It took only a short time to make preparations. Zirilla took her bow, I took my bow and greatsword, and Luthiel took a small bundle of parts that he would use as a focus for some of his spells.

  Zirilla didn’t give any object to his accompanying us, not this time. The need for Luthiel, both at the keep and in the field, had changed: not only did we have more psychic defenders, but Palimpsest was dozens of kilometers away.

  It wasn’t just that we couldn’t take anyone who didn’t fly. Now that we knew the true scale of our enemy, our chance of quickly overpowering them in their lair—or even overpowering them at all—seemed slim. Their defenders were sure to be powerful and numerous, with functionally limitless reinforcements.

  But as far as I knew—as far as any of us knew—the only way they could do what they were doing, psychically, was if they were both extraordinarily predisposed to natural psychic talent and able to replicate their mental capacity for controlling others without [Focus]. Even if they weren’t the vine-creature that we’d killed in the other cave, they’d still have to be very large.

  They would need a lot of food, water, and air. They’d have to fear quakes if they were too deep underground, and elementals if they were even deeper. They’d have to have a truly massive source of mana to fuel their constant telepathy. These things not only meant that they couldn’t be too deep below the earth, and that some form of passage from the surface to their vitals was necessary. And if they were on the surface, then all the better.

  Hence the plan: the three of us were fast and powerful. And from what we knew, Palimpsest didn’t know we had any inkling of where they were. We’d fly to their lair and strike fast, then dig ourselves out of the rubble, if we had to.

  Luthiel signaled that he was almost ready to leave, and so I contacted the voice that I’d spoken with among the floating plant creatures. I go now to kill the parasite in its lair, I said. Please, keep my people safe in my absence.

  We will protect.

  You may wish to shelter inside our keep, I said. It’s unlikely that we’ll be able to quickly kill every flying creature that they send. I don’t want you to be hurt.

  We may shelter, it said, not asking it as a question but rather stating it as a possibility.

  I could only hope they’d do as I asked: the skies would be dangerous, soon. I didn’t ask or tell them anything else. Nothing they could say would make me any more certain of their assistance than they already had.

  I rose into the air, joining Luthiel and Zirilla and merging our windsleeves, flying close together as we moved into the third mist layer and set out toward the place that Mirio had marked for me. Zirilla took the lead, reaching out with her senses to avoid any elementals and landmasses while Luthiel and I both used our psychic skills to shield us from sight.

  To be clear, Zirilla asked. The plan is that you’ll bear Palimpsest’s entire psychic assault on your own.

  Yes.

  Without the enchantments we have on the keep to protect you.

  Those enchantments mostly make it easy to protect everyone in the keep as a group, I said. Put everyone under one mind’s umbrella. Protecting both of you shouldn’t be too hard.

  She can do it, said Luthiel.

  If you both insist... Zirilla said.

  Zirilla and Luthiel were both familiar enough with me and my mind to guide me even if Palimpsest’s constant mental pressure turned me into a frothing beast—which may well have been the case.

  On the way, we mostly discussed the fight to come: what we’d do if Luthiel needed to take over for me if Palimpsest was too strong, what sorts of creatures we might encounter as their defenders, how best to handle the varying scenarios in which we wound up buried under tons of stone….

  There were a thousand things to consider, but we’d probably only gotten through a hundred of them by the time I dipped down to the edge of the mist layer, checking the contours of the forests and mountains below us, and realized we were almost there. We were flying along the border of forest and snow on a mountain’s peak.

  I think I found it, Zirilla said as we approached. There’s a pit ahead, don’t know how deep.

  Sense anything? I asked Luthiel.

  I can feel something, he said. The vibrations of its mind somewhere below us—but I sense no defenders. Not yet.

  Let’s hope that’s a good sign. We’ll dive fast once we leave the mists. Get to the bottom of the pit once we’ve taken them by surprise and see what else we sense, there.

  We left the mists, diving straight downward with the wind at our backs.

  I could see the slope of a mountain below us, a blanket of forest just giving way to frosted, stone-covered earth. Directly below us, and on the fringe of the forest, there was a gaping hole perhaps a hundred meters in diameter. There was no telling how deep it went: the luminescent surface of the second mist layer was just visible kilometers below us.

  They can’t have bored too deep, I said. Or they’d have to contend with the elementals.

  In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this pit was likely as deep as they could make it while remaining below the third mist layer and out of sight of the air elementals. The least likely stone to encounter elementals in was that of a mountain: hemmed in on all sides by air, elementals of earth and fire tended to avoid it in favor of deeper places.

  This was Palimpsest’s stronghold, then: as deep a hole as they could carve between two elemental kingdoms. Akkakesh didn’t strike down those who flew above the third mist layer as long as they were flying above a mountaintop, but perhaps our enemy had wanted the mists to hide them from the elementals in any case.

