A colossal wyrm rolled over the mountain range. Crimson scales glimmered, covering a body the size of four large ships placed bow to stern. Her horns jutted into the sky like spires, her eyes glowed pale green.

  Grant stood in a forest of men. Sunlight poured down on hundreds who wielded spears of all sizes, wearing whatever helmets, gambesons, greaves, and gauntlets they could find. Many had abandoned their weapons and lines to flee toward the coast. Nobody stopped them. Both the dumbest and the maddest man on the field already knew that their last stand was futile—that their lives were being forfeited to buy their families mere seconds more to escape.

  He glanced over his shoulder, back toward the town. The last ship drifted away.

  Nobody called orders. There were no tactics and no plans. There was no vanguard, no rear guard, no reserve, and no hidden cavalry to flank the beast. Such were reserved for those who expected to win.

  Instead, they sang together.

  “Steel, men, your courage runs deep

  Gods themselves shall watch and weep

  The weak, the strong, the cowards and brave

  We meet again, beyond the grave”

  The wyrm rose to her full height, a black shape in the blinding sun, filling the sky above them. She screeched, then pitched down with shocking speed. Grant gasped and stumbled back. A creature that large should not move that fast, especially one without legs. Each contraction of her hulking body propelled her hundreds of yards forward. He looked down at his gauntlets. They were too large for his hands. He looked down at his belly. It protruded far more than he was used to.

  He readied his spear anyway.

  Bodies flew as the monster crashed into the first lines. Men’s screams grew distant as they were launched into the sky, loud again as they neared the ground, and cut off with sickening thuds against the rocks. Some had been impaled by her horns, and as she weaved and swerved through the crowds of men, they swung like twisted ornaments.

  Trying to fight was like trying to stop a rolling boulder with a feather. Their weapons broke on her body, and their bodies lay limp soon after. Panic gripped him, he felt wet warmth running down his leg. This isn’t right. I’m not a spearman. I’m not a soldier. I’m a baker. I don’t belong here!

  He looked down to find his spear near his shaking feet. How did that get there? He looked around himself. There was scarcely a man near him now. Fear had taken them all, and the clever had fled first.

  He ran in the direction he faced, not knowing if it was toward his enemy or away. His boots sloshed through the mud and clattered across stone. He slipped and pitched forward, his knees crashing down painfully, shoulders jolting as his palms crashed into the ground. He clambered up, holding his hands out for balance. The terrain was a field of cracks, holes, and death for miles around. A great cloud of dust blinded him, the earth a brown haze.

  The world lurched, and he was on his side. Horrible vibrations tickled his skin, and he froze in terror, staring down between his legs. Pebbles and grit hopped and leaped, clinking against his makeshift armor. His mouth opened and a cry burst out as the sheet of rock he lay atop shattered, and a massive mouth erupted from the ground under him.

  His shriek was cut short when her maw snapped shut.

  He was screaming. Everyone in his room was. They screamed hoarsely, shrilly, and frightfully.

  And then they cackled with delight.

  “Praise Her!”

  “We are not worthy!”

  “We serve our Queen!”

  We all had the same nightmare. Something about the Mark, the Toxin, the incense or the chanting must have done it.

  Grant checked his Interface time. It was 3:30. Perfect Invisibility had been reset, and not a moment too soon. These people are mad. There is no word in any language to describe it.

  His skin was clammy and his nails ached. He pulled his hands to his face, finding he had ground their tips down to the nub on his stone bed. Sweat made his robes stick to his skin, and his mouth was sour. It was a dream, but the pain of being crushed into paste in the maw of a giant wyrm was real. The man whose body he inhabited was once a soldier who'd tried to fight back against Bay’kol.

  “More!” shouted another voice.

  What was the point of her showing them the dream? A warning to terrify them into obedience? A twisted demonstration of her power over helpless bakers and craftsmen with makeshift spears and helmets forged from tin bowls? To swell her influence even further?

  The din of their moans continued. He clamped his hands over his ears. They’re mad. They’re absolutely mad.

  With the clock striking midnight, he was given another ten minutes of Perfect Invisibility. Today, he would use it to find the prisoners. He would do whatever it took, and he wouldn’t spend a second more than necessary in this hell.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  ***

  Grant squatted on a ledge watching the cultists trudge along under him. Over the past days, he had mentally mapped the major tunnels and most of the side ones. One of the best parts about the cultists’ pitiful obedience and rejection of any free thought was that he was free to move just about anywhere he wanted. Some guided wyrms like the one he’d seen in front of the mess hall, and they too never questioned him.

  He held the Mark of Bay’kol.

  On the second night, he had another horrible nightmare. This time, he was a sailor on a ship in a fleet, and his vessel was pulled under by one of Bay’kol’s offspring. He drowned over the most agonizing minutes of his life, clawing at the ocean helplessly as cups of salty water flooded down his throat and into his lungs.

  He would much prefer being eaten alive, if given the choice.

  That was the final time he joined their prayer. The next evening, when they stood up from the mess hall, he entered the line last, then turned Invisible at the first opportunity.

  Fortunately, this stopped the dreams, and not a minute too soon. Every day he spent in the fortress, his sanity slipped further. He wasn’t participating in the grueling monotony of endless chores, and he was no longer sitting in on the prayer session, but he was losing a piece of himself with every day. The thick sulfur and wet heat made every thought a struggle.

