Chapter 8 — The Eye of the AllfatherThe Oracle
The party seeks the Oracle's guidance to end the giant threat once and for all.
Into the Spine
They left Fireshear before dawn.
Harshnag went on foot — because of course he did. The frost giant's stride covered more ground per step than the griffons covered in three wingbeats, and he moved through the frozen landscape with the easy, tireless gait of a creature for whom the Spine of the World was not a destination but a neighbourhood. He carried his glowing greataxe across one shoulder, his massive frame cutting a path through snowdrifts that would have buried the rest of the party to their necks.
Dasharra Keldabar came with them — the dwarf woman from the riding school, who had watched the party's progress from "likely to die" to "probably won't die" with the quiet satisfaction of a professional. She flew alongside Kürbis at the front of the formation, her own griffon responding to commands so subtle they were invisible, making the party's riding look like children bouncing on ponies by comparison.
The rest of the party flew. Griffon-back, bundled in every layer they owned, the wind cutting through fur-lined cloaks like it was personally offended by the concept of warmth. Below them, Harshnag's enormous shape moved through the snow with a steady, rhythmic pace that never varied — uphill, downhill, through ice fields and rocky passes, the giant simply walked, and the griffons simply flew, and the Spine of the World unfolded beneath them in a jagged white panorama of peaks and valleys and frozen rivers that had not thawed since before the founding of Waterdeep.
The mountains grew higher as they flew east. The peaks here were not the rounded, weathered shapes of the western foothills — they were sharp, thrust upward like broken teeth, their ridges edged with ice that caught the thin sunlight and threw it back in blinding sheets. The air thinned. The griffons laboured. Even Kürbis, who had taken to flying with the natural ease of someone born for it, looked uncomfortable at the altitude.
Harshnag did not look uncomfortable. Harshnag looked like he was going for a walk.
The Campfire
They made camp on a frozen ridge as the light failed — a shelf of rock jutting from the mountainside, sheltered from the worst of the wind by a natural overhang that Harshnag had to duck to fit under. The griffons huddled together at the far end of the shelf, their feathers ruffled against the cold, occasionally clicking their beaks at the darkness beyond the firelight.
The fire was Mindartis's work — arcane flame that burned without fuel and gave off heat without smoke, which was necessary given that there was nothing to burn within a day's march in any direction. The party gathered around it in a loose circle, eating trail rations and watching the stars appear one by one in a sky so clear and so dark that it felt less like looking up and more like looking through — as if the atmosphere had simply given up and the void beyond was right there, close enough to touch.
Dustin took out his flute.
Not to play — not yet. He turned it in his hands, feeling the familiar weight of the ironwood, and watched the firelight catch the grain. Then he looked at Harshnag, who sat cross-legged on the bare rock with his axe across his knees, his massive frame silhouetted against the stars.
"Harshnag," Dustin said. "Can I ask you something?"
The giant's pale eyes moved to him. "You can ask."
"Klauthen Vale." Dustin let the name hang in the cold air. "I heard stories, years ago. Campfire tales — the kind bards pass around when they're trying to impress each other. A hidden valley in the mountains, magically warm, green in the middle of all this —" He gestured at the frozen waste around them. "Guarded by a dragon. A great red wyrm."
He paused. "I wrote a song about it. Seemed like a good story. The kind of thing that's too interesting not to be true, but too convenient to actually be true."
Harshnag was quiet for a long moment. The fire crackled. The wind moaned through the rocks above them.
"It exists," the giant said.
The words landed like stones dropped into still water. Around the fire, heads turned. Don Juan's hand paused halfway to his waterskin. Kürbis, who had been sharpening his greatsword with the methodical patience of a man performing a nightly ritual, went still.
"It exists," Harshnag repeated. "West of Mirabar, in the high peaks. A valley warmed by old magic — older than the Ordning, older than the kingdoms of men. Green, as you say. Warm. Full of life in a place where nothing should live." He shifted his weight. "And yes. There is a dragon. An ancient one. It has been there longer than anyone can remember, and it does not welcome visitors."
"So the song was right," Dustin said. He wasn't sure if he felt vindicated or deeply unsettled.
"Your song," Harshnag said, with the careful emphasis of someone choosing words precisely, "would be wise to remain a song. The vale is not a place for small folk. It is not a place for any folk. The dragon guards it because the dragon wants it, and what an ancient wyrm wants, an ancient wyrm keeps."
"Noted," Dustin said.
"I am being serious, bard."
"So am I." Dustin tucked the flute back into his belt. "I write songs about things I find interesting. Doesn't mean I'm stupid enough to go looking for them."
Harshnag studied him for a moment with an expression that might have been amusement. "Good," he said. "Because if you did, I would not follow."
The fire burned. The wind howled. The Spine of the World stretched around them in every direction, vast and frozen and full of things that were supposed to be legends.
Dustin played the song anyway — quietly, for the fire and the stars and the giant who listened without comment. Klauthen Vale. The melody winding through the frozen air like smoke, the notes falling into the darkness and disappearing.
Origin Based on a story Dustin heard around the campfire in his early bard days — a tale of a hidden, magically warmed valley guarded by a great red dragon. Performed in Triboar after seeing two real dragons for the first time. Rumours suddenly felt a lot more real.
Performed as Dustin Dwint
Style medieval folk, acoustic, storytelling, mandolin, flute, male singer-songwriter voice
When he finished, Harshnag said nothing. But he nodded, once, and that was enough.
The Green Below
The second day was worse.
The peaks grew sharper, the passes narrower, the wind more vicious. The griffons flew in tight formation now — not by choice but by necessity, the updrafts between the peaks violent and unpredictable, throwing the birds sideways without warning. Dasharra led them through it with the calm efficiency of someone who had flown these mountains before, calling out course corrections that the party followed with the desperate obedience of people who knew they were out of their depth.
Harshnag kept pace below. The giant navigated crevasses and ice fields that would have stopped an army, finding paths through the frozen maze with the instinctive certainty of a creature who had walked these mountains for centuries.
It was mid-afternoon when Dustin saw it.
A flash of colour — wrong for this landscape, impossible in this altitude. He banked his griffon without thinking, dipping below the formation, and there it was: a valley, nestled between two peaks like a secret kept between clenched teeth. And it was green.
Not the muted grey-green of alpine moss or the pale green of lichen on rock. Proper green — the deep, impossible green of a summer forest, the kind of green that had no business existing within a hundred miles of where they were. Trees. Grass. A stream catching the light. All of it tucked into a valley that the mountains hid from every angle except directly above.
Warm air rose from it — Dustin could feel it even at altitude, a thermal that his griffon caught and circled without being told, the bird's head tilting with the sharp-eyed interest of a predator that had spotted something alive.
Dustin stared. The song played in his head — In the mountains high where the cold winds wail, lies a secret place, a hidden vale — and for the first time, the melody felt less like art and more like a map.
"Don't," said a voice below him.
He looked down. Harshnag had stopped, his head tilted upward, watching Dustin's griffon circle the thermal with an expression that was unmistakably a warning.
"I know," Dustin called back. "I'm looking, not landing."
"Look quickly," Harshnag said. "And then look somewhere else."
Dustin pulled the griffon up and rejoined the formation. He did not look back. But he thought about it — the song, the valley, the casual confirmation that the world was full of things that were supposed to be impossible and simply weren't.
He'd written a song about a dragon's lair. And flown over it. And lived.
That, he decided, was enough.
The Temple
They saw it from a distance — a shape cut into the mountainside that was too regular, too deliberate, to be natural. As they flew closer, the shape resolved into architecture: a causeway, forty feet wide, spanning a chasm so deep that the bottom was lost in shadow. At its far end, an entrance carved from the living rock — a massive archway framed by columns of dark stone, the lintel carved with runes so large they were legible from the air.
The Eye of the All-Father. Temple to Annam, father of giants, built in the age of Ostoria when the giant kingdoms stretched across the world and the small races had not yet risen to challenge them.
Harshnag stopped at the foot of the causeway. His expression — usually unreadable — showed something that might have been reverence.
"This is the place," he said. Not a revelation. A confirmation.
The causeway was broad enough for the giant to walk comfortably, its surface dusted with fresh snow that no one had disturbed. On either side, the drop was absolute — hundreds of feet of empty air, the mountain wind singing through the gap with a low, mournful note that sounded almost like a voice.
They landed the griffons at the near end of the causeway. Dasharra began securing them — hobbling their legs with practiced ease, checking harnesses, murmuring to the birds in the rough, affectionate tone of someone who trusted animals more than people.
"Stay with the griffons," Kürbis told her. She gave him a look that suggested she had not been planning to do anything else.
The party started across.
The Arrows
They were halfway across the causeway when the first bolt hit.
It struck the stone two feet in front of Don Juan — a crossbow bolt, thick as a tent peg, burying itself in the rock with enough force to crack the surface. The sound was flat and hard, like a hammer hitting an anvil, and it echoed off the walls of the chasm in a way that made it impossible to tell where it had come from.
Everyone froze.
A second bolt. This one closer — passing between Zarok and Mindartis, close enough that the dragonborn felt the wind of its passage. It came from above. From the entrance. From somewhere in the shadows between those dark stone columns.
"Archers," Mindartis said, in the calm, analytical tone of someone cataloguing threats. "At least two. Elevated position. We're in the open."
A third bolt proved his point by shattering against the causeway at Dustin's feet. Stone chips peppered his boots.
"Move!" Don Juan shouted, and the party scattered — which on a forty-foot causeway with a death drop on either side meant pressing themselves against the low stone balustrade and trying to present as small a target as possible.
Harshnag did not scatter. Harshnag raised one massive arm to shield his face and kept walking, the bolts pinging off his armour and bare skin with the efficiency of someone who had decided that crossbow bolts were beneath his attention.
