Untold Adventures: A Dungeons and Dragons Anthology

WATCHERS AT THE LIVING GATE
A TALE OF THE FORGOTTEN REALMS

He lived with his own kind in the forest, away from the towns of the human world, because of what he was. But once a year since he was small he’d come away to the ruined city on the mountainside where his own people never ventured, nor full-blooded humans either, a place of old magic and old defeats. That first time he’d been hunting on the cliff top, and a wounded ram had led him far from home. In a bowl of mist and leaning stones he brought it down, a lucky shot with the small bow, but soon he heard the hounds yelping behind him. Before he could claim the kill he had been whipped away by men on horseback, shouting and cursing the mother who had borne him. Some dismounted and threw stones. Helpless, he had watched them pull the ram away, his arrow still lodged in its throat.

When he ran away it had not been in shame or fear so much as rage. Toward sunset he came out on the mountainside above the clouds and watched the red light cut across the rocks amid the tussocks of coarse grass. There was the fallen gate, its stone posts inscribed with runes he couldn’t read, not yet. He approached, and came into the first of the ruined streets, the ruined houses built into the cliff side.

Carved statues lined an avenue. Some had lost their arms, legs, heads, but even so, he could see a vision of ideal beauty in the broken stones. He paused to study the statue of a boy about his age, yet more beautiful even than a human child, tall and slender, with long eyes and delicately pointed ears.

He stood at the lip of a stone pool, gesturing down into its depths, and in the last rays of the setting sun, the living boy squatted over it and saw reflected in its surface, as carefully as in any mirror, his own distorted features, his heavy jaw, protruding teeth, mashed nose, bulbous eyes under heavy ridges of bone. In such circumstances even the small attempts at decoration, the shards of broken glass that his mother had tied lovingly into his shaggy hair, appeared to mock him as they caught the light.

Then it was dark. He looked around for the door of a stone hall that still retained some of its roof. The black doorways seemed suddenly menacing. Who knew what ghosts and spirits prowled these ruins, who had died here when the city fell? Instead, shivering with cold, he stayed beside the pool, until the moon rose behind the shattered peaks, and moonlight struck the surface of the water.

That was the first time he had seen her. Every year since then he had returned, when the first full moon of summer fell into the water. He had changed since that first time, grown in stature and in skill, but she never changed. Always she stroked to the surface as if swimming up from underneath, from some submerged tunnel, he had thought at first.

Then, because he was a boy, he had worshiped her as a boy does a woman, worshiped her goodness, as he imagined it, striven to be worthy, and to fulfill every command. Later, full-grown, his shoulders tattooed with his clan’s symbols of manhood, his ears pierced with iron rings, he had moved into another kind of worship, as she had stood with the water to her knees, her body clothed in wet silk, and a phosphorescent sheen that had followed her from the depths. Later still, reckless, he had staggered down into the pool, only to find himself enmeshed in weeds, while she pulled laughing away. “How ugly you are! How is it possible for a living creature to be so ugly? You disgust me-truly, you disgust me.” But when he was exhausted and discouraged she came close to him again, and with flashing eyes she told him once more what he must accomplish to prepare himself. He’d done everything she’d asked.

These commandments, as if from a goddess, had led him far from his own people. Not for him the brawls between the clans, the comforts of marriage and children. Instead he lived with his widowed mother in the forest, away from the clan’s hearth, despised, he imagined, by the purebreds in his village. With a dedication born of rage, he studied human lore. He learned the languages of men and other creatures. He studied old books by candlelight, and parchment scrolls from the libraries of the abandoned city. He spoke the words the goddess brought to him until the trees came alive. And in the spring he cut his totem stick from a piece of bone, and carved the length of it in a pattern of braided hair, and fashioned its knob in the shape of a wolf’s head, with lumps of agate for its eyes.

On the night of the full moon he slept most of the day. His mother woke him for supper, as he had requested. Yawning, he sat down on a mossy rock in the middle of the stream, washed his body, shaved his face, combed his hair and knotted it with iron beads. Then he dressed himself in the clothes he had laid out the night before, his father’s shirt, made from doeskin as fine as linen, salvaged by his mother after he’d left them, mended and patched over the years. The tribe wore furs and harder, heavier leather when they wore anything, but she had kept this human garment for the wedding of her half-human son.

Now she brought him porridge and blood sausage from the fire. She stood watching him, holding the food in the wooden bowl. Long before, she had learned not to question his choices, because it was common for the men in the village to abandon their old mothers and fathers to the wolves, the totem of their clan, when there were too many mouths to feed. But her son was a powerful hunter. Others claimed to see the deer and elk search for him in the meadows and the woods, and lay their horned heads in his lap.

“Haggar,” she said.

He looked up, smiling into her coarse and wrinkled face, until he noticed that her eyes were bright with tears. “Don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried. But you are going far away.”

He expected some sort of complaining then, and when it didn’t come he started to say all the things that he’d rehearsed in order to forestall her: “I won’t be long. I’ve left seven necklaces of iron cash. In the digging pit there’s a wooden box with agates and opals you can sell in town. Humans love them for their games. The smokehouse is full of meat and fish.”

But when she said nothing about any of that, he stood up to comfort her. “I won’t go far,” he said, which was a lie, the first he’d ever told her.

“There’s my cousin,” she said, referring to a girl in the village. “She waits for you.”

When he put his arms around her, she relaxed into his chest. “Me, too,” she said, fingering the bone buttons of his father’s shirt.

Later, as it got dark, he left the encampment. Barefoot, he ran uphill through the woods. When the trees gave way among the rock piles, he clambered onto the ridge, then stood looking back for a moment at the firelight among the trees. It was the first night of the summer festival, and the men were lighting the bonfire in the charmed circle. They were already drinking their honey beer, and soon the women would dance to the rhythm of the drums, while the old shaman marked their foreheads from a bowl of blood-he’d never seen this ceremony. He missed it every year.

He stood on the ridge as the darkness gathered. “I know you’re here,” he said without turning round. The she-wolves picked their way over the stones, their heads low. He ran among them up the slope into the high meadow, among the red-star columbines. The wolves coursed after him but could not reach him, because as he ran he gripped his totem stick and muttered his evocations, until he could feel the coarse hair on his back and down his arms, and he dropped down to all fours.

Everything she’d asked he had accomplished, no matter what the sacrifice. Tonight she would understand that there was no remaining trace of the boy whose shape had so disgusted her. She would recognize how love had changed him.

Before moonrise he paused at the stone gatepost on the mountainside, whose runes, he now saw, spelled out a name, or else part of a name: CENDR. The remaining letters on the other side had crumbled away, and the post itself had broken into pieces in the coarse grass. The wind had died. Black clouds hung above him, obscuring chunks of stars.

