The passage ended without warning.
One moment the walls were close enough to touch on both sides, the ceiling low, the corrupted veins pressing in from every surface. The next step, there were no walls. No ceiling. Nothing above him but darkness so vast and so complete that his mind, searching for a boundary and finding none, simply stopped trying to measure it.
Draven stood at the threshold and looked down.
The passage had delivered him onto a natural ledge — a wide shelf of rock jutting from the cavern wall, twenty feet above the floor of something that should not exist this far underground. Below him, stretching in every direction until it was swallowed by distance, was a forest.
Not a cavern with plants in it. A forest. The distinction mattered. He'd passed through caverns with lily fields, through chambers where corruption had encouraged growth in the spaces between rock. What lay below him operated by different logic entirely. The trees were tall enough that their canopies formed a second ceiling sixty feet above the floor, their trunks wide and deeply rooted, their forms shaped by years — decades — of growth in sealed underground dark. That some of them were recognizable made it stranger, not less: oaks and ash trees, their silhouettes familiar, their substance completely wrong. The bark was black and ash-dry, the canopies dense with dark leaves that held a faint crimson luminescence along their edges, as though the light of the corrupted veins had been absorbed and was slowly being re-emitted. Between them grew things that had no name — broad, flat-capped fungi the size of wagon wheels, pulsing with a slow red bioluminescence; long trailing vines that moved in air currents he couldn't feel from the ledge, their surfaces glistening and dark; clusters of crystalline formations rising from the soil like frozen geysers, faceted and blood-red, each one a slow, steady beacon in the dimness.
And everywhere — threaded through all of it, filling every open space of floor, climbing every root, draping from every low branch — spider lilies. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. Their crimson blooms the only familiar thing in the scene below, and their familiarity made the rest of it harder to accept, not easier.
Through the forest floor ran rivers.
Not streams. Rivers, wide and slow-moving, their beds cut deep into the cavern rock over time beyond his reckoning. The water — if it could be called that — ran the color of dark blood, viscous and deeply red, carrying its own faint light. Where the rivers met the tree roots, the corruption transferred: the roots nearest the banks glowed brightest, their veins thickest, the trees above them most thoroughly consumed.
He stood on the ledge for a long moment, breathing.
From up here he could also see the walls — all of them, the full circumference of the cavern, and what covered them drove the scale of the thing home in a way that the forest itself hadn't quite managed. Passages. Hundreds of them. Thousands, perhaps — openings of every size cut into the cavern walls at every height, some wide enough to drive a wagon through, some barely large enough to crawl, connected by the forest floor below and by narrow rock bridges higher up, a branching, interconnected maze that radiated outward from this central chamber the way roots radiate from a tree. He could not see where any of them led. They simply opened into dark, each one a question with no visible answer, the whole arrangement suggesting something vast and deliberate beneath the surface of the world — a network, a system, something that had been building for a very long time in the places no one thought to look.
He noted the nearest path down from the ledge — a natural slope where the rock had fractured and terraced — and began his descent.
The forest floor received him in silence.
He activated Mana Sense immediately, keeping it at a low, careful output — enough to read his immediate surroundings without broadcasting. The signature density down here was extraordinary. Every tree, every fungal growth, every lily and vine and crystal formation was so thoroughly saturated with corrupted mana that reading individual signatures from the background was like trying to hear a single voice in a crowded hall. He had to tune it carefully, filtering out the ambient corruption and listening for the dynamic signatures — the ones that moved, the ones that breathed.
He found them quickly.
The wolves moved in loose groups of three and four, threading between the trees with the fluid, unhurried confidence of predators in familiar territory. Up close they were worse than the wolf carcass he'd seen dragged through Ashveil's gates. These were not recently corrupted — they had been inside this place long enough that the process had run its full course. Their fur was gone entirely, replaced by a smooth black carapace of corrupted flesh that absorbed the ambient light rather than reflecting it. The crimson veins beneath ran in thick, raised lines across their bodies, pulsing visibly with each heartbeat. Their paws were silent on the forest floor despite their size, the corruption having done something to their joints that made each step uncannily precise.
Their eyes, all six of them — three on each side of their elongated skulls — burned with a flat, constant red.
He gave the first group a wide berth, circling through a dense cluster of crystal formations that disrupted his Mana Sense readings but provided cover. The wolves passed within fifteen feet of him, close enough that he could hear the subtle sound their breathing made — a low, clicking rasp, air moving through a chest cavity that had been partially crystallized. None of them turned toward him.
