Lost Legends | Episode 5 — Beginning of the End (Part 1)

The staircase had been there all along. None of them could say exactly when the door had appeared, tucked just to the side of the main shelves — perfectly ordinary looking, and precisely out of place. Given the note that had drifted down from the ceiling the previous evening, five words in Octave's handwriting, the question of when was less pressing than the question of what. Help me. Books. Second floor. They went up.

The staircase was torchlit and blocky and entirely unremarkable. The door at the top had purple mist trailing underneath it. They opened it anyway.

The second floor was another library. Four large sections filled the room, each marked with a nameplate — Hríd, Morub, Belial, Thordan — and packed with books in various states of age and care. From a number of them, thin threads of purple mist rose and settled across the floor in a low, even haze. In the center of the room, a large orb floated above a pedestal, glowing blue-green, occasionally flickering.

They spread out to see what this place held. That was, by now, simply habit.

Belial approached his section with the enthusiasm of a man attending a compulsory meeting. The investigation was not his strongest suit — the bookcase included titles such as Belial the Conqueror, Belial the Murderer, and Belial with a Hat — but one title caught his attention enough to pull it from the shelf. Belial the Peacemaker. He opened it. The first page was a note in Octave's handwriting: experiment gone wrong, does not fit individual characteristics, don't forget to remove this world later. He closed it, looked around to confirm no one was watching, and shoved it into a corner. Nobody noticed the loud bang of the book. He went back to browsing.

Hríd worked through his section more carefully. Most of the books were variations on stories he recognised, some close to what he remembered and some considerably further away. The one that stopped him was titled Rhyvan: What if Hríd was not there? It would not open. It sat in his hands with a faint purple glow at the edges, heavy and stubborn, and he stared at it for a moment before setting it aside.

The others found their own unopenable tomes. Morub pulled out An Exercise in Frustration — not about him, but about Fionnlagh, the mentor he recognized in the title. Belial's was titled Rules of Secession Within the Ranks of the Demon Lord. Each of the four refused to open, and each seemed, in a quiet and persistent way, to be pulling towards the center of the room.

They gathered around the orb. It flickered once. Then they heard heels on marble, and Carabossa walked out from behind it.

She was not particularly surprised to see them. She greeted them warmly, complimented their persistence, and explained that she had decided to stop wasting time on them. While they had been dealing with her sea hag, she had taken the opportunity to have a more productive conversation with Octave, the Director. He had been cooperative, eventually, and had made her something she expected to work considerably better than free will.

Through the star-shaped portal that opened briefly behind her, Flutterwing was visible in the background, bound and strung up in what looked like a gothic throne room. The portal closed before anyone could do much about it. Thordan's arrow missed the threshold by a fraction. Carabossa waved with sass.

Four shapes rose from the mist.

They were not strangers. That was clearly the point. Ryzeth, Belial's former second-in-command, stood on the left looking ready to remove someone's throat. Next to him was a figure in a golden mask with elven ears and long hair and one eye still her own — Thordan's sister, Madelieve. Rhyvan stood larger and paler than Hríd remembered, his eyes carrying a purple glow and very little else. And Fionnlagh stood slightly apart from the rest, watching, and winked at Morub. It seemed a bitter irony, that our four heroes would have to fight against those they most held dear. These variants from worlds, where our heroes unfortunately did not succeed. And a heated rivalry between Belial and his subordinate.

The battle was messy and expensive and frequently on fire. Thordan's sister opened with a circle of death that killed Hríd's table. Ryzeth worked through Belial with the methodical efficiency of someone settling a long-standing account. Rhyvan simply hit things, repeatedly and very hard. Hríd tried talking to him anyway, gave him a small piece of bardic inspiration, like he used to when he was confined to their old tale. It broke through for a slight moment, before hatred ran across Rhyvan's face once more.

It was Morub who spotted what they all had in common. A purple stone set within a necklace, at Thordan's sister's throat. A headpiece at Rhyvan's brow. Chains at Riseth's wrists and neck. A ring on Fionnlagh's finger. All of them pulsing. All of them purple. We have to take the things off, he said.

Thordan's sister broke free first. She laughed, recognized her brother, looked around the room, and said oh, my head hurts — and then collapsed into purple smoke that rushed toward the book in Thordan's hands and disappeared inside it. Defeating the four now, seemed possible. Rhyvan followed shortly after, which produced some disagreement between Hríd and Thordan about the relative merits of persuasion versus just shooting someone. Ryzeth went last, hit with fire and thunder and Belial's chains until his weapon gave out and he too dissolved.

Fionnlagh did not dissolve. He sat down cross-legged in the middle of the room, accepted a cup of chamomile tea that Morub produced from thin air, and started talking.

He had not been genuinely converted. He had, he explained, simply recognised the shape of the situation and made himself useful within it — which was, he noted, not very different from what he always did. Carabossa had made her usual pitch about freedom and liberation, and he had smiled and kept his wits about him. The ring was real and the contract was real and he would need to be properly defeated before he could hand either over. That meant trials. Three of them.

The group received this with varying degrees of patience. Belial said very little, which said a great deal. Morub accepted it. Hríd asked practical questions. Thordan wanted to know which one to do first.

They chose wits, and the room went dark.

They came up separately in a fog-bound Fey Wild, each on a different path, the mist thick enough to cut visibility down to around fifteen feet in any direction. The trial, Flock's voice informed them, was to find the center. What was not explained immediately was that the center was a large, gnarly tree with branches holding several glowing orbs in place, and that the point was to free the orbs so they could float home. This became clear gradually, through a combination of nature checks, lucky perception rolls, Belial following a liquid orb through the undergrowth with unhurried calm, and Thordan jumping directly through the foliage in what turned out to be the correct direction, acquiring a poison condition in the process.

Morub played his bagpipes so the others could locate him by sound. The sound did not carry very far.

Eventually the orbs made it back. The tree lit up. A hole opened in its base. Thordan jumped in immediately. Morub followed. Hríd climbed. Belial dropped last, landed on Morub, got up, and said nothing. Fionnlagh noted that they had technically succeeded, if not elegantly, and moved them on.

The trial of combat took place in a clearing with four seasonal tree spirits — Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn — circling a larger Tree Lord at the center. The detail that mattered surfaced from Morub's memory of a lesson Flock had once repeated until it stuck: the whole is a sum of its parts. Kill the small ones first. The group acted on this with reasonable coordination, applying fire liberally — fire was, it emerged, a solid strategic choice against woodland creatures — and working through the four spirits in rough sequence. Thordan's arrows. Belial's searing chains. Hríd's shatter. Morub's scorching rays, which finished the Tree Lord with enough fire damage to make Fionnlagh look up from his roasting marshmallow.

One trial remained. Morub attempted to argue that three challenges were, philosophically speaking, excessive, and that the trial of character could be considered implicit in everything they had already done.

Flock smiled pleasantly and said they still had one more to go.