The town had never earned a name the maps respected, so everyone called it Crossroads, which is not a name so much as an apology. It squatted where a dirt road kinked to avoid a boulder that had been there longer than the idea of kings, pressed up against a forest that poured autumn over ravines like stained glass smashed and reassembled by a penitent. Wagons stopped because horses demanded rest and drivers demanded beer. Gods, when they bothered to glance down, saw a smudge on their great design and felt justified in their indifference.
One god watched now, amused, fingertips idly worrying a die that never quite finished rolling.
Months had passed since Hrast. Months since a dead dragon had been convinced to remember it was dead; since one wizard had unstitched herself into incandescent grit and ethics; since a single egg the color of trouble had been carried out under someone's cloak and later tucked to sleep in brine and warding circles back at an old granary turned redoubt. The granary's walls had heard too many plans and not enough laughter. Isolde's books lived there too, mouldering with intent, reordering their margins when unobserved—as if refusing to admit their author had ceased turning pages. (You will tell me that paper can't sulk. Tell that to the notes that still smell faintly of singed rosemary and moral outrage.)
The adventurers were elsewhere, in Crossroads' only tavern, under antlers and smoke-black beams. They sat at a battered table and watched the locals practice their regional sport: pretending not to stare.
Riona Vale looked much as she always had—tall, scarred, plate like a sermon—but the new lines were internal: fractional hesitations that had not existed before; a phantom weight between her shoulders where a wizard had once clung and then hadn't; afterimages of wings burned into her sense of balance. When doors banged open, some reptile thread in her spine still braced for a dry voice at her ear asking if she was ready to be a conduit again. You cannot grow callus on that part of the soul; you only learn to carry the rawness as if it were a badge.
Kel "Three Knives" Joran was the same height he had always been—most of the way to someone's waist—and in constant motion. He rolled a knife through clever fingers because stillness spooked him. His eyes had sharpened a shade since Hrast, as if expecting the storyteller to forget him now that the loudest wizard on the board had gone quiet. Isolde had been his favorite heckler and audience; without her, punchlines hit a wall only he could see. He compensated by throwing twice as many, louder, so the silence had something to choke on. (He would deny the grief if you asked. He would deny the question.)
Lyra Fogstep wore a pale starburst of scar where dragon's breath had kissed cheek into numbness. She carried it the way rangers carry weather: another datum, no melodrama. When cold wind found the dead patch, a phantom taste of Hrast—clean, empty, hostile—touched the tongue. Lyra went still for a count of three, like a hunter assessing a trail, and then moved on, precise. The emotion lived elsewhere, behind doors she had nailed shut from the inside. She was practicing a discipline that looks like indifference from the outside and feels like survival from within. The nails would hold. For now.
Tamsin Reed had braided new bone beads into their hair, each carved with a spiral that looked decorative until you noticed your breath trying to match it. If you stood close when they weren't speaking, you might hear a second heartbeat far off—a cold embryonic metronome keeping imperfect time with their own. Ask if they brooded over the egg sleeping at the granary and they would argue the semantics of the word brood until you gave up. They were not brooding; they were aware. The way storms are aware of the sea that made them.
Sir Branna Kestrel sat among irregulars like a needle stowed in a bag of nails. The King's Guard had attached her after Hrast—half honor, half surveillance, her cropped hair the tidy emblem of a conscience that files reports. Duty had given her an unromantic relation with courage: she knew exactly where it frayed and stitched anyway. She watched the room as if one of the shadows might stand up and claim jurisdiction.
The tavern smelled of wet wool, staler beer than anyone wanted to admit, and that thin, sour fear country people carry when they know something is wrong but lack a word that won't get laughed out of the room.
The mayor—a man whose authority derived from being the only option everyone disliked equally—plucked at his cap. "Missing folk," he said. "Cattle gone wrong. Lights up past the treeline. We sent letters. Road never sent 'em back."
Branna's jaw tightened at the doctrine of distances. She folded the reaction into the pocket where duty lives. "You have us now," she said. It came out like a verdict.
Riona listened with her hands folded, gauntlets quiet. The last time a town had whispered about wrong weather and missing people, the King's answer had been body bags, a dragon corpse with opinions, and a wizard burning herself into theology. She had learned to run Isolde's questions through her own bones before she let orders speak.
