“Then start praying to any god listening that Gorm and Niln had a point with all their talk of destiny.” There was no humor in the ranger’s smirk as she shot Gorm a sidelong glance. “Because we’ll need some help from above to survive this.”

“Please! Please! A little longer!” Thane’s aimless prayers rode on ragged breaths as he barreled down the twisted passages of Mount Wynspar. He sprinted past the nameless horrors and lesser monsters that scrambled unheeded from his path. He leapt bottomless chasms with barely a thought. Traps fired and misfired as he trampled their ancient mechanisms; their darts and arrows bounced from his thick hide, their blades bent and broke against the force of his charge.

Still he ran on, gasping words to someone who could not hear him, and running all the faster so that she might. “I’m sorry… I’m sorry I left… I will be with you soon… hang on.”

Sometimes he ran in total darkness. Some of the corridors he traversed were illuminated by glowing fungus or shimmering crystals. Ahead, his eyes caught a faint glow that seemed both fainter and larger.

His foot crushed an old pressure plate, causing stone walls to slide in place around him. Presumably the tiny chamber would soon start filling with sand or water or poisoned gas, but the Troll didn’t pause to find out. He crashed through the wall with a punch like a rockslide, rounded a corner⁠—

And bounced off something more solid than the mountain around him.

Thane shook his head and looked up. A wall of emptiness blocked further passage. The barrier glowed faintly the color of an evening sky, and behind its sorcerous light he could see the rubble of the trap wall and his own panicked face staring back at him.

The Troll leapt to his feet and pounded on the barrier. It rang with a sort of distorted silence whenever he hit it, but otherwise his blows had no effect. His impotence was as alien as the wall itself, and an unfamiliar panic began to well up inside him before he remembered a side passage.

It took a precious minute or so to double back through the broken trap room, where green acid was dribbling from broken pipes in the hole Thane had punched through the wall. He turned down the side path, ground through the machinery of a crushing wall trap, blew through a scarg nest, and found himself face-to-face with the same enchanted surface. This barrier had a slightly different curve than the previous one, bending back and toward the top of the hallway like the edge of some massive sphere. Otherwise it was identical to the other wall, and just as immovable.

“No!” he cried, pounding on the wall, and the resulting boom of silence drowned out his own sobs. “I need to get to them! Let me pass!” On the last command, he swung his fist at the barrier for emphasis, but it never connected. The barrier began to disintegrate at his words, beginning at the point where his fist would have slammed it. The hole widened rapidly, shedding particles of faint light that twinkled like miniscule stars before falling like snow. The momentum of Thane’s punch carried him stumbling through the gap to the other side. By the time he looked back, there was nothing left of the barrier except a line on the floor where the dust and mold stopped, leaving only pristine stone carvings that put Thane in mind of his old garden.

It was confusing and unsettling, but there was no time for it now. With a weary groan, Thane hurled himself down the passageway as fast as his tired legs would carry him.

Exhaustion kills.

It was one of the first axioms Gorm learned as a professional hero, a painful if not terminal lesson that every young adventurer comes to grips with quickly in the field. A shield offers no defense without the strength to lift it. A sword is just a sharp accessory without the energy to swing it. Armor is more weight than protection for a hero at the end of his reserves. There were potions and enchantments and magical gear to help prolong a hero’s endurance, but even they had their limits, and when they reached their end the hero using them tended to as well.

That was the worst part of facing the undead. Worse than the unsettling smiles, their stench, and the stains they left everywhere, was their unholy stamina. They might have been slow, clumsy, weak, and predictable, but the restless dead did not tire.

And if he couldn’t put them down before he did…

“Doesn’t look good,” Kaitha panted beside him.

“Keep tryin’ things,” he said, glaring at the undead half of the Golden Dawn on the other side of the walkway. “What about acid? We tried acid?”

“Three varieties,” said Heraldin. “Now they’ll burn your skin if you touch them.”

“But they’re still coming,” said Jynn.

“What about somethin’ sticky? Can we glue ’em down?” said Gorm.

“Shouldn’t have passed on Boomer’s goo arrows,” said Kaitha.

“And we can’t melt the stones?” Gorm asked. “Felt like we got really close with that one.” Dagnar’s flesh, as it were, was blackened and charred around a faint orange glow in the center of his chest.

Laruna shook her head, her hands balled into fists beside her. “I can try again, but powerful magic is binding the stones together.”

An idea struck Gorm. “What about the⁠—”

“She was using the Wyrmwood Staff,” said Jynn.

“Burn it!” And then, in an unwitting example of Nove’s sixth principle of universal irony, he added, “Any other way we can get the stones hot enough?”

