When Gorm’s eyes snapped open, he saw Kaitha rising in front of him. Not standing, but rising into the air on currents of green fire and blue sorcery. The Dwarf looked down and saw that he was borne on similar strands of magic, weaving and dancing to the all-encompassing tune. The magic turned him around and gently set him down on the shattered cobblestones. When he stepped forward, he was near a tall Sten carrying a gleaming blade. Opposite him, Kaitha stepped into place. Beyond her, more figures were walking into the middle of the Pinnacle. Gorm recognized many of the figures as the marble sculptures they’d left in Kulxak’s lair, animated by the streams of enchanted water flowing through their joints and over their smooth surfaces. But the others…
Jynn and Laruna’s faces were familiar, but their robes were unlike any he’d ever seen. Laruna wore the searing light of the midday sun, lit by a brilliance that never touched the omnimancer walking beside her. Jynn’s garments were the blue-gray of a lake at twilight, and they reflected a gibbous moon from a different sky. In one hand he held the Wyrmwood Staff; the other was intertwined with Laruna’s fingers. Behind them, Gaist glided across the cobbles, his cloak as black and shifting as a shadow. Three ghostly lanterns hovered above his head like a foxfire banner. Heraldin brought up the rear, holding an unremarkable wooden staff and wearing a scowl that suggested he was aware of the discrepancy in ordained armaments.
Mannon snarled in every direction as the figures walked past him, shrinking back like a rat from a flame. All of his faces glared at the adventurers and the shimmering figures standing beyond them. “You can’t be here!” several of his grotesque mouths chorused. “You can’t!”
Yet they were. The Heroes of Destiny took up positions around the Sten in the center of the plaza, glowing water rushing around their feet. Gorm looked down and found the ensorcelled currents flowing around his own boots, and saw that the streams were connecting him with his old companions to form a perfect circle. Once the ring closed, new luminant tributaries split from the ring beneath the heroes and rushed to the center. The azure glow swirled around the Dark Prince and flowed back out to the heroes, so that he stood at the center of a great, glowing wagon wheel, with one hero standing at each of the spokes. A symbol Gorm recognized instantly.
“There weren’t enough!” screeched Mannon. “It can’t be the prophecy!”
His foul breath was wasted. Destiny flows like a river, running across the rough and uneven horizons of possibility. Its flows join and split as they make their way through time, but when probability and prophecy channel enough fates together, it becomes as unstoppable as a flash flood tumbling through a canyon.
Mannon fought back. His thick tentacles whipped in vicious arcs, sending horrible, leering faces screaming toward the heroes. Other faces detached themselves from his viscid mass and scuttled forward on thorny legs. A face like an oil-drenched vulture emerged to consume Mannon’s dominant visage, its beak opening in five different directions to swallow its predecessor. Three crowns of black iron perched upon its head, a yellow flame hanging in the air above each one. It opened its star-like mouth to loose an ear-shattering scream, and choked on the silver shaft of an arrow protruding from its mouth.
The being that was both Al’Matra and Kaitha nocked another arrow as she darted over the broken stones. The Felfather’s tentacles swatted at her, but they may as well have tried to catch the wind. She leapt and danced as she dodged away, and another volley of her arrows found their marks in several of Mannon’s free-roaming, ambulatory heads.
The shots cleared a path for Heraldin as he danced over the battlefield. Flames billowed from his staff wherever it struck, whether he was bashing one of the faces pursuing him or planting the staff into the cobbles to vault over incoming strikes. He supplemented these bursts of fire with a barrage of glass spheres that exploded into clouds of brilliant smoke, choking and blinding the foe until he was away.
The smoke also concealed the shadow that was Gaist. The weaponsmaster emerged from the mists in flashes of steel and crimson silk. He sliced limbs and screeching faces from the black morass of evil, then melted back into the shadows before the severed blobs splattered against the cobblestones. His blades burned with a ghostly light during their brief appearances, and the wounds they left in Mannon’s side glowed like heated metal.
