Coral raised her dagger. Tears shone in her eyes, and the smoke-laden air was heavy with the scent of her grief. “How can you condemn me to be your murderer?” she growled at the paladin. “I thought you loved me.”
Dragonbait swung his blade, and Coral’s body and head tumbled into the pile. There was no bloodshed. Nothing but rotted vines and dust spilled out of the priestess’s severed neck. The pile didn’t even try to suck her into it for nourishment. There was nothing left of her.
Immediately the vines that held Dragonbait fell away from him as if the magic in them had been dispelled. The paladin presumed the magic had died with Coral and began to move cautiously toward the mages who held Alias. One began to chant a spell and gesture in the paladin’s direction, but the words died on his lips, and he tumbled forward with a dagger in his back.
Now held by only two people, Alias threw her weight to one side, knocking one of the mages to her knees. Dragonbait rushed the remaining mage and sliced him in two. Like Coral, this mage was nothing but dust and rotted vines inside. With her bare fists, Alias throttled the female saurial beside her until the mage fell at her feet.
“Dragonbait, your sword!” the swordswoman shouted. “Give me your sword!”
Confused, the paladin let Alias take his sword from his hands. She began to slice into the top of the pile, looking for Akabar.
A dark figure landed beside Dragonbait and wordlessly pulled the dagger out of the mage who had tried to cast a spell over the paladin. The figure stood up and sheathed his blade. It was Finder Wyvernspur.
The pile shifted suddenly, knocking Dragonbait and Finder to their knees. The massive heap wasn’t merely settling, the paladin realized; it was coming to life. He struggled to his feet as Alias began hacking at the vegetation more frantically, screaming out Akabar’s name.
As the paladin helped him to rise, Finder shouted, “We can’t stay here!”
Dragonbait was inclined to agree, but when he saw the wild-eyed look in the swordswoman’s eyes, he was sure he’d never convince her to leave. The smell of her grief for Akabar permeated the air.
“Akabar is gone!” Finder shouted. “There’s no hope for him! If you don’t help me get Alias away from here, she’ll die!”
Dragonbait nodded. He took the hand the bard offered him and moved toward Alias.
“Sister,” he called out, “give me your hand.”
Alias looked up at her saurial brother, confused. She didn’t question him; she simply reached up and grabbed his paw. Dragonbait clenched her fingers with all his strength. Then Alias saw Finder standing behind the paladin. The bard held the finder’s stone in his hand.
“No!” Alias shrieked.
Finder sang to the finder’s stone, and the three adventurers glowed brightly for an instant, then disappeared. When they reappeared in the Singing Cave, Alias was still shrieking. She jerked her hand away from Dragonbait’s and pointed the paladin’s flaming sword at the bard’s heart.
Finder dropped Dragonbait’s hand. “I’ll be back,” he said. Then he sang to his magic stone again and vanished.
By the time Olive reached the top of the pile, it was beginning to tremble alarmingly. She wasn’t sure if it was her imagination or not, but it seemed to be moving toward the east side of the vale. The halfling looked around at the dead bodies and the shaking greenery and started to shiver.
Olive screamed out Dragonbait’s name, trying to discern in the darkness if he was one of the corpses. A vine sprang up from the pile right in front of the halfling. An eye was visible on the end of it, round and glassy, like a fish’s. Olive gasped and took a step backward. More vines began popping out of the surface of the pile all around the halfling, each tipped with some sort of eye—a saurial’s eye, or a wild cat’s eye, or a bird’s eye. Then more vines appeared with mouths on their ends—fanged lizards’ mouths, birds’ beaks, a beaver’s mouth. The mouths all began calling out Moander’s name in a cacophonous chorus that set the halfling’s heart pounding with fear.
Olive moved cautiously away toward the edge of the pile. She’d slide down somehow; even falling to the ground would be preferable to becoming part of those eyes and mouths. A feline-mouthed vine lunged toward her, and the halfling shrieked.
Before the vine could strike her, strong hands grabbed her and lifted her off the top of the pile.
Olive gasped from the shock, then sighed with relief. She swiveled her head, expecting to see Akabar or Grypht. Her eyes widened in astonishment at the sight of her rescuer.
“Didn’t I tell you that you had to be more careful, little Lady Luck?” Finder Wyvernspur said as he soared northward with the halfling wrapped in his arms.
Grypht looked up from the exhausted form of a small flying saurial at the cleric, Sweetleaf, who stood over him anxiously.
“Excuse me, High One,” the cleric said, “but we have a problem in the vale. The—”
“I’ll set a backfire soon to keep the fire from spreading,” Grypht said. “There’s time yet. Don’t worry, Sweetleaf.”
“It’s not the fire, High One,” the cleric explained. “It’s Moander. It’s been resurrected.”
Grypht stood up and looked into the vale. Sweetleaf was right. Moander had been resurrected, and it was heading eastward, straight toward them.
The wizard had never really believed that rescuing Dragonbait and recovering the saurial workers would halt Moander’s resurrection. If anything, he had realized, it would precipitate the event, but since the Mouth of Moander had the seed and intended to use it that night, there hadn’t seemed any reason to put off the inevitable. Grypht had hoped, however, that he would have had more time to get his people back on their feet.
The mountain of greenery slid slowly but steadily across the ground, pushed along by some unseen magical force. Grypht shuddered to think just how much power Moander expended on movement. As the god moved slowly over the fires set in the vale, the flames were instantly smothered by its damp mass. Boulders caught in its path were crushed into gravel. Whenever it came across an especially large tree that the saurials had cut down but had been unable to haul, Moander sucked it into its body, where it was immediately splintered into smaller pieces.
Now that the saurials were free from the god’s possession and no longer served him, the wizard had no doubt what use Moander would have for them now. Moander would consume the saurials whole. The wizard looked up and down the hillside for Alias, Dragonbait, Olive, and Akabar, but they were nowhere to be seen, despite the fact that they had agreed to meet him here. Grypht began to grow alarmed. What could have happened to them?
The sound of Moander’s approach, cracking trees and smashing rock and rumbling earth, now reached the wizard’s ears. Above all those sounds came a cacophony of singing from the hundreds of mouths that grew from the god’s body. The Darkbringer was chanting its own name over and over again in victory.
“High One, what should we do?” Sweetleaf asked nervously.
Grypht was about to scoop up as many of the small fliers as he could carry and teleport away with them and Sweetleaf when suddenly Moander changed directions and began heading northward, toward the mountain slope and the Singing Cave.
“It’s following that flier!” Sweetleaf cried, pointing to a dark shape moving northward through the air with the smooth movement of a mage using a fly spell. “Who is it, High One?” Sweetleaf asked.
Just before the shape disappeared into the Singing Cave, Grypht caught sight of the yellow glow the finder’s stone gave off in the dark. “Can it be … the bard?” Grypht asked uncertainly.