And when he saw the sky glow silver behind the eastern peaks, he picked his way down the avenue of statues, his feet delicate on the uneven stones. At the limit of his senses he could hear the noise of rats or rabbits in the empty houses; they would not show themselves. They would crawl into their crevices and holes, not knowing they were safe from him; he wasn’t hungry. All day he had fasted, in preparation. Now finally he reached the rim of the stone basin and lowered his head to drink. But at the last moment he did not break the surface with his long tongue, and as the moon rose he saw his countenance reflected as in a mirror, his yellow eyes and cruel teeth. Baring them, pulling away his dark lips, he allowed his breath to trouble the water, while at the same time a small wind came out of nothing, following his secret command. It stirred the surface, sparing him the sight of his ugliness as he regained his mortal shape.

When the circle of the moon was bright in the water, he heard her laughter from the other side of the pool. She sat on the far lip of the basin, weeds in her yellow hair, which gleamed with phosphorescence. She was examining the bottom of one foot when she raised her head.

“Haggar,” she said, her voice soft and musical, and he wondered if he’d ever told her his true name, and if not, how she came to know it. “So many years you’ve disappointed me. When I tell my friends, they laugh at me. But it’s time to prove them wrong. I need your help. I have an urgent need. I hope things are different now.”

So many years-nine years. During that time he had changed utterly in body and mind, but she had not changed. He stood in his leather breeches and his father’s wedding shirt, his totem stick slung in his belt. Now she stood and beckoned, and as he stumbled forward, it occurred to him that he was older than she, or at least he looked older, a full-grown man. And at the same time he thought about what she’d said: she needed him. What for? Need, he knew, was different from love, however similar they felt. And friends-what friends? He’d always thought she was alone in the world, last of her race, of the people who had lived here in this city, perhaps.

He paused, the water around his shins. She stood within a stone’s cast away, one hand on her slim hip. She smiled at him, a mocking smile, he understood, and for the first time he listened to his doubts-he had learned much in the solitary study of his craft. He knew the evocations that summoned clouds and rain, and those that summoned lightning from the sky. He had his hand on the druidic chain of being that linked all beasts with the primal spirit, and he knew the evocations that would pull him closer to that spirit up the evolutionary links, so that he could find the dividing lines, and sink back down again into another body, bird, or fish, or reptile, or warm-blooded beast. And though he had the practical mind of his mother’s people, he could not have learned these things without some knowledge of the rest, of other worlds or planes that joined to this one in small places, of the Feywild and the crystal towers of Cendriane, where the eladrin had once lived, tall and proud and slender, but blind in their suspicion that all other races were animals to be used. Worse than humans in that way.

“When I tell my friends…” Now suddenly he imagined her not as a solitary gift to him, but as an emissary from that world. He took a step backward, and at the same time watched the smile fade from her lips. How had she known his name, and not even his clan name but the secret name his mother called him? For an instant he imagined his mother’s cottage in the woods, and heard in his mind’s ear the drums of the summer festival, and saw the bonfire and the women dancing among the trees, among them Uruth, his mother’s cousin, but younger than him, a sweet girl with big eyes, but not beautiful, not like this.

Her smile dwindled as she saw his doubts. She stood with her hand on her hip, while the moonlight spread across the surface of the water. “Catch me,” she said, and she dived into the depths-the pool was deeper than it looked, he knew. With a cry, he dived in after her, struggling to follow, to seize her as she swam down. For an instant he thought he’d clasped her in his arms, but then she’d slipped down deep, her wet silk slippery as eel skin. The water was murky, suffused with light, and he saw nothing.

His lungs were bursting, but he held his shape. He knew this was a test, a last test, and if he failed it she would not come again. Last year he’d tried to follow her down, and in the hole at the bottom of the pool where the current changed and the water turned cold, he’d lost his nerve. Defeated, desperate, he had clawed his way up to the surface again.

But now he saw a glimmer down below, and imagined her small feet kicking through the weeds. He imagined diving down to her, touching her body with his outstretched fingertips as she twisted away. He imagined he would drown and die rather than lose her, and with all his strength he struggled grimly, even as he felt the weeds clutch at his legs. Below him in the phosphorescent depths of the pool he saw a shadow flicker, and with his lungs empty, his brain starved of air, he toiled down into the glow, first green, then blue until it burst around him, and he realized he’d been swimming upward to the light, and now had broken through the surface of another pool, under another sky.

And even so he might have drowned, because he found himself almost too exhausted to move, and too depleted to breathe, except he found the water shallow where he was. On his hands and knees, he dragged himself up a surface of smooth, blue-green tile until he lay at her feet.

The sunlight blinded him, it was so bright. The air was too rich to breathe. He had a vague impression of her standing over him, speaking not to him but someone else. “Humor me. I didn’t choose him for his looks. Take him and put him with the others. Leave him his rags until we find him proper clothes. And be careful. He doesn’t look it, but he has some skill. That’s why he’s here.”

Haggar rolled onto his back, forcing his eyes open so he could peer up through his lashes at the azure sky, so terrible and deep. He forced his ears and nose to open, fuzzily aware that if he tried to protect himself from the intensity of colors, sounds, and smells that distinguished this place, he would lose any hope of commanding nature here, as he could at home. Ignoring the long hands that snatched his wolf stick from his belt, he murmured an evocation. Leaving his body to be mauled and harried by the eladrin, he cast his mind into the air until he hung suspended far above, and looked down with an eagle’s eye on the small group of struggling figures at the edge of the tiled pool.

This projection of himself, this imaginary eagle, was not capable of astonishment. Otherwise he would have been amazed to see the extent of the ruined city below his claws, the height of the crystal spires that soared up past him. The city lay at the edge of a sprawling forest that had overgrown it in a twisting mass of vines. What remained were buildings of prismatic stone, many of them perfect and untouched, as if the inhabitants had been called away momentarily to attend to something important, and left their doors standing open. But other parts of the city bore the traces of the powerful explosions that had destroyed it many years before, circular craters that contained structures not just ruined but pulverized, blasted to their foundations. Within these circles nothing lived, in contrast to the teeming life that overran the rest, life not just vegetable but animal as well: panthers and rodents and feral pigs, as well as monstrous insects, made huge, perhaps, by the lingering effects of a forgotten war.

There were no birds above him in the high, unnatural, purple and blue vault of the sky. Below, the eladrin were wrestling his body into a cart. He counted three of them besides the girl, and as they bound his arms behind him, he could tell they were nervous and unsure. He knew it from the language of their bodies, and because they were rougher than was necessary-he was offering them the resistance of a sack of potatoes, or perhaps a sack and a half. Nor could he explain their vicious pokes and jabs as merely their natural contempt for him. No, the eladrin were in a hurry, and the horses, also, were skittish and shy.