Nove’s principles of universal irony actually document their own greatest flaw. Nove penned his sixth principle after a series of high-profile demonstrations of the first four principles in the academies of Essenpi catastrophically failed. When the watched pot incident resulted in fatalities, the high chancellors of academia forbade Nove from further experiments.

Disheartened, Nove worked out a mathematical proof that showed that even if his principles were accurate, they could not be measured or relied upon. Nove’s Bidirectional Paradox proved that if his principles were ever validated enough to become laws, they would make the universe too predictable and thus immediately disprove themselves. Or, put another way, a person cannot avoid saying things that might be ironic, because it’s actually more ironic when an unexpected statement or behavior leads to unexpected consequences. The theory, proofs, and full ramifications of the sixth principle took Nove a full year to pen. These volumes are seldom cited or read, however, because he eclipsed the work when he famously summed it up over a beer with colleagues afterward as, “the gods are bastards.”

Gorm was certain that some deity must have a cruel sense of humor, because the moment he uttered his question, a bright blue light flared near the uppermost reaches of the cavern. In a few heartbeats the prophetic vault dissolved into a cascade of sparkling particles, draining away the cool blue light that had filled the cavern. Behind the falling barrier, high above their heads, a crescent of flame carved itself from the blackness, dripping white-hot gobbets of molten doom. The fire cast a crimson light that illuminated a serpentine neck as thick as an ancient oak, ending in a reptilian head that was the same size as a Gnomish harvest machine, though with significantly more sharp bits. Titanic wings unfurled like a galleon’s sails as two luminous green orbs looked down. The Dragon of Wynspar rumbled like a long-dormant volcano as it regarded the living and undead heroes assembled on the walkway beneath it.

Gorm felt his spine melt and his legs turn to jelly under that molten glare. “It can’t be…” he breathed.

“The dragon!” Heraldin punctuated his cry with a trio of glass orbs that burst into cobalt clouds. The sudden explosion startled Gorm enough that his survival instincts bypassed the malfunctioning circuits of his brain, hardwired his legs, and sent him sprinting up the nearest walkway.

The smoke startled the dragon as well. It reared back as its scales flared with crimson light, painting the cavern the color of blood. The beast pulled in a lungful of air with a sound like a hurricane wind, and then held its breath as its head aligned on its target.

Gorm was holding his breath too, even as he ran, and that instant stretched out over a tiny, agonizing eternity as the whole world seemed to hesitate for a moment.

Then a stream of fire, white-hot and blistering, poured from the dragon’s maw. The undead members of the Golden Dawn shambled along the walkway as fast as their decaying legs could carry them, which meant that they made it two steps before the spray of molten death engulfed them. The enchanted stones within them audibly popped, and three wailing souls rose like ghoulish, glowing smoke from the center of the inferno. When they dissipated, there was nothing left of the undead heroes but a glowing hole in the stone walkway.

“Run! Get to cover!” Gorm hollered, but even as he ran for the nearest pillar he doubted it could provide much shelter from the dragon’s flame. The other heroes scattered.

“You said there wasn’t a dragon!” screamed Jynn as Gorm overtook the mages on the narrow walkway around the stone tree.

“I didn’t think there was!” Gorm shouted.

“Well, there are some things you need to be absolutely certain⁠—”

“Shut up!” Gorm shoved Jynn and Laruna toward the pillar and away from a lance of dragonfire. Heat like the center of a forge rolled over him as the flame passed, blistering skin and singeing hair. He might have succumbed to the heat anyway had Laruna not managed to deflect the stream with a weave of fire magic.

“Are you all right?” the solamancer gasped as the dragon’s flame faded.

“Aye, thanks.” Gorm scrambled to his feet, already scanning the cavern for the others. “Where is everyone?”

“There are Heraldin and Gaist.” Jynn pointed across the black chasm to the next pillar. The bard waved while Gaist peered around the stone trunk to watch the dragon.

“Good,” said the Dwarf. “And the dragon’s focused on us.”

“No.” Laruna peered around the pillar. “It’s turning away.”

“What?” Gorm’s heart plunged into the pit of his stomach as he scrambled for a better view.

The dragon picked its way through the stone branches of the petrified trees like an eagle climbing through a bramble. Its almost-feline body could move with fluid grace, but its giant wings made maneuvering through the tangle of stone an ungainly task. It unfurled them for balance, then tucked them back in to squeeze under a path, then flapped them to avoid tipping over the side. Yet as awkward as its progress was, it was still gaining on the figure sprinting along the paths ahead of it.

“Kaitha!” Gorm screamed.