These smoldering wounds marked targets for Jynn and Laruna’s sorcerous strikes. The mages stood at the outer edge of the battlefield, launching spells into the fray. Encroaching tentacles and creeping heads groped toward the spellcasters, but sending swarms of expendable troops to battle a pyromancer is as effective as using snowballs to hunt a Flame Drake. Laruna seared Mannon’s progeny to a screaming crisp with one hand, while her other clasped Jynn’s palm and channeled power into the balls of fire and shadow he wove. The omnimancer’s potent spells bloomed into flame wherever they slammed into Mannon, and as they burned away they left violet hooks of shadow embedded in his viscous flesh. These sorcerous hooks seemed to hamper Mannon’s motion, as though tethering him to the stone, and his movements became slow and uneven as the barrage continued.
Sluggish movements and uneven strikes are fatal mistakes, and Mannon paid for every one. Gorm Ingerson sang through the air all around the demon lord, his axes carving through tentacles and sending spouts of glowing green gore skyward. He felt something like the berserker’s rage, but there was no red mist, only the music. Its rhythm pulsed in Gorm’s heartbeat, his muscles vibrated with every chord, and his axe struck with the rhythm. Gorm’s onslaught reached its crescendo in time with creation’s symphony, just as Thane reached Mannon’s dominant head.
Flashes of desperation played over Mannon’s faces as he tried to stop the Seventh Hero’s advance. A tentacle like an oak tree swung at the Sten, its faces’ opening maws filled with oily teeth. Thane’s blade flashed, a stench of ozone filled the air, and the limb fell wailing into a limp puddle. The tattoos on the Dark Prince’s skin glowed with power and anticipation, and his eyes burned with raw fury.
In the face of such an onslaught, Mannon fled.
He didn’t get far.
The Felfather convulsed and shook in a manner that suggested he was trying to fly away and shrink into nothing at the same time. A moment later, his amorphous bulk splattered back onto the ground. “What?” his mouths shrieked as he convulsed again, but this time Gorm could see the hooks of shadow embedded in his flesh glow more brightly as Mannon strained against them. The sorcerous tethers held and dragged Mannon back to the ground with a wet thud. His manifold eyes flashed with budding horror, and then they all rotated to stare at the omnimancer across the plaza.
“I first saw that binding when my father tried to pull you from Johan,” Jynn called. “Later, I found I could even kill a demon when it is so restrained. I doubt that even you have a way to leave the mortal planes now.”
Laruna grinned wickedly. “Although, there’s always the standard route. The one that mortals use all the time.”
“Wait!” Mannon cried with a cyclopean face. Several of his smaller heads echoed the plea. “Wait! We can make a deal!”
Gaist emerged from a cloud of turquoise smoke, his hard eyes set in a way that said that heroes did not, as a matter of policy, negotiate with interdimensional manifestations of evil, and that even if they were open to such discussions, the current conflict was too far along for a peaceable resolution. It was a very succinct and effective facial expression, and the other heroes let it speak for them as they advanced.
“You don’t know what you’re doing!” Mannon wailed. “I gave you all of this! People prospered! Other evils will rise up in my absence—far worse for you! Far worse!”
Yet the foretold time had come. Thane raised his blade and charged, and the other Heroes of Destiny followed. For a pristine moment, crystallized in Gorm’s memory forever, they were a force of good protecting the innocent by slaying evil.
Then blades and arrows and spells struck deep into Mannon’s wounded flesh with the force of ages. The cuts and gashes along his slimy body flared with searing light, and the world disappeared in a brilliant flash.
The goddess’ power receded from Kaitha like the outgoing tide, leaving her coughing and sputtering in the sun. A thin blanket was beneath her, but the cold of the cobblestones beneath it cut through the fabric. She tried to open her eyes, then quickly squeezed them shut again in the sudden glare of the winter sun. Someone placed a mug of warm water in her hand, and she drank it eagerly.