He could not judge the time of day from the color of the light, which was too unfamiliar. He could not see the sun. But as he sank down into his body, tried to imagine the reason for their haste as they pulled the horses over the jolting stones, down the Avenue of Gods-this name came to him intact, a memory from old maps. He knew that, like the corresponding street in the mortal realm, it cut across the city toward the eastern gate, and was embellished by its own double line of marble statues-many objects here, he knew, had their own pale resonance in the land he had left behind.

He lay trussed-up in the back of the cart, considering his options. Now that he had his bearings, it seemed to him that even without his totem stick, much could be done. Whatever these people were afraid of, he could use that fear against them. He started with a few small guttural evocations, which his captors might confuse with the sound of him coughing or spitting-they hadn’t blindfolded him or bound his mouth. No, they had underestimated him, which was why he’d not resisted them. But that would change now, he thought, staring at the girl’s beautiful face as she looked up into the sky.

The breeze had freshened, and tendrils of dark vapor moved across the sky, while at the same time the front wheels of the cart fetched up against a root, whose heavy knee had split the paving stones. The driver spoke his own less-effective evocation as a single tendril broke out of the bark and grasped at the wooden rim like a weak, small, pale green hand-it was enough. Before the horses could pull free, a half-dozen more had clutched the wheel, while vinelike clouds clutched at them from above-the Feywild, Haggar thought, was responsive to him. The force of nature was overwhelming here.

The sky darkened. Soon, he imagined, a bolt of lightning would spook the horses; already they refused to move, shivering with their ears back, while the driver hacked them with his whip. Two eladrin warriors leaped out of the cart, and one stood guard while the other bent to cut at the new creepers with his sword. Neither of them had yet thought to connect him with what was happening.

The girl, however, was wiser. Alone in the cart with him, she bent over him. Her yellow hair fell over her face and he could smell the scent of her, a perfume like cinnamon or clove. “Listen to me, you bird-brained pig,” she murmured. “Let me explain. In half an hour it will be dark. Sooner if you persist. Even in twilight, we won’t last ten minutes here. Lord Kannoth will open up the gates of his black palace, and he will hang our corpses from the trees. He has an army of undead soldiers who worship him as a god. Do you want to play your stupid games with him?”

“Free me,” Haggar croaked. His voice was ugly even to himself.

She bent lower, so that she could whisper softly in his ear. “You stinking lump of excrement.”

Above them the sky was black, and a foul mist had gathered. Rearing up, screaming with terror, the horses yanked at their traces and the cart fell to one side, kept from overturning by the swarming vines. The girl stepped to the ground and stood erect. She raised her cupped hands, filled now with a greenish light that ran down her naked arms and over her body, soaking her clothes until she herself was a radiant torch against the darkness. She drew her knife and cut the horses free of the vines, and in an instant they were quiet; they stood trembling, patient, their eyes wide, their nostrils rimmed with foam. Then she bent to hack at the creepers that held the wheel, and Haggar could feel the cold edge of the blade as if against his own skin.

He rolled down against the side of the cart, and there he found his totem stick discarded and wedged in a crevice between the knotted slats; the eladrin had thrown it there, not respecting him enough to keep it safe. Rolling against the wolf’s-head knob, pressing his shoulder into it, he snarled an evocation and felt his body change. He felt the bone absorb into his body. The ropes slackened, and he bit at them until they gave way.

He no longer suffered the edge of the girl’s knife. Instead, she’d turned away from him, walked a few paces down the road to illuminate a wider area. Her arms were upraised, and the knife glowed in her left hand. In the mist, Haggar could see she kept at bay an emaciated pale creature taller than herself, while the other eladrin, the two soldiers and the driver, cowered behind her. Shaking himself free of the last knots, he bounded from the cart and moved away into the darkness, only to turn when he heard one of the horses groan, a low gurgle deep in its chest.

Both animals had sunk to their knees on the stone road. A hideous spider, larger than a man, crouched above them. Snarling and cursing, Haggar did his best to clear the darkness he had made, conjuring up a wind to blow the mist away, break apart the clouds. But he knew that whatever he did, he would find the day had sunk to twilight. Whatever creatures lurked in the catacombs and forests of Cendriane, their feeding time had come.

But there was a full moon here, too, or almost full, brighter than its counterpart in the mortal world. By its light, and the light cast by the girl, he could watch the spider wrap its kill in pale cords as thick as a man’s wrist. In the other direction, toward the eastern gate, the way was blocked by a dozen or more of the undead, their bone-bleached skin luminous in the moonlight. Skeletal, with swollen heads and grinning jaws, they carried weapons of a type Haggar had never seen, swords that shone like crystal, and bows of yellow horn. One of them nocked a gleaming arrow, and in a moment the eladrin driver fell, shot through the eye.

Again Haggar paused, one forefoot upraised. This was not his fight. But then he saw another of the eladrin stumble to his knees, a sword through his belly. The final soldier was just a boy, and he fought bravely, his yellow hair matted with blood. But then one of the pale creatures pulled him down from behind, which left only the girl, twisting away from a behemoth with an axe, cutting him through the ribs and then shying back, her green fire diminished, almost extinct.

Haggar threw back his head and howled, and a single bolt of lightning hit the spike of the creature’s axe, sending him sprawling. A peal of thunder shook the ground, and then Haggar was upon them, snatching the thin bones of the skeletons’ legs. And when the girl fell, he seized hold of the collar of her shirt, gripping the fragile cloth in his narrow jaws, dragging her away. At the same time a miasma of fog seemed to spill out of the ground, and the creatures, disoriented, hacked and stabbed at shadows, while a freezing wind surrounded them in a sudden squall of snow. Haggar backed away from them, dragging the girl over the icy stones until they reached the gate at the base of the avenue, an enormous arch of carved and decorated marble, with friezes and embellishments of fighting beasts, and a squat stone eagle on each corner of the roof.

On the other side of the arch, the moon rode high and unimpeded above the forest’s edge. Not knowing if she was alive or dead, Haggar dragged the girl out through the gate, out of the city, and immediately found himself returned to his common form, a lurching half-breed orc, gesticulating impotently with his totem stick while the fingers of his other hand grasped at her torn collar. Back through the arch he could still see the blizzard, but here everything was still.

Or not quite. There was a sound of melancholy laughter. Then a man detached himself out of the shadow of the gate, and Haggar understood without knowing that this was Lord Kannoth, archfey ruler of the catacombs of Cendriane.

He was a man of middle height, dark, delicate, and slender, and dressed in a jacket of wine-colored velvet. His only weapon was a flower, a lily at the end of a long stalk. Bending down over the recumbent girl, he touched the lily to her brow, her lips. His voice was light and mocking. “When I first saw you, I thought perhaps you were an enemy to be feared, some wild lycanthropic berserker out of Brokenstone Vale. But in the moonlight, as you perceive, these illusions have melted, and here we are, a simple eladrin maiden, a cowering orc, and me.”

