Escape

The Pack - The Loading Dock

The mountain wasn't just shaking; it was shivering.

Aga rolled off the lip of the slag bucket, hitting the metal grating of the loading dock with a grunt. He hauled the weeping swordsman out after him, then reached back for Gaidan.

The air in the hangar bay was screaming. Sirens wailed, steam pipes burst with deafening hisses, and the groaning of the rock walls drowned out all thought.

"To the ship!" Aga roared, shoving the swordsman toward the idling barge.

The ore-transport was an ugly thing—a rectangular slab of rusted iron the size of a tavern, held aloft by four massive, vibrating Etheric thrusters. It was built to haul rocks, not people.

Bolla was already in the cockpit, a glass bubble perched on the front of the barge. She was punching buttons with both fists.

"Get on!" the gnome’s voice crackled over the bay's intercom. "The ceiling is coming down!"

Elara and Faren were already sprinting up the loading ramp. Aga dragged the swordsman up behind them, tossing him onto the cold iron deck like a sack of grain. Gaidan followed, still clutching his arm, his face grey.

A massive chunk of the hangar roof, the size of a carriage, broke loose. It slammed into the docking clamp they had just vacated, crushing the slag bucket flat.

"Go!" Aga shouted, slapping the side of the hull.

The thrusters screamed. The barge didn't lift gracefully; it lurched. Gravity fought them. The Stone King, waking in the deep, seemed to be pulling everything back down into the dark.

"I need more power!" Bolla yelled from the cockpit. " The intake valves are clogged with dust!"

Elara didn't hesitate. She ran to the engine housing in the center of the deck. She flipped open the maintenance panel.

"Faren! Hold the bypass valve open!" she ordered.

Faren, his hands bandaged and shaking, grabbed the red wheel and hauled it open. "I don't know what that does!"

"It floods the core!" Elara yelled, jamming her own Etheric capacitor—the one from her cannon—directly into the engine's intake slot. "Hold on!"

BOOM.

The engines backfired, shooting a jet of blue flame fifty feet long out the rear exhaust. The barge surged forward, snapping the last of the docking cables.

They shot out of the bay, not into the open sky, but into the Transit Tunnel—a five-mile tube carved through the mountain's crust, leading to the outer valley.

It was a race against the collapse.

Behind them, the hangar bay crumpled. The tunnel began to twist. The stone ribs of the mountain were snapping.

"Hard left!" Aga shouted from the bow, seeing a falling support beam.

Bolla jerked the stick. The barge banked heavily, scraping its iron belly against the tunnel wall. Sparks showered the deck.

The swordsman slid across the deck, unresisting. He didn't try to grab a railing. He just lay there, staring at the sky rushing by, his eyes empty.

"Help him!" Aga barked at Gaidan.

Gaidan stumbled across the tilting deck, grabbing the Twice-Born by the collar of his tunic and lashing him to a cargo cleat with a length of rope. "Stay put, vessel," Gaidan grunted. "You aren't dying today."

"Incoming!" Faren screamed.

Ahead of them, a Gold-Guard automaton—damaged and half-crushed—fell from a maintenance alcove in the ceiling. It landed on the front of the barge with a metallic crash that shook the teeth of everyone on board.

The machine was missing its legs, but its torso was active. Its green furnace chest glowed. It raised a spinning saw-blade arm, crawling toward the cockpit glass.

"Get it off!" Bolla shrieked. "I can't see!"

Aga drew Gaidan’s longsword. He charged down the length of the barge, fighting the wind and the g-force.

The automaton swiped at him. Aga ducked, the saw-blade shearing off a chunk of his hair.

He didn't try to fence it. He treated it like a tree.

He drove the sword into the gap between the machine's head and chassis. He planted his boot on its chest.

"Get off my ship," Aga roared.

He heaved. Metal shrieked. The automaton lost its grip and tumbled backward, falling off the side of the barge and vanishing into the darkness below.

"Hold on!" Bolla yelled. "We're breaching!"

The light at the end of the tunnel wasn't white; it was a wall of dust.

The barge burst out of the mountainside.

For a second, they were weightless. They plummeted through the air, the thrusters coughing. Then, the engines caught. The barge leveled out, skimming the tops of the pine trees in the valley below.

Aga pulled himself up to the railing and looked back.

The mountain was gone.

The peak of Glimmerdeep didn't just fall; it was inhaled. The center of the range collapsed inward, a cloud of dust rising five miles into the air. The sound hit them a moment later—a deafening, low-frequency thud that rattled the bones in Aga’s chest.

The Stone King had rolled over in his sleep, and crushed a civilization.

The barge drifted lower, the engines winding down to a low hum. Bolla set them down in a dry riverbed, miles away from the dust cloud.

Silence rushed back in.

Elara slumped against the engine housing, her face smeared with grease. Faren was leaning over the rail, retching. Gaidan sat heavily on a crate, his eyes closed.

Aga walked to the bow. He looked at the ruin of the mountain.

"We lost," he said quietly.

"We survived," Gaidan corrected, opening his eyes. "In war, that is the only victory that counts."

Aga turned to look at the swordsman. He was still tied to the cargo cleat. He hadn't moved. He was staring at his empty hands, his fingers twitching, grasping for a hilt that wasn't there.

"He is broken," Aga said.

"He is grieving," Elara said, walking over to check the man's pulse. "The bond... it wasn't just magic. It was symbiotic. Without the sword, his neural pathways are misfiring. He doesn't know who he is."

"He is a liability," Gaidan noted, though his voice lacked its usual edge.

"He is part of the pack," Aga said firmly. He cut the ropes binding the man.

"Get up," Aga told him.

The Swordsman looked up. His eyes were red-rimmed, terrified. "The Edge... he took the Edge."

"We will get it back," Aga said. He pointed to the East.

High in the sky, a crimson streak was fading against the blue. The black tower, Root's escape pod, was a distant speck, moving fast toward the burning horizon of the desert.

"We know where he is going," Aga said. "Taba-Taba. The Domain of Fire."

"Why there?" Faren asked, wiping his mouth. "What's in the desert?"

"Fire," Zalim's vessel whispered, his voice trembling. "The Dead King of Rage. The Burning Prince."

"Another god to bleed," Elara realized.

Aga sheathed his sword. He looked at his battered, broken family.

"Then we follow," Aga said. "Bolla, can this thing fly to the desert?"

Bolla hopped out of the cockpit, kicking a loose bolt across the deck. She looked at the smoking engines, the dented hull, and the impossible distance to the East.

She grinned, revealing a gold tooth.

"It's a brick with a rocket strapped to it, big man. It'll fly until it explodes. Let's go chase a wizard."