here, snakes and lizards and rodents of all kinds, but also tiny deer and goats perched upon the rocks, and even a few pale birds. Flowering vines and creepers covered the distant walls, and hung from the stalactites above their heads. The air was lighter, richer here, and breezes wafted through the endless caverns, as if freshened from below.
The wolf loped ahead. They came to the shore of a black river and climbed the shattered rocks beside the waterfall. Haggar picked his way over the stones and paused at the first man-made structure he had seen in hours, a guard house built from black cubes of pumice stone, and lit with a guttering lantern. “Who is there?” Astriana called.
Her armor glimmered green and blue in the darkness, and she raised her silver mace. A man staggered out the open door, a firbolg warrior dressed in leather armor, carrying his sword. “You’re here,” he said. “Thank the gods. I’ve stayed alone for hours, waiting for them to come back. They’ve taken all my men,” he added, pointing with his sword to a hole in the rock wall, lit from within by an unearthly mix of colors.
“Who?”
“Themiranth and the others. What’s left of them.”
He was a big man. Sweat glistened on his pale skin. Raising his sword, making a gesture toward the depths, he said, “I was about to try again, one last time. There are too many of them if they come out in the open. But we can fight them in the tunnels, one by one.”
“What’s your name?” said Astriana.
“Garm, my lady.”
“You’re a brave man. Let’s go down.”
Finally they reached the environs of the Living Gate, that tiny portal to the Far Realm. Its diameter could be measured in eyelashes, yet even so, the substance that seeped through, less matter than deranged ideas, could poison a whole world. Once inside the last cave, they could see how all its surfaces were covered with a glistening slime, which sucked at their feet and made it hard to move. Yet it provided light for them; a mile and a half in, they saw the first of the aboleth’s servitors, the eladrin guardians it had bent to its will. One of them appeared suddenly, standing up out of the shin-deep slime, where he had been lying full-length.
“Themiranth,” Astriana breathed.
His skin was transparent now, his organs and blood vessels mottled and visible, his staring eyes wide with unthinking malice. He wore no clothes, carried no weapons, but waded toward them with his arms stretched out, trying to wrap Astriana in his slimy grasp. She hacked at him with her mace, which made a wet, squelching sound as it sunk into his flesh; Haggar didn’t watch. He had already begun his transformation, climbing down the curving ladder in his mind, until his body had lengthened many times, his arms and legs had disappeared, and he was slithering through the mucus-covered rocks, past Themiranth and past the other eladrin servitors deeper down in the hole; they couldn’t see him.
As he passed, he battered at their ankles with his blunt nose; one he knocked from his feet and encircled with his tail as he pulled himself along, crushing out of him or her what still passed for life. He let go, then swam down to where the slime was thickest, submerged in a paste or stew of half-dissolved corpses, until he found a corridor that was entirely packed with mucus, and he slithered through.
Just for a moment he saw the aboleth, with its wings and flanges and tentacles, its three red eyes in a vertical line; he closed his own eyes, closed his ears, let his mind sink down into its tiniest reptilian confinement, locked inside his flat little skull as if inside a prison made of bone, in the center of which he rolled his consciousness into a ball, as a prisoner might sit and hug himself on the floor of his cell, turning his face inward partly from despair, partly as a way to conserve his strength.
On the long dull surface of his body, along the smooth patterned skin of the great snake, he allowed himself to feel no sensation as he burrowed through the slime into the belly of the great beast, a belly that absorbed him as it allowed him to pass, and sucked him down into a landscape of inflamed viscera, mucus-encrusted tunnels full of parasites.
Even with his mind shut down, and sunk into his body as far as he could permit it without letting go of the synapses and ganglia that controlled his breathing and his heart, still he caught a vague impression of Astriana and Garm up to their knees in effluence, hacking and pounding at these parasites as they tried to drag them down.
Then Haggar was past them, and had slipped down through the submerged tunnels yet again, and glimpsed again the red eyes of the aboleth, and sunk through the membrane of its body once more.
