The Dwarf’s flight through the palace was a blur. Raking spines and gnashing teeth tore his cloak, snagged his armor, slashed across his face. His axe spun and twirled as he ran, splitting leering faces and severing thorny tendrils in sprays of green and black ooze. The cacophonous sounds of Mannon’s pursuit thundered in his ears; the howling of hungry maws, the snaps and crunches of chairs and end tables dragged beneath the creature’s bulk, the creaking protests of stone and timber as the foul ooze pressed itself through doorways. Gorm’s face and beard were sticky with sweat, blood, and whatever foulness Mannon was made of by the time he staggered from the front doors of the palace.

The courtyard was in between its metamorphosis from a battlefield to an administrative field office. Eager adventurers had already begun preparations for guild carters to loot the palace. Claim notices hung from the marble plinths and brightly colored inventory flags flapped from every golden fixture, patio furnishing, and corpse. This premature postmortem paperwork likely only contributed to the courtyard confusion when fleeing heroes came spilling from the palace and whatever spell the mages had used left a smoking crater where the Wallward gardens used to be. Now heroes milled about and shouted questions at each other.

“Run!” Gorm rasped as he stumbled down the palace steps. “It’s comin’ this⁠—”

And then it arrived. The front gates shuddered and buckled as Mannon erupted from the stone facade of the palace in a shower of slate and chartreuse slime. Screams rang out as Mannon’s many faces leered down at the guild heroes, and then the doom of Arth sloshed after Gorm again.

He was already running for the courtyard gates in a straight line. His lungs ached, blood streamed down his face, and his ears rang with the cries of adventurers caught in the wave of vile ooze that roared behind him. Yet nothing could take his focus from the mission. He had one chance, one idea to stop Mannon, and everything else was a distraction⁠—

A warrior in silver armor crashed into the ground by his feet, nearly knocking Gorm over. It stopped him short, which was all that kept a golden sculpture from smashing into him. He glanced back and saw Mannon preparing to hurl a sundial and a struggling ranger at him next.

“Bones!” swore Gorm, already running again. He sprinted in a jagged pattern, trying to evade the lawn ornaments and adventurers that rained down around him. The projectile heroes were easier to avoid; they announced their imminent impact with screams and curses. Gorm was almost to the gates of the courtyard when he heard a surprised bellow, and the clouds above him were briefly eclipsed by the airborne form of Mr. Brunt. The Ogre sailed over the wall and landed like a trebuchet stone somewhere on the Pinnacle.

It was a Halfling rogue that finally clipped Gorm, catching his leg just as he made it to the courtyard gates. It took him a moment to right himself, disentangle from the cursing thief, and get them both back on their feet. He made straight for the gate, while she darted to the left, perhaps hoping to dive out of Mannon’s path. A split second later, her muffled scream confirmed that the ooze was still hot on his heels.

He could see the Dark Prince standing with his back to Gorm in the middle of the empty plaza. The shops and cafes of the Pinnacle stood empty; a line of thugs and goons contracted by the Heroes’ Guild held Andarun’s citizenry at the far end of the Pinnacle, far from the danger and loot. They milled about with the casual confidence of spectators; making predictions, buying ten-cent beef rolls from shouting vendors, and searching for some sign of excitement. Half of them were looking away from the palace, watching an emerald glow flaring from the lower tiers.

The crowd’s demeanor changed as Gorm ran from the gate. Mannon roared behind the berserker, and the faces of the enforcers and onlookers shifted from excitement to surprise. As one, their gazes swiveled upward. They gave a collective gasp and took a synchronized step back. Yet fear can only unify a people for so long, and soon it was everyone for themselves as they ran screaming for the steps.

Gorm’s chest burned like it was on fire, his throat was raw and ragged in the frost-kissed air, and his legs did not feel like anything at all. The Dark Prince was just ahead, and for a brief and glorious moment, Gorm was sure he was going to make it.

A vine-like tentacle whipped around his arm and wrenched it back so hard that he dropped his axe. He spun around and pulled his hand free, but another tendril had snagged his leg. Still more ooze wrapped around his waist, thick enough for a leering face to grow from it and start gnawing on his torso. The many bleeding facades of Mannon leered down at Gorm, wearing faces of triumph even as they consumed one another. Gorm roared, his voice shaking with rage and terror and the exertion of trying to stay on his feet, until a shockwave blasted him.

Emerald flames washed over the plaza. Patio chairs and racks of merchandise flew away from the epicenter of the explosion, shattering the windows and splintering the walls of the abandoned shops lining the Pinnacle. Mannon reared back, his manifold eyes squinting in the glare of brilliant green light, his tendrils dropping Gorm. The Dwarf grabbed his axe and turned to the impact site where a viridian comet had struck the cobbles between himself and the Dark Prince. At the center of the shattered and bubbling stone, a familiar figure rose.