"He's stepping around something," Riona said when the mayor had retreated and the tavern hum rose to cover the professionals at work. "Not lying. Skirting a grave he won't name."
"Not just fear," Tamsin added, lids lowered, listening with muscles most people never discover. "Shame. The kind you wear when you can't articulate your own nightmare without sounding foolish."
Kel flashed the dagger that was his smile. "The timeless village dance: 'Something Ate Our Cows, Please Don't Laugh.' Seen it in six counties. Seven if you count the one you only find when you're lost."
"Isolde would be insufferably delighted," Tamsin said, betraying themself. "She'd have a thesis and a footnote to scold the thesis."
A brief, communal flinch: the place in any conversation where Isolde used to stand, now a bruise they refused to poke.
Lyra studied a notice hammered onto the wall: REWARD FOR RETURN OF MISSING: THAREN, MILLER'S BOY; JOVA; OLD COB; FIVE COWS; TWO SHEEP; ONE DOG (GOOD). She got up without comment and ghosted through the room, collecting quiet truths from people who never get to tell them: the barmaid with permanent bruises under her eyes; the drover with mud up to his knees and a better sense of distance than a magistrate; an old woman who watched the world as if she had stocks in it.
The stories came out in the slow pour ale purchases. Cattle found with hides unbroken but skulls light, as if scooped. Blood that dried into branching veins, repeating itself in pretty little fractals like a mathematician with a grudge. A boy gone near the ravines; his dog came home three nights later walking tight circles until the legs gave up. Lights above the canopy—not aurora's honest green, but violet and bile, flickering in polite geometry.
"Sky devils," a man muttered.
"Lantern-spells," the barmaid countered. "But there's no mage up in them hills we'd take bread with."
The last mage they'd heard of was a woman who burned herself out killing a dragon in some other poor town. The tale had blown through on a trader's tongue—half wrong, twice embellished. Lyra had not corrected it. She listened for where it diverged from the truth and kept that for herself. You can file that under symptom if you need to.
Branna returned with a wrinkled sheet of parchment and dropped it like an indictment. "Reports he wrote and never sent. Didn't like how they sounded." The script was cramped with urgency. Shapes in fog, tall and thin. Men waking bloodied from noses and emptied of dreams. Voices from the well. A shadow walking beneath the skin of fields. Crossroads had tried to confess; Crossroads had failed to find the right priest.
"Textbook omens," Kel said cheerfully. "We walk toward them. It's our vocation."
Up above, the god hummed and let the die wobble. Idiots make the plot move. It keeps the lights on.
Lyra's fingers found a small parcel in her belt-pouch, felt for its shape through oilcloth. Dusk-ember root: an ugly little sprig that grows where boundaries thin—graveyard walls, old roads, places where memory gets snagged on the way past. Grind it with silver and powdered bone under the correct stars and you can make a smoke the dead know by name; they'll follow it like a rope, if you are stubborn enough to pull. One of Isolde's marginalia had called it USEFUL. DANGEROUS. ONLY BURN IF SOMEONE YOU TRUST IS HOLDING THE OTHER END.
Lyra did not announce her purchase. Rangers are allowed pocket-sized acts of treason against group transparency. Tamsin noticed the flicker anyway and chose courtesy over interrogation. If a friend's secret isn't bleeding on you, let it breathe.
"Sleep and daylight?" Kel offered. "Investigate when monsters are statistically less theatrical?"
"No," Riona said. "By morning there will be another name on that wall. We move."
"Define lucky," Kel murmured, already standing. No one obliged.
Outside, the air had a metallic tang that promised snow ahead of schedule. The forest sat there like a cathedral that had not yet decided whether to forgive. The first rows of mountains hunched gray behind it, like ideas that refused to resolve.
The first farm crouched a mile down the road. Fence leaning into retirement; a congregation of crows assembled with ecclesiastical gravity. The farmer smelled like hay, sweat, and irony. Branna read the man's mouth the way some people read scripture and saw in it a civic variant of the Hrast look: the face you wear when waiting to learn how much of your life is salvageable.
He led them to the carcass.
The cow lay as if sleeping off an insult. The hide was whole save where panicked knives had explored later, searching for an explanation that wasn't there.
