To his surprise, Kri listened to him. The old priest took a deep breath and seemed to steady himself, then nodded his readiness. Albanon tried to look confident and reassuring. He swept his gaze over the three doorways and chose the one directly ahead, stepping decisively to the empty arch and ducking his head to pass through.
The room beyond had evidently been a guard post-it was equipped with a broken wooden chair, a rack that still held rusting spears, and a large, solid-looking table. No other door led out, so Albanon sighed and shepherded Kri back out the door and through a different one.
This door led to a spiral staircase stretching both up and down, which Albanon reprimanded himself for not seeing earlier.
“Up or down?” he asked, looking at Kri but not expecting an answer.
“Down down down,” Kri whispered.
Cold fear ran along Albanon’s spine. The priest’s voice was so different, and his demeanor so completely altered, that Albanon started to wonder whether he might have been possessed. “Kri?” he said.
Kri’s eyes flicked to his and then looked away, back at the staircase. “Down,” he mouthed.
“Very well,” Albanon said. “Down we go.”
The stairs twisted down over a hundred steps before Albanon forced himself to stop counting. Without the steady count of numbers in his mind, Albanon started hearing the same sinister whispers that Kri had been hearing upstairs. He started counting again, reaching forty-seven before arriving at the bottom.
A small stone chamber was lit only by the light of Albanon’s staff. A hallway stretched off into the darkness opposite the stairs, and Albanon saw archways blocked by heavy iron bars. Cells, he thought. A low table in the chamber held an unlit candle and a length of thick chain with an open cuff at one end.
“An altar,” Kri said.
Albanon looked at the table again. It bore no symbol he recognized, unless the chain related to the god of imprisonment. “To what god?” he said. “Torog?”
“Not the King that Crawls,” Kri said. “Not with an open cuff. The Chained God.”
The Chained God. Albanon had read stories of the god who turned against the other gods, who created the Abyss in his attempt to destroy the planes and all that dwelled in them, and who the gods had bound and imprisoned someplace beyond the planes, outside of reality. The events described in these legends were so ancient that the details were forgotten-perhaps intentionally, long ago. He’d often wondered if they were some kind of allegory, describing not a real god but an impulse toward evil and destruction contained within all the gods, sort of a mythic etiology of evil. Clearly, though, to the mad cults that sprang up in devotion to the Chained God, some element of truth rang out in the myths, something that spoke to their crazed and twisted minds.
“He was here,” Kri whispered.
Metal squealed from a cell door down the hallway, making Albanon’s heart leap into his throat. “Who’s there?” a gruff voice called. “Who dares intrude upon the Patient One’s sanctuary?”
Kri stepped toward the hallway’s mouth. “We seek the last true disciple of the Chained God,” he said.
A bear of a man stepped into the circle of Albanon’s light. He wore a flowing robe of royal purple, open in the front to reveal a coat of chainmail. His face was hidden behind a full helmet bearing a monstrous visage and topped with sharp horns. He stood a few inches taller than Albanon, and easily weighed twice as much as the slender eladrin. A jagged spiral formed of adamantine hung from a thick iron chain around his neck.
“I serve the Chained God,” the man growled, “but I am not the last.”
“Kri,” Albanon whispered, “if that’s the demon we could be in trouble.” In a halfling’s tiny body, the demon had been unbelievably strong. Albanon didn’t want to imagine how that hideous strength might be amplified in this man’s body.
Kri shook his head. “We seek the demon, Nu Alin, who was once Albric.”
The man stepped a little closer. “And what business do you have with the demon?”
“We come to destroy him!” Albanon blurted.
Kri held up a hand to quiet him. “If necessary,” he added.
“Then I will kill you for him,” the big man said, spreading his arms.
Kri muttered something that sounded like “miserable failure,” but Albanon wasn’t sure who he meant- himself, the cultist, or Albanon. Albanon threw up an arcane shield around them just as a blast of black fire washed out from the cultist, spreading around the shield and dissipating harmlessly.
In answer, Albanon sent a bolt of lightning down the hallway. It sent out tendrils of blazing light to the iron bars in the cell doorways, then exploded around the cultist, knocking him off his feet. Kri followed that with a pillar of fire that roared down over the man as he struggled to regain his feet.
Kri cackled as the man roared in pain, smoke billowing from his robe and even snaking out through the eye holes in his helmet. Albanon gave him a sidelong glance, increasingly concerned that the priest was not himself. He shook the thought from his head as the cultist roared again, seeming to draw strength from the sound of his own fury, and stood up.
“You will pay for that,” the cultist said.
As he strode forward, he pulled a metal-studded club from a loop on his back and rested it on his shoulder. As Kri hefted his morningstar, Albanon stepped back and sent bolts of force down the hall to slam into the big man’s chest, slowing his advance. Kri could handle himself in a hand-to-hand fight if he had to, but Albanon figured that the longer he kept that huge club away from Kri, the better.
The cultist answered his arcane missiles with another roar-a monstrous bellow that shook the walls around them and the ground beneath their feet. The sound thundered into Kri and knocked him backward like a physical blow. Albanon didn’t feel the force of it so much as a pressure on his mind, as if the man’s howl were tearing at the edges of his sanity. He tried to call another spell to mind, but while the sound continued he couldn’t focus.
The man’s barrel chest seemed to have a limitless reserve of breath-his roar went on and on, and Albanon’s head started to spin. He staggered back, hoping that with a little more distance he might escape the range of whatever mystic force empowered the scream, but darkness started clouding the edges of his vision and he fell to his knees.
“Enough,” Kri whispered. Somehow, for all the noise buffeting his ears, Albanon heard the priest’s sharp whisper clearly-and after the whisper was sheer silence.
Light and fire burst out from Kri, still utterly silent. The merest instant of the most savage heat Albanon had ever known sent him sprawling to the ground in unspeakable agony. He felt his skin char and heard it sizzle, smelled his hair burning, but saw nothing except the incomparable brightness of divine power ravaging him.
Then the moment passed. He saw the shadow-draped ceiling of the small chamber above him, heard his own ragged breathing and Kri’s panting breath, felt every nerve of his body screaming its pain. He tried to lift his head, but the pain was too great.
“Albanon?” Kri said, as if noticing his presence for the first time.
Albanon flinched away as brightness washed over him again, but this time the divine light brought soothing coolness that washed away his pain.
“Did I …” Kri began, crouching over him. “Did I do that?”
“You honestly don’t know?” Albanon said.
“I–I’m not sure. I … it shouldn’t have harmed you. You should have been safe.”
“I wasn’t.” His body still ached from the memory of the pain, and even the slightest movement sent sharp tingles through him.
“I’m sorry, Albanon. I’m so sorry.”
Kri looked so stricken that Albanon couldn’t sustain his anger. He sat up, wincing at the pain, and saw the smoldering remains of the cultist behind Kri. “At least I didn’t end up like him,” he said, trying to smile.
Kri turned and looked down at the cultist’s corpse as well. He muttered something Albanon couldn’t understand as he stomped over to the body, then crouched down beside it. He reached down and lifted the spiral symbol off the dead man’s chest, pulling the chain over the bulky helmet and hefting the heavy amulet.
“What is it?” Albanon asked. “The symbol of the Chained God?”
Kri started, hiding the symbol behind his body. Then he drew it back out and looked back down at it-a little guiltily, Albanon thought. “This? It’s the symbol of the Elder Elemental Eye. Which is the Chained God. Except most of the cultists of the Eye don’t realize it.”
“They think they’re serving the Eye, but it’s actually the Chained God giving the orders?”
