Errod nodded at the Behemoth. "I'd be happy to duel you at some point, but right now this position is about to be swarmed by people taken over by Tindelus."

The woman we'd saved - I still hadn't caught her name and didn't particularly care - nodded frantically. "They're not far behind us, these three had to cut my Dumine out to free me from -"

"Wait," the Behemoth said, cutting her off, "you were one of the ones that was taken over?"

"Yes, but I'm fine now. We have to get out of here, there's going to be too many to..." she trailed off as the Behemoth swelled in size, growing until he was about twelve feet tall and nearly that wide.

He turned towards one of the others. "Do we still have a jar left? Yeah? Good." A hand shot out and he grabbed the woman around the chest, then used his other hand to twist her head off - it happened so fast that there was nothing any of us could have done. He casually tossed the head to the person he'd been talking to, and they caught it before needing to close their eyes, clearly struggling to not throw up. "Put that in the jar," the Behemoth said, "we'll need to study it. You guys have her Dumine still?"

We were all just braced for fighting, but the Behemoth didn't sound aggressive. He sounded calm, reasonable. He let the corpse drop, then nudged the person who had caught her head. "Hey, c'mon, get it in the jar. We need the sample if we're going to figure this shit out."

He turned back to us, raising an eyebrow at Errod's readied sword. "Her Dumine. You have it? Ah, shit. Never mind, I hear them coming. Alright, form up. Ketter, tell the Hierophants we have company - we'll let them vaporize the first few rows, maintain a line and only engage when they get to you. Oh, and you three idiots... feel free to keep standing there, but you're in our killbox."

We shared a glance, and while I could tell Errod was itching to kill the Behemoth we all shuffled past the Halenvar soldiers for now. As we did, a stream of red-robed figures came from another room and took up positions along the back wall, standing on a raised platform to give them line of sight over everyone's heads. Just as they had when I'd caught a glimpse through the portal at Storm's Keep, the Hierophants of Oblivion wore creepy matte black masks that completely covered their faces - but now that I was up close I could see glimpses of their eyes and hear them muttering to each other.

And they were... just people.

One of them was bitching about the rations being stale. Another was annoyed that they had to fight people while they needed to take a shit. These were just regular people that had decided, at some point, that they would dress up in cultist robes and wear masks and try to bring about the end of all existence. Y'know, as a hobby. I could just picture them having a bake sale to raise money for a death ray or... well, honestly, I wasn't sure what they normally did to try and end the world.

Presumably the planar terraforming device wasn't the sort of thing they came across on a regular basis, but I didn't have a chance to ask before the doors were thrown open and a swarm of Tindelus goons erupted in a fountain of gore. The Hierophants were all spellcasters, and they knew some absolutely devastating spells - or maybe it was just that all the weaker and less dangerous ones were already dead after everything that had happened since Brinkmar came into alignment however-many days ago.

Bodies were torn apart, electrocuted, frozen, crushed, and thrown at each other. I thought back to the calm, orderly attacks I half-saw the Empire launching in waves back at the vault just before Tindelus was released, and this felt like someone had taken all that order and flipped it to chaos. The lack of obvious coordination didn't make any difference to the goons, who died all the same as they fought to get past to us. They still had their abilities, and as I sorted through things in slow motion from my memory palace I started to focus more on the ones that weren't dying, rather than being morbidly fascinated with the churned corpses.

There were force fields, people who were somehow able to just tank the damage, and dead zones where elemental attacks just fizzled out as some entropy effect drained them. They began to establish a beachhead in the large hall, but as some charged past the focal point of the magical onslaught Halenvar's soldiers engaged and dispatched them. Still, things were going from an obvious victory on our side to a contested battlefield very quickly, and I was sure that in another minute we would be the ones on the run.

I grabbed Katrin and Errod's hands and dropped them into my memory palace - I'd thought about just speaking in English, but that still risked some of the soldiers around us taking note and paying extra attention to us. No other reason. "They've deliberately kept us away from the door that leads further into the monastery complex," I said quickly, "but we could fight through while they're distracted by Tindelus. Just kill the guards between us and that door, run through, and they can't follow until this fight is over. What do we think?"