Lyra knelt and pressed gloved fingers into the skull. Beneath hair and bone she found give. Not rot—absence. The thin springiness of brittle something where definite should be.
"Skull's been hollowed from the inside," she said. "No tooth marks, no tools. Just… vacancy."
Tamsin crouched, nose wrinkling. "Nothing local makes this kind of mistake," they said. "Predators eat. Parasites burrow. This looks like a thesis."
Kel studied the blood. It had dried fancy: branching, branching again, repeating as if the pattern enjoyed itself. He unfocused his eyes and the design became almost diagrammatic—neural, familiar in the insulting way handwriting is familiar when you can't recall the name.
A spike of pain drove into his head. The world contracted behind the eyes. He hissed, hand to temple.
Riona's shield-hand tightened. "Speak."
"It's upstairs," Kel said through the ache. "Something pushing. Amateur hour, but ambitious." The pressure climbed, then ran into something inside him that lifted its head and bared neat, infernal teeth.
No jurisdiction, that old something said—principle, not language. This mind is already spoken for.
The pressure slipped sideways and the ache diminished. Kel breathed. He put on a smirk because he needed a mask that wasn't panic. "Psionics," he announced. "Like a gith who owes me money. Or a squid with aspirations."
"Or both," Branna said. "World has an abundance problem lately."
Two more farms, two more wrongnesses: a sheep with eyes imploded and everything else pristine; a dog still alive, rocking, whining nothing, mind scraped smooth. The dog tried to curl in Lyra's shadow and failed; its paws moved in tight little circles that drew no maps. Tamsin had to consciously keep their hand off the beads in their hair. Too far to hear the egg; close enough to worry it would hear them.
"Burn the carcasses," Branna told the farmer, voice clipped but not cruel. "Stack stones over the ash. No wells without lids." She said it like liturgy because sometimes rules are the only way to sound like hope.
By the time they reached the forest's edge, the sun had saucered itself onto the mountains and was sliding off the table.
They entered under a canopy like a burnished nave. Leaves in every theology of orange. Air of leaf mould and distant water. Under it all, a faint chemical aftertaste, as if someone had taught the forest the wrong vocabulary.
"Something's riding the roots," Tamsin murmured. "Not druidcraft. Not old nature. A tune taught with a knife."
"On the bright side," Kel offered, "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 and blinked. Time stretched like poor taffy. Light eddied into an endless late-dusk. The same raven appeared later on the other side; Kel did not notice; the forest kept score.
Little crafts hung from branches: bundles of sticks tied into impossible angles; loops of vine knotted around stones; a twig man with a cow's eye stitched into its chest, rocking gently. The part of Lyra that catalogued world-shapes noted them the way a surveyor notes boundary stones and filed the fear elsewhere. She tied red cloth on trunks at intersections—breadcrumbs nailed down with stubbornness. This was not Hrast's blizzard, but the world folds in more than one direction.
They passed a shallow depression where the leaves refused to lie. Circles within circles, concentrically smug. "Don't step there," Lyra said, too quickly. The scar on her cheek tingled in a remembered cold. She swallowed it whole and moved on. (You want a breakdown? Not today. She'd promised herself one later, under a different sky.)
The first psychic strike arrived without throat-clearing and almost took Lyra out of the story.
Pressure, pure and deliberate, slid into her head. The forest disappeared. She stood in a glass-walled tower under a violet sky, looking down on a city of lights arranged the way ideas are arranged in essays. In her hands: not cards, membranes etched with equations and sigils. Warm laughter nearby.
"Again, Elussen," someone said fondly. "You bend thought like branch and water both."
Her hands—his hands—were long, fine-boned, elf. The name sat wrong in her skull and then sat right: Elussen Merrowe.
The sky tore.
Not air. The idea of air. Something vast and wet and wrong spilled through. Minds screamed like kettle metal. A shadow smelling of brine fell across her—him—the glass. Lyra tasted salt and copper and slammed back into the forest, on her knees, breath sawing.
Riona's hand grounded her shoulder, iron and heat. Tamsin's voice was a rope. Lyra counted to three. Precision returned like a trained dog. The next breath was serviceable. She did not look at anyone. That would have invited kindness and she could not afford that currency.