Another volley. The shooters were good — not military-precise, but fast, persistent, firing from cover with the discipline of people defending a position they considered theirs.
Dustin pressed himself against the balustrade, watching the entrance, calculating distances. Forty feet to the pillars. Open ground. No cover. The shooters had the high ground and the patience to wait them out.
He thought about it for approximately two seconds.
Then he cast Misty Step.
The world blurred — a brief, disorienting lurch, like falling sideways through a door that wasn't there — and he was standing in the shadow of the domed entrance, between two carved pillars, close enough to touch the stone. The air here was different. Still. Cold in a way that had nothing to do with the wind.
He pressed himself against the nearest pillar and looked inside.
A corridor. Enormous — thirty feet wide, the ceiling lost in darkness above. The walls were smooth stone, carved with friezes that depicted scenes from an age so distant it felt mythological. The floor was flagstone, each slab the size of a dining table, worn smooth by feet that hadn't walked here in millennia.
"Clear!" Dustin called back. "There's a corridor — come on!"
On the causeway, the rest of the party was making their move. Don Juan sprinted, his armour clattering, weaving as another bolt shattered the stone behind him. Zarok followed, greataxe across his chest, the dragonborn's bulk making him the largest target and his oath making him incapable of caring. Mindartis moved with the efficient, unhurried pace of someone who had calculated the bolt trajectories and was walking between them.
Harshnag was still on the causeway — not because he was slow, but because a frost giant crossing a forty-foot bridge presented a target that even the worst marksman couldn't miss. Bolts bounced off his armour and skin in a steady rhythm, and while none did real damage, they were persistent enough to force him to shield his face and pick his path.
Behind them all, Kürbis hesitated.
The goliath stood at the near end of the causeway, looking back toward the griffons. Dasharra had them under control — the birds were nervous, wings half-spread, but she was calm, talking them down with the steady authority of long practice. They would be fine.
But Kürbis didn't move.
"Kürbis!" Don Juan called from the entrance. "Come on!"
The goliath looked at the griffons. Looked at the corridor. Looked at the griffons again.
Then the stone began to fall.
A block — enormous, carved to fit the entrance like a stopper in a bottle — descended from the ceiling with the grinding, inexorable certainty of a mechanism that had been waiting centuries for this moment. Not fast. But not slow enough to think about.
"GO!" someone shouted — multiple voices, overlapping.
Don Juan, Zarok, Mindartis — all of them diving forward, sliding under the descending slab with the desperate, ungainly speed of people who had exactly one chance to not be on the wrong side of a very large rock.
They made it. Barely. Mindartis's robes caught the edge and tore, leaving a strip of fabric pinned beneath a hundred tons of stone.
The block settled into place with a boom that shook dust from the ceiling. Behind it — Kürbis, Harshnag, and Dasharra. Outside.
"Find another way in!" Dustin shouted at the stone. He didn't know if his voice carried through four feet of rock. "There has to be another entrance!"
On the other side, Kürbis heard enough. He nodded to himself, turned, and headed back toward the griffons and whatever alternatives the mountain had to offer.
The Drowned
The corridor beyond the entrance was built for giants — a hundred and twenty feet long, ten feet wide for human proportions but narrow for the creatures who had carved it. The ceiling vanished into darkness above. The walls were smooth stone, lined with friezes that depicted scenes from an age so distant it felt mythological. The floor was flagstone, each slab the size of a dining table, worn smooth by feet that hadn't walked here in millennia. Stone balconies ran along either side at a height of about twenty feet, accessible by broad stairs carved into the rock. At the far end, a set of steps rose to a pair of doors — giant-scale, carved from stone so thick and so precisely fitted that no seam was visible.
They were not alone.
Movement in the corridor ahead — shapes stepping from the shadows of the balcony stairs with the careful, deliberate pace of people who had been waiting. Four of them. Human, or close to it. Broad-shouldered, wrapped in furs and leather, their faces painted with symbols that Dustin didn't recognise. Barbarians — wild-eyed, armed with crude but heavy weapons, and utterly silent.
And behind them, something else. Not human. Female in shape but wrong in proportion, too tall, too angular, her movements too fluid — as if her joints worked differently than they should. The air around the creature shimmered with a faint, sickly distortion, and even from a distance Dustin could feel it — a pressure, a wrongness, like standing too close to a fire that burned cold.
The barbarians charged without warning and without words. The creature followed, and as it moved closer the distortion around it intensified — a wave of something that wasn't heat and wasn't cold but hurt, radiating outward from the creature's body like poison seeping from a wound.
The fight was brutal and close. Without Harshnag or Kürbis — both trapped outside behind four feet of stone — the party fought with what they had in a corridor too narrow for tactics and too long for retreat. Don Juan in the thick of it, blade blazing with divine light. Zarok anchoring the line, his greataxe sweeping in arcs that kept the barbarians at distance. Mindartis weaving shields and counterspells with the methodical precision of a man working through a problem.
The barbarians fought like people with nothing to lose — wild, reckless, throwing themselves at the party with a ferocity that went beyond courage into something that looked very much like compulsion.
And when they fell, they drowned.
The first one — a broad-shouldered man with an axe — went down to Don Juan's blade and hit the stone floor convulsing. His mouth opened, and water poured out. Not blood. Water — clear, cold, salt-tinged, flooding from his mouth and nose as if his lungs had been full of ocean all along. His body arched, thrashed, and went still, the stone around him darkened with seawater.
"What the —" Zarok started.
The second drowned the same way. And the third. And the fourth. Each barbarian that fell choked and spasmed and expelled impossible quantities of water, dying not from their wounds but from whatever had been inside them all along — drowning on dry stone, hundreds of miles from the sea.
Dustin had seen this before.
Yartar. The sewers. The fight beneath the casino boat, where the creatures they'd killed had coughed up water in exactly the same way — the same salt smell, the same convulsions, the same terrible wrongness of watching someone drown in a place where drowning should not have been possible.
"It's the same," he said. He didn't need to explain. Don Juan's expression said he remembered too.
That left the creature.
With the barbarians down, it turned its full attention on the party — and the aura around it surged. The pressure became pain, a crushing force that radiated from the creature's body and filled the corridor like floodwater. Dustin felt his vision blur. His skin burned. Staying close to this thing was not an option.
He cast Misty Step.
The world lurched — and he was on the left balcony, twenty feet up, gasping in air that was merely freezing rather than actively wrong. From above, the creature looked worse — the distortion around it visible now as a shimmer in the torchlight, warping the air the way heat warped a road in summer.
He raised his flute and played. Dissonance became damage, the notes finding the creature the way a blade found flesh, while below Don Juan and Zarok pressed in from either side. Mindartis's spells struck from behind, precise and devastating.
The creature died hard. It took everything they had — steel and faith and arcane fire — before it finally buckled, hit the flagstones, and drowned. The same convulsions. The same impossible flood of salt water, dark and steaming where it pooled around the creature's angular body.
They stood in silence, bleeding, exhausted, surrounded by seawater and dead things that had drowned inside a mountain. The questions could wait.
The Other Way In
Kürbis watched the stone block settle into place and made his peace with it in the space of a breath.
He was a goliath. His people did not waste time on things they could not change. The entrance was sealed. His companions were inside. He was outside. The next question was not why but what now.
He turned back toward the griffons. Dasharra was already on her feet, one hand on her bird's harness, reading his expression with the professional efficiency of someone who could distinguish between "problem" and "catastrophe" at a glance.
"There'll be another way," she said. It was not a question.
Kürbis looked at the mountain. The Eye of the All-Father was carved into the rock — a temple this size, built for giants, would have more than one entrance. Service tunnels. Ventilation. Emergency exits. The mountain would provide, the way mountains always did, if you knew how to listen.
They flew. Low, hugging the cliff face, the griffons' wings nearly brushing the rock as Kürbis and Dasharra circled the mountainside. The wind tried to peel them off the stone. The cold was absolute. Dasharra flew with the calm precision of someone who had done this a thousand times, and Kürbis followed, trusting the dwarf's instincts the way he trusted the mountain itself.
They found it on the northern face — a cave mouth, half-hidden by an overhang of ice, large enough for a giant to pass through but angled in a way that made it invisible from the causeway. Natural, or close to it — the rock around the opening showed tool marks where someone had widened a natural fissure into a passage, the work old enough that the stone had weathered smooth.
They landed on a ledge below the opening. The griffons were unhappy — the space was tight, the wind was brutal, and something about the cave made them flatten their feathers and click their beaks in the agitated rhythm that meant wrong.
Kürbis dismounted and looked into the darkness.
The tunnel sloped downward — steeply, the floor worn smooth by water or time or both, the walls narrowing as it descended. The air coming from inside was different — warmer, damper, carrying a faint mineral smell that reminded him of hot springs in the mountains of his childhood. And underneath that smell, something else. Something organic. Something alive.
He listened.
Clicking.
Not the griffons — something deeper in the tunnel, faint but distinct. A rhythmic, chitinous sound, like mandibles working, or legs moving across stone. Fast, then slow, then fast again, with the irregular tempo of a living thing.
The trainer heard it too. Her hand went to the short axe at her belt — not drawing it, but resting on the handle in the way of someone who wanted to be ready.
"Spiders," she said. Flat. Certain. "Ice spiders. The big ones."
Kürbis looked at her. "How big?"
"Big enough to matter."
He drew his greatsword. The tunnel swallowed the sound of steel clearing leather. The clicking continued — louder now, or closer, or both.
They went in.
The tunnel descended in a long, curving slope, the walls glistening with frost that reflected their torchlight in crystalline patterns. The floor was treacherous — smooth ice over stone, with patches of something that might have been webbing frozen into the surface. The air grew warmer as they went deeper, the mineral smell intensifying, mixed now with the unmistakable musk of something large and predatory.
