Someone Else’s Nightmare

The beast came through the fire at the foot of the wall, its chest and shoulder burning. It staggered below them.

Maeril leaned over the parapet and spread her fingers, sending blue, green, and violet light twisting down before its eyes. “Just calm down for a moment, will you?”

She drew the colors into a shifting pattern, waiting for its shoulders to slacken. The creature shook its head, scattering sparks, and fixed its eyes on her through the fading light. Its hind legs bunched.

Erik lifted his aim. “It’s coming up!”

The creature launched into the air. Erik’s arrow drove under its ribs and twisted it sideways, but its burning body kept coming. Red gathered in its eyes.

Erik dropped the bow and brought the shield across his chest, turning his boots against the stone. “Gond. Let it hold.”

The beam struck. The shield became ash without cracking, and Erik dropped one shoulder behind its vanishing edge. Red-white force raked his chest. His coat disappeared beneath it; stone opened behind him in a widening scar.

For one heartbeat his body was a dark shape inside the light.

Then he slid backward onto one knee beside the top of the stair. Smoke rose from his chest. His jaw clenched until one tusk split his lip, but he was breathing.

The beast crashed into the wall where he had stood.

Claws and tusks burst through the parapet on Maeril’s right. She staggered back beside Erik as the floor jumped. The creature hauled its burning body over the wall and onto the strip of roof, its head hanging above the open stairwell. To Maeril’s left, a stretch of parapet had fallen away. Beyond the broken edge, the slope lay forty feet below.

Rishi heard stone break as he flew above the wooded slope. The tower shook ahead of him. Through a breach in its upper wall he could see the beast moving on the roof, but neither Maeril nor the orc. The last stand of trees still hid the foot of the tower.

He drove his wings harder. Pain caught beneath his ribs, cutting the stroke short. He lost height and tilted into a turn, skimming past the branches with his staff held close.

Shallower wingbeats kept him aloft. He climbed toward the broken wall above the slope.

At the top of the stair, Maeril could still see the blackened timber far below. She sent another bead of fire down toward it.

The beast swung its head across the stairwell and caught the bead in its jaws.

Orange shone through the seams of its teeth. Smoke burst from one nostril. Maeril waited for the blast to tear out through its mouth.

Nothing came but black smoke against her face. The beast lifted its head clear of the stairwell.

“Clear the stair,” Erik shouted.

Erik had both arms beneath a fallen block at the top of the stair. His hands shook, and each breath rasped. Maeril stepped aside along the broken parapet, giving him room. With the gap at his back, he planted his feet and turned, driving the stone down toward the timber with his hips and shoulder.

It struck the timber where her acid had eaten deepest.

Erik’s hands fell to his sides. He swayed, eyes half closed, as the beam cracked below them. Then the timber folded, a seam raced up the wall, and the roof tilted beneath Maeril’s boots.

The beast’s burned shoulder buckled as it hauled itself round toward Erik. It caught itself and lunged, jaws open. Erik did not lift his head.

Maeril shoved him backward through the gap.

The edge broke beneath her boots. She fell after him, staff clenched in one hand. The roof folded inward, taking the beast down into the tower as she dropped past the broken wall. Dust swallowed Erik below her.

She flung out her free hand and cast Feather Fall. Her plunge slowed; stones shot past her toward the slope.

She reached down, searching for Erik so she could cast it on him. A sleeve, a hand—she could find nothing through the dust and tumbling masonry.

Where are you?

A gap opened in the dust as Erik hit the slope flat on his front. His chest and face struck the mud; his body jolted and lay still.

Maeril’s hand stayed outstretched. The beast’s roar stopped beneath the grinding stone.

Her boots touched the slope. Her bad leg would not take her weight, and she went down on one hip, sliding through leaves with her staff still in hand.

As the last of the wall came down, Maeril saw Rishi clear the last trees through the dust. He was visible now, radiant wings burning at his back. He dropped toward Erik a few yards farther down the slope.

Erik did not move when Rishi landed beside him.

