The blue arrow was still streaking right at him. Dante had just enough time to slap together a second round of nether. Instead of a single large bolt, he broke it into a score of little black hornets, staggering them one after another. He directed them slightly to the right of the blue arrow, swerving them into its side at the last second. Each impact gouged a few more sparks from it. But the black hornets couldn't seem to make direct contact with it, flying through it or bouncing off it to perforate the clay wall. Which meant in turn that they couldn't fully knock it off course, either.

  A barrage of ether pulsed past Dante, so bright that he could hardly make out what was happening. Yet he didn't trust it to be any more effective than the nether had been. He flung himself to the side. But the tunnel hemmed him in, and though the blue arrow had had its course destabilized by the counter-attacks, it was still steady enough for its controller to bend it to match Dante's general course, if not to perfectly strike his heart or head.

  It pierced into the back of his left hamstring. He gasped. Clamping his hands to his wound, he rolled over.

  "Kelen!" Dante kicked himself back with his right leg and tried not to let the thudding of his heart overwhelm him. "We're not your enemies! We're here to seek your aid!"

  Blue light glowed from down the tunnel, revealing a short, slim man. "You lie."

  "We're not here to kill you!"

  The light grew brighter. "That's just what someone here to kill me would say."

  "Then let's move on to things that people who don't want to kill you would say. We're friends of Maralda's."

  "Many know that name. It means nothing on its own."

  "We're here because we need to destroy Olastar—and she thinks you can show us the way."

  "Why in the nebulous would you want to destroy Olastar?"

  "Because…" Dante had healed himself while they were speaking, and gotten back to his feet. He glanced at the others. "Can we trust him with this?"

  Blays shrugged. "We're about to trust him with the existence of our entire reality."

  "This is true." Dante cleared his throat. "Do you know of the entity?"

  "The? There is more than one, you know." Kelen's voice was higher in pitch, yet authoritative. Enough that Dante would have paid careful attention to him even if he hadn't known the man was a type of sorcerer he'd never before encountered. "But you must mean Nolost. Everyone has heard of what's happening. Even here, where the only thing rarer than news is people."

  "We've been fighting him ever since his arrival. We've done everything we can to stop him. But none of it has worked. We're running out of time, people, and options to defeat him. We have one last chance to expel him from our world forever."

  Kelen tipped back his chin. "By collapsing the portals. Clever clever. Maralda's thinking?"

  "That one was ours. She's very reluctant about it."

  "I can imagine why. In thought, it could work. But why in the void do you think you have the power to do this?"

  "We very possibly don't. But the reason I think we might is that, as far as I know, we're the only humans in a very long time to fight a god and walk away with our lives."

  "I don't recall much walking," Blays said. "More like full-fledged—"

  The blue light tripled in intensity. "Bullshit!" Kelen shouted. "The three men who defied Taim are not standing in my rat-tunnel in the wastes of Gharadhain!"

  "Is that what this place is called?" Blays glanced across the walls and ceiling. "Anyway, he's telling the truth. Not sure how to prove it, though. Unfortunately, we forgot to have Taim set his seal for us when we were fleeing from him for our lives."

  "Don't you lie to me!"

  Another blue missile zipped down the passage. This time, rather than trying to counter it directly, Dante launched his attack into the wall, knocking a tumbling heap of clay into its path. The blue bolt flashed stutteringly as it expended itself against the earth.

  A finger-sized blue splinter punched through the cloud of clay. Gladdic hit it with a much larger volley of ether. As before, the two powers mostly glanced off of or passed right through together, but it was just enough to quench the last of the bolt before it could reach them.

  "I was just joking about having no proof!" Blays took a step forward. "Just stop being an idiot for five seconds!"

  "What are you going to do?" Kelen called. "Wave Taim's severed head at me?"

  "Not far from it. Gentlemen, might I recommend you all stand back?"

  Dante backed up several paces, as did Gladdic. Kelen didn't. Blays removed the rod from his belt. With the ceiling as low as it was, he held it parallel to the ground, then thrust it forward.

  A flash of searing light erupted over them. What happened to Dante next was such a common event in his life that he somehow knew what had happened even though he was unconscious: he had been knocked unconscious.

  When he came to, he was fairly certain it had only been a couple of seconds; in any event, Kelen hadn't budged from his spot down the tunnel. Or killed them, though he would have had sufficient time to. As Dante dragged himself to his feet, Blays sat up, rubbing his eyes.

  "You idiot!" Dante said. "You knocked us out!"

  "I didn't do it. It was the spear."

  "Which is in your hand!"

  "The tunnel must be too tight for it. Blame that on the guy who dug this place." Blays braced himself on one knee, then stood. He'd remembered to loop the spear's cord around his wrist, unlike when he'd dropped it in the forest earlier, and it was still extended to its fighting length, its pearly white light shifting over the tunnel walls. "Do you know what this is?"

  "I've never looked on it," Kelen said. "But there's only one thing it can be."

  "Do you know where we got it?"

  "As I told you, the stories of what's happening have even traveled all the way out here."

  "Then either we are who we say we are, or we killed the people we say we are and took their stuff."

