The lights didn’t come back on right away.
That room liked to linger. Let the silence sit between your ribs. Let you wonder if it was done with you—or just bored.
Lori kept working the puzzle while the rest of us handled the room’s idea of hospitality. Big things with too many mouths. Dolgrims snapping and laughing like they were in on a joke we weren’t. Some tentacled, blood-drinking nightmare that decided Jeremy—Balgus’ poor, borrowed fae—looked like a juice box. One pull and he was gone. Just… empty. Room didn’t even flinch.
Bowmore and I did what we do. Steel. Song. Lightning. I put holes in things that shouldn’t have holes, and Bowmore’s tune kept my hands steady when the shadows leaned too close. One by one, the monsters dropped—and then, like a bad memory losing its grip, they faded. Dead ones. Living ones. All of it. Like the room had erased its own notes.
That’s when the door opened.
Fresh air poured in, cool and real, like the world apologizing. We followed it through a tunnel that felt too clean to trust—and stepped right back where we started. Six Kings Monument. Border of Droaam and Breland. Sharon’s backyard. Same sky. Same stone. Like none of it ever happened.
I lit a smoke and let my legs dangle over the edge. Needed to feel gravity again. Everyone else caught their breath. No one laughed. Not yet.
We went back through the pocket, kept our end of the deal, and introduced Mergrim to MODMOS. He took it better than I expected. Said he’d have his people guard the caves while we slept. Lori sent word to Corvas and Gurack—Day Eight—then baked us into unconsciousness with kindness and exhaustion.
Business done, secrets shared. Von Zeclin’s prophecy laid out on the table. Overlords. Undead generals. The usual end-of-the-world chatter. MODMOS found out he has a soul. There was a long pause. A collective sigh. Nobody knew what to say to that, so we didn’t.
Two days on the road after that. Lori knitted MODMOS a Bowmore Nation scarf. Cookies appeared. Somehow. Nobody questioned it.
Near the end of the second day, Mergrim told us to look up.
Lori took to the sky on her mop, and I followed—turns out falling taught me how to fly. There it was. A floating island shaped like a human heart. Hanging two hundred feet up like the world forgot to bury it. Bats circling. Bad vibes humming. A few hours out.
By morning, we were at its base.
That’s when the ThreeKin stopped us. Said something was wrong ahead. I did what I always do when someone says that—I ran straight into it.
Poison hit me like regret. Snake-things everywhere. An abomination at the center, all coils and hate. I couldn’t see. Couldn’t breathe. Still fired lightning. Still stood my ground. One hit left between me and the obituary, saved only by a stupid bean treat I ate earlier. Fate’s got a sense of humor. I hate it.
Lori pulled me back from the edge. Healing light. Poison burned out. Vision came back red and angry.
Then I started killing.
One abomination down. Four to go.
The room might have let us go.
The world didn’t.
