We took a moment to collect ourselves in the stench of the cavern. All four of us were exhausted, and we were splattered with black ichor from head to toe.

  “Is anyone hurt?” Elle asked.

  Bran and I shook our heads no. Mira used a cleaning spell to help clean off Bran and Elle a bit, and I mended Mira and Elle’s outer clothing, which was pretty badly shredded in places.

  “Thanks for that,” Elle said.

  “What about the pearl?” Bran asked, referring to their dream.

  “I don’t know. All I can see are rocks and bones and the burning bodies of the Xerith down here,” Elle said.

  “Is the pearl from your dream a real pearl or is it figurative?” I asked.

  “I think it’s figurative, just like the vipers were,” Elle said.

  “Well, let’s look around and see if we can find something hidden,” Mira said. “If you were a shapeshifting assassin trying to hide something valuable, this is the safest, most remote place in the entire complex. It has to be here.”

  We split up and started looking around various places. I flew around and looked more closely at the walls and ceiling, but I saw nothing unusual even with the magic of Mordon’s helm to point out magical or hidden things. Elle was standing in a far corner of the room where the bones were more intact and piled higher than in other places.

  “If I were one of them, I’d bury something over here and pile my rubbish on top of it,” Elle said.

  I flew down to look. “Let’s see if there’s anything down there. Everyone stand back.”

  I used a telekinetic spell to push the bones away from where they were piled and kept at it until I uncovered a large, flat boulder. The boulder was at the very limit of what I could move with my magic, but I managed to slide it away from where it rested. Underneath was a niche dug out of the solid rock that was just big enough to hold a leather-bound book that was about a foot wide and tall. On the cover was a golden plaque affixed to the leather.

  “That’s the covenant Name of God,” Elle said breathlessly. She reverently bent down and picked the book out of its resting place. Despite being crushed by a huge rock for years, the book was perfectly preserved. Even the name plate was completely unscratched. She opened it and inside were pristine white pages of paper with perfectly legible script in the common tongue.

  “That’s definitely what we’re here for,” Bran said. “I can tell it’s holy.”

  “Sure is. I can feel it, too,” Elle said.

  “Let’s just get out of here,” I said. “Unless you want to keep digging around in the bones, that is.”

  “Back to civilization, then,” Bran said as he put a gauntleted hand on my pauldron.

  Mira followed suit. Elle had her hands full with the book and with her shield, so I reached out and took her pauldron in hand, then focused my will on a teleportation spell. We appeared in the center of Bran’s and my bedroom above the smithy. We stood there for a minute, just getting used to the idea that it was over. Then Mira and Elle went into their bedroom, but Bran and I used the bracelets to change out of our armor and we went downstairs. We could hear the hammering of Dortham and my brothers in the smithy below us, and we saw Nora, Samirah and Bethan in the common room watching my nephews play. We both walked down the stairs to the smithy. Darek and Elric hammered away at their work, but Dortham flicked a glance our way when we entered the smithy, noticed how sweaty we were, and paused in his hammering. Maybe it was our posture, though. Or maybe the smell.

  “Is everyone all right?” Dortham asked.

  Elric and Darek stopped hammering and looked. For all my stoic attitude, it started to settle in on me just how much danger we had just passed through. Everything I had seen was trying to kill me with everything they had, and knew I was very fortunate to be alive. My hands started shaking a bit and my eyes were wide. Bran wasn’t nearly as unnerved as I was just then, and I think that had a lot to do with the way he trusted God for his protection. Even after the miracles I’d seen, I still trusted only in myself, and I knew how fallible I was.

  “Yeah, we’re fine,” Bran replied. “Mira’s a little shaken up, but she’ll settle down. Elle’s with her.”

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  “It was bad then, wasn’t it?’ Dortham asked as he put his hammer and tongs down, leaving the tasset he was working on the anvil.

  “It was a living nightmare, and Jeron faced most of it by himself,” Bran admitted while grabbing my shoulder. “It was like the temple in Mithram but worse. Much worse.”

  “Was it worth it?”

  “There won’t be any more Executors coming to town, I think,” Bran said, releasing my shoulder. “There was something else. We found a holy book. Somehow, I think it’s going to change things in this world for the better.”

  Dortham could see I was in a good bit of distress, and he put a hand on each of our shoulders. “Bran, Jeron, I can see that this was a tough day for both of you. I’ve never known either of you to act selfishly when the welfare of others is at stake, and I’m sure that the decisions you’re making are for the good of us all. You should take solace in that and find peace in knowing that you helped people even if they don’t know it or personally thank you for it.”

  Bran and I both thought about that for a minute.

  “Most people would never thank us anyway, would they?” Bran asked.