The first spider came from above.
It dropped from the ceiling without sound — a pale, bloated thing the size of a horse, its legs the translucent white of deep ice, its body covered in fine bristles that glittered like frost. Eight eyes caught the torchlight and threw it back as eight points of cold blue light.
Kürbis's blade met it in midair.
The impact was enormous — the spider's weight driving him back a step, his boots sliding on the ice, the greatsword biting deep into the creature's thorax with a sound like cracking timber. The spider shrieked — a high, keening sound that echoed down the tunnel in both directions — and its legs lashed out, fast and sharp, catching Kürbis across the arm and tearing through his armour.
He didn't flinch. He wrenched the blade free and swung again, and the spider came apart.
"More," Dasharra said behind him.
She was right. The sound of the first spider's death cry had carried, and the tunnel ahead was alive with answering clicks — dozens of them, overlapping, the sound building like a wave.
They came in pairs. The tunnel was too narrow for more, which was the only thing that kept the fight manageable. Kürbis held the centre, his greatsword sweeping in arcs that used the confined space to his advantage — the spiders couldn't flank him, couldn't climb past him, could only come forward into the killing zone of a goliath who had been fighting things larger than himself since he could hold a weapon.
Dasharra fought beside him — not with the raw power of a barbarian but with the efficient, economical strikes of someone who knew exactly how much force a spider's joints could take before they gave. Her short axe found legs, eyes, the soft places where chitin met flesh, each blow precise and devastating.
They pushed deeper. The spiders kept coming — not in the organised waves of an army but in the frantic, territorial surges of creatures defending a nest. Each encounter was sharp, violent, and over quickly, the tunnel floor gradually becoming a carpet of pale legs and cracked chitin.
And then, abruptly, the tunnel opened.
The passage widened into a natural cavern — broad, high-ceilinged, connected to the worked stone of the temple by a rough-hewn archway that marked the transition from mountain to architecture. Beyond the arch, Kürbis could see carved walls, flagstone floors, and the faint glow of magical light.
He was inside.
The cavern gave way to a room that had once been sleeping quarters — giant-scale, with stone platforms that served as beds and alcoves carved into the walls for storage. The space was cold and long abandoned, dust thick on every surface, the air carrying the dry, mineral stillness of a place that had not been disturbed in centuries.
Two exits. A tunnel leading upward — or it had, once. The ceiling had come down at some point, filling the passage with a wall of collapsed stone and rubble so thoroughly settled that it might as well have been solid mountain. Whatever route that tunnel had connected was gone.
The other exit was a door. Heavy, stone, giant-proportioned — and covered in a thick sheet of ice that had crept across its surface like a living thing, sealing every edge, filling every gap. In front of it stood a statue of a hill giant, squat and heavy, its carved face set in an expression of dull menace that the sculptor had captured with unflattering accuracy.
Kürbis looked at the ice. He looked at Dasharra.
"We go through," he said.
It took time. The ice was old and stubborn — not the brittle frost of a cold snap but the dense, blue-white ice of something that had been freezing for centuries, layer upon layer, until the door was encased in a shell thick enough to turn a blade. Kürbis's greatsword did the work — not elegant, not quick, but effective, each swing sending chips of ice spinning across the stone floor until the door's surface emerged, slick and dripping.
He pushed. The door ground open, reluctant, the hinges protesting with a sound like a giant clearing its throat.
Beyond it was something else entirely.
Archibald reappeared in the temple corridor moments after the fighting ended — materialising between one heartbeat and the next, the grey shimmer of the Ethereal Plane clinging to his robes like morning fog. He blinked. Looked around. Took in the dead barbarians, the salt water pooling on the flagstones, the bruised and bleeding adventurers who had clearly been having an awful time without him.
Again. It had happened again. Pulled out of one reality and dropped into another with no warning, no control, and no consideration for the fact that he was an elderly academic who had specifically not signed up for any of this. The bloodstone did as it pleased, and Archibald was beginning to suspect that what it pleased was chaos.
He adjusted his spectacles. He dusted off his robes. He surveyed the carnage with the weary resignation of a man who had long since stopped being surprised by the trouble this particular band of careless adventurers managed to find — or, more accurately, manufacture — in his absence.
One day, he thought, he would wake up somewhere quiet. A library, perhaps. A study with a warm fire and a locked door and absolutely no one wielding an axe.
Today was not that day.
The Hall of the All-Father
The battle was over, but the temple was not done with them.
The corridor stretched around them in the aftermath — silent except for the faint drip of seawater finding cracks in the flagstones. The air was thick with the mineral smell of old stone and the salt-tang of the water still pooling around the fallen.
At the far end of the corridor, the steps rose to the great doors. Don Juan tried them first. Then Zarok. Then both together, shoulder to shoulder, armour scraping against stone.
The doors did not acknowledge the attempt.
"There's no mechanism," Mindartis said, examining the surface with the clinical thoroughness of someone looking for a puzzle. "No lock. No handle. No hinge. They're simply... doors that don't open."
"Helpful," Dustin said.
He was still on the left balcony from the fight. From up here, details emerged that the ground floor had hidden. The balconies were flanked by pillars, and set into the pillars were braziers — great stone bowls, blackened by use, clearly designed to hold flame.
Mindartis climbed the stairs to join him, while Don Juan and Zarok took the right side.
The braziers were interesting. They were empty — no fuel, no oil, no kindling. Just stone bowls worn smooth by ages of use. But there was something about them. A faint hum, barely audible, the kind of sound you felt in your teeth rather than heard with your ears.
Magic. Old magic. The kind that didn't need to announce itself.
Dustin lit one. A flick of Prestidigitation, and flame erupted from the empty bowl — bright, steady, burning on nothing. The stone beneath it didn't blacken. No heat rose from it. The flame simply was, as if the brazier had been waiting for permission.
He lit the next. And the next. Four braziers on his side, each igniting with the same effortless, magical obedience.
Nothing happened.
He looked across the corridor to Don Juan, who had been watching from the opposite balcony with the barely contained excitement of someone who had figured it out.
"My turn!" the paladin called, and began lighting his side with the theatrical flair of a man performing a ritual he was certain would change everything. First brazier — flame. Second — flame. Third — flame. Fourth —
Flame.
Nothing happened.
The corridor remained exactly as it was. The great doors remained exactly as closed. Don Juan stood among his four perfectly lit braziers with the expression of a man whose grand theory had just been disproven by reality.
"Seriously?" he said.
"Maybe they're decorative," Dustin offered.
"They are not decorative. They're clearly part of a mechanism —"
"A mechanism that does nothing."
"It does something. We just haven't —"
"Don Juan. They're decorative."
The paladin made a sound that was not quite a word and turned away from the braziers with the wounded dignity of someone choosing to ignore evidence.
Behind the balconies, back toward the entrance, each side had a smaller chamber — still giant-scale, but utilitarian, with bare stone walls and a single prominent feature: a lever. Enormous, set into the wall at a height meant for giant hands, the mechanism disappearing into the stonework with the solid engineering of people who built things to last.
On Dustin's side, the lever was up. And frozen — coated in a thick crust of ice that had built up over centuries, welding the mechanism in place with the patient, irresistible grip of deep cold.
"What's your lever doing?" Dustin shouted across the corridor.
"It's down!" Don Juan called back. "Trying to —" A grunt. A scraping sound. Another grunt. "It won't move!"
Zarok tried. The dragonborn threw his weight against the lever with the determination of someone who solved problems through force, his armour scraping against the stone, his boots digging for purchase on the frozen floor.
It didn't budge.
A silence from the other side that lasted a beat too long.
"Zarok?" Dustin called.
"It won't move," the dragonborn said. His voice was carefully neutral — the tone of someone processing the fact that a mechanical problem had defeated his considerable strength and choosing not to discuss it.
Meanwhile, Dustin was staring at his own lever — frozen, locked, immovable by any conventional means. He looked at his flute. He looked at the lever. He looked at the flute again.
"Right," he said.
He cast Shillelagh first. The ironwood flute hummed, its surface rippling with the earthy green light of the Dao's magic — the wood hardening, thickening, becoming something that was simultaneously a musical instrument and a weapon that could crack stone. Then Green-Flame Blade. Emerald fire licked along the flute's length, hissing where it met the cold air, throwing dancing shadows across the frozen walls.
He swung.
The flute hit the lever with a sound like a bell — a deep, resonant clang that echoed through the chamber and sent chips of ice spraying in every direction. The frost cracked. Dustin swung again. And again. Each impact shattered more ice, the green flame melting what the force didn't break, until the lever stood bare and gleaming in the torchlight.
He grabbed it. It moved — smoothly, heavily, with the oiled precision of a mechanism that had been waiting to work again. He pulled it down.
A grinding sound filled the corridor. Deep, mechanical, coming from the walls themselves — the sound of counterweights shifting, of stone moving against stone, of engineering older than kingdoms doing what it was built to do.
At the entrance, a second stone block slid down from the ceiling.
It settled into place with a boom that shook dust from the carvings — a second slab of rock, dropping directly in front of the block that had already sealed the entrance, doubling the barrier. The way in — their only known way in — was now blocked by eight feet of mountain.
"DUSTIN!" Don Juan's voice came across the corridor at a volume that would have carried through a siege. "WHAT DID YOU DO?!"
"I MOVED THE LEVER!"
"THE WRONG WAY!"
"IT WAS THE ONLY WAY! IT WAS FROZEN!"
"WELL MOVE IT BACK!"
Dustin grabbed the lever and heaved it up. The same grinding, the same mechanical certainty — and the second block rose, slowly, back into the ceiling. The entrance was still blocked by the original portcullis, but at least it wasn't blocked by the portcullis and a four-foot slab of mountain.
