Halfway to the abbey, burning lungs and screaming thighs insisted on a break. Gasping, she slowed to a reluctant walk, hands rising to her head as she struggled for oxygen. Forcing herself back into a run, Iskvold willed her body across the remaining distance to the outer courtyard, sweat gleaming against her ebony skin. Open gates? That’s not normal.

  Judging by the volume of smoke and occasional tendrils of flame curling from the upper windows, whatever happened was recent—within hours, while she had been idly monitoring the gap. Reaching the iron gates, Iskvold gained a full view of the courtyard and froze for the second time. This was no accident. Her shoulders rolled forward involuntarily. The courtyard was a battlefield. Drying blood spattered the grey slate stonework in overlapping patterns, pooling sickly around four prone, motionless figures dressed in the white robes of the Luminarium—no enemy corpses.

  Despair hit first, its weight forcing her to her knees. Then the guilt, sharp and quick, hammered her gut, doubling her over again. She retched. Her mind flashed to that first day at the abbey, the day everything changed. Watching her mother walk away, one backward glance and a blown kiss, Sifu’s strong arms holding her in place while she struggled to follow. Every moment of need from that day forward found only absence, emptiness. When she was finally old enough to take the vows, these monks became her family, filling that void. When they needed me most, I wasn’t there either. I’m no better than her!

  Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she struggled to her feet, the ache in her thighs forcing a wince. Stepping to the nearest victim and rolling him over to check for a pulse, she looked into the dead eyes of Brother Jellen, an elf she had known since childhood. They’d grown up together here at the abbey. No pulse. Gone. Tears streamed down her cheeks as grief, anger, and disbelief threatened her objectivity. Stay in control! Multiple gashes crisscrossed his torso and face; she could see the gaping wounds beneath his blood-soaked, tattered robes. Similar parallel slashes marred his palms. His palms.

  Iskvold’s head snapped around, surveying the scene. No weapons. No warning. These monks were slaughtered before any call to arms could be raised. She moved briskly among the others on the ground, nearly slipping on the blood-slicked stone. Sister Karela, Brother Ren, and Brother Avil—all dead. These were accomplished martial artists, more dangerous with their bare hands than most warriors with a sword. What could have cut them down so easily? The guilt returned, squeezing the air from her lungs as she knelt next to Brother Avil’s body, until a more dreadful thought forced a sharp intake of breath. What if they’re still here?

  Something visceral began to churn deep in her guts. Fear and hesitation crystallized into compulsive rage. Within seconds, the strange fury reached full boil, forcing all rational thought aside. Justice...Retribution…no. Vengeance! With her friends dead and her home razed, she could suddenly think of nothing else. Jumping to her feet, staff in both hands, she let out an animalistic roar and charged the Luminarium’s main structure.

  The next few minutes were a blurred, disoriented separation of rational thought and action. Her consciousness became the passenger, her actions driven exclusively by the pull of this new, blinding rage—like a frenzied marionette.

  Entering the cloakroom, a fifth corpse propped open the swinging door to the mess hall. Another friend…can’t stop. Her heart hammering, she stepped over her fallen ally and shouldered the door mid-stride, rocketing it back against its hinges.

  The room was heavily charred. Benches and tables smoldered from the fire, smoke still curling toward the ceiling. Three more bodies lay blackened and still. Keep moving. Kitchen or main hall? Kitchen. She heard herself roar:

  “You want battle? Come and get it! I will rip your limbs off and feed them to you!”

  What was that? Where did that come from? She sprinted across the mess and through the kitchen door. Its wood frame weakened by the fire, the impact from her shoulder sent the slab off its hinges, careening into nearby shelves holding the abbey’s cookware.

  The collision launched a large soup pot from the top shelf. She struck it in mid-air, her fury releasing like a coiled spring, driving it forcefully to the ground. The metal rang out like a bell against the stone floor. Before it bounced, she hit it again, leaving a significant dent. Just a pot. Move on! Two more down. The tatters of Luminarium robes were barely distinguishable on the fringes of their charred remains. She heard herself scream again:

  “Cowards! Where are you!?”

  A smoldering shelf blocked the door to the main hall. Without thinking, she freed one hand from her staff and tossed the burning wood aside. The pain was instant, though her rational passenger noted it hurt less than it should have. The injury, in addition, redoubled the rage that had her in its grip—a kite lifted higher on a passing gust of wind. Her focus sharp and narrow, she let out another unintelligible roar and pushed into the main hall.