In the heart’s core of the monster he discovered the Living Gate, the portal to the Far Realm. Contagion seeped from it, a tiny valve of puckered flesh in the contracting wall. Another monster lurked there, floating in a substance that was neither solid nor liquid nor gas, a creature made of writhing tentacles around a single flaming eye. Daggerlike teeth circled its maw, and Haggar found himself drifting toward it in his natural form, naked save for his totem stick, which protruded from the bone of his forearm. It was as if this creature could perceive his true essence after all, and limit him to his weakest shape.
Gouts of fire burst from the monster’s eye. But Haggar had his totem stick, and with it he began to stir the substance of the deep, grunting, muffled evocations as he did so, until the matrix that surrounded him began to move, assume a shape like a vortex or tornado; he was controlling it, as he would a cloud or a storm in his own world. The streamers of fire circled back, catching the monster in a net of its own flame, while at the same time the living gate spread open, and a single purple tentacle stretched through it. This was the mind flayer, the last of the horrors that awaited him here, and it searched for him diligently, penetrating through the ooze, grasping for his head. Doubtless just beyond the gate was the encrustation of the elder brain that was commanding this entire web of illusion and deceit.
He kicked away and it grabbed hold of him. Inside the prison of his mind, a long hand snaked through the bars, because he was afraid. He sat naked, curled up in the center of his cell, allowing the hand of the mind flayer to palpate his skull, searching for a place to enter. He felt a rush of emotion and sensation surge up through him, and his mind was full of pictures of the past and present and the future: his mother standing by the fire outside her cottage in the woods; the pool in the abandoned city on the mountainside, and Astriana standing in it with the water around her knees; Astriana with her mace held high, breaking the flesh of the slime-covered servitors, while he failed here, allowed the mind flayer to take him and destroy him, destroy them all.
But then with a last effort of his reptile will, he choked all that away, constricted the mental passages it flowed through, that sequence of images, and his mind went dark. Those processes of the brain and heart were what the creature fed on, and Haggar felt its grip loosen, its probing tentacle release its hold. Instead of struggling, he forced himself to relax, to welcome the touch of the jailer’s hand upon his face. And the more he welcomed it, the more he emptied his mind of panic and regret, the weaker and less sure was its grasp, while at the same time he was climbing downward into a new reality, in which he stood in his wolf’s form at the edge of a rocky, fetid pool under a blood red sky. Some kind of twisting mollusk was down there, a cephalopod with purple tentacles, and he stretched out his claws and ripped along its flabby, unprotected head.
He heard a scream, all the more horrifying for being silent and internal. He pulled back his paw. And then he found himself floating up through the spheres of illusion: the Living Gate with his naked body suspended underneath, watching the arm of the mind flayer suddenly retract and disappear, and the gate pucker closed. At that moment, as if the source of contagion was necessary for its life, the beholder shut its awful eye. And again at that same moment, Haggar found himself lying on his side among the mucus-covered rocks, his fur matted and greasy, his body aching and hurt. He licked at the air, and then after several panting breaths he stumbled to his four feet, and climbed and scratched his way out of the tunnel, to where Astriana sat among the stones, her armor coated with a glowing slime, her mace broken, her scimitar in her hand. Haggar crawled past Garm, the firbolg soldier, floating on his back, his face contorted in the rictus of death.
And then Astriana put her hand out and Haggar crawled under it, and allowed her to rub the soft fur of his forehead and around his ears. His tongue lolled out, and he licked her hands. She bent over him to put his face against her face, while he-not because he thought it was a good strategy, but out of simple exhaustion-allowed himself to find his natural shape again. His heavy head fell into her lap. She took her fingers from his hair, rolled him aside, and stood up hurriedly.
But later, after they had climbed back to the surface again, and after they had mounted the cage to the tower’s roof, and after he had washed himself in the sumptuous quarters she’d assigned to him, he stood in front of the window, looking up at the sun as it rose above the rim of the great well. He didn’t hear the door open, but he turned when she spoke. She wore a gown of green silk, open at the neck and throat, and her hair was loose around