Mana Sense, he reminded himself. Keep it low. Don't let the output reach them.
The birds were the greater problem.
He'd registered their signatures from the ledge but hadn't appreciated the full difficulty until he was beneath the canopy and one passed directly above him. They were large — wingspan wider than he was tall — their bodies dark and angular, feathers replaced by the same black carapace as the wolves, six eyes arranged in two vertical rows on either side of a narrow skull. They moved through the canopy in slow, banking circles, and they did not flap. The corruption had changed their flight mechanics into something nearly silent, a controlled glide that produced almost no sound and no air displacement below.
What they produced instead was mana.
He noticed it on the third one that passed above him — a constant, low-level mana emission radiating downward from their bodies as they flew, a passive scan that spread through the canopy like a net and returned information to the bird above. Not sight. Something more comprehensive than sight.
He went completely still beneath the canopy whenever one passed and suppressed his Mana Sense to the absolute minimum — not off, because off meant blind, but low enough that the output was below the detection threshold of what he was estimating their scan sensitivity to be. He held his breath. He waited. The bird completed its circuit and banked away.
Then he moved again, quickly, using the gaps between their overlapping scan patterns.
It took three times longer than it should have to cross the forest. He tracked two wolf groups, four birds, and one thing he couldn't fully identify — a large signature deep in the trees to the east that didn't move, didn't scan, simply sat with the particular weight of something that didn't need to hunt because everything else in the forest already knew not to come near it. He didn't investigate. He kept moving west, toward the point where his Mana Sense registered a change in the ambient texture — a thinning of the organic signatures, a shift in the quality of the light filtering through the canopy ahead.
The trees ended at a riverbank.
The widest river yet — twenty feet across, its current slow and red and carrying heat he could feel from where he stood. On the opposite bank, the forest simply stopped. No gradual thinning, no transition zone. Just trees on one side of the river, and on the other side —
Nothing.
Rock. Bare, dark rock, cracked and ancient, its surface painted in the dried remnants of old lava flows that had cooled into frozen rivers of black and deep red. The temperature change hit him the moment he found a crossing — a cluster of rocks breaking the river's surface — and stepped onto the opposite bank. From the humid, organic cold of the forest to something drier and deeper and hotter, the air tasting of mineral and char.
The volcanic biome spread before him without apology.
There were no plants here. No lilies, no fungi, no vines. The corruption manifested differently in this heat — the crimson veins ran through the rock itself, deep and bright, illuminating the fractured terrain from within and casting everything in a red light that had no softness to it. Lava moved in slow channels cut between the rock formations, not volcanic in the eruptive sense but steady, ancient flows from somewhere far below that had been seeping upward for long enough to carve their own geography. The heat shimmer above them made the far side of the biome blur and shift, the landscape distorting at the edges.
He picked his way forward through the rock formations, his boots finding solid ground between the lava channels, his Mana Sense reaching ahead into the heat-distorted air.
What it returned made him stop walking.
A signature. One signature, at the center of the biome, where the lava channels converged into a wide, flat basin of bare rock. The largest signature he had ever read. Larger than the half-dragon on the battlefield. Larger than anything his Mana Sense had encountered in this dungeon or outside it, a density of mana so immense that reading it felt less like perception and more like standing at the base of a cliff and looking up. Corrupted, yes — deeply, thoroughly — but the corruption was almost secondary, layered over something that had existed long before the dungeon's influence reached it. Old. Incomprehensibly old, in the way that the rock around him was old, in the way that the lava flows were old — measured not in years but in the slow grammar of geological time.
Three heartbeats. He was reading three distinct heartbeats, large and unhurried, from a single source.
He moved through the last rock formation and saw it.
It stood in the center of the basin with the absolute stillness of something that had not needed to move in a very long time. Three heads on three thick necks, each one the size of a draft horse, their skulls heavy and angular, jaws long enough to close around a man from shoulder to hip. The body beneath them was enormous — four-legged, deep-chested, covered in a hide so thoroughly corrupted it had lost all original color, black as volcanic glass with crimson veins running in dense, luminous networks across every surface. Each head bore six eyes arranged in two rows, burning with a red so deep it was almost black at the center. A mane of corrupted crystal formations ran the length of each neck, irregular and sharp, glowing faintly in the lava light.
Three heads. Three heartbeats. One thing.
Draven stood very still at the edge of the basin, the heat pressing against his face, and looked at the Cerberus.
Of course, he thought, with the particular exhaustion of someone who had stopped being surprised by terrible things a long time ago.
None of the three heads had turned toward him yet.