"What did you see?" Riona asked.
"City. Tower. Cards-that-weren't. The name Elussen. Then an ocean with a brain decided to fall on everyone." Lyra resumed scanning the trees. The report was crisp. You want tears? Find a bard.
"Elder Brain," Kel said, mouth tight. "Mind flayers. Illithids, if you prefer the version that fits in a schoolbook. They come with a salad bowl full of souls."
Branna looked at him sidelong. "You speak as if from experience."
"Devils hear things," Kel said lightly. No one flinched outwardly. Everyone else added a weighted pebble to their internal scales.
They pushed deeper. The forest's geometry cheated. Stones wore spirals no local carver would admit to. Leaves fell in concentric circles with priestly neatness. Shadows ignored torches and obeyed some other moon. Twice they came upon structures of twig and vine—eldritch mobiles that hummed when wind did not.
Then the forest grew teeth—not metaphorical, this time.
A figure stepped into their path, lantern held too high, smile fixed and fossilized. "Evening," the figure said in a voice that belonged to someone from another village and another decade. The skin at the throat quivered incorrectly, as if remembering gills.
"Back," Lyra said, already drawing.
The lantern swung. The light inside wasn't fire. The glass was full of pale, writhing filaments like hair in water.
The man's eyes rolled white. He opened his mouth too wide and sang a note that stroked the meat behind their ears.
Thralls. The word arrived in Riona's mind like a nail.
"Don't kill if you can help it," she snapped, even as she moved.
Kel flicked a knife to pin the lantern-bearing arm to bark; the thing screamed, not with pain but with interference. Tamsin's staff cracked across knees that did not like remembering they were knees. Branna's spear butt kissed a temple and the man sagged, lantern dangling, filaments stroking the glass with obscene affection.
Two more came from the brush in a crabwise scramble, eyes filmed, mouths working. Lyra shot to pin coat to tree and then to pin sleeve to ground. The third arrow hovered, trembled a hair—don't—then took the shoulder instead of the heart. Her hand shook. There, reader, in the minute muscles, is where she cracked. Not the big dramatic break, but the spiderline in glass that predicts the vase's doom months from now.
"Binding," Tamsin said. They pressed palm to ground and whispered sense into roots. Vines lugged thralls to earth and held them, breathing slow vegetal patience into human panic. "They'll live if we do," they said, and the conditional tasted correct and ugly.
"Forward," Riona said, as if the word were a blade.
The ravine opened like a throat. The path narrowed and then shrugged away; the only route down was a series of stone steps spiraling into its gut. Bones made rough gravel—deer, cattle, human, hollowed skulls grinning with vacancy. A cave yawned behind a curtain of ferns. Something within pulsed faintly, phosphorescent, rhythmic. The air stank of damp rock, old blood, and laboratory squid.
"Left," Lyra said, arrow half-drawn. "On the wall."
It clung like a spider where no spider's god would allow: too long limbs sunk into stone, pallid skin gleaming mauve, a bulbous head, face a spill of grey tendrils around a vertical mouth. Milky eyes regarded them with a stillness that felt deeper than patience.
The tilt of its head was a locksmith's tool. Pressure surged.
Branna's spear clattered from numb hands. Lyra dropped to one knee, vision white-shocked. Tamsin held on by reciting the names of trees like a spell. Kel's laugh turned into a hiss and then, again, that interior lawyer stood up and filed an objection. Riona lifted her shield. She opened her oath a fraction, not to the cheap glow of righteousness but to the map of bonds she carries—promise and name, obligation and consent. She felt the illithid burn: not like undead, not like demon, but like foreign policy. Threaded through: a human-shaped color. Distant. Kicking upward through glue.
"Something of him remains," she said. "Elussen. He's drowning and arguing with it."
"Wonderful," Kel said. "We'll rescue him after he finishes trying to liquefy our heads."