  Kelen regarded them silently. The spear was casting more light on him, enough to finally get a real look at his face, which didn't look like any human Dante had ever seen, especially in the bluish light of the man's strange sorcery.

  "I think you are them," Kelen decided. "I think you might have the power to destroy Olastar. So I will show you how."

  ~

  Apparently it was as simple as that.

  Nor did they have to wait long before they were back on their way: it turned out Kelen already had a bag packed with everything he needed to light out at a moment's notice. He took a few minutes to circle through his home, gathering some other items he thought might be useful to their journey, and then the four of them headed outside, traveling west under the night sky.

  And it was a good thing they had Kelen to guide them back through Gharadhain, for Dante realized, with a kind of falling sensation, that he didn't actually know the way back to the portal, and that he had no way of tracking either Carvahal or Maralda. Even if they'd had full daylight, Dante doubted he would have been able to find the way. Meanwhile, Kelen didn't even need to ask which way to strike out in. Somehow, he just knew.

  The man had agreed to join them, but he seemed to already regret or even resent his decision, for he ignored every question they put to him, walking onward as if he was alone. Dante found this unnerving, and doubly so because he'd gotten a better look at Kelen in the meantime. Enough that he was no longer sure if he was human.

  For one thing, his skin hadn't just been shaded by the glow of sorcery—it really was bluish. That of a washed-out sky. He was short and slender and his ears were pointed like something out of a tale about elves. The irises of his eyes looked to be iridescent, although Dante wanted a closer look to be sure.

  But they had seen plenty of foreign-looking peoples in their travels, especially when they'd been flung to the far ends of the world in search of the Four That Fell. Kelen didn't even appear more strange than the Cantag of Bagrad, down in their caverns, where their warriors were huge with skin as gray as stone, and whose redgen servants were as small and frail as children, with minds even simpler.

  It was Kelen's bearing that felt truly uncanny. His movements were quick and smooth, almost more like a fish in its element than anything that walked about on two legs. There was something off about his walk itself, too. One that Dante couldn't piece together until they came to a stretch of sand, and he noticed that Kelen left no footprints behind him.

  "How did you make it?" Kelen said, his first words in an hour of travel. "All the way to my home?"

  "We almost didn't," Blays said. "And almost didn't more than once. Then Dante figured out the secret trick."

  Kelen looked to Dante, which he did by swiveling his upper body at the hips instead of just turning his head. "How?"

  "The land wasn't hurting any of the animals," Dante said. "So I kept watching them until I noticed different species were doing the same thing." He pointed his finger skyward and twirled it in a circle. "This place, Gharadhain. Is it really alive?"

  "It is really alive."

  "But how can that be? It feels like the size of an empire."

  "It can be because that is how it was made to be. It has also had a long, long time to grow bigger."

  "It was made? By who?"

  "By one of the gods."

  "I had assumed that much. Which of them? And why?"

  "It isn't known. That's why I said just what I said and not something more. But if you like to hear gossip, one story is that Arawn wished to know what it would be like for people to live on a world that could be hurt and even die, the same as them. How that would make them think, and act, and take from the land. He thought that it could make them more mindful and present within the great loom of life."

  "Do you think that's true?"

  "The story that most people like the most is that Simm was trying to make a mate for Jorus."

  "That's, uh…generous."

  "For Jorus. But it's also said that Simm wanted to fill creation with dragons, so that people would have to fear them whenever they stepped outside—and so that great heroes would arise to battle them. However, nothing he created would grow big enough for his liking. When he made Gharadhain, he thought he'd finally done it right—except Gharadhain wouldn't stop growing. In time she got so big that even the gods feared her. They had to trick her into leaving the Realm."

  "And now she keeps them out of her? And they've never figured out the flowers?"

  "Oh no." He shook his head briskly. "The flowers wouldn't do them any good if they came here. That is just how she takes care of herself while she's asleep."

  Dante was about to ask a string of further questions, but decided to move on to more important matters while Kelen was warmed up to them. "I'm honored that you'd aid us, but I have to say I'm curious why you're so ready to destroy Olastar."

  "Because it deserves it."

  "Is it filled with horrors or something? What's it like there?"

  Kelen turned his body to stare at Dante again. But it was too dark to read his expression. "That is not for now."

  "What's the difference? We'll be in it within a day."

  "But we're not yet. And I still don't fully trust you are who you say."

  "But we showed you—"

  The man chopped his arm to the side. "I said no more! Or there will never be more!"

  Dante fell silent. Had he just crossed some cultural boundary he was unaware of? Or had Kelen just been off by himself for so long that he'd gone crooked in the head? The question had seemed plenty innocent. Then again, whatever Kelen's doubts about them and their intentions, they should be cleared up shortly.

  They walked on, mostly in silence, the insects peeping at each other from the bark and grass while unknown constellations sailed across the sky. Kelen had claimed that the land—being?—of Gharadhain was asleep, but Dante only truly felt that this was true now, in the middle of the night, when the terrain about them switched as quickly as it might in the Mists, as if they weren't walking across a physical place, but were traveling through Gharadhain's dream. This was unsettling, especially once they came back to the geysers, which burst from the ground without warning, making Dante jump into the air more than once. Yet there was something greatly soothing about it, too, like the serenity of his earliest memories before he'd ever understood anything of pain and death, and so he was almost disappointed when they stepped free of the great slumbering being and returned to the place where Maralda and Carvahal awaited them.