“Glad to see you’re up,” said a friendly voice. Kaitha blinked a few times, and her blurred vision resolved itself into a plump Dwerrow wearing the white and red robes of a medic among the bannermen. She was one of several overseeing a triage camp set up next to the smoldering ruins of Bugbeary Limited. Most of the other makeshift cots were empty. Only a few wounded heroes still lay convalescing in the sun.
The medic noticed her glance. “Oh, the only ones of you lot left are the ones with your, ah, sense of fashion.” The Dwerrow tapped her wrist, and Kaitha glanced down at her sobriety bracelet. “Anyone able to take a draught of salve is already up and on their way.”
A sudden thought cut through the haze in Kaitha’s head like a sunbeam through the clouds. “Gorm?” she croaked. “Laruna? The others?”
“Oh, your party is fine, Miss Kaitha. Have some more water, dear,” said the medic, and waited until the ranger was drinking to continue. “All your fellows are out helpin’ with the clean up, and I’m sure there will be paperwork after that. You can join them once you’ve rested up. The whole city is talkin’ about this one. Ha! They’ll be talkin’ about it on the far continents by next week!”
Kaitha was only half listening. Memories streamed through her mind; she could recall entering the chamber beneath the mountain perfectly, yet when the goddess had come upon her, everything became clouded and confusing. She could only catch glimpses of the exploding temple, and fighting alongside Gorm, and Jynn taunting an ancient evil, and…
The mug slipped from Kaitha’s hand and cracked on the cobblestones.
“Miss Kaitha? Are you all right? No, sit back down! You can join your friends once you—Miss Kaitha! You need rest!”
Yet the ranger was already walking out of the medic’s camp, her eyes locked on the rubble of a boutique armorer across the plaza. Fjordstorm Pinnacle looked like it had been hit by a siege weapon, and now several people searched through the rubble. Gorm was one of them, and also Heraldin, and a one-eyed woman who seemed familiar, but all of Kaitha’s attention was focused on the tall figure in their center.
He was built like a bear, with a thick beard that spilled down over a chest like an oak cask. He leapt with limber grace when Gorm shouted to him, but had the strength to lift a thick beam and cast it aside like a child tossing a stick. When he reached into the wreckage and helped a dazed Mr. Brunt to his feet, he was only a head shorter than the Ogre, yet somehow he seemed bigger. And when Gorm saw the Elf and said her name, the Sten turned around with a smile that outshone the dawn. He slapped Mr. Brunt on the shoulder and remitted him to the care of the one-eyed woman, then bounded over the ruined timbers toward Kaitha. He stopped short after hopping down from the wreckage onto the cobblestones, and for a moment it looked like he might jump back up into the rubble.
He didn’t, though. The Sten took a deep breath, ran a meaty hand through his hair, and spoke as she approached. “Ah, hello Kaitha,” he said in a voice as deep as a mountain’s roots. “My name is Thane.”
She stared at him with a gazer’s focus, as if her eyes could peel off this new facade and see beneath his skin with enough intensity. He looked different from… well, from anyone who had walked on Arth in the last five ages. But there was something familiar in his smile, something that she could feel rather than see.
“Uh, I know… I—I think you know me. We’ve met. In a way,” the Sten stuttered a bit as the Elf drew closer to him, and worry flashed in his eyes before he remembered his next line. “B-but I’d like to get to know you better. Would you care to join me for tea?”
Kaitha squinted at the tattoos on his exposed arms. There was something familiar about the spiral tattoos that cascaded over his muscles, a pattern reminiscent of the fur she’d seen on a dying Troll beneath Wynspar.
“I’ll buy the tea,” Thane added hurriedly. “I know a nice place. Spelljammer’s. It’s right over… uh…” Thane’s voice faltered as his eyes fell on the smoldering ruins of Spelljammer’s Cafe.
“Aha, that’s unfortunate. Still, I’ve heard the Astral Plate is… is…” The Sten turned to the other end of the Pinnacle, where a team of Academy mages were working to extinguish the fire that still raged through the wreckage of the Astral Plate.