  Over thirty feet long and twenty feet across, the main hall was the abbey’s social hub. It had been the gathering point for announcements and worship. Previously, four rows of polished wooden benches flanked a center aisle, all facing a raised platform. Now, it was smoldering rubble. Black soot stained the grey stone walls, the shadowy outline of flames licking higher. The benches had collapsed into ashen mounds. The sour smell of burned varnish mixed with sulfur replaced the usual scent of sandalwood incense. Visible among the remains of the furniture, she counted four more corpses curled into the fetal position, burned beyond recognition. But there was also something else: another creature.

  Her rational passenger estimated it to be seven feet tall with gaunt musculature. Charcoal skin stretched over its emaciated, skeletal form. Jagged vertebrae bristled its spine and down the long tail encircling its motionless body, ending in a sharp-tipped point. Feral claws on the hands and feet were stained in blood, as were the long incisors protruding from the creature’s upper and lower jaws.

  Most uniquely, the back of its skull tapered into a bony horn, curled forward over its head in the shape of a fishhook, coming to a point several inches above its eye sockets. Even in death, the creature’s mere presence inexplicably triggered her unquenchable fury.

  She heard herself cry out, “Finally!” as she charged, her staff coming down repeatedly—ribs, back, shoulder. She felt the rage pull at her Ki. Arcane energy surrounded her fists in a white glow before she rained down an additional flurry of blows—head, head, head.

  The creature’s body absorbed each one, never moving, never flinching. Her last strike produced a sickening crack as the skull caved in. Suddenly, her vision widened. She stood over the lifeless attacker, her chest heaving. As quickly as it had risen, the rage was gone. The passenger regained control. She blinked several times, processing the anger-filled rampage. What in Gond’s name was that?

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  A wave of exhaustion pushed her backward into a seated position, her staff rattling against the stone floor. The run, the rage, the emotion of the discovery all converged, sapping her energy, wrapping her brain in the fog of fatigue. For several minutes, she didn’t move, didn’t even think. Her eyes, under heavy lids, fixated on soot patterns, curling over the surrounding walls.

  Finally shaking it off, she centered on her KI and disciplined training, seeking any breath of a second wind. The drow monk moved gingerly among the fallen, checking for signs of life. Nothing. She could tell there were two male and two female victims, but the bodies were too charred to identify. At least this group was armed, each still clutching a blackened staff. That made fourteen fallen. She attempted some quick math, trying to calculate the abbey’s full complement, fighting mental and physical exhaustion. Thirty souls called the abbey home: twenty-three full-fledged monks, Sifu Haft, and six acolytes currently in training. They would have been studying in the Vault. The Vault!

  Iskvold pressed on through the main hall, out the side door to the left of the dais, and into the dojo. Until she left for watch duty, the dojo had been a sanctuary of comfort and discipline. Racks of staves, wooden swords, and tonfas lined two walls, framing several individual practice mats. In the room’s center, a heavy woven grass mat with a large painted circle served as the abbey’s main sparring ring. Its current state was jarring by comparison.

  The weapons racks and all their contents had been reduced to cinders. Twisted nails protruded from heaps of white ash piled against the blackened stone walls. All the nearby mats were frayed and singed. The scent of scorched hemp, burnt wood, and sulfur hung heavily in the air. A second hook-headed creature, surrounded by three more fallen monks, lay inside the sparring circle. The mat itself was dappled with blood spatter, but like the bodies, it showed no evidence of fire.

  Looking down into the faces of Kai, Lin, and Finnegan, she was numb, her emotional bank fully depleted. She half-heartedly shoved her foot against the second creature, staff poised to strike. It didn’t move. Sixteen. No, Seventeen. She crossed the dojo toward the transcription room and the Vault.

  One of the two doors was ajar, belching smoke into the larger sparring facility. The transcription room was still on fire. This had been where the abbey performed commissioned literary work. At any given time, four or five monks could be found researching, writing, and transcribing at the long tables, piles of texts from the Vault below spread out before them. Tapestries and paintings adorned the walls, together with shelves of supplies: paper, binding, ink, and quills. As Iskvold poked her head in, the room was unrecognizable.

  All the tables had collapsed, three of them still burning. The artwork was nothing more than soot outlines on the stone walls. Multiple shelving racks were also alight, their contents already incinerated. Seeing the smooth stone of the back wall, her hopes soared. The Vault was closed! The access point, however, was buried under the flickering rubble.

  Dragging herself to the window on the adjacent wall, she drove her elbow into the blackened folding shutters, wincing from the effort even before making contact. Need water. Spying the nearby millpond, she summoned her Ki. The white energy crackled as she called for the water.

  Closing her fist and pulling it back into the room, a liquid cylinder two feet wide and thirty feet long burst from the pond’s surface and through the window, cascading across the transcription room. With a sustained hiss, a bloom of smoke and steam filled the air. Equally drenched, Iskvold coughed and pushed the hair from her eyes, feeling quite satisfied as she surveyed the space.