  It was something like two in the morning, yet neither of the gods was asleep, which Dante felt stupid to be surprised by. Instead they were standing perfectly still, not even blinking, until the four travelers crested a little ridge (for Dante had been watching the gods through one of his scouts), at which point the two lords unfroze, glanced their way, and began to chat with each other.

  As Dante and the others closed on them, Carvahal advanced to meet them, looking them up and down. "You made it back!"

  "You sound surprised," Dante said.

  "More like shocked," Blays said. "If you think that little of us, what does it say that I still beat you in a duel?"

  Carvahal shrugged one shoulder. "It is of course complete coincidence that it was also to my purposes that you should win that duel."

  "That's so slanderous I ought to challenge you to another duel."

  "Even if you think you won the first time, surely you can't believe the same trick would work twice."

  "Who says it would be the same trick?"

  This was all very amusing, Dante supposed, especially since he didn't think either of them was actually joking, but he didn't think Carvahal's surprise at seeing them alive had been a joke, either, and that quietly discouraged him. Carvahal hadn't believed they were even going to make it through Gharadhain. And so he must not believe they were going to be able to tear apart Olastar and expel Nolost from their world, either.

  Then again, it had been Carvahal who had shown Dante a vision of his future many years from now. That glimpse—though it was not an inevitability, just a possibility—had been what had inspired them to come up with this course of action. One last hope after they'd thought all hope had been lost. So let the odds be damned.

  Kelen and Maralda approached each other in silence. She moved like the panther she often took the form of while he had the start-and-stop precision of a bird.

  "I didn't think I'd see you again," he said.

  "Don't be insulted," she said. "You know very well what it's like to care more for new places than for old people. To wander farther than you ever thought there was world to see. To leave everyone you once knew behind you." She flicked her fingers eastward, toward the wilderness they'd just traveled through. "That's why I find it so strange that you've isolated yourself there in one spot, and seemed determined to stay there for good."

  "But if you and they are to be believed, that ends now." He sounded insulted. "That is, if you are telling me the truth."

  "Why would I lie to you?"

  "Because you think I have slighted you somehow, or because you are trying to deceive me into doing something I wouldn't otherwise do, or just to make yourself laugh. There are many, many of your reasons I could never really understand. But it could also be that you mean to lure me out of the wilds, and deliver me to my pursuers."

  Stormclouds of anger gathered on her face. "You think I would turn you over to the Lesta? It isn't my place to move against them…but I would never, ever help them."

  Kelen considered this, then nodded. He motioned to the three mortals. "So it's really them? The ones who've battled both the gods and the entity?"

  "Yes." She eyed Carvahal, then smiled crookedly. "Unless he's been lying to me even more than usual."

  "Then I now have the chance to do what I was brought to believe was impossible. Come, then. Send us to Olastar."

  Her eyebrows twitched upward. "But why am I surprised by your haste? You've been dreaming of this for all your life."

  She headed for the portal that stood just thirty feet away and vanished within it. The others followed. Dante was last to cross through it. As his senses recohered, he found himself inside a star-flecked tunnel, with Kelen collapsed to his hands and knees. But when he tried to offer him a hand up, the elfin figure angrily waved him away.

  "It's been a long time since I did that." Kelen stood, lifting his eyes to the ceiling of the tunnel. "And to think this could be among the very last times, for anyone."

  ~

  While it had been the deep part of the night in Gharadhain, it was still early evening in Yent, and as they traveled toward the portal Maralda had opened to Olastar, the jungle was lively with the calls of both insects and animals. Dante carried the nether with him as he walked, watching both the undergrowth and the boughs for giant serpents and other hazards.

  Maralda delivered them right to the other portal. As they gathered about it, Dante wondered if she was able to track it the way he might track blood, or if her divine memory was so perfect she could simply remember everywhere that she had ever been and the exact paths to return to them all.

  "I know you mean to keep out of this," Dante said to the two gods. "But if there's anything else we should know about what we're about to get ourselves into, now would be the time."

  Maralda's voice was as tart as an unripe cherry. "That's what your guide is for."

  Carvahal was staring off at nothing. Dante glanced at the others and nodded. He walked toward the doorway. Before he could enter it, Carvahal uttered something under his breath and placed himself in Dante's path.

  "I have no gifts for you this time," he said. "But remember that you won't be beyond Nolost's reach. If you can go there, so can he."

  "That's been on my mind. If we had more time, I'd arrange a distraction in Rale to keep the entity occupied. As it is, we'll just have to hope the people still fighting for their lives provide enough of a distraction instead."

  "Let's pray that it is so. One last thing. There will be many doorways where you're going. If I were you, I'd keep note of where they are. When you find yourself in danger, if it looks to be beyond you, it may be better to cross through a doorway and wait for the danger to pass."

 

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