The jingle of iron keys warned Rasp that he had visitors. There was a metallic clunk and a vigorous twist before the heavy bolt slid away. Rusted hinges squealed in protest as the door swung open, allowing a channel of blinding light to filter in from the outside. Rasp eased his head up off the pillow, using his elbows for support, and squinted at the obnoxiously bright doorway.

Two blurry shapes shuffled inside, their stout forms backlit by the light pouring in from the hallway. The pair ducked in surprise when a dark projectile rocketed over their heads in a frenzy of feathers and talons.

Croak! Father circled the room twice, chattering up a storm, before settling onto Rasp’s pillow in an uneasy fluff of bristled feathers.

“Good to see you too,” Rasp murmured, refusing to look away from the open doorway. Alas, rushing the exit wouldn’t do him any good with a hobbled leg. He’d be lucky to get a single step in before his injury felled him. Still didn’t stop him from trying to gauge the distance from the bed to the door, though. “You didn’t happen to find any of the others before me, Dad, did you?”

Father had, actually. Faris, Hop, and June were being housed in separate rooms nearby, purposely isolated from one another. Father’s attempts to dart inside and check on them had been unsuccessful. He didn’t know what state any of them were in, but the lack of sounds coming from within their rooms hadn’t sat right with him. He’d started to fear they were all dead, Rasp included. That is until he heard all the commotion about ghosts and the afterlife from out in the hallway.

Across the room from Rasp, the dwarfs finished their hushed conversation and stepped all the way inside. Hinges squealing, the door slammed shut behind them, rendering the chamber oppressively dark once more. One of the entrants stopped about halfway, content to venture no further. A single set of heavy footsteps continued on alone.

Father hissed a warning but the newcomer shuffled along, unfazed by Rasp’s feathery watchdog. The dwarf reached Rasp’s bedside and sat without being invited. The straw mattress sagged beneath their combined weight. Rasp’s visitor didn’t speak, not at first, but he knew who she was from a single sniff. The overpowering combination of crushed rose petals and tobacco smoke told him it was Priestess Oreword.

A wiser man knew to keep his silence and wait for the enemy to reveal their hand. Rasp was certainly not wise and barely qualified as man most of the time, but even he could keep his mouth shut when he wanted. He locked his jaw, quieting the nagging thoughts demanding to know what had happened to the rest of his party.

The priestess leaned closer and, once more, helped herself to Rasp’s face without asking. She cupped his chin in her calloused hands and looked him over, muttering to herself as she did so.

“No touching!” Rasp snapped, pulling away.

The interpreter, Bromm, was content to keep his distance and translate from afar. “Priestess Oreword believes the nameless one calls to you. You have heard it, yes?”

“I don’t know what any of that means, but you’re not getting another word out of me until I know everyone else is alive and safe.”

“Your companions are still recovering,” Bromm explained. “All four of you were poisoned during your escape. The body will flush the toxin on its own, but it takes time. You are the first to regain consciousness.”

Unbelievable. A whole party taken out by a damn weed! Just one more reason to hate vegetables, Rasp supposed. “But they’re all good, right? Expected to make a full recovery?”

“Yes. Thanks to our people, of course. Who saved you from becoming plant fodder.”

Well this was awkward. It wasn’t everyday you had to credit a cult for saving your skin. Rasp reached up and rubbed the back of his neck. “Thanks, I guess.”

“As a show of your appreciation, Priestess Oreword would like you to speak with her truthfully. Starting with what it was that brought you down here. A voice, perhaps? One that calls to you in your head?”

“Desperation is what brought us here, not a voice. We went underground because it was the only option to avoid capture.” Rasp paused, momentarily conflicted, before spilling the rest of the truth. He didn’t like revealing all his cards so soon, but if the dwarfs knew about the voice, then maybe they’d know how to stop it from worming its way into his brain. “But I did hear a voice. It’s not the first time I’ve heard it, either. I heard it once before, back on the surface. It reached me through a harmony stone.”

“A harmony stone?” Bromm repeated.

“Yeah. Giant pillar built to honor fae or something. Details are a bit fuzzy but the thing was huge and crawling with magic.”

Bromm and Priestess Oreword murmured back and forth in hushed, worried tones.

Rasp waited, but neither seemed inclined to include him in the discovery process. “It’s something bad, isn’t it? That’s why you’re keeping it all hush-hush.”

Finally, Bromm delivered the grim news, in the matter-of-fact manner that he seemed incapable of deviating from. “You are being hunted by an ancient monster, whom we call the nameless one.”

What a terribly unclever name. And while Rasp sorely wanted to point out that referring to something as nameless was still giving a fucking name, deep down he knew it didn’t matter. Arguing pointless details served no other purpose but to distract himself from what was truly taking place. The monster, as ridiculously named as it was, deserved his full attention.

“The nameless one is an enchanter,” Bromm explained. “It projects its voice into the minds of prey and puts them under its spell. Victims caught in the throes of its siren song are then lured into the beast’s lair, destined to never to be seen again. The priestess believes the nameless one has found a way to tap into the harmony stones above ground and uses them as means to broaden its range.”

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“Ah.”

“It wishes to consume you,” Bromm continued, as if his prior explanation had not been abundantly clear on its own.

“Yeah, I got that,” Rasp said quietly. He then added, less quietly, as the anger started to bubble up from within. “Of course it wants to eat me. Why is it no one ever wants me around purely for the sake of my company? I am a delightful person!”

Father politely disagreed.

“No one asked you, old man!”

Bromm and Priestess Oreword fell silent. Rasp imagined they were too busy trading skeptical glances to point out he’d been nothing but a thorn in their sides so far. “Okay, mostly a delight. It doesn’t apply to people trying to use me as a sacrifice.” Rasp gestured for Bromm to carry on. “Anyway, I get the strangest feeling you’re not done telling me about your magic beastie. Go on. Get it over with. Tell how truly fucked I am.”