As he spoke, the snow died away on the other side of the arch. The mist dissipated, and as far as Haggar could see, the Avenue of the Gods stretched unimpeded to the blue-tiled pool. The wreckage from the fight had been pulled away. The stones were white as chalk under the moon.

“Tell me,” said the archfey. “Now that everything is still, and if you can remember, and if you have the wisdom to speak, what is the impulse that has powered all this violence? Don’t worry,” he said, as Haggar crouched over the girl’s body, stretched out his hand and then drew it back. “She is asleep, waiting for you to wake her. It is love, is it not? It is love that has caused all this.”

He didn’t deny it. In slumber, in the moonlight, all the anger and contempt that had disfigured her were bleached away. She lay on her back, her hair away from her face.

“And what about her? What does she feel? An orc and a fey maiden-I must confess to you, a story such as this could touch my heart.”

Haggar shook his head. Lord Kannoth smiled. “But that might change. You must not give up hope. Don’t be afraid-she cannot wake unless you kiss her lips.”

Haggar looked up in wonder into the archfey’s pensive face. Again he put his hand out, pulled it back.

“Boy,” advised Lord Kannoth, “it is a token of my good will. But do not make me wait. For only a few more moments will I consent to be amused.”

And so Haggar closed his eyes, leaned forward, and placed the lightest possible kiss on the girl’s lips. Instantly she came awake, and when she saw him, she twisted away as if he’d burned her. She turned her face to the ground and spat. “Pig!”

Lord Kannoth laughed. “This boy has saved your life. Show some gratitude, my child. Pride is nothing, beauty is nothing, compared to the virtues of an honest heart. Believe me, this I know.”

With his lily wand, he pulled the hair back from his feral, delicate face. And wherever the flower touched, the skin changed. What had been pale and pure, in a moment was scorched and ridged, grotesque and distorted, with ragged lips pulled back in a grin. “Child,” he said softly. “What’s your name?”

“Astriana, my lord,” she mumbled into the dirt.

“Astriana, that’s a flower’s name. Accept your fate, Astriana, as I have accepted mine. This is your husband. Do you understand me?”

Tears glistened in her eyes. “Yes, my lord.”

“Speak the oath in your heart, where I can see it. Good. Then it is done.”

He stood and turned away from them. The moon slid behind a cloud. When it came free again, Lord Kannoth had disappeared.

“Come,” Haggar said, after a moment. “Let’s leave this place. It’s not safe to stay here.”

A hundred paces from the road, the forest waited. “No one will harm us,” murmured Astriana. “Are you so stupid that you did not hear? He gave his word.”

She was weeping into her fists. She crouched in the road as he stood over her, embarrassed. The air around them stood still.

“Are you so stupid that you don’t understand?” she continued. “You’re my husband now. Anything you ask, I am sworn to deliver, especially on this night.”

“That is not the custom of my tribe,” he said.

Moaning into her hands, she didn’t hear. “I am carefully punished. All these months I’ve used my own self to entice you, everything I am-I knew what I was doing. Why else would you have come?”

Then she looked up, her cheeks wet, her eyes glinting savagely. “What do you want? Don’t keep me in suspense. Whatever it is, I am bound to give it, as a good wife should.”

Standing in the bone-white roadway, Haggar cleared his throat. He fiddled with his totem stick, picking with his thumbnail at the chunks of agate. “In my clan,” he murmured humbly, “that is not the measure of a good wife.”

She gave him a glance in which a moment of clear gratitude was immediately clouded with suspicion. “Easy to say. Are you so stupid that you can’t understand what I’m offering you?”

He smiled, because he thought he understood how to disarm her. “Astriana,” he said, and saw her flinch. “Woman,” he amended, “this is what I want.” Again she cringed away, as if from a blow. “I want to understand why you have brought me here, to this place. For nine years you made the journey to my world. ‘Put him with the others,’ you said, when I was lying in the cart.”

She looked at him then, a long, slow stare. She wiped her nose on her hem and, eyes dry, clambered to her feet. “That’s what you want?”

“That’s what I want.”

“I swear you’re even stupider than I thought,” she said, but then she smiled when he burst out laughing. “In the Feywild we are bound by our promises, you understand?”

He nodded.

“Then come,” she said. “I’ll tell you. It was not nine years for me.”

She turned down the road into the forest. “What about your men?” he asked her. “Will you come back in the morning?”

“Who?” She shrugged. “They’re gone. I hired them in the village.”

“Even so. We should go back. One of them was just a child.”

She gave him a look that suggested his stupidity had grown so powerful, it had become a force of nature like the ocean or the wind.

“Besides,” he said. “We have no weapons.”

“That’s not the place to search for them.” She gestured with her hand. Looking back through the gate, he could see an enormous figure standing in the roadway near where they’d struggled over the cart. His shape was human, but his size was not.

“We have no choice,” she said. “Lord Kannoth has taken everything, all our strength. It’s a tradition. His gift to us.”

Now suddenly she was in a hurry. She turned and ran down the gentle slope, and he followed her. She had spoken the truth: there was no strength in him, no trace of his totem animal. Heavier than she, he labored to keep up, as if the air of this new world were too rich for him to breathe.

After a mile and a half, she stopped to draw breath under the forest’s eaves. “How long?” he asked, after a moment.

“Until dawn tomorrow. It happened when I made my vow. It is the way of the eladrin, to come together without any skills or powers, as simple men and women on our wedding night.”

He had the impression, now, that she was mocking him. “Don’t keep saying that.”

“It gives me no pleasure to remind you. Nine months, it was, not years. Nine months I cast my hook into that pool. You’re not the only fish I caught.”

“I suppose not.”

She studied his face as if, he thought, she were trying to memorize his ugliness. “Why aren’t you angry?” she asked. “I would be angry at the things I say.”

They stood beside a stone pillar at the entrance to the forest. It marked the border where the bleached dust of the roadway and its verges gave way to the darkness of the trees. Where the paving stones gave out and the road became a rutted track, two enormous oak trees stood as sentinels.

“Kannoth’s protection ends here,” she said. She shrugged. “Even my knife is cold.” She turned under the oaks and disappeared into the darkness.

He didn’t know whether she was lying or didn’t understand her own powers, but she retained some luminescence in the dark, a greenish glow that led him onward. Without it, he’d have had to pick his way like a blind man, because the canopy of leaves denied all but an occasional shaft of moonlight, and the path was muddy, and wound among tangled masses of roots. Soon the way steepened, and in some places they descended a cliff face among evergreens, clambering down over wet boulders. Rivulets of water fell around them, and Haggar was astonished at the fecundity of this place, the denseness and intensity of life. Every place he put his hand or foot, living creatures squirmed or flopped or skittered away, and the air was thick with bugs, which got into his nostrils and his mouth. In the darkness, sounds and smells assaulted him with an almost physical pressure, a profusion of squawking and chittering and grunting and croaking, of sap and ash and mud and rotting wood. But among all these he caught the tiny, evanescent perfume of cinnamon or clove, which he followed downward like a gleaming thread, hour after hour. Sometimes the scent of her would thicken, and he would find her waiting for him in some crevice or dell, her skin glimmering faintly.