Neither of them looked like they loved it, but they also didn't have any better ideas. I made the call.

I didn't want to lose more of my throwing knives if I didn't have to, and there was no way I'd be able to retrieve any I threw right now, so I settled for swinging the edge of my hand into the throat of the guy next to me before grabbing him by the collar and shoving him into the only soldier that had reacted so far. They both went down and we jumped over them, but some of the Hierophants had noticed what we were up to and were starting to cast.

Errod cut one down as he ran past, and as the other began to point at us Katrin waved a hand in front of them and a sickly flickering appeared around their hand as they screamed - I was pretty sure she'd just used her mana manipulation to scramble the spell as it was being cast. I charged into a soldier at waist height and flipped him over my head - Sige had taught me that, though I hadn't been able to actually do it at the time - and then as Errod cleanly decapitated another Hierophant Katrin used her concussive blast spell to clear the last few people away from the door.

I saw the Behemoth turning, but we were already through and running. The building was clearly older than the Clockmaker's time, with narrower hallways and more natural-looking stone walls as opposed to the nearly modern look the labs had showcased. I saw signs of careless modification - odd devices sticking out of walls right in the middle of a mural, reinforced doors whose installation had obliterated a finely-carved doorframe - and I was guessing that they'd been the result of Tantek making this his base during the civil war.

In my memory palace, I was desperately trying to recover the passages from Jake Ross and the Shattered Crown where he discovered the secret labyrinth below this building. I wasn't sure it was a real thing or embellishment for the books, but since the mystery bodyguard had said there was an exit under the building that was "hard to find" it seemed like our best bet. Unfortunately, I was discovering that I had a context and indexing problem; I'd magically recovered all my lost memories, but I hadn't incorporated them in a way that I could just 'remember' them.

Worse, I'd recovered all of my memories - including the boring ones. I couldn't manually sort through untold hours of me sitting in school or walking to Walmart or using the bathroom, not unless I wanted to take a few years, and until I'd viewed and absorbed a given memory I couldn't properly search for it. Instead, I had to just think about times I'd read a Jake Ross book and hope for the best. I came across one pretty quickly and tried to just flip through to the passage I needed, but this wasn't divination and so all I got was gibberish. I needed a memory where I was actually already on that page.

The time differential helped, but I was still on a very short timeline. I couldn't just have us stop in a hallway and wait, not with enemies so close behind us - for now we were still looking for stairs down, but once we found those we needed an answer. The scene I was hunting for was from the final book in the trilogy, and I'd only read that once - but I'd recalled that the scene existed, so there had to be a memory attached to that. Right?

Sitting at a little table in the kitchen, flipping through the boxed set while Bill made waffles. No. Laying in my room, wrapped in a towel after taking a shower - my clothes draped over the old CRT television because I had been planning on getting dressed before picking up the book. No. Reading in Bill's car, with its bench seats and window cranks and door locks you pulled up. Nope. Hunched over a book in detention, Zoey glaring at me with her two black eyes... wait... yes.

Yes. It was the right book, and... the right part? It was. I spared a glance at Zoey looking like some sort of fucked up raccoon, her normally perfect face slathered in a ridiculous amount of makeup that still failed to hide her swollen nose and the dark skin all around. Holy shit. Had that... had that been me? I felt like it maybe had been, but I didn't have time to really try to absorb the memory properly and follow it backwards. Instead, I focused on the page and... no, I needed the part where they emerged into the monastery. Where was it?

'Algie, Zyl, and Ulmot soon followed Jake and Yelrick into the room, while Dorin pushed the shrine back into place against the wall as quietly as possible.' Fucking bingo.

"Okay," I hissed in a ghostly whisper, "we're looking for a room with a shrine." As I said it we reached a stairwell and headed down, with me proceeding face-first in a tangle of flailing limbs. Well, shit.

Errod helped pick me up and I waved him away, but he insisted on fussing over me even though we were kind of in a hurry. "I'm fine, let's go!"

"Say it with your actual mouth," he said, and Katrin - the traitor - nodded.