“Kaitha?” Gorm rasped. “It ain’t possible!”

At high enough population destiny, concepts such as “possibility” or “probability” break down. One-in-a-million chances become near certainties, and even more outlandish odds become the norm.

In the halls of the Palace of Andarun, for example, time and space had given up any attempts at enforcing the laws of nature. Wan light filtered into the stone depths of the palace’s basement through the ceiling’s recently seared skylight, yet those beams were almost entirely lost in the azure glow of the streams running through the cobbles and over the carpets. The waters pulsed and burbled in harmony with a haunting melody, sung by stones cursed ages ago. The singers strode purposefully toward the stairs, where the luminous river was already beginning to creep up the steps.

The music rose, and as it lifted, it called. Two more singers joined the chorus and the glowing figures marched toward their fate. With every step, their song and the light grew stronger and more brilliant.

Gorm had to squint to look at Kaitha, and not just for the blinding halo of emerald flame that danced around her head. Her whole form was blurred and shifting, as though reality itself couldn’t decide whether she was an Elf or a goddess. Her hair was both waves of auburn and silver locks webbed with pearls. Her eyes were reddened by the tears flowing from them and also blazing with the same emerald fire that danced around her. She wore Kaitha’s familiar leather armor and also the divine mail of a goddess, covered with dancing filigree and green flames. The avatar of Al’Matra nocked an arrow like a lightning bolt in a bow older than the mountains and sighted it on Mannon.

A large head, squid-like and burbling with sinister laughter, emerged from Mannon’s mid-region, green and black ooze dripping from it. “Interesting,” it burbled, sounding almost like laughter. “I see the Mad Queen herself has⁠—”

The arrow screamed from Al’Matra’s bow and into the head’s bulbous eye. The tentacles waved and the beak beneath them wailed as Mannon shrank back.

“Not mad,” said the goddess and Kaitha. “Just angry.”

“Kaitha?” Gorm said again. Most of his mind worked feverishly to catch up with current events, but it was difficult to process the arrival of a fallen friend and the metaphysical implications of Al’Matra’s appearance. Still, a professional hero doesn’t last years in the field without developing a keen instinct for self-preservation, and that instinct told Gorm that while the theological and ontological connotations of a goddess incarnate battling the progenitor of all evil in the mortal realms were staggeringly complex, it was a fairly straightforward deduction that standing between them as they fought was a really dumb idea. He dove aside just as another of the All Mother’s arrows rent the air, a lethal comet blazing toward its mark at the black heart of the animated sludge.

Mannon caught it.

The bolt still crackled with power and vibrated in the clutches of Mannon’s thick tentacle, as a bee might struggle in a mantis’ claws. A new head was laughing as it swallowed the squealing squid face, a guttural, gulping sound. “Oh, no dear. You must be mad,” chuckled the new face, like that of a frog with razor teeth. “How else could a single god hope to defeat me in the seat of my power?”

“Deceiver!” cried Al’Matra.

“I only lie when I need to,” slurred the frog head. “But you know as well as I that you can’t stand against me.”

The goddess replied with a single shot that split into three as it arced toward Mannon’s bulk. Tentacles whipped around two of the bolts, but the third struck home in one of the demon lord’s smaller faces. It gave a tiny wail as it slumped over, black tongue lolling.

“Not for long, anyway,” snarled Mannon. Several of his other faces loosed hoarse screams as he charged at the All Mother’s avatar.

Gorm scrambled along the Wallward side of Pinnacle Plaza toward the sculpture of the Dark Prince, ducking behind a patio table upended in front of Sigil’s Cafe. Broken crockery crunched beneath his boots as he ran to the cover of another upturned table, then dove behind a tangle of wrought iron chairs.

Mannon had been determined to stop him from getting to the sculpture, which was reason enough to think reaching it was a good idea. The trick was finding the right moment to run across the wide-open expanse of the plaza. He glanced up over the edge of the table.

The black mass of malignance had closed the distance with Al’Matra’s avatar, and the goddess had cast aside her bow in favor of smiting the evil with her fists. Every punch sent a ball of holy fire scorching toward Mannon. His foul tentacles managed to deflect some of the blasts, while others seared bubbling seams into the demon lord’s viscous membrane, sending gibbets of green and black ooze spraying over the cobblestones. Gorm was most concerned, however, with the fireballs that Mannon managed to dodge.