And at these moments as they rested, she would give him partial answers to the question he’d asked: “I had to find some help,” she said. “In the deep Feydark, where we are going, there is a portal called the Living Gate. For many generations, which means many hundreds of your years, a cohort of my people were its guardians. Over the years they relaxed their vigilance because the gate was shut, sealed in the old days. Even though we retain terrifying stories of the days before the seal was put in place, still over time these legends lost their urgency, sank into myth.”

He stood beneath an overhang of gnarled roots while she bent to scoop up a handful of water. A beetle scurried up his neck and he slapped at it. When he looked down she had disappeared, and he clambered after her through the boulders. It was only after half an hour, sitting on a fallen tree trunk in a broad forest of oaks, that he heard the continuation: “So the traditions of the guardians became empty and ceremonial. It was a mark of honor at the Summer Court to be its captain. Last year a nephew of the queen achieved this post, a boy named Soveliss, and he used it to discover a way to break the seal, perhaps because he was curious about the world beyond the portal, the Far Realm. Perhaps for the glory of closing it again-we cannot question him, for he is dead, or worse than dead.”

Her voice was a drifting whisper, and he had to lean in close to understand. She turned her head away. “Your breath stinks,” she murmured softly.

The way grew steep again. In a crevice between enormous boulders, she paused. “At first, out of shame, he hid what he had done. He knew nothing of druidic lore, or any of our traditions. He was a boy flailing in the dark, and by the time he had confessed, most of my cohort was already destroyed. Nor was I able to recruit another, for the boy had been a favorite of the queen, and she refused to allow it. She was the one who suggested I go elsewhere, so as to find cruder folk. We are long-lived, and one of our lifespans is worth seven of yours.”

“That is well known,” grunted Haggar. “The arithmetic is clear,” he added, and Astriana smiled.

“It was my choice to train you as I did,” she said.

He remembered the long hours by himself, the years of study. “You didn’t train me.”

She shrugged. “But I provided the spark.”

Then she was gone again and he hurried after, stumbling down through smaller trees with trembling leaves and pale branches, until he reached level ground, where he sank up to his shins in water, and his bare feet disturbed minnows and frogs.

When the trees gave out entirely, he strode though waist-high bushes in the swamp. The moon was down behind the hills, and the first red glow of dawn was in the sky. From this new vantage point, and under this new light, he saw he stood in a bowl among high hills with the forest all around him. He saw for the first time that the way they had traversed, wild as it seemed, was not untouched by ancient architects and builders, for here at the bottom of the bowl, rising up out of the swamp, he could see the remains of ruined buildings, the stone foundations of colossal structures. Following Astriana’s footsteps, he soon found himself on the lip of a sinkhole which, though it was topped with mud and grass, and though rivulets of water coursed over its edge and fell in endless streams, revealed itself under the pink light as a gigantic cylinder of stone masonry, whose circumference was three miles or more, and whose bottom was obscure.

She stood on the brim of a waterfall, looking down. “We have arrived.”

In the middle of this cylindrical well, rising from the bottom, was a tower, whose gabled roofs and turrets were far below them. A stone staircase spiraled down from where they stood, a quarter of the way around the inside of the well. It ended in a fortified buttress, from which a high bridge, a single wooden span, joined a crenellated terrace at the tower’s top. Astriana had already begun to make her way down the steps, and Haggar followed; there was no rail or balustrade, and to their left yawned the abyss, an open maw of darkness with the tower as its tongue.

But after a quarter of an hour, they stood on the stone buttress at the bridge’s outer end. Guards kept watch there, archers with long bows, and halberdiers. The captain saluted as they approached the bridge. “Lady Astriana, when you didn’t return, Lord Themiranth decided to go anyway. Past midnight we brought some of them up again-another failure. Your two were the only survivors, though one has died since, I think.”

“And Themiranth?”

“He did not return.”

He was speaking to her, but he was looking at Haggar, his nostrils wide, his lips curled in disdain. “Is this orc your prisoner or your slave? I’ve got a cage full of his stinking kind.”

She smiled. “Captain, this is Archdruid Haggar, Magister of the Broken Pool, master of all druids in the mortal realm. He has agreed to help us. Is that not so, magister?”

At that moment, above them, the first rays of the morning sun touched the inside of the well, revealing tendrils of vegetation that hung down from its rim over the black stones. And as if touched by Kannoth’s flower, Haggar felt his strength return. Astriana faced him, and in the new light he noticed things he’d never seen before, either in the darkness at home when he had met her at the stone pool on the mountainside, or in Kannoth’s bewitching moonlight, which had covered everything it touched with a light as thick as paint, hiding as much as it revealed. She stood just his height, a fair-haired woman in ragged blue-green silk, barefoot, with muddy legs. Like all the eladrin, she appeared to have no pupils or whites to her eyes, which had a faintly yellow cast. Her wide mouth and forehead, her high cheekbones were beautiful to him-beyond beautiful-but at the same time he could see her flaws, the misshapen bridge of her nose, where it had been broken and reset, and the scar that ran over her cheekbone and her lips.

Suddenly embarrassed, he looked down at himself, the torn wedding shirt, which revealed his tattooed chest and shoulders, slick with sweat. “ ‘Magister’-that’s a new one,” chucked the captain. “Is this creature capable of speech?”

“It is you who should be silent,” Astriana said. She turned, and Haggar followed her over the bridge into the tower. And she whispered to him as she walked through the guard chambers and tapestried corridors, so that he had to follow close behind her. “Among my people, it is customary for a man and wife to trade requests. You asked a question, and I answered. Now it is my turn. I want you to close this gate with me, and kill whatever creatures have crawled through from the Far Realm. Then it will be time for you to ask again.”

“Anything I want?”

“Anything you want,” she conceded, eyes fixed straight ahead. A pair of soldiers saluted, then drew back in surprise when they saw Haggar. “One more thing,” she continued without turning around. “You are not to speak of Lord Kannoth, or refer in any way to the magic he cast over us, or of the promise I made. These obligations can only be dissolved by the Summer Queen at the Court of Stars, whom I will petition as soon as we have done our work. That will be enough of an opportunity for my humiliation, as if I needed to dissolve a marriage with a pig or a goat. No, be quiet,” she went on, as he tried to interrupt her. “Among my people, my ugliness is already a legend. The part of a seductress was a new one to me, not one I could accomplish here. Doubtless I enjoyed it. Doubtless that was part of Kannoth’s joke.”

