and a revolution at the same time.
I remember a glass city, he sent, not aimed but allowed to spill. Towers that tuned thoughts. We called it the Junction. We thought we could walk the mind across borders the body respected. We were correct. And very edible.
He let the image sit like a cat in the middle of their thoughts, sunning itself. No one reached to move it.
"Good," Kel said aloud, because somebody had to puncture the mood. "Tomorrow we introduce our new friend to local government and see if they issue a receipt for 'returned monster.'"
"No," Riona said gently. "Tomorrow we go back for the bound. We pull them toward themselves. Then we walk the treeline and see where the straight lines go when they run out of forest."
"And after that?" Branna asked, still writing.
"After that," Riona said, "we go home."
The word had taken on edges. "We look in on a granary that keeps secrets, and books that won't lie still, and a thing that is not a baby and not a bomb and not a prophecy but has enough of each to embarrass any king. After that, we pick a fight that deserves us."
The god with the die rolled it again, indulgent.
There would be consequences. There always are.
Elder Brains do not handle emancipation well. Devils have fine print that squeaks if you stand on it. Druids whisper to eggs. Rangers salt their pouches with dangerous smoke. Paladins try to talk the cosmos into reason with a voice that breaks and keeps trying anyway. Somewhere east, a forest's geometry is taking notes. Somewhere north, a skeleton remembers being a dragon. Somewhere in Lindell, a street is quietly learning how to put on a judge's robe. A temple has started rehearsing its refusal to sink. A clock, miles away, is working up the nerve to defy its cue.
(Yes, I am editorializing. You would be bored to death if I left this entirely to their interior monologues. Consider this a kindness. There are storms coming that will not care for your comfort.)
They walked back into their little smudge on the map carrying one more impossible ally and one more impossible secret.
The first chapter had ended with a door banging in an ordinary draft, promising that silence could learn to be a voice in some other room. Consider this its ugly sibling—the one that shows up uninvited, dripping, sitting at your table, and, somehow, making itself at home.
Far below, in a brine pool that thought it contained the world, something swollen and ancient learned a new sensation: insult. It sent the feeling out along wet wires. In a dozen dark places, other illithids looked up sharply without knowing why. One, small and crooked in its robes, remembered for half a heartbeat the feel of tying back long hair before a speech and the satisfying weight of a quill in a proud hand.
The chorus drowned it.
Not forever.
The die kept rolling.