I opened my mouth and told him I was completely fine, but it came out as "I'm ffffffffffff.... buh," which for some reason didn't convince him. I reluctantly turned my pain receptors back on, and in addition to the damage presumably caused by the stairs my head was absolutely pounding still. Stupid hammer. Stupid brain injury. I failed to keep my cool and doubled over clutching my head, so Katrin dropped a heal on me - but it didn't seem to help. Maybe the spell was just bad at complex stuff like brains, or maybe there was a pool of blood in there applying pressure.

It didn't matter. We had to go. I gave a thumbs-up successfully - I'd been worried about that - and pushed past down the hallway. Behind us, we could hear the sounds of combat getting closer and that probably helped with getting Katrin and Errod to let my muddled state slide for now. We split up to each check a different door, and in no time Katrin was calling us towards her so we could shove at a shrine in a low-ceilinged room that looked like it had maybe been a prayer room in the distant past and a storage room more recently. The shrine in question wasn't for anything familiar at a glance, but based on the strange creatures - six on each side - I suspected it was related to the twelve families of spirits that had come up a few times.

That meant this place was old, far older than the Clockmaker. Given what I knew of history here, I was guessing it was at least close to five thousand years old in Earth time - maybe older. I wasn't sure what to compare that to in my head. Something from Egypt or China probably, one of those old cultures that stuck around for thousands of years in one form or another. Errod wrangled the shrine back into place as best he could - it was stuck on something, but should pass a quick inspection - and then we hurried down the steeply-sloped passage as it curved down underneath the rest of the complex. In addition to this place being old, I was also aware that I was directly following a path last traversed by Jake Ross - albeit in the other direction.

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There was no map in the book, unsurprisingly, no detailed list of turns we had to take. That was a shame, because holy shit it was a literal maze. Worse, it didn't have dead ends; at first that was encouraging, but quickly we realized it meant we could more easily go in circles. I started mapping it out as we went, not only the passages we were in but the ones next to us thanks to divination. In my memory palace in Ematse I could actually physically build a scale model as we traveled, and with the time difference I could do it as we hurried along. It felt like cheating, in the best way.

This quickly turned into an exercise in knowing what passages not to take, steering us towards whatever part of my growing map was blank. The ghost-me had to be there in person to help steer the body since it wasn't in great shape at the moment, and that meant I wasn't in synch with myself unless I wanted to give up the advantage that the time differential was giving me. Instead, I just overlaid arrows onto my vision which probably worked better anyway.

The sound of an explosion echoed behind us, and sounds of fighting got louder - I was pretty sure they'd just blasted a hole into the maze when they couldn't find the proper entrance. It was possible they would just keep doing that, blowing their way through walls until they either found us or got buried in the rubble. We sped up, but I still hadn't located the correct path. Faster than should have been possible but still way too slowly, I filled in my model of the maze and realized that there was no exit - the maze just wrapped in on itself without ever going anywhere. We'd been everywhere, seen every hallway - some only via divination - and... hmm.

There was... an inconsistency. A bump.

The maze was symmetrical, not in its passages but in its borders. It wasn't square, it was some crazy squiggly shape, but if you drew a line through the middle starting where we'd entered and folded the whole thing over it would line up. Except for one spot. I steered us there, going the long way when fighting sounded too close; I was reassured that it was still fighting, since I didn't really want either side to do too well. Ideally they'd kill each other off, unless... unless Hugh was there. Shit.

We reached the odd spot, a place where the border of the maze indented a little, and I popped through with my ghost. Jackpot. "There's a latch, right here. I don't see how it opens."

Katrin was running her hands all over the wall, searching for some hidden button or lever or sigil as the yells and explosions got louder. The flicker of lightning was visible from a side passage, and I could hear metal clashing. There hadn't been that many Halenvar people, even counting the Hierophants - whoever was left had to be putting up one hell of a fight. Errod shoved Katrin aside, took a deep breath, and swung at the wall - the stone shattered and crumbled, tiny pieces ricocheting around and slicing my face. I was really jealous of that sword.

We piled through and once again it was a sloping narrow passage - this one less curved, meaning we weren't going to be directly below the monastery anymore. Eventually we reached a small complex of rooms, ancient spaces that looked like they might have been for bunk rooms, a small area with a dry fountain, a long narrow hall with a stone table. I tried one of the larger doors and found an empty nine-sided room, but before I could even turn around Katrin called out.