  The few remaining stubborn tendrils of smoke rapidly surrendered. Shoving the charred furniture aside, she ran her foot through the charcoal slurry covering the floor to expose the small stone that served as the release for the Vault door. Under normal circumstances, the door remained ajar, especially if the abbey’s residents were working down below. Sifu drilled two specific security protocols into everyone at the Luminarium to safeguard the archive. At the first sign of outsiders, the door was to be closed, rendering it invisible to anyone unaware of its location. At times of significant threat, the lockstone she now sought was pressed flush to the floor. This made the Vault practically impenetrable from either side until the stone was released. Locked. Good. Maybe someone survived.

  Finding the stone unresponsive, Iskvold dropped to her hands and knees, tracing her short fingernails around its outer edges to clear any debris. Prying out a piece of grit, she tried again, and the stone reluctantly popped into its typical raised position. She hurried over to an unremarkable spot in the wall a few feet to her right and pushed.

  Relief washed over her when she felt the familiar click. The wall receded, exposing a simple staircase cut into the earth. Stone slabs served as stair treads, descending ten feet before making a right turn. The faintest rustle of movement whispered from below. Instinctively, she gripped the staff as a figure emerged from the shadows at the foot of the stairs. A flash of blue eyes. A familiar stance. Sifu Haft. The drow’s posture slumped as she lowered her staff, then her legs gave out completely, sending her to the floor in a heap.

  Short for a human, Sifu had close-cropped, thinning hair. A substantial mustache protruded more than an inch off his top lip.

  “Iskvold! Praise be to Kord! I thought we might never get out of there!” Haft turned over his shoulder and called back into the Vault, “All clear! It’s Iskvold!”

  For a man of his advanced age, his sustained fitness was impressive. The abbot sprinted up the stairs two at a time. She summoned enough energy to roll to her right, vacating the space at the top of the landing. Behind him as he rose, six acolytes scurried from the Vault below, afraid of too much distance separating them from their teacher.

  “I was giving the initiates a lesson when we heard what sounded like Tiamat crashing a tea party, and they closed and locked us in immediately.”

  His voice trailed off, jaw muscles tense as he crested the stairs and surveyed the room. Regaining his composure, Haft straightened as he beheld his disciple, splayed on the floor in a puddle.

  The grizzled monk turned to the initiates, gaping at the room’s destruction. “Don’t just stand there, find her a bench.”

  Two of them scuttled across the room to one of the recently extinguished seats, carrying it over to Iskvold. Together, they hoisted her into a sitting position, the warm wetness from the wood soaking through the seat of her already damp robes.

  Sifu crouched, bringing his eyes level with hers. “What can you tell us about what happened?”

  The drow delivered an emotionless, thorough accounting of all she’d seen and experienced since arriving at the front gates, omitting only her bizarre rage bender. Iskvold took pride in her measured composure, and this recent loss of control scared her more than a little. Sifu and the acolytes listened intently, the former furrowing his brow at several points during the debrief but never interrupting. When she finished, he clasped his hands behind his back, raised himself to his full, though modest, height, and turned to face the group.

  “Right… This is an immense and unfathomable loss. It will take time to process. At this moment, we must focus on protecting the Luminarium and our remaining brotherhood. I promise there will be time later to mourn and wrestle with what just happened and why. Right now, I need your purpose and clarity of action, however difficult that may be.”

  He turned to face each of them directly as he fired off instructions.

  “Iskvold, you rest here for a bit. Esmi and Jin, sweep the rest of the abbey. Make sure the fire is completely out and bring any injured to the mess hall. Nori—you and How begin moving the dead to the outer courtyard. Usha—fetch Tsuta and the rest from the beacon outposts. We will suspend watch duties until we have things back in order.”

  Surveying the group, he settled on the young male halfing. “Graver—I want you to ride immediately to the Abbey of the Crystal Dawn…” He paused as he stepped to the window.

  “Scratch that. The stables are gone. First, see if you can find any horses wandering about; maybe we’ll get lucky. If you do, ride. Otherwise, go on foot.” Eyebrows raised, Haft held the acolyte’s gaze until he received a confirming nod, then continued. “Explain the situation to Sifu Aganon and request activation of the Pact of the Brotherhood. Also, ask him to spread the word to the other orders on our behalf.”

  “Yes, Sifu!” came the chorus, and they all moved quickly to their assigned duties.

  The old monk closed the vault door, pressing the lock stone back into position, level with the floor. His tone was firm. “The Vault stays locked until we have things better under control.”

  The Glimmerstone Enigma and The Siremirian Conundrum?

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