Errant projectiles arced over the plaza, their divine power unmoored by mortal errancy. One burned through a jeweler’s tent before immolating the Restored Tambour Cafe. Another set a ten-penny beef roll cart alight and sent it careening into the flagship store of Bugbeary Limited, whose luxury enchantments and alchemical reagents turned out to be just as explosive as their more austere counterparts.

As Gorm watched, another fireball flew high into the air in the general direction of himself. In his professional opinion, it looked like an excellent time to be on the opposite side of the plaza. He sprinted around the debris and ran toward the Dark Prince as the flaming projectile sank almost lazily down to crash through the window of the cafe. The Dwarf leapt for the sculpture just as Sigil’s Cafe went up in a billowing cloud of flame behind him, creating the sort of dramatic look that normally took an expert pyromancer and several expensive glamours for a hero to achieve.

The effect was dashed, and Gorm nearly was as well, as the shockwave from another explosion knocked him sideways and sent him skidding across the cobbles. Dazed, he looked up to see Kaitha rising from the unrecognizable ruins of several small shops and restaurants, a thick trickle of blood dripping from her brow. With another cry she launched herself back at Mannon, a viridian comet burning toward the darkness.

Gorm turned back to the center of the plaza and found that he was nearly at the statue of the Dark Prince. “Still got time,” he muttered as he scrambled to his feet and stumbled over to the sculpture. Unfortunately, he was out of plans.

“What do I do?” he asked, half expecting the statue to answer. The Dark Prince stared over his head, as though avoiding an awkward question. Gorm felt around the sculpture’s base and the boots for a hidden switch or lever, checked the horizon for any wayward structures that might have formed significant silhouettes at sunrise or sunset, and probed for recesses where some conveniently available gemstone or artifact might fit neatly. There was nothing.

Al’Matra shrieked. Peering around the sculpture, Gorm saw that Mannon had caught her leg in one of his thick tentacles. She struck back with searing fists, and several of Mannon’s faces burned away with wails of pain and despair. Yet they all grew back, leering and hungry as more tendrils of darkness wove their way toward the All Mother.

“Come on!” Gorm slapped the side of the Dark Prince’s leg as one might rouse a dozing student late for class. “Come on! Dark Prince, we need ye! We know the Sten ain’t what we thought—ye ain’t what we thought!”

The statue was stoic. Al’Matra screamed somewhere behind it.

“I don’t know what ye want!” Gorm shouted at the impassive stone. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry I doubted all this destiny and prophecy nons—er, stuff! It’s new to me! But I believe in ye now! You’re the Seventh Hero and the Dark Prince! You’re the one of legend! And if you’re gonna come to save anyone, now’s the time, ’cause there won’t be much to save soon!”

If the statue was concerned with a Dwarf’s faith in it, it gave no indication.

Gorm’s mind raced, grasping at straws. “Do I need to say your name? Sten? Sten king?” He didn’t know any Stennish names, though as far as Troll names went… A flash of memory in his mind showed him Thane’s body bursting in a cloud of dust, decomposing in the same violent way the soul-bound minions of Detarr Ur’Mayan had many years ago. “Thane? Is it ye?”

Something wet spattered over Gorm as a shadow briefly eclipsed the clouds above. He glanced at the blood and ichor dribbling over his hands just as Al’Matra crashed into the cobbles behind him. He glanced back, anticipating another barrage of green fire, but Kaitha lay motionless in an expanding pool of crimson.

“Come on!” Gorm cried. “Thane or Dark Prince or whoever ye are! I believed! I showed up! You’re supposed to save the world. Do your destiny stuff! Work your prophecy! Just do it fast!”

The statue was still. The black tentacles whipping around it were not. Thin tendrils of shadow and malice caught Gorm about the leg and the arm. He hacked at a couple with his axe, but the fluid limbs wrestled his weapon away and threw it to the ground. More and more rubbery limbs wrapped around the Dark Prince, crushing Gorm against the stone, pressing the air from his lungs. A tentacle wrapped around his face and⁠—

And he saw himself taking up his axe and driving back the darkness. Felt Mannon grow limp as he clove its last head from its vile body. Heard the cheers of his name from a beloved populace. They would call him Pyrebeard, demon slayer, the greatest hero of the guild’s long and storied history. He could be made grandmaster of the guild. Perhaps the throne was in reach. An end to the pain crushing his lungs and a gift of everything Arth had to offer. All he had to do was accept the pact, to make the bargain, and he could be the savior of the world.

Gorm ripped the tentacle from his mouth with the last strength he could muster. “Al’Thadan!” he screamed. Two more tendrils of thorns wrapped around his face and slammed his head against the stone, and there was only darkness.

Chapter 34