She'd found another passage, a long hallway leading into the darkness, and on the floor was a discarded emblem, that same Van Halen logo - it could have been knocked off of some armor, maybe, or possibly it was left on purpose for some reason. Either way, this was clearly the way they'd come and therefore the way out. Except... it wasn't. It was a way out of the city, but that's not what we needed. We needed to leave Brinkmar entirely. I turned and headed back to the nine-sided room, the others trailing after me in confusion.

"I've seen this before," I said, "not just the shape of the room but... Katrin, can you give me more light?"

The little magic light I'd been carrying was suddenly rendered useless as Katrin sent a swarm of bright orbs spiraling up to the domed ceiling. The intricate patterns on the eight sides without doors were too familiar. From where? I glanced over at one of the walls and suddenly felt like it should have a hole in it. It should have a hole, because... because I'd come through there, to get to Poicelria's throne room. Right. Was it just a coincidence? I pulled up my clearest memory of the patterns, but I couldn't use divination - I hadn't been there in person, I'd just been watching through my connection with human Callie.

"This same room was at the guru's place. Okay, okay. One was destroyed, but the question is... do the others match?"

Errod looked confused. "Why wouldn't they match? They're probably for the same purpose, some old ritual or worship site."

"Because... because something about the patterns is familiar. Not just that I've seen them before, there's something else." I looked at the patterns, but it wasn't making sense. They were beautiful, but just nonsense. They weren't pictures of anything. Why did they feel so familiar? Either Tindelus' forces or the Behemoth would be on us soon, we should just run away, but... I was so sure I was right. Suddenly, the question became moot.

Because I saw the faint signs of footprints coming from one of the walls.

"This one!" I yelled, and put my hands on the pattern. Someone had come through here. I sent my ghost through and it was solid rock, which meant this wasn't just another secret passage. This was a portal. I had opened gateways to Brinkmar before, and I could open one back out. I was sure of it. I concentrated, imagined it opening, tried to focus on thinning the barrier between worlds. I looked down at the bracer on my arm, the one with the dial. I hadn't thought much about it. There was a rune for each plane, and I turned it until the one for the prime plane clicked into place. I felt something change, like the barrier was thinning, and as it finally gave way the stone in front of me melted away.

For a second the pattern was still there hanging in the air, a glowing three-dimensional shape, and that feeling of familiarity pinged at me again - but I didn't have time, because the Hierophants of Oblivion started firing magical attacks at us from the doorway. Katrin was fast with a shield, thankfully, and we all dove through into Poicelria's fortress as I frantically tried to seal the gate behind us. I couldn't do it, or at least not fast enough; they were charging, and standing my ground would for sure get me killed.

As we ran into the throne room the super attractive cultists tried to yell at us, and we tried to yell at them - specifically, warning them to get behind cover. They didn't, and a moment later blasts of energy were being thrown around and cutting them down where they stood. The Hierophants of Oblivion were the 'shoot first, ask questions never' type and my prayers that they'd be out of mana by the time they reached us had clearly gone unanswered. The Behemoth was right behind them, growing larger as soon as he was through the portal, and then behind that were three ragged Halenvar soldiers trying to hold off Tindelus' forces.

They were dragged, screaming, back through the portal as dozens of mind-controlled fighters piled out. The Behemoth barely flinched as something blasted a crater in his arm, and instead just stared at me with those crazy eyes. He was going to kill me. I made a run for the doorway under the dais that I'd seen the servants leave through last time, but as I reached it an explosion collapsed it, also tipping the throne sideways. Silk hangings were burning, the floor itself was cracking, and the few living servants of the guru were screaming at the top of their lungs.

The guru herself finally appeared. She'd been yelling, something like "what is the meaning of this," but as she saw the violent chaos in front of her she turned to run. She didn't make it. A blast of red lightning slammed into her nearly naked form and she simply exploded, showering the room in gore. I kicked an attacker away right into the Behemoth's path, and he stomped the poor bastard. I reached for one of my knives, but my hand wasn't cooperating; I could grab it, but it was like one of those rigged claw machines that just dropped its cargo as soon as it tried to retract.