"It's back!" Dustin called. "Your turn! Move yours up!"
A pause. Then Don Juan's voice, carrying the forced patience of a man explaining something obvious: "It won't. Move. We told you."
"Try again!"
More grunting from the other side. Zarok's boots scraping stone. A creative string of Elvish from Don Juan that Dustin was fairly sure wasn't from any prayer book.
Then silence.
"Don Juan?"
"I'm thinking."
What Don Juan was thinking, it turned out, was that the mechanism on his side was also frozen — not visibly, but internally, the cold having worked its way into the gears and joints hidden inside the wall. And if cold was the problem, then heat was the answer.
"Heat Metal," Don Juan announced, with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had solved the puzzle.
Dustin heard the spell — felt it, almost, the faint pulse of divine magic crossing the corridor. Then Don Juan grabbed the lever.
The scream that followed was not a word in any language.
Don Juan had cast Heat Metal on the lever. Then he had grabbed the lever. The heated lever. With his bare hands.
"GODVER —"
The sound of armoured gauntlets being frantically shaken. More Elvish, this time definitely not from a prayer book. Zarok said something too quiet to hear. Don Juan said something very loud in response.
"What's happening over there?" Dustin called.
"NOTHING!"
"It doesn't sound like nothing."
"IT'S FINE. THE LEVER IS — THE LEVER IS VERY HOT."
"You heated the lever and then grabbed it."
A pause.
"...Yes."
Dustin pressed his forehead against the cold stone of the wall and took a breath.
"Don Juan."
"Don't."
Eventually — after the metal cooled, after Zarok wrapped his hands in thick leather, after more swearing than any temple of the All-Father had likely heard in its entire existence — they got the lever up.
The grinding came from the entrance. The portcullis — the original, the one that had fallen and trapped them inside — began to rise. Slowly, the iron bars lifting into the ceiling with the inexorable patience of machinery that worked on geological time.
Light spilled in from the corridor. And filling the corridor, with an expression that was either patience or contempt, was Harshnag.
The frost giant ducked under the still-rising portcullis and straightened to his full height inside the corridor. His pale eyes swept the scene — the dead barbarians, the salt water on the stone, the lit braziers, the party scattered across two balconies looking exhausted, burned, and sheepish.
"Took you long enough," he said.
The Big Room
The room beyond the sleeping quarters was enormous. Square, the ceiling vaulting upward into darkness, the floor a single expanse of polished flagstone that stretched a hundred feet in every direction. The scale was wrong for humans — everything built for creatures three times their height, the proportions making Kürbis feel appropriately sized for the first time in his life and Dasharra look like a child who had wandered into a cathedral.
Six enormous statues knelt in two rows of three, facing inward — giants, each carved from a different stone, each depicting a different race. They towered even above Kürbis, rendered with a precision that went beyond craftsmanship into something that felt devotional, each figure holding a weapon appropriate to its kind. They were kneeling, heads bowed, in the posture of worship or supplication.
And the thing they knelt before was larger still. At the centre of the hall, an eighty-foot statue dominated everything — a robed giant, arms outstretched, its face hidden beneath a stony cowl that revealed nothing. No features. No expression. Just smooth, blank stone where a face should have been, as if the sculptors had not dared to guess what the god looked like. The statue faced the glowing archway on the east wall, its outstretched arms encompassing the kneeling six like a shepherd over its flock.
To their left, a glowing archway set into the wall — forty feet wide, forty feet tall, its frame carved with six runes inlaid with mithral. A faint, churning mist filled the arch, and the whole thing hummed with a subsonic vibration that Kürbis felt in his chest rather than heard with his ears. The runes pulsed with a dim, dormant light, waiting for something to wake them.
Across the hall from where they stood, two sets of double doors flanked the far wall — both closed, both covered in a thick crust of ice that sealed every seam and rendered them immovable. Whatever lay beyond them had been frozen shut for a very long time.
To their right, a massive stone doorway — arched, giant-scale, its surface smooth and unbroken by any handle, lock, or visible mechanism. The door was simply a wall shaped like an entrance, offering no suggestion of how it might be convinced to open. On either side of it, broad stone stairs climbed to elevated landings, each one leading to a smaller doorway — still giant-sized, easily fifteen feet tall — sealed shut with heavy metal grates. The bars were thick as a man's arm, set close together, the ironwork ancient but sound.
And from behind the metal grates — voices.
Kürbis heard them first. Muffled by stone and distance, but unmistakable. He looked at Dasharra. She nodded.
They climbed. The steps were giant-scale but manageable for a goliath — less so for a dwarf, though Dasharra hauled herself up each one with the grim efficiency of someone who refused to be inconvenienced by architecture. At the top, the landing opened onto the grated doorway, and through the bars, lit by torchlight from the passage beyond —
The rest of the party. Dustin, Don Juan, Zarok, Mindartis, Archibald — battered, singed, standing in a corridor that smelled of salt water and violence. And behind them, filling the passage with his enormous frame, Harshnag.
"About time," Kürbis said.
Relief was brief and practical. The grate had no mechanism on either side — no lock, no latch, no lever. Just iron bars in a stone channel, held in place by gravity and the engineering of people who had built for permanence.
They discussed it. Dustin examined the frame for hidden catches. Mindartis analysed the metalwork for magical locks. Don Juan suggested force, which earned him a look from Zarok that said we just tried that with a door.
Harshnag watched them talk for approximately ten seconds.
"Let me have a look," he said.
Then he stepped forward, gripped the bottom rail with both hands, and lifted. The grate rose — not easily, not quietly, the metal groaning in its channel, centuries of corrosion protesting the indignity — but it rose, because when a frost giant decided something should move, it moved. He slid it up until it locked into a recess in the ceiling, the mechanism catching with a deep, resonant clunk that echoed through the hall.
Kürbis clasped Dustin's arm as the half-elf stepped through. No words. No need for them.
They decided to seal the entrance behind them — no uninvited visitors while they explored. Dustin pulled the lever on his side back down. The grinding filled the corridor once more, and the stone block descended into place with the same inexorable certainty, sealing the causeway entrance behind a slab of mountain. Whatever was in here, they would deal with it. Whatever was out there would have to wait.
Together, the full party descended into the hall.
The Runes
They explored the hall properly now, the full party moving through the space with the cautious attention of people who had learned that this temple did not reward carelessness.
The six kneeling statues drew them first. Harshnag moved among them with a reverence the party had not seen from him before — slow, deliberate, his pale eyes moving from one carved face to the next with the quiet intensity of someone greeting old acquaintances.
"The gods of my people," he said. He stopped before each one in turn, naming them with the careful weight of a prayer. "Grolantor, father of hill giants." A squat, heavy figure clutching a bone greatclub. "Skoraeus Stonebones, keeper of the stone giants." A gaunt shape holding a massive boulder against its chest. "Thrym, lord of frost." A towering figure, kneeling, its hands —
Harshnag paused.
"Surtur, the fire lord." He moved on — an enormous shape gripping an iron greatsword. "Memnor, the cloud giant." A regal figure with a mithral spear. "And Stronmaus, the storm king." The last, holding an adamantine trident.
He looked up at the great statue in the centre — the eighty-foot robed figure with its featureless face and outstretched arms.
"Annam," he said. "The All-Father. Father of all giants. This is his temple."
Dustin had read about them — hours spent in Zephyros's tower, the cloud giant's library chaotic and vast, its scrolls and tomes scattered across surfaces that floated at heights requiring creative climbing. He recognised the names, the weapons, the hierarchy. But hearing Harshnag speak them here, in this place, was different. This wasn't scholarship. This was worship.
"Harshnag," Don Juan said. The paladin was standing before the frost giant statue — Thrym — with his head tilted, studying the carved hands. "This one's missing something."
Dustin joined him. The statue's hands were positioned to hold a weapon — the grip carved, the stance set, the empty space between its stone fingers unmistakable.
"A greataxe," Dustin said. "Judging by the grip."
They both looked at Harshnag. The frost giant's expression was unreadable.
"Thrym's axe," he said. "It should be here."
The portal archway hummed on the far wall — the six runes pulsing with their dim, patient light, waiting.
Harshnag crossed the hall and studied the archway with the unhurried attention of someone reading a familiar text. Six runes, inlaid with mithral, arranged in an arc around the glowing mist. He examined each one, his massive head tilting from symbol to symbol.
"This one I know," he said, pointing to one near the bottom. "Ise. Ice. The frost rune." He moved to the others, slower now. "The rest... I do not know them."
"Can you touch it?" Dustin said. "The ice rune. See what happens."
Harshnag considered this for a moment. Then he reached out and pressed his fingers against the Ise rune. Light bloomed from within — a cold blue-white glow that pulsed once and held steady.
"Interesting," Mindartis said, already at the archway, studying the other runes. "What about the rest?"
Harshnag shook his head. "I do not know what they do. I would not touch what I do not understand."
"Let me," Don Juan said, and pressed his palm against one of the dark runes with the confidence of a man who expected results.
The rune pulsed — and the hall twisted. Not physically. Inside. A wave of something ancient and spiteful washed through the room, settling into every mind like fog filling a valley. Dustin's thoughts went blank. His legs locked. He stood where he was, staring at nothing, aware that something was terribly wrong but unable to remember what or why or how to make it stop. Around him, the others had frozen too — Don Juan mid-step, Zarok with his hand on his greataxe, Kürbis motionless, Mindartis blinking at the ceiling as if he'd forgotten what it was.
Only Archibald moved.
The old wizard — caught in whatever broken logic the enchantment had substituted for reason — turned and launched a spell at Harshnag's back. It struck. The frost giant staggered — less from damage than from surprise — and swung around, one enormous arm sweeping the air. The backhand caught Archibald and sent him tumbling across the flagstones like a dropped puppet.
