Chastised, Adira and Magfire settled for glaring. Taurion prompted Johan, "Go on."
Confined, Johan squirmed on his rump. "This patchwork monster possesses great and unknown magics, for it fell from the stars. Shauku found the beast and taps its knowledge and spells. No surprise. Some wizards in Dominaria spend all their time accumulating new sources of magic to tap. To pin it in one place, Shauku rooted it here. The monster grows like a plant, you see, propagating by sending out shoots that take root. Thus Shauku orders the kobolds to maintain the ring of fire to confine it. Now, see the amber crystals scattered about? These crystals are like eggs."
"Eggs?" asked several people.
"Exactly. An egg contains both the substance of a bird, the yolk, and the food it needs to grow, the white. The crystals are the same. Inside is a jot of meat or wood that becomes a beast, and the amber fluid to sustain it. There's more. The monster is somewhat like a plant, but too a hive beast like a colony of bees, where separate minds and bodies cooperate to survive."
"How know you this?" asked Magfire.
Silent a moment, Johan finally confessed, "I saw its dreams."
"What?"
"Shauku communes with the monster by wrapping in a robe and napping," explained the mage. "Her dream coat lets the wearer absorb errant thoughts. I donned the coat and dreamt of the beast's foreign world in the sky."
"That can backfire," put in Jasmine. "Even insane, the monster might still possess unimaginable magics to fry your brain like an egg, or do worse."
"World in the sky?" Magfire, down-to-earth and edgy, hissed in exasperation. "Do you claim this ugly twitchy blotch fell from the Glitter Moon?"
"Never mind its origins! We waste time!" Adira was aware the vampire might arrive any time. "Why speak of all this?"
"The beast has no food," said Johan simply. "It starves."
"Sad," said Adira, "but so what?"
"If you extinguish the fires and give the beast food, it might regain its strength. Then it, not we, could lash out and punish Shauku!"
Adira and Magfire looked blank. Taurion, Heath, and Jasmine squinted.
"Think!" admonished Johan. "Any plan Shauku pursues discommodes us! To scotch her plans can only help your cause! Or will you fight Shauku and her legionnaires with your ragtag misfits?"
"We might fight the horror too!" retorted Adira. "Who knows what happens if it's loose? It might kill Shauku. It might kill all of us, or turn us into jellyfish, or pull the mountain down on our heads!"
Yet Adira Strongheart looked at her battered crew. She'd lost Virgil and Peregrine. Sister Wilemina had a broken arm. And none of them, she guessed, despite their bravery, could win against a single schooled and skillful Akron Legionnaire, let alone fifty.
Finally Adira said, "I hate to agree, but Johan's course makes sense. As Murdoch said, we need allies. Best we set this massive monster free to strike at its enemy. We'll have enough fighting to satisfy, I judge. Very well, Johan, how?"
"Look around," said the trapped wizard. "At the walls. Disregard the rubble. See how the walls join at odd angles? See the hints of six-sided tunnels, same as these crystals? These walls are made of no material found in Dominaria."
"So what?" asked Adira.
"I see it." Taurion's brown eyes went wide. He pointed through the haze at facets stippled along the walls, six-sided edges like a gigantic honeycomb. Until now, the adventurers had been too busy to notice.
"Exactly," said Johan with a tone of triumph. "When the monster fell from the stars, it crashed right on this spot."
"It makes sense." Magfire crept down a tilted tunnel with six sides. "Our tribe fled this place because of a great disaster three-score years ago. These queer tunnels…"
"The ruins built atop this hill are more than sixty years old!" countered Adira. Her hands and face were lit with her cold blue glow, giving her a ghostly pallor.
"I know that!" snapped Magfire. "The castle dates to shortly after the glaciers receded. It was obviously built on a crater. What I say is, sixty years ago the lord living in the castle must have delved into the ruins and unleashed the ancient horror that drove him from the castle and my people from the forest!"
"Could be," conceded Taurion. "I look forward to putting the question to our tribal historians."
Adira wanted to spit, tired of crotchety forestfolk and their moldy traditions. She stroked a hand along a wall that felt smooth as marble but warm as wood. By matching Johan's observations to the kobolds, the freedom fighters had learned that six-sided tunnels honeycombed the hill deep under the sky-monster's chamber. The kobolds had pointed out one descent, but just in case, Jedit led two kobolds by leashes like war dogs.
The explorers were the pirates Jedit, Adira, Simone, Murdoch, Heath, and Jasmine, and the pine warriors Magfire, Taurion, Kyenou, and three others. The tunnels were a fractured jumble canted at a bizarre angle, as if a large apartment house had been picked up and dumped on end. Skidding and sliding down the tunnels, the adventurers found their leg muscles trembling in protest.
Adira said, "I still don't understand. Do you claim these tunnels once flew through the sky?"
"Fell from the sky," corrected Taurion. "Yes. The crying horror or its eggs were in a sky-ship that sailed through the heavens and wrecked here, same as your sea-ship beached on rocks."
Adira conceded, "Anything is possible. It explains why these passages are so dreadfully canted. 1 thought they'd suffered a groundquake. But why six sided? Who builds a giant honeycomb but giant bees?"
"The crying horror bears features of both animal and plant," said Taurion. "Why not the habits of an insect?"
"The spuzzem!" Adira halted with one black boot braced on the edge of a portal. "Recall how it layers moss on its victims? Perhaps it's some spider webbing! Perhaps it's a giant insect too, let loose from these ruins!"
The thought jolted them, but they pressed on. Time was short.
Jasmine said, "This place reminds me of the stone sarcophagi of the ancients. In northern climes, frost heaves push them upward and out of the soil. Country folk think underground demons seek elbow room."
"That's it," muttered Simone. "Tell us a jolly bedtime story to soothe our nerves. But how could glass crystals survive such a crash?"
Taurion peered everywhere by the light of a torch as they took one fork after another. "Recall how tough the crystals are. Neither tiger claws nor a steel blade could sunder them. So it's possible some are intact."
Adira blinked. "How do we crack them to feed the horror?"
A voice squeaked, "Water."
Everyone looked at the kobold on Jedit's leash. The gray-purple cad looked sheepish. "Sometimes we fetch big golden boxes for Yellow Lady. She shoos us away. She thinks we don't know, but we do. Water makes them break."
"Water." Taurion rubbed his beard, nodding. "Yes. If the sky-ship crashes like a shooting star, anything alive must die. But the crystals can't be shattered, so they'd lie in the ground intact. Forever, unless something intervened. The first rainfall would make the crystals crack, so the horror could grow freely."
"Like cactuses that sit for years inert," said Jasmine, "then flourish on a handful of rain."
"Grow how much?" asked Jedit.
No one knew. In the lead, Taurion came to a triple fork and hesitated. Jedit braced both paws across a tunnel, gave a mighty sniff, and announced, "The spuzzem passed this way not long ago."
"Ohhh!" said half a dozen. Yet with a collective shrug, and no other choice, they passed on.
The tiger crept along comfortably on two feet or all fours as needed. The humans stumbled behind, heads bowed, ankles and calves throbbing from the treacherous tilted footing. Gray-stone tunnels intersected at odd angles, as if the original inhabitants had crawled on every surface like ants. Not every passage was tunnels. They found several six-sided rooms full of nothing identifiable. One room held miles of spun floss like spider webbing. Another sported gadgets like lead water pipes all jumbled and crumbling. One held big empty vats oddly spaced. One held hundreds of cells, each big enough to hold a man. In a few holes they found desiccated husks like cocoons. Every room only confused them further.