Lindon had been reaching out for the door already, silence filling his mind where Dross’ chatter belonged, but he stopped as he noticed something.

The door had no mechanism to open it and no clear script-circle, which meant he would have to use his authority to open it, but that wasn’t what had seized his attention. It was a trace of someone else’s authority over to the side of the hall, a little to the side of the door.

An indentation in space. Like an invisible bump.

Lindon’s alarm went up immediately. Someone had torn space here, and if it wasn’t him…

He should call for help in case there was something deadly on the other side. Dross could have done that.

The spirit wasn’t gone. Not quite. He drifted in Lindon’s soul, right around the base of his skull as usual, but Lindon didn’t see details. His eye, his boneless arms. Instead, Dross felt like a loose cloud of dream madra. Like a two-dimensional copy of his former self.

Eithan insisted that it was possible to bring Dross back, but Lindon understood the nature of spirits. If Dross returned, there was no guarantee that he’d be himself anymore.

Lindon shook himself free. Dross wasn’t here, but some of his passive enhancements to Lindon’s mind remained.

He focused on the bump in space. It didn’t feel like a tunnel to him, or a trap. It felt like a sealed void key more than a tunnel somewhere else in the world.

Though he supposed there could be anything inside the void key.

He stretched out a tongue of Blackflame, infusing it with his authority and using it to slice through space. It was much easier than when he had tried the same thing with only his will; when he commanded the world to “Open,” he cut through the barrier separating the spaces almost without resistance.

As soon as a doorway in midair unfurled, opening onto a huge room cluttered with various objects, he noticed two things more than any others: the art and the swords.

This room actually had walls, and on those walls hung brightly colored tapestries, long black-and-white landscapes painted on scrolls, framed portraits, even decorative lights and constructs of slithering color that were clearly designed only for decoration.

Between the paintings were swords. Some were elaborate and ancient, shining with power, while others were dull, pitted, or rusty. Some were just hilts, their madra blades having faded away to essence, and still others had Forged blades that were perfectly preserved.

A scripted cauldron sat cold in the corner, next to buckets, boxes, bags, and bundles of herbs, spirit-fruits, pills, and elixirs. Next to it was a rack of sacred artist’s robes, all black, many of them nicked and cut.

Lindon’s stomach twisted.

He noticed the second rack, filled with more black robes, all of them shredded as though by errant sword-slices.

And the rack of cycling swords next to them, all radiating sharp aura.

This had to be the Sword Sage’s private storage space. It was the only thing that made sense.

But that was impossible.

“It can’t be his,” Lindon said aloud. “It’s too old. The world would have healed up the entrance by now, and I would never have found it.”

When no one responded, Lindon turned slightly over his shoulder.

“I’m talking to you.”

An onyx statue of a curled-up panther sat next to the entrance, where there had been nothing a moment before. To be fair, the illusion was convincing, even to Lindon. But he had senses the inhabitants of Sacred Valley couldn’t fool.

That, and Lindon had felt the Path of the White Fox following him before he opened the portal.

The onyx panther uncurled itself, its tail spreading out into five copies. The tails flexed out as the cat stretched, opening its jaws wide in a yawn, and as it did so it grew taller. Its snout extended, and its smooth surface melted to gray and then to a coat of white fur.

“You have traveled far down your Path, child,” Elder Whisper murmured.

“So have you, I see. And you have kept that to yourself.”

He did not hide the tone of accusation in his voice.

Elder Whisper prowled around Lindon. “I did not deceive anyone. At first, we taught our descendants to focus on one technique at a time as an adaptation to the suppression field. But memory fades so quickly, and time is the greatest liar of all.”

“If you had the power to open this space, you could have helped us fight the Dreadgod.”

“To face one of the four beasts with illusions is to face down a lion with a spider’s web.”

Elder Whisper kept an illusion of himself standing still and talking as his real form crept out beneath a cloak of invisibility.

Lindon traced the invisible one with his eyes. “That’s how we beat it.”

“When you lose what you fought to defend, and your opponent leaves you alive out of mercy, is that victory?” Elder Whisper sighed and let his illusions drop. “Perhaps it is. In any case, any victory against one of them is temporary. That is why I preserved this place.”

Lindon swept his gaze over the isolated space. “Why didn’t you take what you needed and leave it closed?”

“While I can visit Heaven’s Glory unseen whenever I wish, it would be quite another matter if I were to drag a trunk behind me in my teeth. And the ability to open these spaces is quite separate from the power to create one of my own. In that, you have me outmatched.

“Sages avoid these lands. The last one to visit, the man who left this space, was asking forbidden questions. Which is the best way to find forbidden answers.”

A purple-and-white flame kindled over a cylinder tucked away in the corner.

It was about as high and broad as Lindon’s waist, and made of dull bronze metal. Scripts wrapped around the cylinder, and it took Lindon a moment to analyze them.

When he activated the scripts in the correct sequence, the cylinder fell away, revealing a tall rectangular box beneath. This one, he had to cut through with Blackflame.

Finally, a cube about the size of his head rested in the third layer. It throbbed and pulsed, and Lindon recognized the taste of the madra inside.

As he recognized the symbol on the top: the moon crest of the Arelius clan.

“The Sage brought this to our lands,” Elder Whisper continued, “a tool granted to him by a Monarch. A key to the prison at the depths of the labyrinth. But he was not capable of delving deeply enough.”

Lindon’s will was enough to open the box. It wasn’t made to keep people out so much as to keep something in.

If it was what Lindon suspected, he needed to be fast.

The box opened to reveal a shriveled, mummified, chalk-white left hand.

Appetites Lindon had absorbed from the Wandering Titan burned to life, and he longed to consume the hand whole, to tear it apart with his teeth and let it satisfy his stomach and his soul.

He slammed the box shut again. “We can’t open this,” Lindon said firmly. “It will drag the Titan straight back.”

Elder Whisper sat on his haunches, tails waving smoothly behind him. “Wei Shi Lindon. Would you like to know how to kill the Dreadgods?”

THE END