I'd spent all that time learning to fight and becoming a badass, and now my brain was too fucked up to do anything. I could still attack with my ghost, but I'd already run into some people with protection against that and I also wasn't eager to find out what the Hierophants' attacks could do to my ghost. I was behind a pillar, trying to decide the best way to contribute, when I heard a voice.

Psst, hey kid.

It was speaking directly to my brain, but I could still tell where it was coming from. I looked down, and there near my feet were some chunks of the guru including a somehow intact eye.

Kid, put me in your mouth. Just trust me.

What the actual fuck? Oh god, was it the brain injury talking? I turned to struggle with another attacker, and thankfully my body cooperated enough to kidney-punch them while my ghost slapped them through the brain. They fell to the side, stunned but not dead, and I caught sight of Errod cutting people down left and right while Katrin shielded him. One of the Hierophants took a shot at them that was thankfully blocked, but that was a good reminder that the enemy of my enemy was not my friend. They weren't going to just focus on Tindelus, not after we'd tried to ditch them. To be fair, if we hadn't run away I was sure they were going to kill us as soon as we showed them a way out.

I know a way out, the voice said, just pop me in your mouth and we can get the fuck out of here.

I scooped the eye up. "Tell me the best way out, or I'll crush you right now."

Hey, hey, no need for that. Just promise me you'll bring me along.

There was a flash as the portal closed, finally stemming the tide of Tindelus goons. Still, there were too many on both sides left and I couldn't hope they'd finish each other off. "Yes, sure," I hissed with my ghost, "now where do we go?"

Behind those decorative hangings to your left, there's a passage. Leads deeper into the complex, but I can give you directions once we're back there that will get you to safety.

"Watch me! The window!" I yelled, once again fucking up the words I was trying to say - but Katrin and Errod wouldn't have heard my ghost from where they were. I was just glad I'd managed to talk at all. They did start heading towards me, but were forced to circle around rubble and bodies and explosions. I headed to the exit and confirmed it was really there, and then the Behemoth charged me. I saw him coming - he wasn't subtle - but I wasn't sure I would be able to do anything about it. I tried to dodge and stumbled, falling to the ground. As he reached me I tried to punch him in the brain with my ghost but felt some resistance and got shunted away. Of course the nearly unkillable guy would protect himself from shit like spirit attacks.

Errod was almost to him, but the Behemoth just grabbed a chunk of stone that had fallen from the ceiling and threw it at him. It hit his legs and made him flip forward as his leg snapped, and Errod's head slammed into the ground so hard he was going to be talking like me. Katrin stopped to heal him, leaving me there facing the Behemoth at maybe the largest I'd seen him outside of Theramas. He had grabbed me, and was laughing and licking his lips. Oh god.

I moaned and babbled, unsure if it was the brain injury or sheer mindless panic. He'd eaten people before. I was going to die, and he was going to make it horrific. Errod was still on the ground, Katrin kneeling next to him and blocking attacks that were keeping her pinned down. Even if that hadn't been the case I wasn't sure she would have been able to do anything to save me, the Behemoth was a force of nature. He was unstoppable. He was an immovable force, a devouring monster. Even if Errod had reached him with the Sword of Density, he could grow back limbs like it was no big deal. I looked into that wide open maw, and saw my death.

Or an opportunity.

If my reflexes or control of my body failed, everything was over. Time had slowed, and I knew this was my only chance. My brain was fucked up, I was barely able to move with the massive hand clamped around me, but if I could just flick my wrist the right way... please...

An eyeball flew through the air, into the Behemoth's open mouth - he flinched back and looked startled, then shrugged it off and went to bite me in half... but hesitated. He shuddered, dropping me, and then clutched his head and screamed as his whole body shook and began to shrink. Katrin was finally getting Errod to his feet, and I was hoping that he'd be able to cut the Behemoth down while he was stunned - it wouldn't be me, I was barely able to stand after being half crushed.

Before Errod could get within striking distance the Behemoth was back to his normal but still very large size, and a third eye opened in the middle of his forehead. "Okay," he said, "I can work with this. Hairier than I'd like, but it'll do. Come on, kid, you can still come with me if you'll help me carry some shit."

And he disappeared through the passage.

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