Then it passed. The fog lifted as suddenly as it had come, and the party stood blinking at each other — stiff, disoriented, trying to piece together the seconds they had lost. Archibald was picking himself up from the floor, bruised and bewildered. Harshnag looked down at the wizard with an expression that was not quite apology and not quite amusement.
"Perhaps," Mindartis said carefully, "we should not touch the runes."
Nobody argued.
The missing greataxe. That was the logical next step — find whatever weapon belonged in the frost giant statue's hands and see if it activated the ice rune properly. They spread out through the temple, searching side chambers and alcoves and the kind of dead-end passages that giant architecture seemed to generate in abundance.
It was Dustin who stopped them.
He had been thinking — which, in his experience, was usually more productive than searching, though the rest of the party would have disputed that claim. The frost giant rune had lit up when Harshnag touched it. Nothing else had worked. No other rune had responded to anyone, in any way, except to scramble the minds of people who tried.
The rune didn't need the missing greataxe. The rune needed a frost giant's axe.
"Wait," Dustin said. "Before we waste our time searching this whole temple — Harshnag, touch the ice rune again. With your axe."
The party stopped. Looked at him. Looked at each other.
"That seems —" Mindartis began.
"Harshnag." Dustin cut across the wizard. "Go on. Push it."
The frost giant regarded him for a moment. Then he shrugged — a gesture that, on a creature his size, moved enough air to flutter cloaks — unslung his glowing greataxe, and pressed its blade against the ice rune.
The rune flared.
Not the steady glow of before — a blinding, searing white that filled the hall like a flash of lightning. The ground shook. The carvings on the walls seemed to move, their frozen figures twisting in the sudden light.
Then it started raining.
Acid — burning, hissing, falling from the darkness above in sheets that sizzled where they hit stone and raised welts where they hit skin. The party ran for cover. Don Juan dove behind a statue's base. Mindartis threw up a magical barrier. Zarok ducked behind a pillar.
"Under the statues!" someone shouted, and they scrambled for the kneeling giants, pressing themselves beneath the massive carved figures like children hiding under tables. The statues provided cover — partial, imperfect, the acid finding gaps and seams and the spaces between carved limbs to reach the people crouching beneath.
Then the hailstones.
Not hail — boulders of ice, the size of skulls, falling from the same impossible height with the random, merciless rhythm of a thunderstorm designed by something malicious. They shattered on the flagstones, sending shrapnel spinning across the hall. One struck Zarok's pauldron hard enough to drive him to one knee. Another clipped Don Juan's shoulder and spun him sideways.
The hail stopped. For a breath — one breath — the hall was silent.
Then the lightning came.
It struck from above without warning — white-blue bolts splitting the darkness, lashing the flagstones with cracks that left the air tasting of copper and ozone. The thunder was instantaneous, deafening, the sound slamming off the stone walls and multiplying into a roar that made thought impossible.
Archibald caught a bolt square in the chest. The flash was blinding — a column of white light that connected ceiling to wizard in one searing instant. The old man's body arched, lifted, and crumpled. He hit the stone and didn't move. Smoke rose from his robes in thin, acrid wisps.
"ARCHIBALD!" Dustin shouted from beneath Thrym's statue — the irony of sheltering under the one with the missing axe not lost on him, even now. He couldn't reach the wizard. Couldn't cross the open floor without catching a bolt himself. But he didn't need to cross the floor.
He needed to be heard.
Healing Word.
The spell left his lips as a melody — a single phrase, bright and warm, cutting through the chaos like a candle in a storm. The magic found Archibald across the hall, threading between the lightning strikes, and settled over the old wizard like a hand on a shoulder.
Archibald gasped. His eyes opened. His fingers twitched. Barely alive — but alive.
Then it stopped.
Not gradually. Not a tapering off. One moment the hall was a killing floor of acid and ice and lightning — the next, silence. The rune on the portal dimmed to its steady glow. Drops of acid hissed quietly on the stone, chunks of melting ice steamed in the suddenly quiet air, and the smell of ozone lingered like a warning.
Dustin stood up. His cloak was ruined. His left arm was burned from wrist to elbow.
He looked at the party.
The party looked at him.
"Don't," he said.
"Dustin." Don Juan's voice was very, very calm. "What exactly made you think —"
"It worked."
"ARCHIBALD ALMOST DIED."
Dustin looked at Archibald, who was sitting upright now, blinking, patting himself down with the dazed caution of someone checking whether all his pieces were still attached.
"He's alive," Dustin said.
"By your Healing Word. Because your idea nearly killed him."
"And my Healing Word saved him. So it balances out."
The silence that followed was the specific silence of people who wanted to kill someone but recognised that they might still need him.
Harshnag, who had weathered the acid and ice and lightning with the mild inconvenience of someone caught in drizzle, looked down at the party from his full height.
"The bard is not wrong," he said. "The rune holds."
"The bard," Don Juan said, "is going to get us killed."
"Not today," Dustin said.
While they argued, Mindartis had not been listening. The wizard had drifted across the hall toward the frozen double doors on the left wall — the ones sealed behind centuries of ice — and was studying them with the quiet, focused intensity of someone who had identified a problem and was already three steps into solving it.
"Stand back," he said.
Nobody heard him.
"Stand back," he said again, louder, and something in his tone made the argument stop.
Then he cast Fireball.
The detonation filled the hall — a roaring sphere of flame that slammed into the frozen doors and erupted outward in a blast of heat and light and noise. The ice didn't melt. It evaporated — flash-boiled into steam that billowed across the flagstones in a scalding cloud, the doors emerging from behind it blackened but clear, their surfaces steaming in the suddenly warm air.
Mindartis stood in the aftermath with an expression that had no business being on the face of a School of Abjuration wizard. It was the expression of a man who had just done something deeply, thoroughly satisfying — the quiet, radiant contentment of someone who had been carrying a Fireball around for exactly this kind of moment and had finally been given permission to use it.
He turned to face the party. His eyes were bright. His hands were still faintly smoking.
"The doors are clear," he said.
The rest of the party stared.
"Stop!"
Two voices — simultaneous, sharp, cutting through the steam like blades. Kürbis and Zarok. The goliath and the dragonborn had spoken at exactly the same moment, with exactly the same tone, and now they looked at each other across the hall with the surprised recognition of two people who had arrived at the same conclusion independently.
They nodded.
"Everyone," Kürbis said. His voice was calm. Deliberate. The voice of someone who had watched his companions nearly die three times in the last hour and had decided that the dying was going to stop. "Stop. Stop doing things. Stop touching things. Stop casting things. Sit down."
Nobody argued. Nobody even tried.
"We rest," Kürbis continued. "We recover. We think. And then we continue."
The Long Rest
They made camp in the hall — if you could call it camping. No tents, no fire, no comfort beyond the stone floor and whatever bedrolls they had carried through salt-water corpses and acid rain and lightning to get here. The statues of the six giant gods loomed above them in the dim light, their stone faces impassive, watching the small people arrange themselves on a floor built for creatures that could have stepped on them.
Before settling in, Dustin walked to the doors Mindartis had cleared. The ice was gone, but the doors themselves were still closed — heavy, dark wood banded with iron, giant-scale, the kind of doors that suggested whatever was behind them had been sealed for a reason.
He pressed his ear against the surface.
Clicking.
Not the wind. Not the settling of old stone. Something alive — small, fast, rhythmic. A lot of it. The sound of many legs moving across a hard surface, faint but persistent, with the irregular tempo of a living thing. He had no idea what it was, but whatever was making that sound had more legs than he was comfortable with.
He stepped back.
"Something's behind these doors," he said. "Don't know what. But probably a lot of legs."
The party looked at him. Looked at the doors. Looked at each other.
"Harshnag," Kürbis said. It was not a question.
The frost giant understood. He moved to a position beside the cleared doors — not blocking them, but close enough that anything coming through would meet him first. He settled his greataxe across his knees, leaned his back against the wall, and regarded the doors with the patient, unhurried attention of a creature that could stay awake for days without consequence.
"Sleep," he said. "I will watch."
They slept. Or tried to. The hall was cold, the stone was hard, and the clicking behind the doors continued — faint, irregular, never quite stopping. But exhaustion won, the way it always did, and one by one the party drifted into the uneasy rest of people sleeping in a place that was not safe, guarded by a giant who did not need to sleep.
Nothing came through the doors. Nothing stirred in the hall. The statues watched, and Harshnag watched, and the temple held its silence through the long hours until the party woke — stiff, cold, bruised, but alive and whole and ready for whatever came next.
The Feast Hall
They formed up at the doors — Kürbis and Zarok in front, shoulder to shoulder, the goliath's greatsword and the dragonborn's greataxe forming a wall of steel that filled the doorway. Behind them, the rest of the party in the loose, watchful arrangement of people who had learned that the first thing through any door in this temple was likely to be unpleasant.
Kürbis pushed the doors open.
The room beyond was vast — far larger than the hall they had slept in. Two hundred and forty feet wide, four hundred and forty feet deep, the vaulted ceiling supported by six stone pillars, each twenty feet across and sixty feet tall. The air was different here. Warm. Not the damp, mineral warmth of the spider tunnels but genuine heat, dry and steady, radiating from the centre of the chamber where a massive bowl-shaped basin sat in the floor. Inside it, a fire — real fire, fed by natural gas escaping through cracks in the stone, the flames bright and steady and impossibly old. It had been burning since before anyone in the party had been born. Possibly since before anyone in the party's species had been born.
Around the fire pit, six tables of carved granite with matching benches, giant-scaled, their surfaces stained dark with blood and grease from feasts that had ended centuries ago. Neat stacks of plates and goblets — beaten copper, green and black with age — sat on the nearest slab. Against the far wall, a deep alcove stretched back into the rock, two hundred feet wide and dark beyond the firelight's reach.