  But the anxiety over the Evenonians was far worse. For all he knew, they were already kneeling in front of Bay’kol herself, mouths blabbering with everything they could tell her and more.

  If she learned everything, the resulting assault on Estreia would be a catastrophe beyond imagination. Hundreds of men waiting to evacuate would be massacred.

  On the fourth day, he finally had a breakthrough. After a lengthy trek where he aimed to get as high in the mountain as possible, he found two grand steel doors in a colossal hall. Reaching them took over two hours, but he would bet another incense-fueled nightmare that the Evenonians were somewhere behind them. He almost rushed in when the doors slowly opened, but he had less than a minute on Perfect Invisibility that day, and he resigned himself to waiting for the next.

  Now he sat waiting with over nine and a half remaining, drumming his fingers on the rock ledge. He was ten yards above where everyone else stood, hidden under a dark alcove from which he could see everyone and everything in the area.

  With an agonizing groan, the doors moved. Finally! Waiting for hours had turned him into a twitching mess.

  Grant leaped from his perch, activating Perfect Invisibility midair. He landed on the top of the enormous stone door and slid down its edge, squeezing its panels between his hands and knees to slow his descent. It was as thick as a man’s torso and must have weighed thousands of pounds.

  He touched down on the floor and, pushing off the balls of his feet, sprinted into the room, then slid to a stop.

  It was completely foreign from the rest of the stronghold. There was an ornate wall-to-wall rug covering the rocky floor. It was a dark ruby like the color of the wyrm in his dreams, and in its delicate embroidery, it depicted dozens of Bay’kol’s conquests. He recognized the mountains she descended from and the ships she and her spawn sank.

  Grant gritted his teeth. Killing a bunch of helpless farmers with tin pots on their heads and drowning a few sailors was not something to brag about, nor was it worth commemorating in detail on a rug. It was like a bard writing a song about a tavern owner swatting a fly.

  The center of the room was dominated by the largest table Grant had ever seen, around which fifteen chairs sat. Dozens of exits branched every way, and as men and women trod in behind him, he haphazardly chose a larger entrance to explore.

  The path was, in a way, pleasant, or at least as pleasant as a tunnel in the home of a death cult could be. It was carpeted like the main hall, the rocky flooring filed down, and the sulfury stench that burned his nostrils was far less pronounced in this wing of the fortress.

  Each chamber he passed was single-occupancy and had beds with actual mattresses pushed against their farthest corners. Full bookshelves lined the walls. If he weren’t in such a rush, he would have loved to investigate their contents. With amusement, he wondered if hidden between the pages of Conquests of Bay’kol, Volume XIV, any cultists had a steamy love novel hidden.

  Being an Elder seemed to have its perks.

  But the architecture and furniture weren’t what surprised him the most. The most striking difference was when he hid from cultists, who almost always moved in twos, he could overhear actual conversations. They did not only speak to bark orders or draw attention to urgent tasks; they discussed books they read, relationships they had, and of course, Bay’kol. Unlike those downstairs, they almost felt like actual people instead of ants in a colony.

  His first break in his search came hours after his intrusion into their sanctum.

  “You hear anything about them having any more luck?”

  The deep voice came from around the corner. Grant pressed himself into a shadow and listened, ready to turn Invisible.

  “No,” sighed a woman. “I think one of them has started saying his name. Sister Shareen is the only Elder with the Languages Skill, and she won’t be back from her pilgrimage for another month.”

  Grant breathed out, holding his chest. After days of constant searching, the risk of being caught, and sleeping on a stone bed with Siphoning Fang in his grip, he had finally made a discovery.

  They were talking about the prisoners. They had tried to communicate with them, but they couldn’t understand a word they said. A few of the townsfolk had taken the Languages Skill, but the cultists must have spent their Points elsewhere. There was still time. Ships could return to evacuate the rest of Estreia with days to spare, and if he left the fortress now, he could be on the second one out.

  “The Tomb Fiend’s emissary will get to the bottom of it,” she continued.

  Grant froze in place. The Tomb Fiend's emissary?

  There was a long silence between the two. “Do you suspect sabotage?” the man eventually asked, a trace of fear in his voice.

  The woman scoffed. “Of course I suspect sabotage. The fools at the gate saw nothing, but do you mean to tell me they wandered thirty miles out of their territory and showed up on our doorstep by pure chance?” She laughed, and then her voice sank into a wicked hiss. “The only question remaining is the source of the villainy. I would suspect the town to our north, but they are too soft to orchestrate such an attack on their own. I want to know their co-conspirators.”

  They’re talking about Estreia.

  “And who could they be?” the man asked. His voice hushed into a whisper. “Who could risk both the wrath of Bay’kol and the Tomb Fiend on such an attack?”

  “There are as many possibilities as there are fools in Celand,” she muttered. “It is an exercise in pointlessness to speculate. We will know for sure tomorrow.”

  Tomorrow? Grant had to brace a hand against the wall as the room began to spin. If the emissary was to arrive tomorrow, he had not even a day to formulate and execute a plan to prevent the deaths of hundreds.

  And he had no leads, no clues, and absolutely no idea where the Evenonians were.