Rishi’s wings vanished as he laid down his staff and knelt. He rested a hand between Erik’s shoulders and bent close. “He’s breathing.”

Maeril stared at the faint movement beneath his hand. She had seen Erik hit; she could scarcely believe there was breath left in him. Thank the gods.

Rishi looked up. “Turn him.”

Maeril crawled to them, set her staff beside Rishi’s, and took Erik’s shoulders. Together they rolled him onto his back. Blood marked his mouth, and burned cloth exposed a raw black-red wound across his chest. His right leg lay at an angle no living joint should hold.

Rishi went to the knee.

The impact had driven dirt into an open wound and pushed bone into sight. Rishi stopped with his fingers just clear of it, then bent closer. His face was gray with pain. Blood darkened his robe at the flank.

“Your side,” Maeril said.

“Later. Hold him.”

“He is unconscious.”

“Hold him.”

She obeyed.

Rishi cleaned what he could with water from his healer’s flask, then placed both hands around the lower leg. He moved slowly, finding the line of bone beneath damaged flesh.

The joint returned with a wet grind.

Maeril held Erik still. Rishi never looked away.

Light gathered between his hands. It was not soft or ceremonial. It entered the wound like another kind of work, sealing vessels, drawing flesh over bone, persuading torn muscle to remember its shape. Erik’s body arched once beneath Maeril’s grip.

The bleeding slowed. The knee remained swollen and ugly, but the leg lay straight.

Rishi kept one palm over it until the last radiance faded. Then he sat back on his heels. “He will keep it.”

Maeril looked from Erik’s unconscious face to the ruin of the tower. “A fortunate man.”

“Yes.”

“Fortunate he missed the repair.”

Rishi’s breath caught against his wound. It might almost have been a laugh.

Far below, voices still rose from the timber camp. Stone shifted in the ruins above Maeril.

Rishi stayed beside Erik, one hand pressed against his own flank. The orc’s breathing had steadied.

Maeril collected her staff.

Rishi looked from Erik to the ruin. “Can another one appear here? There are people down there who cannot walk.”

“I don’t know yet. I’ll see what I can find.”

Maeril climbed the few yards to the rubble, keeping clear of the wall that still leaned over the slope. A fallen lintel lay across the creature’s flattened skull. Exposed bone and one shattered tusk jutted from beneath it. There was nothing left behind the ruined eye sockets to hold that red light.

It was dead.

She worked down toward the camp, following the damage back among the timber stacks. Deep claw marks ended in churned earth. Beyond them she found bootprints, drag marks, and a long scrape where a log had rolled. She circled the first shattered stack, then went farther into the trees. The leaf litter there lay undisturbed.

A draft horse trembled beside the ditch. It backed away when she approached, pulling against its tether. Maeril stopped and waited until it let her touch its neck.

She laid a bridge between her words and its animal memory. “Before the red light. What was here?”

The answer brought the red back: a torn mouth, the wrench of the traces, the need to run. She kept her palm against its neck and asked again, more gently. This time she caught the sense of something appearing where nothing had been. When she tried to reach further back, the horse shied and the memory broke into terror again.

A crow offered the image of a bad egg cracking, but repeated it when she asked where. She paid it with a crumb and got nothing more useful.

At the broken stack, Maeril planted her staff and opened her senses. The remains of the fight crowded together: red force along the erased lanes, fear lying thick over the ditch, her own fire spread through wood and stone. She had to move clear of the scorched ground before she could separate anything beneath it.

A sharp distortion drew her back toward the slope. She followed it between two splintered trunks, hoping to find where a passage had opened. Then she recognized the place. She had watched the creature vanish from here during its charge. This was one of its leaps.

She stood for a moment with her weight on the staff. Then she made her way back up the slope to the tower.

She crouched beside the exposed skull and opened her senses. She held her free hand above the bone, then drew it slowly back along the edge of the crushed hide. The red force was strongest around the ruined eyes. Beneath it lay something colder, deep enough that she could scarcely distinguish it from the creature itself.