The illithid moved in three directions at once. Hands flared. Stone bulged under invisible pressure and popped. A clatter of pebbles became a slide aimed to shear them from footing. Riona stepped into it, shield low, taking the rush on iron; Branna anchored the side like a wedge. Kel slid, grinning because terror tastes like sugar if you chew it wrong, and vanished into shadow. Tamsin slammed the staff; roots woke and got angry. They lashed the wall. The illithid unmade some without touching them; others bound one leg and an arm. Lyra's arrow hissed and buried to the fletch in slick shoulder. Ichor smoked and smelled like seaweed cooked by someone who hated you. Branna's spear scraped a groove. A tentacle shot for her visor. Riona hit like a verdict and tore it free. Steel came down bright and carved a ragged crosshatch across robes and skin.
"Eyes!" Lyra barked, voice thin but unshaken. She shot for the off-center notch above the cheek ridge—humanoid habits die slow. The arrow skipped along a field that crackled blue-white and ricocheted. She swore—short, precise, unmusical.
Kel popped from an angle below the thing's elbow, daggers precise, one skittering off the psionic sheen, the other tasting smoking ichor. The illithid's invisible hand caught his mind and squeezed.
Not yours, said the lawyer in Kel's head, bored and immaculate. Prior claim.
The pressure slewed. The illithid's focus stuttered. For an instant the field thinned—enough for Branna to drive the spear through sleeve and into stone. The haft juddered with a sound like someone tightening a violin too far.
The cave exhaled something that was not wind. A second wave of pressure came low and dirty, aimed to collapse stomachs and loosen bladders. Tamsin gagged, spat an oath that tasted of sap and old promises, and answered with a lattice of roots that knitted like fingers. "Down!" they snapped, and Lyra went flat, rolled, came up on one knee, loosed. This one stuck in the joint where shoulder met chest. The illithid spasmed. The tentacles writhed, tasting air, furious.
Riona dropped her sword, seized a tentacle, and used leverage and spite. She twisted, turned the weight of the creature against itself, and brought it down into the bone litter hard enough to crack ribs that did not like admitting they were ribs. The thing sprawled, spreadeagled against roots like an obscene saint in reverse. It strained; the pressure rose; the pressure broke against whatever the party had chosen to be that day.
From the cave came a rustle. Figures—their thralls—shambled out, faces slack, mouths open to be sung through. One carried a butcher's cleaver. Another dragged a chain. Lyra's hands moved before thought. The first shot cut the cleaver-carrier's boot lace; he crashed to a knee. The second bit into chain links and jammed them in rock. The third—hesitation, crack—took a thigh instead of a throat. Her jaw clenched. The world tilted for a heartbeat; she remembered a boy under a beam and his last noise being surprise; she pushed that memory into a small box and nailed it shut with four nails and a prayer that did not expect to be heard.
"Kill it," Branna said through her teeth. Sensible. Clean. Chop and cauterize.
Riona hesitated.
There are pauses that change stories. This was one.
"Wait," she said. "We can split the monster from the prisoner or destroy both at once. Choose once; regret twice."
Kel rolled his eyes with professional elan. "You are constitutionally allergic to simple roads."
Tamsin, quieter: "If we pull one voice out of that chorus, we don't just save a man. We learn the song the choir is singing."
Lyra—flat, clean tone—said, "He pushed back when the Brain pushed. If he wanted to be only monster, he'd lie there and hum along."
Inside their skulls, the Elder Brain's voice bulldozed: YOU ARE FOOD. YOU WILL SERVE. YOU WILL—
Another voice cut across, thin but sharp as cracked glass: I am not your instrument.
Riona knelt, ignoring the stink and the slime. She set her palm on that slick chest and chose a different facet of her order. The Ember Crown had articles about heat as judgment; it also had arcana about contracts far older than kings: a covenant of consent, service freely sworn. She reached along that groove.
"Elussen Merrowe," she said. "Scholar of 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 saying it. You cheated at cards once and despised yourself for a week. You are not a utensil."
Tamsin's voice braided in, low. "You loved the way thought feels when it changes the room."
Lyra, almost clinically: "You were proud of your hands."
Kel surprised himself. "You hate puppets."
The pressure surged. The Elder Brain bellowed STOP across every cortex in range. Riona poured stubbornness—the moral heat Isolde had taught her to trust—into the space where a self still labored.
"Choose—for a breath," she said. "Even a breath counts."
Inside the bound thing, something tore. A presence withdrew snarling, met resistance, tried legalese, found a clause it had never anticipated, and recoiled.
