Tyrna’s bow sung, letting loose arrow after arrow. It was no good. Terror birds were closing in, vaulting over the underbrush. Henri had nothing left - he shivered in his boots, pale, sweat cascading down the bloodless white of his face. The old man had to hold him up, using one hand to sweep his staff at the birds as they approached.

She had never fired so quickly. There was a music to the bow she heard now, a swiftness to her fingers, a certainty that every shot would find its mark. In the midst of hopelessness, a feeling of raw strength that rushed through her veins and ignited into bravado. She didn’t need to look for more than the blink of an eye - didn’t need to watch the arrows fly - she heard the screams of pain and death that followed as she met one oncoming terror after another with deadly precision.

“We need to jump. Tyrna, we have to jump!” The old man was saying, eyeing the breach, their one escape. She heard his voice as if from under cold, deep water. Her bow spoke louder.

“One second! One second, I can- I can give you somewhere to land!” From below Mhurr was shouting, and to her surprise, Tyrna heard her own voice call back-

“One second! I can give you that!”

An arrow caught a terror bird mid-leap, as it lunged over a fallen fungal stalk to slash its claws at her. The leap turned into a tumble of dead weight and pure momentum as the arrow stuck through its skull. She stepped aside, letting it go crashing over the edge of the breach, whipping around to save Draig by piercing another terror through the chest.

And then there were no more arrows.

Claws caught her face. She ducked, lunging under a set of grasping claws that swept towards her - the hind-talon caught her from chin to cheek and she felt the tip rattle her teeth as it opened her face. Blood rushed into her mouth. It was behind her now, and two more in front, flanking. Draig was screaming and flailing his staff, trying to frighten them, ghosts of all kinds whirling around him in a spectral sea. Bears and wolves howled, birds called and cawed, the furor of their cries growing together into an orchestra of feral sound.

She felt it then. The presence of the Dungeon. The seething anger, the petulant, almost childish spite. The capacity for hate that no human could match - an underground sea.

A mind that expanded through the walls, up to the ceiling, that pervaded the earth under her feet, that gazed out at her from every eye, that had sculpted every claw. Hating. Hungering. Bearing down upon her like a physical weight.

Caiorre’s sword cut against pearled armor, finding the joints, ripping shallow cuts and dipping between in flashing stabs that pulled out bright ribbons of yellow blood when they retreated. The spiders would rear up and come crashing towards him, slashing as they brought their weight down. They were strong, they were fast, but they were not dancers.

And Caiorre was a dancer. He flung himself forward at the first foe, surprising it with his fearlessness, his bravado. He pierced it through the underside with his long blade, delivered a stomping kick to its hindlegs, and used his sword stuck through its underbelly to bodily throw the beast into its comrades.

That opened a space in the encirclement that was closing around him and Mhurr. In that moment of respite, Caiorre spun the other way and dived forward, meeting the next spider with a lightning-quick double stab that raked across one row of eyes, then the next, blinding it.

The years didn’t hold him back today. He was young again, and in love with it, adoring his own body, his own strength, the lethal prowess that flowed through his arms.

It was like a blind painter having a day of sight again. A last day of glory to practice his art.

He could almost hear the roar of the crowd, and smiled, star-struck.

They were closing. He sliced one’s leg in half at the weakness of the joint, twisted to block another spider that surged in from behind, stopping both razor limbs across the flat of his blade. It was a brutal position; the beast’s weight pinning him with his spine twisted torturously, unable to exercise his full strength. The injured first spider lunged forward again, aiming to pierce him through the belly with a stab.

It raked his side instead as he turned, twisting, levering the weight of the spider atop him and stepping aside so they crashed into one another. Their deadly limbs scraped and clawed and tore each other apart.

He met the next with a whirling hack, throwing all his weight and momentum into cleaving through its head. No fancy moves now, simply killing before he was killed.

But he would be killed.

There were simply too many, and their forces were split.

The curtain was closing, slowly, on what Caiorre thought would be his last dance.

Nathaniel remembered. He had come this way before. Then, his strength was flagging, failing to hold up the weight of Camila as she died in his arms. His weapons had been spent, his plans exhausted. Every step had felt like a mile. Exhaustion had narrowed his world to a pinhole view of the next step.

Now, he almost flew over the root-strewn earth. Adrenaline and fear surged in fire-ice harmony through his veins and he ran like a madman. A bolt of lightning licked past his ear, prickling him with tiny threads that leapt from the main mass and lifted his hair into wild, standing disarray. The thundercrack deafened him in that one ear, replacing half the world’s sound with a dull, distant ring.

He didn’t care.

All that mattered was stomping that little imp from reaching the silver door that stood on the hilltop, a strange artifact amidst the wild splendor of the Everforest. Roots were already beginning to climb up the silvered arch with its runic inscriptions.

He wasn’t going to make it.

He wasn’t going to make it, for the second time, he was too slow.