They had come to the center of the tower, a circular chamber that also contained a well, the interior echo of the colossal architecture outside. And in the middle of the well was an iron cage suspended from a hook and pulley and reached by an iron ramp. Without pausing, Astriana climbed the ramp and stepped into the cage, where she stood holding the bars. Haggar entered behind her, and at a nod from her, a pair of soldiers pulled the ramp away, leaving the cage dangling. Then another pair let down the chain; the cage descended down the length of the shaft, whose bottom was in darkness, invisible to Haggar as he peered between his filthy feet.

They passed storey after storey of iron balustrades, lit by glimmering lanterns. In time, Haggar guessed, they had penetrated below the foundations of the tower, and down into the rock. The air became damp and thick. As they descended, he felt his mood darken also. Astriana said nothing during all this time, but only stood with her hands on the iron bars, embarrassed, he imagined, at having revealed so much. Now that they could talk freely without fear of being overheard, she was silent. Nor could he think of what to say. “This is my duty as your husband,” he ventured finally, “to close this gate?”

She shot him a look of agonized contempt. “If Themiranth is dead, it is a blessing. Not once has he followed my command.”

A bell clanged and the cage jerked to a halt, dangling and groaning at the end of its stupendous chain. They hung suspended in a natural cavern, with stalactites and stalagmites the length of a man. Down below, a platoon of soldiers labored to secure them with long grappling hooks, and then to pull them to the edge of a metal structure, a wheeled staircase; when the cage grated against its iron edge, Astriana leaped onto it as if relieved not to be with him any longer in such an enclosed space, and sprang down the stairway, among soldiers very different from the eladrin in the upper tower. These were men in black armor, with hunched shoulders and heavy faces, stunted legs, and powerful arms.

They were inhabitants of the Feydark, Haggar guessed, firbolgs and goblins. One looked up, and he saw it was missing an eye. They clustered around Astriana as she descended the stairs, and she held out her hands, whether to welcome them or keep them at a distance, Haggar couldn’t tell. They moved aside to let her pass, and she waited for him to catch up. “If the watch captain is right,” she said, “we don’t have time to lose. You will see.”

Then she turned to speak to the one-eyed soldier in a language Haggar didn’t know. “He says he’s laid them in the antechamber,” she summarized after a minute’s talk. “Come.”

They passed into a torchlit corridor, rough-hewn from the rock. And then through an iron door into a vaulted hall, at the far end of which two figures lay in nests of rags. Astriana hurried to them and went down on her knees.

One was alive and one was dead, as the captain of the watch had claimed. Astriana knelt over the living one, clasping one of her hands and pushing the hair back from her face. A smoking lantern hung from an iron stanchion above their heads, and by its light Haggar examined the corpse of the other, a tiefling, he saw, with bosses of bone along the crest of his scalp, and curling horns that rose up from his brow, one intact, the other lopped off at the base. The creature was dressed in jointed armor, and in his stiffened hand he still clutched a druid’s staff, decorated with carved runes and also sheared off short. He lay on his back, and the straw and rags beneath him were soaked in his black blood.

Fascinated, Haggar studied the man’s face, his curled, heavy beard, his red skin, paler now, he imagined, in death. He knew the history of this maligned and hated race, how ancient human families had sworn pacts with devils and corrupted their entire lines. “What did you promise him?” he asked.

Astriana didn’t answer. The other woman was a shifter from the look of her, with a flat, feline face and jagged teeth. Hair grew on her cheeks and down her neck, and she was dressed in fur and leather. Or rather she had been, for she had ripped most of her clothing away with her long claws, and lay with her hairy body exposed. Her totem stick had fallen away from her and lay forgotten on the ground, a black shaft of tibia bone studded with uncut tiger’s eyes.

She had raised herself onto one elbow and was talking to Astriana in low, urgent tones. Astriana scarcely seemed to listen, but instead she busied herself rearranging the bedding so the shifter could lie more comfortably. And when the firbolg captain strode in, she turned on him. “Didn’t I ask you to take care of them? Bring her to my guardroom, to my couch. Give her water mixed with wine.”

“Lady, she’s a-”

“Do not tell me what she is.”

Later, she brought Haggar to a square stone chamber cut into the rock. Food and water had been laid on an iron table-roast capon, pepper sauce, and bread. They sat on iron stools. “To answer your question, I promised I would fill his boots with gold.”

“And her?”

“An invitation to the court of the Summer Queen at Senaliesse. The thanks of her majesty. You see,” she said, biting into a bone, “you work for cheap.”

“I would not have come here for those things.”

“Don’t I know.” And then after a pause: “Themiranth was a fool, but at least he did me this favor. No one will question my decision to bring druids from the mortal realm. The tiefling. You and the shifter. You have a toughness that the eladrin have lost, most of us.”

She grimaced, then continued. “Themiranth said it was because I was most at home with outcasts and degenerates. Creatures more like animals. He said it was because none of my own kind would look at me. Because of my ugliness.”

He said nothing, even though he imagined this confession cost her a great deal. He watched her take a gulp of water from a crystal cup. At first he’d been embarrassed to eat with her, until he’d noticed how messy she was, licking her fingers, wiping her mouth on her hand. She’d changed into new clothes, soldier’s garb that was heavier and plainer than the thin silks she’d worn in Cendriane.

“Eat,” she said. “You’ve had nothing, and you need your strength.”

The chamber was lit with magical lights that burned with a hard, white flame. They were set in niches in the walls. Haggar leaned forward on his stool and stuck his spoon into a wooden trencher: grilled mushrooms in black sauce. “What do you know of the Far Realm?” she asked. “The Living Gate, that’s where it leads. No-‘leads’ is not the word I want.”

When he didn’t reply, she frowned. “I told you how to find the texts to study these things. Months ago-years ago, for you. Because I knew I wanted you for this. So try and talk to me. Try to be cleverer than you are. The Far Realm is outside of time and space-”

Haggar interrupted. “The words we use to describe these things, we can’t control them.”

Astriana looked at him, grease on her lower lip. “So?”

“So-nothing. This is what I took from what little I read, before I forced myself to stop: It makes us vulnerable to think about these things. Outside time and space-what does that mean? Objects and creatures that we can’t perceive. What we see is only indirectly, by its effect upon our minds. And this is corruption. Creatures from this world that are pulled from their true nature and transformed.”

Astriana stared at him, chewing slowly. “That razorclaw shifter,” she said. “Hazel is her name. She told me Themiranth and the others are still alive down there. Mind slaves. Servitors of something called an aboleth.”

“Did she see it? How does she know its name?”

She laughed. “I told her.” Then after a moment: “The important thing is sealing the gate. These creatures, the aboleths, mind flayers, and their slaves. They will try to prevent us.”