The illithid sagged. The milky eyes did not become human; they became focused. The tentacles drooped, twitching like a man's fingers flexing after a cramp.
You are loud, the voice said—singular, fractured, Elussen threaded through alien harmonics. Mortal. Disorganized.
"Says calamari in a robe," Kel muttered.
A mental chuckle, awful and almost charming.
I remember enough to resent, Elussen said. The Brain will try to reclaim. It will send others. You will be in the path of that decision. I do not… wish that. I wish less to go back.
"Then we need a leash that doesn't go to the soup," Branna said, practical as a hinge.
"Fine," Kel sighed theatrically. "We were going to have this conversation eventually."
He stepped away and let the glamour he wore for public safety peel off, not with drama, but with a shift of saturation: skin warmed to bronze-red; small, neat horns curved back; eyes clarified into polished gold with a cat's surety; a narrow tail flicked, embarrassed by its own honesty. He stayed exactly halfling height because the universe likes a joke you have to explain twice.
Tamsin blinked. "You're… smaller than the literature suggests."
"That's racist," Kel said, perfectly pleasant.
Riona's mouth twitched. "My order judges service, not species," she said. "Kel provides plenty of the former and is embarrassingly entertaining about the latter."
He turned back to the prisoner.
"I can offer a contract," he said, businesslike. "Not a soul sale—you're a special case and I hate paperwork. A binding. We anchor you away from the soup. You agree: no trying to floss us with our own nerves; no betrayal; no choir practice with enemy telepaths. You help us make the big brain regret surviving."
Devil, Elussen said. Fiend. Contractual parasite.
"Bureaucracy with teeth," Kel corrected. "Do we have a deal?"
Calculus happened behind milk-cleared eyes: survival, autonomy, residual ethics of a man who loved arguments more than certainty. Then: We have a deal.
Kel clapped, delighted. Smoke coiled into a parchment that wasn't, script that moved if you looked too long, a quill that had belonged to someone who would not be needing it again.
"Clause one," he said briskly, "no aggression toward signatories. Clause two, obedience to reasonable commands furthering freedom from soup and retaliation against soup. Clause three, no whispering secrets to anyone with too many tentacles. Clause four, we do not sub-let what remains of your soul."
He pricked his thumb—burning, not bleeding—and signed. The contract purred. Elussen strained a bound hand until fingers brushed quill; the ink that wasn't ink flowed; the name wrote itself in characters none of them had seen and all of them understood.
Something cold and massive tugged on the far end of reality. The Elder Brain pulled the leash. The binding smiled—legal and infernal—and said no. Two absolute authorities discovered each other's edges and made faces. The god above almost applauded.
The pressure receded, sour and promising vengeance.
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. Gods help the bureaucracy that has to write that report."
"Fortunately," Riona said, collecting her sword, "there are few sane bureaucrats in this profession."
The thralls at the cave mouth stirred, as if someone far away had tried a different key. Elussen twitched, tentacles reflexively flexing, and the contract hummed—no. The figures sagged back into uneasy sleep.
They cut Elussen free enough to walk, binding still in place because optimism should never travel alone. He moved carefully, as if gravity had changed size. The contract thrummed between them like a second pulse.
On the way up, Lyra paused to pluck a small phosphorescent fungus from a rock seam and tucked it beside the dusk-ember root. It would smoke well with bone powder if she was clever. Isolde's margins had notes on the subject—footnotes that required argument. Lyra imagined the arguments and discovered the curious mercy of not being able to have them. She felt the tremor in her fingers finally subside. She did not thank anyone for it.
Halfway up, the ravine tried to keep them. Stone shifted. A long crack wrote itself under their boots. "Move," Riona barked, and moved last. Branna grabbed a wrist and hauled; Kel planted a dagger as piton; Tamsin grew a ladder out of roots where no ladder deserved to be. Lyra slung a rope with unlovely efficiency. Elussen floated for a heartbeat—not psionics; he had merely forgotten the etiquette of gravity—then remembered and stumbled. The crack sighed and gave up on murder. Not yet, said the god with the die. There are more efficient calamities scheduled.
