“Agreed. I had to ask.” He gave Cheyenne a quick, reassuring nod, then stepped briskly through the doorway and out of the in-between.
L’zar gazed at the slow black flames around him when he stepped through next. Maleshi waved Cheyenne and Ember forward after him.
“Is it gonna feel like I’m drowning when we step out of here too?” Ember asked.
The general chuckled. “It’s always better out than in. I suppose that’s a universal saying.”
“Great.” Ember floated through the doorway, and Cheyenne followed her.
Maleshi, Byrd, and Lumil joined their group on the other side in quick succession, and the party stood at their unexpected destination in Ambar’ogúl.
“What the hell is this?” Byrd muttered.
L’zar stood rigidly alert behind Corian. His wide golden eyes were the only part of him that moved as he scanned the chamber of black stone in which they’d found themselves. Then he took a long, deep sniff of the air and growled. “I believe the last option left to us was very possibly the worst.”
“Great.” Cheyenne wrinkled her nose at the thick metallic odor hanging in the air. It covered something deeper and heavier—blood, a scent not unlike ozone, and a darker element she couldn’t name. “I’d love for someone to just come out and say where we are.”
Lumil leaned away from the warped reflection looking back at her. She lightly flicked the glass and grunted. “Mirror, mirror on the wall and all that, huh?”
Maleshi eyed the dusty, chipped mirror serving as a one-way exit from the in-between. “No fair queen in this hellhole.”
“No way.” Cheyenne blinked in the near-darkness lit by two blazing torches hovering against the far wall of the chamber. “Did the portal ridge at my mom’s seriously lead us into the Crown’s castle?”
“The Heart,” Corian corrected.
“Sure. Whatever. This is it?”
“Yes.” L’zar took another deep breath and finally started moving again. “This changes everything.”
“Dammit.” Byrd rubbed a hand vigorously across his mouth before trudging after the group. “Now all the timing’s off.”
“No, our timing was perfect,” L’zar hissed. He stopped beside a dark metal table bolted to the black stone floors. The surface was scratched and dented in a few places, but that was nothing compared to the long-dried bloodstains on the metal and the stone below it. The drow spun and glared at Corian. “It was perfect.”
The nightstalker glanced quickly at Cheyenne, then headed toward the drow and kept his voice low. “We’ll make it work.”
“We’re too close, Corian. We’re way too close. The first stage has been wiped off the table now.”
“I understand, and we’ll find a way to contact them. But there’s no going back at this point.”
“I don’t want to go back,” L’zar growled. “I want this done right.” A purple light flashed behind the drow’s eyes as he bared his teeth and curled his lips in a snarl. He breathed heavily in hiss after hiss. “We didn’t come here to play it by ear.”
“Well, it looks like that’s what we have to do now. You’re still under the Weave, and you’re still running low. Don’t let this undo what you spent the last week weaving through it, understand?”
“I’m not as weak-willed as you so comfortably think, vae shra’ni.”
Both magicals turned quickly toward the other end of the chamber at the sound of footsteps descending a stairwell.
“That’ll be the first pair of eyes, then,” Lumil muttered.
“Quiet,” Maleshi hissed.
The group waited in silence as the footsteps drew closer. A flickering green flame became visible in the stairwell across the chamber, then the magical carrying it, a short, round gremlin with scrawny limbs and a bulbous yellow nose, appeared at the base of the stairs. The gremlin sniffed the air and turned to look directly at the intruders. “What in the name of the Crown’s vaulted hand do you think you’re doin’ down here?”
Corian’s blast of silver lightning caught the gremlin in the throat, seared clean through, and burst against the opposite stone wall. The gremlin dropped with a gurgling choke, spilling the green fire like a dropped glass of water across the floor.
Shouts rose from the stairwell, and four more magicals in the same dark blood-splattered robes raced down the stairs. Maleshi and Corian sprinted toward them, Lumil and Byrd close on their heels. Cheyenne followed, shooting L’zar a scathing glance, which he didn’t notice in lieu of the sudden appearance of a second metal table covered in dried blood. He needs to cut this shit out right now.
“Ember, can you keep an eye on—” A green dart like a crackling spear shot over the halfling’s shoulder and barely missed the warped mirror on the wall behind her.
“Got it,” Ember said even as Cheyenne snarled and entered the fray.
Five against four shouldn’t have been an issue in this dark chamber that smelled like blood and fear. The Crown’s appointed attendants in this place put up a much better fight than any dozen O’gúl loyalists Earthside. Two of them were gremlins who seemed to have mastered small bursts of teleporting themselves around the chamber. The other two were a skaxen and a shriveled goblin, neither of whom were any easier to lock on as targets.
Silver nightstalker light darted around the chamber as Maleshi and Corian took off after the yellow-skinned gremlins. Every three or four seconds, they’d catch up with one to throw or deflect a spell before the gremlins disappeared and reappeared somewhere else.
The skaxen leaped at Cheyenne, snarling and slashing with long, sharpened black nails at the ends of her orange hands. The halfling missed her first attack with her crackling orb of black energy. The skaxen darted from side to side, narrowly escaping Cheyenne’s next attacks, then the orange-skinned magical headed toward the far wall.
Cheyenne paused when the skaxen skittered up the vertical surface like a spider, leaped to the adjacent wall, and kicked out to come at the halfling from a different angle. That’s new.
She stepped aside and sent her black whipping tendrils to coil