She kept chewing, pointing at him with her chicken bone. “You and me.”

And when he said nothing, she paused, looked down. “Because you promised.”

He cleared his throat. “When we have done with this, I won’t be content with any knowledge or money or the worthless thanks of some archfey. The Far Realm is not the only thing that can’t be thought of without damaging ourselves.”

“So,” she said, “you’re saying we can use stupidity to protect ourselves. I suppose it’s not so bad, to cultivate the minds of animals.”

“It’s what our people do,” he said, not meaning orcs or eladrin, but followers of druidic knowledge from the dawn of time, before the higher races had evolved.

She smiled. The scar across her lips was livid in the dim light. “That’s a lofty reason to have no plan at all. Eat,” she said.

He chose a leg from the bowl of capon parts and brought it to his mouth, wondering if she could see his heavy teeth, the long tearing incisors, and if so, whether she’d grown accustomed to them. “Lord Themiranth and the others, I’m sure they were full of plans. Scholars of the Far Realm. Mind slaves now. After this, we won’t think or talk when we fight against these creatures. Instinct only. Kick me if I have a thought.” He stuck the leg bone in his mouth and snapped it off.

“I’ll kick you anyway,” she said.

After they finished, she left him for a few hours to rest. In a lighted alcove off the main chamber, he found a mirror set into the wall. Standing before it, he unbuttoned the remnants of his father’s shirt and slipped it off, put it aside. He poured water from a crystal ewer over a linen towel and used it to clean his body, wipe away the mud that obscured the tattoos on his hairy arms and chest.

Like all shapeshifters, he wore only leather, which absorbed into his skin during the transformation, as did the bone of his totem stick. Doubtless Astriana at that moment was dressing herself in armor, choosing her swords and knives and spears, but he couldn’t use any of that. Instead he stared at himself in the dim glass, while in his mind he allowed himself to climb the curving helixes of evolution away from his finished nature. These were the shapes he would take with him on this adventure, and he moved through them in the new air of the Feywild, to see if anything was different in this world.

He watched his jaw lengthen, and his neck grow thick and slope down toward his shoulders, which swelled first and then receded as he sank down to all fours-a wolf, the totem of his clan. It was his most comfortable shape, but he didn’t stop there. Instead he increased the pace of transformation, while in his mind he scampered up the ladders: the coarse hair thickened on his forearms turned into plumage, while at the same time a web of skin stretched from his shoulders to his wrists, and his jaw turned cruel and sharp. And then his feathers receded into patterned, oily skin, and the scales spread from his nose as his legs fused together and his arms clung to his sides, and he dropped down before the mirror in a coiling heap.

But he was curled up asleep in his wolf’s shape when she returned. She was dressed in the war garb of a shiere knight in the Summer Court of Queen Tiandra, an armor of overlapping scales, alternating blue and green, made from carapaces of insects, lighter and tougher than steel, and so tight and fine that they covered her body like a second skin. Her hair was brushed back from her face and held at her nape with a silver ring. She wore ridged gauntlets of silver mail and carried a mace in her left hand, while a long scimitar hung at her waist. In the dark alcove, her body seemed to glow.

“Time to move,” she said, and he got to his feet and stretched, lowering his shoulders, letting his tongue loll out between his teeth.

He followed her through the studded door and down through a warren of deserted ward rooms and low-ceilinged corridors. In ordinary times, this place was full of life, the borderland between the Feydark and the surface world, where the fomorians of Harrowhame and the eladrin rangers of the woods maintained a queasy peace. This nest of warriors was now empty, but when Haggar and Astriana reached the endless staircases that led deeper into the guts of the rock, they found them packed with refugees, goblins and cyclopses and fomorians all crowding toward the surface, their possessions on their backs. And in their terror, all these pale citizens of the underworld had forgotten their differences, though they came from a dozen clans and races and competing powers. They waited in long lines so that they could pile on upward toward the sunlight, which many of them had never seen.

Hunchbacked women with bloated hands and faces carried their children on their backs, and they shrank against the damp, black walls to allow Haggar and Astriana to pass, the last guardians of the Living Gate. Occasionally they touched their foreheads or else murmured some vestigial token of respect before they bent to their burdens again and resumed their place in line. Now the wolf bounded ahead to clear the path, the long staircase that was lit not by torches or burning chemicals, but by glowing crystals in the rock, which shone blue and green and purple as they climbed down.

In time they came to Harrowhame itself, the dismal fortress of King Bronnor, built in an enormous cavern of quarried salt. They came out suddenly onto the salt floor, where the stone and iron ramparts rose above them. Here at least were light and soldiers also, the myrmidons of the fomorian king. From the citadel came the sounds of drumbeats and brazen trumpets, which echoed from the crystal walls. But the gates were closed, and there was no guard to acknowledge them as they crossed the salt plain under the battlements to continue their descent.

They entered a gigantic fissure in the rock, where the ground sloped downward. And here the world changed. Above, nearer the surface, the rock was cut, quarried, and dead. Here it was still alive, growing in a landscape as varied as any forest or mountainside. They climbed down through glowing forests of mushrooms. Animals lived here, snakes and lizards and rodents of all kinds, but also tiny deer and goats perched upon the rocks, and even a few pale birds. Flowering vines and creepers covered the distant walls, and hung from the stalactites above their heads. The air was lighter, richer here, and breezes wafted through the endless caverns, as if freshened from below.

The wolf loped ahead. They came to the shore of a black river and climbed the shattered rocks beside the waterfall. Haggar picked his way over the stones and paused at the first man-made structure he had seen in hours, a guard house built from black cubes of pumice stone, and lit with a guttering lantern. “Who is there?” Astriana called.

Her armor glimmered green and blue in the darkness, and she raised her silver mace. A man staggered out the open door, a firbolg warrior dressed in leather armor, carrying his sword. “You’re here,” he said. “Thank the gods. I’ve stayed alone for hours, waiting for them to come back. They’ve taken all my men,” he added, pointing with his sword to a hole in the rock wall, lit from within by an unearthly mix of colors.

“Who?”

“Themiranth and the others. What’s left of them.”

He was a big man. Sweat glistened on his pale skin. Raising his sword, making a gesture toward the depths, he said, “I was about to try again, one last time. There are too many of them if they come out in the open. But we can fight them in the tunnels, one by one.”

“What’s your name?” said Astriana.

“Garm, my lady.”

“You’re a brave man. Let’s go down.”

Finally they reached the environs of the Living Gate, that tiny portal to the Far Realm. Its diameter could be measured in eyelashes, yet even so, the substance that seeped through, less matter than deranged ideas, could poison a whole world. Once inside the last cave, they could see how all its surfaces were covered with a glistening slime, which sucked at their feet and made it hard to move. Yet it provided light for them; a mile and a half in, they saw the first of the aboleth’s servitors, the eladrin guardians it had bent to its will. One of them appeared suddenly, standing up out of the shin-deep slime, where he had been lying full-length.