They reached the forest's edge with night folding over the canopy like a lid. The thralls they'd left bound on the path still breathed, faces slack, fingers twitching as if typing on absent keys. "We come back for them," Branna said. It was not a suggestion. Duty is a kind of superstition that works.
Crossroads slept badly under a sky trying to remember how to be honest. The tavern door yawned. The same antlers waited, the same smoke, the same locals poorly practicing indifference. Elussen drew hoods and shadow close and sat in a corner where the torchlight could not decide if it wanted to know him.
Branna commandeered a side table and wrote with vicious tidiness: incidents, numbers, recommendations. She found herself drawing a spiral in the margin and scrubbed it out. She began again. "Report to the capital," she said, not looking up. "Minimal details on the aberrant. Specifics on missing residents. Suggested quarantine of wells." She did not write the egg. She would not write Elussen by that name. Some truths must be marched to the crown in chains, and some should be smuggled under a cloak.
Tamsin coaxed the hearth to behave less like a sulking hole and more like a fire. They fed it shavings and careful air until it remembered. The second heartbeat in their hair-spirals matched the flame's tick, just once, and then slipped out of sync. Far away, in brine and circles, something turned over in sleep. "Soon," Tamsin whispered, a promise or a threat.
Kel recorked a bottle he had not paid for and returned it to the shelf he had borrowed it from. He palmed a ring, scowled at himself, and slipped it back onto a widow's hand when she wasn't looking. "Look at me," he told no one, "becoming an ethical hazard."
Riona leaned her sword against the table and closed her eyes as if in prayer, which in her order meant inventory: damage, debts, favors owed to the dead. If the Ember Crown has saints, they are the ones who stood not because they were sure but because standing was the only decent verb left.
Lyra went out to the stoop and watched the sky try to do stars without conviction. Her breath smoked. The scar on her cheek ached at the same pitch that the memory of Hrast hummed. She took the dusk-ember from her pouch and turned it over in gloved fingers. She could make a rope of smoke. She could drag a name across the night. She could ask the dead for directions. Isolde would have argued, then grinned, then argued better. Lyra wrapped the root and tucked it away. Not tonight. Not yet. She pressed thumb and forefinger together hard enough to hurt and waited for the shaking to stop. It did. Eventually.
Elussen, from the shadow, watched the room the way a scholar watches anthills and revolutions. His voice in their minds had become a quieter weather. I remember a glass city, he sent to no one in particular, perhaps to the contract, perhaps to the ghost of a habit. There were towers that tuned thoughts. We called it the Junction. We believed we could walk the mind across boundaries the body respected. We were correct. We were also prey. He let the thought sit among them like a cat that might or might not be tame.
"Good," Kel said aloud to break what needed breaking. "Tomorrow we take our new calamari friend into town government and ask for a receipt."
"No," Riona said gently. "Tomorrow we go back for the bound. We drag 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 without looking up.
"After that," Riona said, "we go home." The word had angles now. "We look in on a granary that keeps secrets, and books that refuse to sleep, and a thing that is not a baby and not a bomb and not a prophecy, but contains enough of each to embarrass any king. After that, we pick a fight that deserves us."
The god rolled its die, indulgent. There would be consequences. There always are. Elder Brains do not take emancipation well. Devils have fine print that squeaks. Druids whisper to eggs. Rangers salt their pouches with dangerous smoke. Paladins attempt to talk the cosmos into reason with a voice that breaks and keeps talking anyway. A street will one day put on a judge's robe. A temple will forget how to sink. A clock will refuse its cue and make time apologize. (Yes, I am editorializing. Consider it a kindness. There are storms coming that do not care for your comfort.)
They walked back to their smudge on the map with one more impossible ally and one more impossible secret. The first chapter had ended with a door banging mundanely in an ordinary draft, a promise that silence can learn to be a voice in some other scene. Consider this that scene's ugly sibling, the one that doesn't get invited to dinner but shows up anyway, hungry and earnest.
Somewhere far below, in a brine pool that thinks, the Elder Brain learned a new sensation: insult. It sent the feeling outward along wet wires. In a dozen dark places, other illithids looked up sharply without knowing why. One, small and crooked in its robe, remembered—briefly—tying back hair before a speech and the feeling of hands that were proud of themselves. The chorus drowned it. Not forever.
The dice kept rolling.