  We dove out of the mists and into the pit, Zirilla bending our windsleeve so that we gathered an speed at an alarming rate. Within moments we’d crossed the lip of the pit and plunged into the dark. Soon streaks of glowing pink moss appeared on the sides of the pit.

  I sensed no defenders when we left the cloud of mist—a good sign. It meant that Palimpsest had likely not sensed us coming.

  As we dove, I saw stains on the sides of the pit, streaks of discoloration that might have once been blood. Did they throw corpses down here—bodies that burst when they struck the rough walls of the circular pit? A sickening scent of rot wafted up from the depths below us even though we were at least a kilometer from the bottom, and I thought of the psychic seedling that we’d killed near the settlement, fed by the decaying carcass of a giant worm.

  A moment later I felt Palimpsest’s mental assault on my mind. It was much the same as it had been before: an enormously potent presence made of bizarre, vibrating thoughts that felt nothing like an ordinary animal’s emotions. I dispersed the spike of sudden psychic energy through my body, blunting my conscious thoughts so that I began to fly automatically.

  Nonetheless, it wasn’t as intense as the assault that I’d borne while defending the keep. A strange thing, given that we were likely closer now to Palimpsest than the keep was to any of their nodes.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  It took me a second’s thought to realize why their psychic assault was so dim, but when I did I burst into a broad grin. Galenni would have used their refocused attentions to take a much-needed respite… but our new friends were likely using it as a chance to attack.

  Palimpsest couldn’t bear down on me with all their psychic might: they had to defend themselves from our new allies.

  I could still focus on reaching out with my [Wild Bond], sure that any moment we’d encounter Palimpsest’s defenses, both their minions and their psychic strength.

  Wyverns, I soon found myself saying. A lot of them. They’ll come up through the mists as we approach.

  What’s the plan? Zirilla asked.

  We can fall faster than they can, I said.

  If they collapse this hole on us…. she said, leaving the rest unspoken.

  We’re past that point now, I answered. They would only be sealing themselves in with us if they collapsed it from the top: we could fall faster than the rocks, too. A better strategy would be to collapse it from the bottom, but that would still leave us in a cavern above them. Even then, we’d be able to reach out into the rock and break it over them to bury them in their self-made tomb.

  But I had a feeling they wouldn’t, not until it was a last resort—this creature was so powerful that I doubted they’d ever prepared to bury themselves alive to stop an intruder, and if they had, it wouldn’t be an intruder of our size and speed.

  A moment later, we saw the wyverns rising out of the cloud below us, silhouettes against the light with mist trailing off the edges of their wings.

  My teeth gritted against Palimpsest’s psychic assault, I simply followed the path that Zirilla mentally laid out before me, jerking myself to one side with an abrupt push of my windsleeve and falling in behind her along with Luthiel.

  A wall of air struck us a moment later, preceding the rising flock of wyverns by only a few meters and pushing us all upward. Either Palimpsest had created some mechanism to release a pressurized wave of air into the pit, or these wyverns had been levelled to be more powerful than those normally found on the mountaintops.

  Still, I followed Zirilla as our enemy’s alien mind beat and throbbed against my own. We twisted in the air, diving close to one of the creature’s talons as she disrupted their flight paths with calculated burst of wind against their wings and bodies, keeping them from coming close to us as we rushed down.

  We hit the second mist layer, and I got a brief impression of shadows in the faintly glowing mist around me as I flew with my mind more than my eyes. A moment later I got the first real impression of just how fast we were going as we tore our way out of the layer and rushed through the much shorter distance between the second layer and the first: hundreds of meters passed by in fewer than two seconds before we struck the first layer, cut our way through it in a flash, then sped toward another one further down.

  I got the instant impression of stones that were hovering in the air, perfectly still between the layers of mists—then realized that they were massive spiders, perched with perfect stillness on glittering webs that covered the whole of the pit below us, woven through every square meter. There was another mist layer below what was normally the first, past the spiders, turning them into silhouettes just as the wyverns had been.

  Fly, Zirilla insisted, and we dove headlong into the webbing, twisting to follow her trajectory. I shut my eyes and felt a a frigid strand break against my face, shattering from its brittleness—Luthiel was freezing the webs a moment before we reached them, perhaps even coating them with a thin veneer of conjured ice.

  Palimpsest’s mind beat against mine like a mallet beating a gong. For a moment my eyelids fluttered and it was all I could to follow the guiding thoughts that she sent me, to rush after her almost blindly. I felt the webs break against me, splintering under my momentum despite their thickness. I saw a flash of light, heard the squeal of hot air escaping chitin—Zirilla had blasted one of the spiders that had grown too close.

  Ground, she said suddenly, and each of us rotated back until we were belly-down, spreading our arms and catching more air as we struck the layer of mist below us, falling through it only briefly to emerge and see the bottom of the pit at last.

