As the great creature reached into the silver moonlight, the young screeched their welcome. Their own tentacled limbs writhed like a field of grass in the wind; under the moon’s light the effect was dizzying, and Elspeth drew Feymal. She met the thousand-eyed gaze and called the beast by the name the dark man had woven into her dream.
“Shub-Niggurath!”
With a sound of thunder, Shub-Niggurath forced itself wholly free of the temple, stone avalanching down as the beast thrashed into the sky. The shrieking globe of it blocked out the moon, and where its tentacles didn’t end in mouths, they were barbed and dripping with rot from its long nesting beneath the river temple.
Elspeth raised Feymal and Shub-Niggurath laughed, a repulsive sound that poured its way into her ears as boiling oil. Elspeth believed her brain would be eaten from her skull, and dropped to her knees, even as Nanrin also fell. The jar of fire shattered and in the wet of the swamp the flames hissed out, leaving them in moonlight’s chill. Winseris let fly with arrows, and though the barbed and poisoned missiles plunged into countless fanged mouths, Shub-Niggurath’s laugh only deepened, as though these wounds did not carry pain or death.
Elspeth had no way to reach the floating beast, so high had it risen above the temple ruin, and so began where she could: on the ground, with its young. Feymal cut hungrily through the tender boughs. Everywhere a limb fell, blood coursed to deepen the ebon foulness of the river. The shrieking deaths of its young brought Shub-Niggurath from the sky.
It swept over the temple’s scattered stones and Elspeth charged to meet its hideous mass. She leaped sideways, from fallen stone to fallen stone, dodging the drooling, fanged mouths of Shub-Niggurath. When the first mouth caught her shoulder, hot and fetid, Elspeth reeled backward, slicing up and out with Feymal. The sword’s bright edge severed the tentacle, though the mouth clung yet to her flesh. A bright trail of sour blood arced upward against the night sky.
It was then that Elspeth saw Basher, charging the furious Shub-Niggurath, screaming “Iä! Iä! Iä!”
Basher launched herself into the insect-laced air as if born to the sky — not a dwarf at all, but a sleek, flying animal of the clouds, and so it became, as Elspeth watched the way the compact dwarf body changed, the way the body released what it had held. One form folded aside so the second, a glorious shadow dragon, could emerge. The ink-cloud dragon clawed itself into the sky with silver talons, obsidian wings unfurling behind. Basher’s tail whipped foul and forked into Shub-Niggurath.
But Shub-Niggurath would not go quietly; even spiraling down to earth, it lunged screaming for Basher, enveloping the dragon with its endless tentacles. Basher was swallowed, wings collapsing as if broken at the root, tail lashing the air, while Shub-Niggurath folded and consumed her. Elspeth’s wonder turned to horror, even as Winseris and Nanrin advanced, arrows and bright ropes of flame directed at the boundless creature. Ghostsign, too, leaped across fallen stones and severed tentacles, slashing any limbs within reach. It was the pattering rain of warm slop from the onslaught that got Elspeth moving. Feymal screamed its death song between Elspeth’s sanguine palms, ravenous for the tender curve of Shub-Niggurath’s belly. The blade cut and pulled, until the fiend was split down its center, surrendering itself and the bloodied wreck it had made of Basher.
Elspeth coiled a shaking arm under the dragon’s jaw, but could not haul her free, even as the others told her no, stop. She sank sobbing into the steaming viscera and prayed that Basher might yet breathe, but the dragon, the dwarf, hung dead in Elspeth’s arms, the ruin of the monstrosity streaming from Basher’s shadowed scales.
In the wake of Shub-Niggurath’s death, its young fell silent. Elspeth pushed away from the dead and stood dripping blood over the field of young; they were not dead.
“Burn them,” Elspeth told Nanrin. The witch conjured a fire from the depths of their fourfold grief, enough flame to enshroud the thousand young and burn them from the face of the world. The fire sparked on the greasy surface of the wretched river, sending a ribbon of flame north and south.
The scent of death still hung in the air as they marched south in a single, gore-drenched line along the still burning River Tayl. The dark man appeared beside Elspeth, and though she kept her eyes forward, she felt him, as oily and hot in her ear as Shub-Niggurath had been. She watched as he opened a portal in the world, cutting one place into another. Following the River Tayl, it would be a long walk to Khyber Bay, and an even longer walk to find a ship that might carry them — where? She thought the question, and he only laughed, barbarous and cold.
The portal — a gate? — shone like a collection of iridescent, globular coins, and none save Elspeth took note of it. One moment the party followed the burning river, with the cries of the dying young in their ears. The next, it was Holy Wood they approached, the ground cracked and desert-dry beneath their boots. Still dripping blood, Feymal trembled in Elspeth’s hand, as if it knew the land that had birthed it, and the sword sang to unleash horrors anew. Holy Wood — so named, though no tree marred the horizon as far as one could see — was said to be as distant from all things as the stars were distant from the world. Unreachable by any but the most faithful, the desert was home to a black pit where it was said the one true god did live.
Elspeth knew Holy Wood put them closer to the Dunegall Sea, from whose tossed blue-gray waves the dismay of Lowenhold Prison rose, ebon shards thrown from heavens that had never known starlight. In the dark of her mind, Elspeth felt the slither of waterlogged tentacles and saw the ratcheting open of an ancient eye, amber and upon her. She did not look away, only kept advancing until the atrocity bowed its head.
Before her Holy Wood yawned, black and vile, countless horrors crawling from its darkness. The star that fragmented itself into Lowenhold had landed here first, a fist in the dry earth, an immeasurable breach from which none had returned. The beasts had made the desert their plaything, shitting the dust to mud, lobbing handfuls of wet at one another. They were goblins and sprites, mischief and mayhem.
“There,” Ghostsign said, and leveled a finger at the largest of the creatures rampaging in the dirt.
A winged serpent slithered its way through the chaos toward her. Elspeth supposed she should have been in awe that these creatures existed, that they drew the same air she did, but she saw these beasts as she saw the dark man: only as a means to an end. The dark man cared for none of them; saw in them only the means to his ascendancy.
“Yig.” She growled the name. In its great arching wings, Elspeth saw only the wreck that had been made of Basher, and she charged with a fiendish scream. To her he was but a lock that, once removed, would see them closer to opening the prison gates. He was a thing to be cut open and bypassed, nothing more.
In her rage, Elspeth had no clear notion of where the other women were; they were vague impressions, arrows whispering past, flame and other spells brightening the dusty air, but her focus was the serpent. She danced in close, a sword’s length away from the beast.
Instead of taking to the air, the god-serpent used its wings to buffet Elspeth before she could strike. She was swept from her feet into the foul wet of the ground, where the snake fell upon her, lunging with his poison-fanged maw.
Elspeth drew the beast closer — wrapped her legs around its writhing length and plunged Feymal through its scaled, quivering belly. With one hard upward pull, she cut Yig from belly to jaw, coating herself in a warm shower of blood. The two halves of the serpent flailed in death’s final confusion, then collapsed on either side of her drenched body.