The walls were lined with niches and sconces, identical to the ones in the entrance corridor. The room was warm and dry and brightly lit, and after hours of sleeping on frozen stone in the dark, it felt almost welcoming.
Almost.
Kürbis heard it first — a shift of weight in the alcove, the scrape of something heavy moving across stone. Then a sound like metal dragged over gravel, low and rhythmic.
Breathing.
Something in the alcove was breathing.
It came forward into the firelight, and the warmth of the room suddenly made sense.
The creature was enormous — thirty feet long, its segmented body the blue-white of deep glacial ice, but pulsing from within with a furnace-orange glow that seeped through the gaps in its chitinous plates like lava through cracks in rock. Winglike fins flared from the back of its head, each one ridged and translucent, glowing with the same internal heat. Its mouth was wide — impossibly, grotesquely wide — and lined with teeth like broken glass, jagged and irregular and designed for one purpose.
It uncoiled from the alcove with the fluid, predatory grace of something that had been waiting to eat.
"Remorhaz," Harshnag said. His voice was calm, but his hand moved to his greataxe. "A young one. Where there is one, there is a nest. Do not let it touch you — its body burns. Fire and cold will do nothing to it." His expression shifted — just for a moment, something almost hopeful crossing the frost giant's weathered features. "If there is a nest, there might be eggs."
"Is it tasty?" Don Juan asked, raising his crossbow.
Nobody answered, because the creature lunged.
Kürbis was already moving. The rage took him the way it always did — not as madness but as clarity, the world narrowing to the thing in front of him and the blade in his hands and nothing else. He charged, his greatsword arcing upward, and the impact when steel met chitin sent a shockwave up his arms that would have staggered anyone who wasn't already beyond feeling.
The creature shrieked — a sound like steam escaping from a cracked pipe — and snapped at him with that terrible mouth. Kürbis rolled clear, the teeth closing on empty air, close enough that the heat from the creature's body singed the hair on his arms.
Behind him, Zarok stepped forward and opened his mouth. The dragonborn's lightning breath crackled outward in a jagged line that struck the remorhaz square in the flank. The creature screamed — a different sound this time, higher, sharper, the shriek of something that had not expected to be hurt. The lightning arced between the gaps in its plates, finding the soft tissue beneath, and the remorhaz thrashed sideways, smoking.
Don Juan raised his crossbow. The bolt flew true, punching through a gap in the creature's armour near the base of its skull. The remorhaz screamed again, thrashing sideways.
Archibald's eyes narrowed. The old wizard extended one hand, fingers spread, and the air between him and the creature warped — a lance of psychic force driving into the remorhaz's mind like a spike into wood. The creature staggered, its movements suddenly uncoordinated, its shriek changing pitch to something that sounded almost confused.
Mindartis followed — a crackling sphere of lightning leaping from his palm, striking the creature's underside where the plates were thinnest. The remorhaz convulsed, electricity arcing between its segments, the smell of ozone mixing with the sulphurous heat of its body.
Dustin raised his hand. The Dao's power answered — a bolt of raw, crackling force lancing across the chamber, trailing green-black energy. The eldritch blast caught the remorhaz in the mouth.
The creature tried to swallow it.
Its jaws snapped shut around the energy, its throat working as if it could consume the blast the way it consumed heat — and for one absurd moment, the remorhaz stood perfectly still, its body swelling, its plates separating, the glow between them intensifying from orange to white —
It exploded.
The detonation was wet and violent and immediate. Chitin and ichor and the superheated slime of the creature's innards erupted outward in a spray that covered everything within twenty feet. Kürbis, closest, caught the worst of it — steaming remorhaz entrails coating his armour, his face, his greatsword, the slime hissing where it contacted metal and skin.
He didn't flinch. He wiped his eyes with the back of one hand and kept his blade up.
Good instinct.
A second remorhaz emerged from a hole in the alcove floor — smaller than the first but no less aggressive, its body glowing hot, its fins flared wide in the threat display of a creature defending its territory. It lunged for the nearest target.
The party converged on it — blades and bolts and spells finding the creature from every angle. Kürbis took the front, his greatsword carving lines of light through the dim alcove. Dustin circled wide, firing eldritch blasts from a distance he hoped was safe.
Then the ground shook.
Not the rune-trap tremor from before — this was deeper, closer, a vibration that came from directly beneath their feet. The flagstones cracked. The fire in the basin surged. And the floor between the granite tables split open like a wound.
What came through was not young.
The adult remorhaz erupted from the stone in a shower of rubble and dust — fifty feet of armoured, furnace-hot predator, its body twice the width of the young ones, its plates glowing so bright that looking at it directly was painful. The winglike fins behind its head spread wide enough to cast shadows across the entire chamber. Its mouth opened, and the heat that poured from it warped the air like a mirage.
The room went from dangerous to desperate.
The creature struck Zarok first. The dragonborn had turned to face it — greataxe raised, oath burning in his eyes, the same stubborn, unbreakable courage that had carried him through every fight since Triboar — and the remorhaz hit him like a battering ram. Jaws closed around his torso, the teeth punching through plate and scale, and the creature shook. Zarok's body snapped sideways, his armour crumpling, his greataxe clattering to the stone. The remorhaz released him and the dragonborn hit the ground, limp, his eyes closed, his chest barely moving.
"ZAROK!" Don Juan screamed.
Harshnag's greataxe came down — a blow that would have felled a tree, biting into the adult remorhaz's flank with a sound like a forge hammer on an anvil. The creature shrieked and twisted, its massive body sweeping the flagstones, scattering furniture, knocking a granite table sideways as if it weighed nothing.
Kürbis was still fighting the second young one — the smaller creature pressing its attack with the mindless aggression of something that didn't know it should be afraid. He dispatched it with a thrust through the skull, wrenched his blade free, and turned to face the adult.
Dustin was already singing.
Healing Word. The melody left his lips before the thought finished forming — the same bright, desperate phrase he had used for Archibald, threaded with every scrap of magic he had left. It found Zarok across the chaos, settled over the dragonborn like sunlight through cloud.
Zarok's eyes opened. His hand found his greataxe. He was alive — barely, brokenly, but alive.
It wasn't enough.
The adult remorhaz was enormous, furious, and largely unharmed. Harshnag's axe had opened a wound in its flank, but the creature's internal heat was already cauterising the damage, the edges of the cut glowing white and sealing shut. It turned on the frost giant with the focused malice of something that had identified the biggest threat and intended to remove it.
The party looked at the creature. Looked at what it had done to Zarok — the dragonborn who could take hits that would kill most men, reduced to a broken shape on the floor in a single bite. They felt it — all of them, in the same moment — the cold recognition that this thing was too big. Too fast. Too hot to touch and too armoured to hurt and too angry to reason with. This was the fight they might not walk away from.
Mindartis picked up a rock.
It was a chunk of flagstone — broken loose by the remorhaz's eruption, roughly the size of a fist, unremarkable in every way. The wizard hefted it, tested its weight, and threw it at the adult remorhaz's head.
It bounced off the creature's skull with a sound like a pebble hitting a wall. The remorhaz turned to look at him.
"Over here," Mindartis said. His voice was conversational. Calm. The voice of a man who had made a decision and was no longer afraid of it. "Yes, you. The ugly one. Come on, then."
The remorhaz lunged.
Mindartis did not run. He planted his feet, brought his quarterstaff up in both hands, and waited — waited — waited until the creature's mouth opened wide enough to swallow him whole, the heat from its throat blistering his skin, the teeth like a cage of broken glass closing around him —
And he jumped in.
The wizard leapt into the gaping mouth, quarterstaff extended, trying to jam it crosswise between the jaws. The staff caught — for half a second — then slipped, and the teeth came together. Mindartis disappeared into the creature's throat. A flash of robes, a glimpse of one outstretched hand, and then nothing. The remorhaz's mouth closed. The wizard was gone.
Silence. Absolute, horrified silence.
"MINDARTIS!" Dustin shouted.
The remorhaz swayed. Its body shuddered — once, twice — the glow between its plates flickering, dimming, changing. Its shape began to warp. The segmented body swelled in places it shouldn't, contracted in others, the chitinous armour cracking and splitting as something inside pushed outward against a form that was no longer the right shape.
Then the creature exploded — for the second time that day, remorhaz came apart from the inside — but this time, what stood in the ruin was not gore and slime.
It was a mammoth.
Twelve feet at the shoulder, tusks like curved swords, its massive body steaming where remorhaz ichor slid off thick fur. It stood in the crater of what had been the most dangerous creature in the temple, shaking chunks of chitin from its hide with the irritated dignity of something very large and very unimpressed.
And somewhere inside that mammoth, behind eyes that held a distinctly non-mammoth intelligence, Mindartis was having the best day of his career.
Polymorph. The wizard — swallowed alive, trapped in the burning gut of a creature that should have dissolved him in seconds — had cast Polymorph on himself. Had turned into a creature so massive, so fundamentally incompatible with the inside of a remorhaz, that the remorhaz had simply ceased to be an obstacle.
The mammoth turned its head and looked at the party. If a mammoth could look smug, this one managed it.
Dustin stared. Don Juan stared. Kürbis, still dripping with the remains of the first remorhaz, lowered his greatsword and stared.
"Right," Dustin said, after a pause that lasted several seconds too long. "I think Mindartis just won."
Nobody disagreed.
The mammoth did not change back. It stood amid the wreckage, blinking slowly, its trunk swaying with the idle contentment of a creature that had no particular reason to be anywhere else. Somewhere behind those enormous brown eyes, Mindartis was clearly enjoying himself.