“The nameless one is a remnant from the age of raw magic. It goes dormant after eating, often decades at a time. The more magic a meal provides, the longer it sleeps. For centuries the beast has feasted upon surface dwellers lured into the underground by its siren song.”

Rasp remembered Hop mentioning how none of the parties sent to explore Kalikose had ever returned. Being fed to a nameless monstrosity was fucking grim, even for cult.

Rasp’s face must have given his thoughts away because Bromm’s matter-of-fact tone actually changed. It now carried the unmistakable sting of offense. “We are not monsters. Our people put up every preventative measure to stop surface dwellers from entering the underground, including collapsing the existing gateways. It has been over three decades since the last outsider stepped foot inside our city. The only reason you made it this far is because you are in the company of the Kriegaar. It was predestined fate.”

Rasp held up his hands in protest. “I didn’t say anything!”

Priestess Oreword placed her hand on Rasp’s elbow in a silent order for him to shut up and let her handle Bromm herself. Although her tone was gentle, Rasp sensed an underlying disapproval — like a parent assuring their ruly offspring that they weren’t mad, simply disappointed. Having been the recipient of many such lectures, Rasp had the sudden inexplicable urge to crawl under the bed.

When Bromm addressed Rasp again, the defensiveness had bled from his voice, replaced instead with sorrow. Rather than apologize for his outburst, he merely picked where he’d left off. “Without magic to sustain it, the nameless one has grown ravenous. The beast has turned to eating flesh. It has claimed ten from our clan so far.”

Oof, that was a depressing thought. Rasp almost felt bad for them now. Still, saving an underground cult from an ancient monster wasn’t on his to-do list. He had his own people to save.

“Flesh does not sustain the nameless one for long. It only makes the beast hungrier.” Bromm twisted the metaphorical knife a little deeper with each word. “Priestess Oreword charmed our homes, making it so the beast’s song could not be heard from within our walls, but our defenses have only made the nameless one more desperate. For the first time in many millennia, it has abandoned its lair to snatch our citizens from the city itself.”

Rasp interrupted. “And this fabled Kriegaar of yours is supposed to swoop in and save you from nameless one, correct?”

That’s right. He had been paying attention.

“Yes.”

“Well, how?” Not that Rasp intended to be the one to do the slaying, but he was mildly curious.

“We…” Bromm’s voice trailed, before admitting with a resigned sigh, “We don’t know. All who have faced the creature have fallen. We don’t even know what it looks like.”

Naturally. How silly of Rasp to assume the cult had any idea how to make their hero’s job slightly less difficult. It was not often that Rasp thought of Daana, especially not in the ‘I wish she were here’ capacity. But now was one of the few exceptions. She would have known immediately what sort of beasty they were dealing with. She might have even been able to tell him how to defeat it without all the cryptic beating around the bush that accompanied these types of conversations. Again, not that Rasp had any intention of being the one to defeat it. He was merely noting that such information would have been helpful, if not for him, than for the cult and any inevitable heroes suckered into helping.

Pointing out how unrealistic their plan was probably wouldn’t go over so well. Rasp tried a different approach, one often referred to by Faris as logic. “Why don’t you just leave then? The nameless one can’t eat you if you’re not here.”

“You speak blasphemy, sir! This is our ancestral home! We have been here since the beginning, from before the floods and the outsiders and—”

Priestess Oreword came to Rasp’s rescue once more. While he didn’t understand a lick of what either of them were saying, Rasp did notice how the priestess’s cadence lacked the theatrics she had used back at the tower. She sounded like a regular person and not some power-hungry zealot with a desperate audience clinging to every word.

“Priestess Oreword believes the Kriegaar is a member of your group.” Bromm switched back to the common tongue without warning. “The issue is—”

“They’re half dead?” Rasp ventured. “Yeah, that’s been a problem for us too, lately. I’m afraid Whisper’s really not in any shape to battling monsters.” All joking aside, it was rather lousy when the person responsible for your training kept nearly dying all of the time.

“Priestess Oreword is a healer.”

A glimmer of hope broke through, like a ray of sunshine on an overcast day. Naturally, Rasp’s first instinct was to be wary of it. “What kind of healer?” He knew the priestess was magical. Her power buzzed so strongly it made his skin itch, as though he was covered in invisible ants. “Are we talking magic healer or the kind that’s only good for terrible tasting tonics?”

“She can remove the hex currently exacerbating the Kriegaar’s illness. The priestess will return them to their former strength, but she cannot remove the poisoning itself. Your companion will still succumb to their illness. Priestess Oreword will only be providing them more time.”

It wasn’t what Rasp wanted to hear, but it was certainly better than nothing. A functional Whisper was better than a dead one. “I don’t suppose the priestess is willing to do this out of the kindness of her heart?”

“Priestess Oreword offers a trade. The health of you and your companions in exchange for defeating the monster.”

It would have been really nice had another member of Rasp’s crew been present to offer advice. Unfortunately, that wasn’t possible, not with the rest of the team currently out of action. Which meant the honor was all his. Might as well make it worth his while.

“How do I know your priestess is capable?” Rasp asked.

Bromm took the bait, as expected. “You dare question the competence of Priestess Oreword?”

Rasp raised his hands innocently. “Talk is cheap, that’s all I’m saying. Maybe if she was willing to prove her mettle first” — he wiggled his injured foot for emphasis and immediately regretted it. Searing pain shot up his swollen leg, causing the rest of his sentence to issue in the form of a gasp — “I might be more inclined to talk the Kriegaar into agreeing?”