  “No, they won’t. They don’t know how badly off they are, and most everyone wants to keep on doing whatever they’re doing, especially when it’s the wrong thing,” Dortham said. “People are strange that way.”

  Bran looked like he was at a loss. He looked down, and his shoulders slumped a little. “So, what now?”

  Dortham thought back on his experience as a vigilante. He knew that sometimes after a traumatic event, the most helpful thing to do was to immerse himself in the mundane. “We can use some hinges,” he said.

  As I numbly went to my workstation, I wondered how he had gotten to be so wise, not that I would ever tell him I thought so. As I picked up an ingot, my hands stopped shaking so much. He was right again. I picked up my tongs and set the ingot into the coals.

  It felt good to do something familiar.

  -----

  Two bald old men in common clothing walked down the Path of Wisdom in Aerie, gazing with serious eyes at the aftermath of the battle in the courtyard before the pillared Temple to the Overgod. Everywhere were strewn the remains of creatures that defied description. Many of them looked human except for some form of mutation like a pair of wings or extra sets of arms and the like.

  “You ever remember seein’ anything like this, Knuckles?” the thinner of the men asked as he carefully stepped with his peg leg around a pile of smoking corpses. It was easy to slip with a peg leg.

  “Can’t say I have, Lefty,” Knuckles said. “But I get the feeling there’ll be fewer of our kids getting’ nicknames like ours.” The tips of two of his fingers on his left hand were chewed off may years ago in a harrowing escape from a nameless menace. “I told you there was a Sewer Beast.”

  “Reckon there was a whole mess of ‘em,” Lefty said, looking around.

  “Sure was,” Knuckles said. “Little whipper snappers ’ll believe our stories now, they will.”

  “Heh,” Lefty chuckled, pointing. “Look at the expression on their faces, will ye?”

  The two old men had a long chuckle at the young men coming up the street behind them.

  “Who’s a daft old liar now?” Knuckles shouted at them. He held up his maimed hand for emphasis.

  The young men looked around them with wide eyes, murmuring to each other. Lefty and Knuckles just laughed.

  “I ain’t seen anything so sweet to my eyes in twenty years!” Knuckles said. He danced a little jig as he pointed at the smoldering gates of the Temple of the Overgod.

  “You reckon they’re all dead?” Lefty asked as they drew closer to the temple.

  “Hope so,” Knuckles answered.

  “Me, too,” Lefty said. “We been tellin’ ‘em fer years that it was the priests all along. I reckon they’ll listen now.”

  “Reckon so,” Knuckles said. “Hey, look there, Lefty.”

  “What is it?” Lefty asked. “You know I can’t see that far, you old fart.”

  There was a group of soldiers standing in a half circle around a particular group of corpses. They were the king’s personal guard, easily identified by their surcoats and halberds. They were scratching their heads and staring at each other numbly. Lefty and Knuckles hobbled over to see what they were looking at. On the scorched cobblestones were several nobles, by their dress, who all had wings and various mutations like extra arms and tentacles with razor sharp bones at the end. Each one of them had a hole six inches wide burned right through the center of their torso.

  “Well, butter my butt and call me a biscuit!” Knuckles said, using his good pointing finger. “That’s the king and queen! They got the royal jewels and everything!”

  “Smell bad enough to gag a maggot, too,” Lefty said as the group of younger men drew close.

  One of the soldiers was a colonel by the decoration on his pauldron. He knelt down and removed the king’s signet ring. “Larson, remove the rest of the jewelry. We’ll bring it back to the keep after we clean this mess up,” Colonel Pike said.

  “If the king an’ queen ’re dead, who do ya reckon the new king ’ll be?” Knuckles asked.

  “Depends on who’s left,” Colonel Pike said.

  A soldier pointed to their left. “General Tanner’s right over there, Colonel. He’s got six arms and a hole in his chest.”

  “Bet there’ll be a lot of our high-ups layin’ around here somewhere,” Lefty said.

  “I bet you’re right, old timer,” Colonel Pike said. “Change of plan, boys. After we recover the jewels, we’re going to let the people have a good look at the things that died here today and clean this mess up tomorrow. For now, we’re going to the castle and we’re going to sample some of the king’s favorite wines while we salute whoever delivered us from these monstrosities.”

  “Huzzah!” the soldiers shouted. Nothing made soldiers smile like free wine.

  The soldiers, led by Colonel Pike, turned and marched back to the castle. At the fringes of the wide courtyard surrounding the temple complex, people began gathering and looking for themselves at the aftermath of the battle. Though there was shock and confusion right now, the two old men knew that those things would be replaced with peace and safety soon enough. Neither had ever seen a Threeday when it wasn’t raining all day long, and they’d never seen a storm as violent as today’s.

  And yet, they’d also never seen a rainbow so bright.