While the rest of the party was still catching its breath, Harshnag walked past them all — past the scattered chitin, past the smouldering remains, past the overturned granite table — and crouched beside the hole in the alcove floor where the second young remorhaz had emerged. He dug for a moment, enormous hands shifting rubble and broken flagstone with surprising care, and then straightened up holding something round and pale and roughly the size of a halfling.
A remorhaz egg.
The frost giant's face split into a grin — the first genuine, unguarded expression of joy any of them had seen from him. He cradled the egg against his chest like a newborn, brushing frost and dust from its leathery shell, and carried it to his pack with the delicate, reverent steps of someone transporting the most precious thing in the world.
"Is it tasty?" Don Juan asked. He had been waiting the entire fight for an answer.
Harshnag looked up from tucking the egg into the folds of his bedroll. "No idea."
Don Juan blinked. "So?"
"So what?"
"What do you want the egg for?"
"Ah." Harshnag's grin widened. "They make very good guard pets."
Don Juan opened his mouth, closed it, looked at the smouldering remains of the three creatures that had nearly killed them all, and decided not to pursue the line of questioning further.
With the remorhaz nest cleared, they explored the rest of the feast hall. Leaning against the southernmost stone slab — half-hidden behind the neatly stacked copper plates and goblets — they found a steel greataxe, giant-sized. Harshnag recognised it immediately and carried it back to Annam's temple, fitting it into the frost giant statue's empty hands. It slotted into place as if it had been carved to hold it.
They took a short rest by the fire pit — the ancient flames still burning steady and warm, fed by gas that had been seeping through the stone since before the founding of Waterdeep. They cleaned their weapons and their wounds. Zarok, propped against a granite bench, let Don Juan tend to the puncture marks where the remorhaz's teeth had punched through his plate armour. The dragonborn said nothing about the pain. He never did.
The mammoth had settled by the fire pit, lying on its side with the boneless comfort of something that weighed several tons and did not care. It had spent the rest of the hour like that — occasionally flicking its trunk at passing embers, occasionally making a low, rumbling sound that might have been contentment or might have been Mindartis humming to himself. Nobody tried to rush him.
Near the end of the rest, the spell faded on its own. The mammoth shimmered, shrank, and Mindartis was sitting cross-legged on the warm stone, covered head to toe in dried remorhaz ichor, his robes plastered to his body, blinking as if he'd just woken from a very comfortable nap. He looked down at himself and sighed.
He cleaned his robes with Prestidigitation, which technically worked but did nothing to remove the haunted look that came from knowing exactly what the inside of a remorhaz smelled like.
Kürbis just sat and ate. Covered in gore, unbothered, methodical. The goliath had a talent for compartmentalisation that the rest of the party quietly envied.
The Portal
They gathered before the archway. Six mithral runes, six giant types, and now all six statues held their weapons. The decision was unanimous — Harshnag would take the greataxe and touch the frost rune.
The frost giant pressed the steel blade against the ise rune. The axe flashed with cold blue light and vanished from his hands, reappearing in the statue's grasp behind them. The glowing mist between the archway's pillars churned, thickened, and transformed — pale fog becoming a roiling mass of thunderclouds, dark and violent, shot through with flashes of lightning. The sound of rolling thunder filled the temple, and through the storm they could see the room beyond.
A hexagonal chamber. Vast. The walls rising fifty feet before tapering to a sharp apex high above. In each corner, a life-size statue of a giant holding a heavy iron lantern — hill, stone, frost, fire, cloud, and storm — their cold, magical light casting long shadows across the floor.
And in the centre of the room, on the frost-covered flagstones, a body.
A giant. Young, by the proportions — a cloud giant, perhaps, though it was hard to tell through the portal's flickering light. It lay on its back, arms at its sides, its skin pale grey beneath a thick shroud of frost that covered it like a burial cloth. It had been there a long time. Beside it, resting on the frozen stone, a morningstar — massive, frost-covered, untouched.
The party stared through the churning archway at the still, frozen scene beyond. The thunder rolled. The lightning flashed. The giant did not move.
There was a brief hesitation — the kind that lasts two heartbeats and feels like an hour. The kind where everyone is waiting for someone else to go first.
Don Juan went first. The paladin squared his shoulders, muttered something under his breath that might have been a prayer to Tyr, and stepped through the archway as if walking through a doorway he'd used a hundred times. The thunderclouds parted around him and closed behind, and then he was on the other side, standing in the cold light of the hexagonal chamber, hand on his sword, very much alive.
Kürbis followed — two strides behind, ready, because Kürbis was always two strides behind and ready.
Dustin took a breath and stepped through. The thunder swallowed him for a moment — sound and light and the sharp, electric taste of magic — and then he was through, standing on frost-covered stone, the cold hitting him like a wall after the warmth of the feast hall.
The others came after. Zarok, still moving gingerly. Archibald, leaning on his staff. Mindartis, who paused to study the archway's rune work and had to be pulled through by the sleeve. And Harshnag, last of all, ducking to fit his enormous frame through the portal, his footsteps cracking the frost as he straightened to his full height.
They stood in the Eye of Annam. The six lanterns burned with their cold, steady light. The giant lay motionless on the floor, preserved by centuries of frost, its morningstar beside it like a grave offering.
They approached the body. Up close, it was unmistakably a cloud giant — tall even by their standards, wearing a golden breastplate that was dented and scored but still beautiful. Around his neck hung an amulet set with an opal that caught the lantern light and scattered it in pale rainbows across the frost. His face was peaceful. Whatever had killed him, it had not been slow.
Dustin was the first to notice the circle. Etched into the floor beneath the thin layer of frost, a ring of mithral inlay twenty feet across, inscribed with runes in Dethek — the angular, precise script of the dwarves. He knelt and brushed the frost aside with his sleeve. The words read: Ask Your Question and Know Truth.
He was still reading when the air above the corpse began to change.
It started as a shimmer — like heat haze, but cold, the kind of distortion that came from magic older than anything Dustin had ever felt. The shimmer thickened, took shape, and the ghost of a cloud giant rose from the body like smoke from a dying fire.
He was enormous even in death — translucent, his features soft and indistinct at the edges, but his eyes sharp and present and very much aware. He looked down at the party with the expression of someone who had been waiting a long time and was not entirely surprised by what had finally arrived.
"You are small," the ghost said. His voice echoed strangely in the hexagonal chamber, the sound arriving from all six walls at once. "But you have come far. I am Eigeron."
Harshnag lowered his head — a gesture of respect that looked entirely uncharacteristic on the frost giant. "We seek the oracle's wisdom," he said. "We mean no disrespect to your rest."
Eigeron's ghost regarded him for a long moment, then turned his gaze to the rest of the party. "You are welcome here. More welcome than the last giant who stood where you stand." Something shifted in the ghost's expression — not anger, exactly, but a deep and ancient sadness. "Sansuri."
He told them the story. How he and Sansuri — the Countess, lord of the cloud giants — had come to the Eye of Annam seeking divine wisdom. How the oracle had spoken of a great upheaval that would shake the ordning — the ancient hierarchy of giants — and give all giant-kind a chance to prove themselves to their gods. Eigeron had wanted to share the oracle's words with all giants, to warn them, to unite them. Sansuri had seen something else entirely — an opportunity. Knowledge that she alone would possess. An advantage over every other giant lord in Faerûn.
They had disagreed. Eigeron had been her adviser, and he had advised her that this was too important to hoard. That the upheaval would affect every giant, and every giant deserved to know.
Sansuri had disagreed more permanently.
The ghost spoke without bitterness, which somehow made it worse.
"When did this happen?" Dustin asked. He looked at the frost-covered body, the undisturbed morningstar, the thin layer of ice that had crept over everything. "How long have you been here?"
Eigeron tilted his translucent head. "Time is difficult here. The lanterns burn, and the frost grows, and nothing changes. But it was autumn when we came. The harvest moon had passed."
Dustin glanced at the others. The upheaval — the breaking of the ordning, the giants turning aggressive across the Sword Coast — that had been less than a year ago. The cloud giants had been here before any of it started. The oracle had seen it coming, and Sansuri had heard the warning, and instead of sharing it she had killed the one person who wanted to.
"More than a year," Archibald said, reading the same thought on Dustin's face. "She's had a head start on everyone."
Eigeron nodded. "The oracle still functions. It is a divine proxy of Annam the All-Father — this chamber was built to allow communion with him directly. The circle on the floor is the focus." He gestured to the mithral ring beneath the frost. "Step within it and speak your question, and the oracle will answer truthfully. It has six charges. Six questions before its power is spent. It replenishes at dawn."
"Six questions," Archibald repeated, already calculating.
"Use them wisely," Eigeron said. "The oracle's answers are truthful, but they are not always clear."
The ghost lingered for a moment, his gaze moving across each of them in turn. "One more thing," he said. "Sansuri retreated to her castle after what she did here. A flying castle — she is a cloud giant, and cloud giants build their homes in the sky. If you find her..." The sadness in his expression did not change, but something harder appeared beneath it. "She should answer for what she has done."
Then Eigeron's ghost faded — not disappearing entirely, but dimming to a faint shimmer above the body, present but no longer speaking, watching them with the patient, translucent eyes of someone who had nowhere else to be.
The Oracle
They stepped into the mithral circle together — the full width of it, twenty feet across, built for giants who came here alone. The seven of them barely filled a quarter of it. The ring hummed beneath their boots, and the air inside thickened — not unpleasant, but present, like standing inside a held breath.
Dustin went first. "What happened to the Ordning?"
The oracle's voice came from everywhere and nowhere — deep, resonant, ancient, with the weight of something that had been answering questions since before the founding of human civilization.
Annam the All-Father broke the ordning, to rouse his children from their complacency.
Don Juan next. "Why are the giants fighting?"
Because King Hekaton is no longer on his Wyrmskull Throne, in his home in the Maelstrom.
"Is Sansuri responsible?"