It felt like the past was a weight holding his limbs back. Stronger than exhaustion, than the aching soreness in his limbs, was the fear of returning to that dark place.

Where was he headed? Back into the Dungeon? Back to face his friend’s murderer?

Was he any stronger now? He had refreshed his weapons, ground new powders and poisoned smokes from the Everforest’s herbs, gone farther astray from home than he had ever dreamed, visited a new world and stood under the alien sky.

But there was no sky where he was going. Only a shadowed vault of stone.

He was so close he reached his hand out, snatching for the imp’s trailing tail. He caught nothing but air, and the nasty little thing passed through the portal, the air within the archway rippling. A second later and Nathaniel burst through, not because he wanted to, but because there was too much momentum behind him to stop- he staggered to a halt a few steps from the door. Annabelle was just behind him, darting through and freezing at what they both saw.

A swordsman moved like wind, floating like a leaf in a storm as spiders crawled towards him ceaselessly. His swords protected a mage pulling knots of spellwork together into a glowing diagram.

The imp was careening away, diving into the thick forest of fungi.

Nathanial was afraid, but he saw people in front of him, people fighting although the odds seemed hopeless. He loved them for that without needing to know a single other thing about them. He really, truly did.

“CLOSE YOUR EYES! NOW!”

Reaching to his belt, he lifted a wooden canister and hurled it overhand into the thick of the spiders. As it cracked open, an alchemical flame burst forth, scattering a thin solution of herbal poison and caustic irritants. Spiders couldn’t close their eyes. Spiders had eight to lose, eight to catch a drop of that burning, clawing solution.

They were clustered tight, and the cloud of toxic smoke caught them all. A mass, hissing cry of pain filled the cavern.

Tyrna heard the cry from an unknown, the burst of the canister, Nolan Mhurr’s scream. She would only piece together the series of events that led to these three things much later.

The fourth thing she heard and understood perfectly. “JUMP!”

She lunged for a glint in the dirt and snatched up Caiorre’s short blade, fallen when he was knocked away by Cabochon. She slashed at one bird, forcing it back. Its wing-claws came for her in return, pulling twin streaks of red down her arm before she could pull the blow back, but she grimaced, held down the scream, and hurtled past.

A leap took her over the shallow edge of the breach.

Henri was in trouble. They had broken him and Draig apart. The old man was wreathed in his smoke-column of ghostly beasts and safe - but Henri was caught by deadly claws. The beast hauled him across the dirt and leaves of the forest floor, sinking its teeth into his shoulder.

She caught the beast with a backhand, reverse-grip cut across the eye, and stabbed into the wing that held Henri down.

He let out a scream as the beast’s toothy maw released him, bridges of bloody drool clinging to the mangled flesh of his shoulder. The claws ripped his back open as they came out, and the beast slammed its neck into her belly, sending her backwards, coming at her with its wings opened wide to give her a killing hug. Tyrna snarled and hurled the dagger through its feathered chest, kicking it down as it reeled back in surprise.

Grabbing Henri, she threw him over his shoulder and dived down the breach. Draig was just behind.

She landed in a whirlwind, a wide, flat cushion of air that stopped her from impacting the ground, bouncing her up before she could smack into the cold earth below. With Henri draped over her she had no chance to make a two-footed landing; they both met the ground in a heap as the wind faded.

Dying runes of gold flickered out around Nolan’s hands. His eyes were white, surrounded by deep, raw pinkness, the skin bubbling and popping as she watched. Acid scars ate their way into his cheeks.

All around, the spiders were thrashing their legs at nothing, crashing over onto their sides. Something foul and burning filled the sour air of the Dungeon, making tears blur in the corners of her eyes even now.

“I-” Mhurr started to say, and Caiorre grabbed him by the shoulder. The old man had taken the acid bomb’s splatter too, streaks of raw flesh carved out across his face, but he had closed his eyes in time.

“Come on boy.” Was all the old soldier said.

Altogether, they sprinted for the glass pagoda. Caiorre leading Mhurr, Henri gasping as he was jostled about on Tyrna’s shoulders. A young man and a woman with a violin were running to meet them, the boy gesturing frantically, the woman whistling a strange magical note that made strength surge into Tyrna’s weary limbs, a force like a gentle wind pushing each step to be that little bit faster.

They broke through the door. Tyrna hit with her shoulder and they stumbled inside, into a hall of mirrors.

Their reflections stared back at them. And back at them. And back at them. So many mirrored walls, each looking in to the others, broke the world into repeating patterns, nested into one another in an infinite tunnel. The single, glowing light at the top of the room became an endless streak of blue, a comet diving down into infinity.

Every surface sparkled. The lights lured, they teased, they threatened to hypnotize.

A glass table held the same cup, copied dozens of times.

Crouched between them and the table was a man of glass, with backwards bending hooves and antlers rising from his head. It had only the one arm, but in its one hand it held a beauty of a blade, curved and elegant.