She tried again farther from the skull. The same pressure remained. She could find no edge to the working, no place where it had been laid over flesh that had existed before it.

Her bad leg began to shake. She eased herself upright and waited for the pain to settle before returning to Rishi.

Two workers had made the climb from the camp. One knelt beside Erik while Rishi bandaged the other’s arm. Maeril lowered herself onto a stump.

“Nothing led into the camp,” she said. “I keep finding where it crossed the wood, but nothing that tells me where it came from.”

Rishi checked the fingers below the bandage. “It vanished in front of me and appeared up the slope. Could it have arrived that way?”

“It could. The tracks tell me very little.” She rubbed grit from her palm. “The remains are what trouble me. I don’t think this began as an ordinary living creature.”

Rishi looked toward the tower. “You think someone made it?”

Maeril turned her hand over, still feeling that cold beneath the skin. “There is something I remember from a bestiary. A beholder might account for it.”

“What is a beholder?”

His hands rested around the worker’s arm as he waited for her answer.

Maeril looked up. “A floating creature. A great round body with a mouth full of teeth and one large eye. Smaller eyes on stalks above it. Those eyes work magic.”

He glanced toward the pale lanes cut through the trees.

“Some can dream a creature into existence,” she continued. “Once it has a body, it can go out into the world. That may be what happened here.”

Rishi returned to the bandage, folding the loose end beneath a turn of cloth.

The worker drew her arm against her chest. Rishi watched her flex the fingers once more, then let her go.

The last sunlight reached through the erased forest in long red bars. Maeril had lost most of it among the broken trees. Beyond the trees, north along the Trade Way, Waterdeep waited in the dusk.

“There is a beholder we already have reason to look for,” Maeril said. “Xanathar.”

Rishi’s hands went still on his knees. “Xanathar is one of those?”

“Yes, but I cannot put this at its door yet. There may be others beneath Waterdeep.”

Rishi looked down at Erik, then toward the camp. “How sure are you about the dream?”

“It fits what I remember. I want the book in front of me before I call it certain.” She wiped ash from her cheek. “Enough to warn the others. We go to the house as soon as we can.”

A call came from the trees below them. Rishi lifted his head.

The first guards entered between the trees in pairs, keeping trunks between themselves and the tower. Two healers followed with bags and a folded stretcher.

Their sergeant stopped behind a tree. “Where’s the creature? A priest of Lathander warned us about its eyes.”

“Under the tower. It is dead.” Maeril pointed with her staff. “Keep your people clear of that leaning wall.”

A healer knelt beside Erik and opened her bag. “What have you done for him?”

“I’ve set the knee and stopped the bleeding,” Rishi said. “He has not woken.”

He pointed down the slope. “There are more wounded in the ditch. Some couldn’t walk.”

The healer glanced at his bloodstained robe. “The others are with them. We’ll take over here. Sit still and let her bind your side.”

Rishi sat back while the second healer loosened the cloth at his flank.

The sergeant stepped closer. “Who brought down the tower?”

Maeril pointed to herself and Erik. “He and I did. Rishi kept it off the workers before it came for us.”

The sergeant looked from the ruins to their staffs. “Both of you, put down your weapons and surrender. The Watchful Order will hear your account in the city.”

“The wounded need to go first,” Rishi said.

The sergeant nodded toward the healers, who were settling Erik onto the stretcher. “The wounded will go first. You two are coming with us.”

Rishi laid his staff on the ground and held out his empty hand to Maeril. She took his forearm, then set her own staff beside his. A guard collected the staffs; another checked Rishi and Maeril for other weapons.

The healers lifted Erik between them. He had not stirred. Guards helped the two workers down the slope while two remained to keep people out of the ruins.

Rishi and Maeril followed the stretcher down through the trees to the waiting cart on the road. Once the wounded were aboard, a guard motioned them onto the rear board and climbed up beside them. Their staffs went forward with the sergeant.

Maeril kept hold of Rishi’s arm as the cart turned north.