Sansuri is not the cause of the breaking of the ordning.
Archibald adjusted his spectacles. "How do we reach the Maelstrom?"
Each giant lord has a conch to teleport to the Maelstrom.
Don Juan again. "How can we stop the giants? How can we fix things?"
Go to the court of King Hekaton. Root out the evil therein, and put him back on the throne.
Dustin spoke last. "Is the Kraken Society behind all this?"
The kraken and the Kraken Society are working with the evil at the court.
Silence. Six questions. Six answers. The mithral circle dimmed beneath the frost.
"One more," Archibald said, and cleared his throat. "Where is the privy?"
Nothing happened.
Don Juan turned to look at him. "The old man really is losing his marbles."
"Just checking," Archibald said mildly. "Had to make sure it was really only six."
They stepped back from the circle and turned to the ghost, who had watched the entire exchange in silence.
"Is there anything else you can do to help us?" Dustin asked.
Eigeron looked down at his own body — the frost-covered corpse on the flagstones, the golden breastplate, the amulet around its neck. "My body is of no use to me," he said. "The armour is enchanted. The opal holds the ild rune — fire magic, old and strong. Take them. They will serve you better than they serve a dead man."
Kürbis didn't hesitate. The goliath knelt beside the corpse with the practised efficiency of someone entirely unbothered by the dead and began working the amulet free. The chain came loose with a sharp tug, frost cracking and scattering across the stone. The breastplate took more effort — frozen buckles, stiff leather straps, the weight of a dead cloud giant's torso pressing everything flat — but Kürbis was patient and very strong, and after a minute of quiet, methodical work he pulled the armour clear.
It shrank in his hands.
The golden metal rippled, contracted, reshaped itself — the proportions adjusting, the shoulder plates narrowing, the chest piece compressing — until what Kürbis held was no longer giant-sized but goliath-sized, the golden surface gleaming in the lantern light as if freshly forged.
Dustin looked at it. Looked at Kürbis. "That looks like it would fit you perfectly," he said. "And not just the size."
Kürbis turned the breastplate over in his hands, ran one thumb across the surface, and said nothing. Which, from Kürbis, was the same as enthusiastic agreement.
While Kürbis examined the armour, Archibald had drifted back toward the ghost. The old wizard's eyes had that particular gleam — the one that meant he was thinking about something that was probably a bad idea and definitely interesting.
"You've been trapped in this chamber since your death," Archibald said. It wasn't a question.
"I cannot leave," Eigeron confirmed. "I have tried. The walls hold me. The portal holds me. I am bound to this room and to my body."
"But you could possess a willing creature," Archibald said. "And that creature could carry you through."
The ghost studied him. "I could. But I would not do so without consent. And the host would be unable to force me out once I am within."
"That is the problem," Archibald agreed. He was quiet for a moment, calculating risks the way other people calculated sums. "Would you leave once we crossed the portal? Willingly?"
"I would. I have no desire to inhabit a body that is not my own. I simply wish to leave this room."
Archibald looked at Dustin. Dustin looked at Archibald. They had been travelling together long enough to have entire conversations in raised eyebrows.
"I can cast Zone of Truth," Dustin said. "Ask him again inside the zone. If he answers the same way, you'll know he means it."
So Dustin cast the spell. The familiar shimmer of compelled honesty settled over the area around the ghost, and Archibald asked his question again, and Eigeron answered exactly as he had before — simply, directly, without hesitation.
"So be it," Archibald said. He straightened his robes, set down his staff, and opened his arms in the universal gesture of a man who was about to do something he would either regret immensely or never stop talking about. "Come in, then."
The ghost flowed into him like water into a vessel. Archibald staggered — his eyes flashing with a light that was not his own, his body swaying under the weight of a presence far larger than the frame it occupied — and then steadied. He blinked. His eyes were his own again, mostly, though something vast and patient looked out from behind them.
"Interesting," Archibald said, in a voice that was his and not entirely his. "Very crowded in here."
He walked to the portal. The thunderclouds still churned in the archway, dimmer now but still passable. Archibald took a breath and stepped through.
He stumbled out the other side alone. The ghost had been ripped from him as he crossed — pulled backward, not forward, yanked out of Archibald's body and back into the hexagonal chamber as if the room had reached out and reclaimed what was its own. Archibald staggered into the temple, clutching his head, gasping.
"Forceful exit," the wizard muttered, rubbing his temples. "Not recommended."
Behind him, through the archway, they could see Eigeron's ghost reforming over his own body — disoriented, flickering, but intact. Still trapped. The room had pulled him back.
Archibald turned to look at the portal and frowned. "The light is dimming," he said. The thunderclouds in the archway were thinning — the lightning less frequent, the edges of the passage wavering, the mist losing its density. "I don't think it will hold much longer."
"Everyone out," Harshnag said. "Now."
The rest of the party stepped through quickly — Don Juan first, then Kürbis with the breastplate tucked under one arm and the amulet around his neck, then Dustin, Zarok, and Mindartis. Harshnag came last.
Dustin turned back toward the fading archway. Through the thinning storm he could just make out the ghost, hovering over the body, watching them go.
"We'll come back," he called.
The portal closed. The thunderclouds dissolved into pale mist, and the archway went dark.
The Second Night
They made camp in Annam's temple, between the massive statues and beneath the frost-covered ceiling. It was not comfortable, but it was defensible, and after the feast hall and the remorhaz nest they had a newly calibrated sense of what constituted an acceptable sleeping arrangement.
The party discussed their situation — the oracle's answers, the questions they still wanted to ask, the six charges that would replenish at dawn. They agreed to spend the night and return in the morning.
"Archibald," Dustin said. "What time is it?"
The wizard didn't check anything — no sundial, no candle, no spell. He simply knew, the way he always knew which way was north. "Half past three," he said. "Give or take."
Too early to sleep.
"I'm going to have a look around," Dustin said, nodding toward the doors opposite the feast hall. "We never properly checked the living quarters. Who wants to come?" A pause. "And who's cooking dinner? Remorhaz stew. Anybody know if that's edible?"
"I'll come," Don Juan said, already on his feet.
"Wait up," Zarok said, pushing himself off the stone bench with a wince he tried to hide. "I'm coming too."
They crossed the hall and through the doors into the living quarters — a long hallway lined with archways on both sides, each leading to a chamber with giant-sized stone beds draped in frozen furs.
Stairs led up to an upper hallway — the same layout, but partially collapsed. Ice had buckled the ceiling, and several archways were choked with rubble. They checked the rooms that were still accessible.
In one of the last — two stone couches, a frozen fur, and on the bed beneath it, a stitched leather sack. Giant-sized, left behind by someone who had never come back for it.
Dustin held up a hand. Don Juan and Zarok stopped in the archway.
"Found something."
He loosened the drawstring and upended the sack onto the stone couch. What fell out was not treasure.
Three human heads — preserved by the cold, their features frozen into expressions that suggested the preserving had not been the worst part of their day. One of them had a gold tooth that caught the lantern light. Beside the heads, a shabby cloak of giant hide — enormous, crudely stitched, the kind of thing a hill giant might wear and a human might use as a tent. And nestled among the folds, a smooth stone inscribed with a single rune.
Dustin picked up the stone. The rune was angular, precise — Dethek script, like the inscriptions in the oracle chamber. Cold radiated from it, not the ambient chill of the temple but a deliberate, magical cold that numbed his fingers through his gloves. The ise rune. Ice magic, old and deep.
He pocketed it.
Kürbis, who had followed them up the stairs with the quiet inevitability of a goliath who didn't like being left behind, crouched beside the couch and studied the heads with the detached curiosity of someone who had seen worse. He gripped the gold tooth between thumb and forefinger and worked it free with a single, practised twist. It joined the giant's tooth on the cord around his neck.
Dustin looked at the cloak. It was too large to carry and too crude to wear, but the hide itself was thick and supple — better quality than the stitching suggested. He drew his knife and cut several long strips from the cleanest section, rolling them tight and tucking them into his pack. Material. You never knew.
They headed back down to the lower hallway. The first rooms were the same as above — stone beds, frozen furs, dust, silence. They worked their way along the corridor, checking each one, until Zarok stopped.
The dragonborn was standing in front of an archway near the end of the hall, not entering, his head tilted back. "There," he said, pointing at the top of the entrance. A stone slab sat recessed into the frame — a door, or a gate, designed to slide or drop down and seal the room shut. The slot it sat in was precise, engineered, the edges clean despite centuries of frost.
Don Juan ran his hands along the frame, searching for a trigger, a latch, a pressure plate — anything that would explain the mechanism. Nothing. Dustin checked the walls inside. Nothing. Zarok examined the floor. Nothing.
"Yo, Harshnag!" Zarok called down the corridor.
The frost giant arrived with the unhurried pace of someone who had learned that urgency in this temple was rarely rewarded. He ducked under the lintel and studied the stone slab above the entrance, his pale eyes tracing the edges of the slot.
"Could you hold one of these open?" Dustin asked. "If it came down while someone was inside?"
Harshnag looked at the slab. Looked at the frame. "Perhaps," he said, which from a frost giant meant probably, but also meant I would rather not find out.
"All the doors have them," Zarok said. He wasn't looking ahead — he was looking back, at the rooms they had already walked through. Every single archway. The same stone slab recessed above each one. They had walked under a dozen of them without noticing. "And none of them dropped on us."
That was true. It was also, now that they were staring at several tons of stone poised above the doorway, profoundly unhelpful. The rooms had been safe before they noticed the doors. They were exactly as safe now. But nobody seemed keen to step under another one.
"I'll check the other rooms from the hallway," Dustin said. "Without entering them."
A Noble Audience
Don Juan
Heavy Purses
The Peace Treaty
On the Subject of Peace
Leaving the Caravan