  Zirilla loosed a blast of air that cushioned our falls as we plummeted toward the ground, and I fell into a hard landing against moss-covered stone a moment later, then rose, my head ringing with Palimpsest’s ceaseless reverberations.

  I heard Zirilla make a noise of disgust, and it was easy to see why. The air was thick with the scent of death and decay. White, translucent vines ran along the ground everywhere, which seemed as if it had once been carved to be flat but was now marked everywhere with craters and rubble.

  I couldn’t see the stone. A thick, glowing pink fungus covered the ground beneath the watery vines, it surface furry and frayed. The glow of the fungus was irregular, seemed to seethe as I looked at it—and I saw that it was crawling all over with insects. They were small enough to fit in my palm, in some places so dense that the glowing moss below was only glimpsed as a shifting field of specks.

  Around us there was a series of huge stone pillars arranged in a circle along the outside edges of the pit, which opened up in every direction around us. The last mist layer was just low enough to stretch across the surface of the wide cavern that this created, lighting a space that was big enough to contain a city.

  Some fragmented part of my mind recognized that it was quiet beautiful, in an eerie way. The rough-hewn pillars stretching out in every direction at irregular intervals hinted at the massive weight of the mountain above us, but the layer of mist that obscured the actual ceiling gave the cavern a day-like quality, even if it was thin enough that the light was dim.

  Then a sharp command from Luthiel drew my attention to the monsters all around us: arachnids with raised, clawed forelegs, looking almost like crabs as they clawed and leapt their way toward us across the uneven stone. Under the weight of Palimpsest’s overbearing psychic assault, I had almost not seen them, or at least not had the sense to deem them any more important than anything else around me.

  But as one reared up before me, I unclasped my greatsword and sheared through the front half of its face, surprised at how much strength I needed to use to cleave through its exoskeleton. They were strong, these creatures, perhaps a higher level than the mantis hulks despite their smaller size.

  I hissed, spinning as I took a few steps toward the next-closest one and seeing hundreds more of them closing in on us from all sides. I dispatched my second adversary, first cutting off one of its claws in a spray of blood, then thrusting my blade through its head, then moved to find the third….

  I didn’t get the chance. Zirilla called me, breaking me out of the beginnings of a killing trance, and I leapt into the air and took flight, following her as she launched herself deeper into the cavern.

  Then I heard a tremendous crack, followed by a rumble. Ahead of us, a cascade of rubble and dust fell from the mist-covered ceiling.

  Palimpsest was not waiting to watch us try their guardian wyverns and insects, no matter how strong they were: they were collapsing part of the cavern over us.

  I could sense the air around me, even through the painful pressure of our enemy’s psychic assault, and I could feel the massive negative space filling the world behind us as the ceiling cracked and stone and rubble poured in behind.

  She bid us slow, and I obeyed her, unthinking. We landed, skidding to a halt in front of a sheer wall, flat and cut smooth.

  Then the mountain above us collapsed down upon us, a cacophonous fall of rock that seemed so mighty that surely it would crush us to death. I looked up at at the falling stone as our enemy’s assault still pulsed painfully through my body, eyes wide….

  Conjured hard light appeared around us, a forcefield with a scaffold to brace it. Zirilla reached out and pushed against the falling stone, making sure it fell in such a way that most of the force came down not on us, but the space around us. We were buried in seconds, and then the grinding, rumbling sounds of the falling rock continued for another half minute.

  Then everything was silent.

  “Did I miss something?” I asked at last. “We were supposed to end up here after we killed them.”

  Luthiel nodded toward the small section of flat wall beside me in the preserved pocket of air. “You missed something.”

  I looked. Bored into the flat wall were holes, each just big enough to fit my arm.

  “For food,” said Luthiel. “Palimpsest just beyond this wall. I can… feel them.”

  I nodded. It would explain why the assault on my mind had seemingly gotten stronger.

  “I can get us through in a minute,” said Zirilla.

  “I’ll watch for any shift in the stone,” said Luthiel.

  I began to channel the mana in the environment into Zirilla as she ran one hand across the stone wall. Through the wall, I could sense many more vines coating the cave floor, and fist-sized insects that had begun to swarm toward us. Then:

  You. We must speak.

  It was Palimpsest.

  “What do you know,” I said. “They want to talk. Anything you two want to say?”

  “Sure,” said Zirilla. “Tell them it takes at least two mountains to kill an elementalist of my calibre, and that I’m much offended by their using only one.”

  “Perhaps... tell them to rejoice,” Luthiel said steadily. “For before they die, they will witness the champions of the elvenkind.”

  Slowly, I began to laugh. I heard a crack as Zirilla broke a section of stone away. It wouldn’t be long now.

  I gritted my teeth against the constant pain of the psychic assault, then answered Palimpsest.

  My companions have a message for you, I began.