“Themiranth,” Astriana breathed.

His skin was transparent now, his organs and blood vessels mottled and visible, his staring eyes wide with unthinking malice. He wore no clothes, carried no weapons, but waded toward them with his arms stretched out, trying to wrap Astriana in his slimy grasp. She hacked at him with her mace, which made a wet, squelching sound as it sunk into his flesh; Haggar didn’t watch. He had already begun his transformation, climbing down the curving ladder in his mind, until his body had lengthened many times, his arms and legs had disappeared, and he was slithering through the mucus-covered rocks, past Themiranth and past the other eladrin servitors deeper down in the hole; they couldn’t see him.

As he passed, he battered at their ankles with his blunt nose; one he knocked from his feet and encircled with his tail as he pulled himself along, crushing out of him or her what still passed for life. He let go, then swam down to where the slime was thickest, submerged in a paste or stew of half-dissolved corpses, until he found a corridor that was entirely packed with mucus, and he slithered through.

Just for a moment he saw the aboleth, with its wings and flanges and tentacles, its three red eyes in a vertical line; he closed his own eyes, closed his ears, let his mind sink down into its tiniest reptilian confinement, locked inside his flat little skull as if inside a prison made of bone, in the center of which he rolled his consciousness into a ball, as a prisoner might sit and hug himself on the floor of his cell, turning his face inward partly from despair, partly as a way to conserve his strength.

On the long dull surface of his body, along the smooth patterned skin of the great snake, he allowed himself to feel no sensation as he burrowed through the slime into the belly of the great beast, a belly that absorbed him as it allowed him to pass, and sucked him down into a landscape of inflamed viscera, mucus-encrusted tunnels full of parasites.

Even with his mind shut down, and sunk into his body as far as he could permit it without letting go of the synapses and ganglia that controlled his breathing and his heart, still he caught a vague impression of Astriana and Garm up to their knees in effluence, hacking and pounding at these parasites as they tried to drag them down.

Then Haggar was past them, and had slipped down through the submerged tunnels yet again, and glimpsed again the red eyes of the aboleth, and sunk through the membrane of its body once more.

In the heart’s core of the monster he discovered the Living Gate, the portal to the Far Realm. Contagion seeped from it, a tiny valve of puckered flesh in the contracting wall. Another monster lurked there, floating in a substance that was neither solid nor liquid nor gas, a creature made of writhing tentacles around a single flaming eye. Daggerlike teeth circled its maw, and Haggar found himself drifting toward it in his natural form, naked save for his totem stick, which protruded from the bone of his forearm. It was as if this creature could perceive his true essence after all, and limit him to his weakest shape.

Gouts of fire burst from the monster’s eye. But Haggar had his totem stick, and with it he began to stir the substance of the deep, grunting, muffled evocations as he did so, until the matrix that surrounded him began to move, assume a shape like a vortex or tornado; he was controlling it, as he would a cloud or a storm in his own world. The streamers of fire circled back, catching the monster in a net of its own flame, while at the same time the living gate spread open, and a single purple tentacle stretched through it. This was the mind flayer, the last of the horrors that awaited him here, and it searched for him diligently, penetrating through the ooze, grasping for his head. Doubtless just beyond the gate was the encrustation of the elder brain that was commanding this entire web of illusion and deceit.

He kicked away and it grabbed hold of him. Inside the prison of his mind, a long hand snaked through the bars, because he was afraid. He sat naked, curled up in the center of his cell, allowing the hand of the mind flayer to palpate his skull, searching for a place to enter. He felt a rush of emotion and sensation surge up through him, and his mind was full of pictures of the past and present and the future: his mother standing by the fire outside her cottage in the woods; the pool in the abandoned city on the mountainside, and Astriana standing in it with the water around her knees; Astriana with her mace held high, breaking the flesh of the slime-covered servitors, while he failed here, allowed the mind flayer to take him and destroy him, destroy them all.

But then with a last effort of his reptile will, he choked all that away, constricted the mental passages it flowed through, that sequence of images, and his mind went dark. Those processes of the brain and heart were what the creature fed on, and Haggar felt its grip loosen, its probing tentacle release its hold. Instead of struggling, he forced himself to relax, to welcome the touch of the jailer’s hand upon his face. And the more he welcomed it, the more he emptied his mind of panic and regret, the weaker and less sure was its grasp, while at the same time he was climbing downward into a new reality, in which he stood in his wolf’s form at the edge of a rocky, fetid pool under a blood red sky. Some kind of twisting mollusk was down there, a cephalopod with purple tentacles, and he stretched out his claws and ripped along its flabby, unprotected head.

He heard a scream, all the more horrifying for being silent and internal. He pulled back his paw. And then he found himself floating up through the spheres of illusion: the Living Gate with his naked body suspended underneath, watching the arm of the mind flayer suddenly retract and disappear, and the gate pucker closed. At that moment, as if the source of contagion was necessary for its life, the beholder shut its awful eye. And again at that same moment, Haggar found himself lying on his side among the mucus-covered rocks, his fur matted and greasy, his body aching and hurt. He licked at the air, and then after several panting breaths he stumbled to his four feet, and climbed and scratched his way out of the tunnel, to where Astriana sat among the stones, her armor coated with a glowing slime, her mace broken, her scimitar in her hand. Haggar crawled past Garm, the firbolg soldier, floating on his back, his face contorted in the rictus of death.

And then Astriana put her hand out and Haggar crawled under it, and allowed her to rub the soft fur of his forehead and around his ears. His tongue lolled out, and he licked her hands. She bent over him to put his face against her face, while he-not because he thought it was a good strategy, but out of simple exhaustion-allowed himself to find his natural shape again. His heavy head fell into her lap. She took her fingers from his hair, rolled him aside, and stood up hurriedly.

But later, after they had climbed back to the surface again, and after they had mounted the cage to the tower’s roof, and after he had washed himself in the sumptuous quarters she’d assigned to him, he stood in front of the window, looking up at the sun as it rose above the rim of the great well. He didn’t hear the door open, but he turned when she spoke. She wore a gown of green silk, open at the neck and throat, and her hair was loose around her head. “You know we are bound by our promises,” she said.

“Then promise me. I want you to take me home.”

Her head had fallen forward to accept his punishment. Now she raised her face to look at him. Her nose was crooked, and a scar ran down her cheek over her lips. “I promise,” she said.

“And this will be my promise,” he continued. “On the night of the full moon, I will wait for you, when the light strikes the surface of the water.”

With his back to the window he couldn’t tell for sure, but he thought he saw a blush pass over her cheek.