Chapter 739: The Handshake
Roland felt it before he’d formed the thought — a jolt of recognition, arriving through some association he hadn’t consciously made.
A giant creature that bore through solid rock. Moving through the mountains like a needle through cloth.
He was about to ask about it when Agatha leaned forward. “Was it you who entered the Devil’s Town and swallowed the Blackstone Pagoda?”
Pasha seemed to need a moment to place the reference. “Devil’s Town? No — we’ve only used the devouring worm to repair the ruins and bore the connecting tunnel to the City of Glow. We can’t use it frequently. It eats a great deal.”
Roland described what the witches had encountered: the expedition to the Misty Forest, the ruined settlement to the west that had no surviving name, the creature they had seen moving toward the great snow mountain in the distance. He asked Scroll to retrieve the drawings Soraya had made — detailed, vivid — and held them toward the curtain.
Pasha went still for a moment.
“Yes,” she said. “That is a devouring worm.” The steadiness in her voice changed slightly — not alarm, but something being revised. “If one was moving toward that snow mountain, I’m afraid there are also ruins of the underground civilization there. The literature we have indicates their civilization once spread across the entire Land of Dawn. The record seems reliable — we can trace the marks of devouring worms in virtually every mountain range we’ve been able to reach: tunnels, hollow chambers, unmistakable signatures in the stone.”
“But you believe the civilization has already perished,” Roland said.
“Yes. But a worm is just a shell — like an original carrier. If a soul entered it, it would be able to move.”
The room’s temperature didn’t change. Roland felt it shift anyway.
He looked around him. Every face in the reception hall had settled into the same expression: the specific stillness of people who have arrived at an uncomfortable conclusion simultaneously and are waiting to see if someone else will say it first.
It was not hard to reach. If someone had found a worm shell — and perhaps more — in the great snow mountain, and transferred a soul into it, the creature that had approached Agatha’s research tower and the ruins of the Devil’s Town had a driver. Not an animal acting on instinct. Someone.
Could it be the unknown enemy?
If they had simply found shells and nothing more, that was manageable. A mobile carrier without other advantages was dangerous but finite.
But if they had also found magic cores. A central carrier. A trove of the underground civilization’s recorded research.
He thought of what the central carrier had already given Pasha’s people — the ability to decode the civilization’s language, to access its deeper records, to calibrate and adjust the magic cores. If the unknown enemy had found the same tools in the snow mountain, they would have access to magical theory generations beyond what either humans or demons had developed. They could build instruments. They could, in theory, construct something like the Instrument of Divine Retribution themselves.
Against whom?
He kept his voice even. “The snow mountain in the western region — how substantial a site would it be? Large enough for a full city?”
“That particular peak is the highest in the Western Region,” Pasha said. Compared to her earlier steadiness, there was something new in how quickly she answered — a current running beneath it. “It doesn’t extend across great distances, but its primary peak would be an excellent location for a large underground construction. Unlike the Impassable Mountain Range or the Dragonspine Range, the civilization would have had easy access to it from multiple directions.”
Celine’s voice cut in before he could respond: “Your Majesty, we need to explore that snow mountain as soon as possible. If any instruments remain there—”
“And the carrier types recorded in our literature,” Pasha said, her tentacles now moving rapidly despite the steadiness in her voice. “If the unknown enemy has reached them first, the consequences would be significant.”
Behind Pasha, the noise among the other blobs had risen — urgent, overlapping. He could hear it without understanding the words.
He understood the urgency underneath them, though.
Four centuries in God’s Punishment Warrior bodies — in shells that locked out sensation, smell, the texture of the world — would leave a person attentive to the possibility of something different. The carriers in the snow mountain might not be as human as an original carrier, might not look like anything familiar. But they would offer more than they currently had: presence in the world. Something to feel. He didn’t begrudge them the excitement.
He let a deliberate pause settle before he spoke. “I understand the concern. I had already planned an expedition to the western snow mountain — the logistics were the difficulty. Adequate transport, minimizing risk to the witches involved. I hadn’t found the right combination of conditions yet.” He paused again. “If your devouring worm participated in such an expedition — that would change the calculation considerably.”
“We will move as quickly as we can,” Pasha said.
He was glad for it. Even setting aside the Taquila survivors’ interest, he had reasons of his own to want that mountain explored and secured. If there was a threat building inside it — dormant or active — it sat uncomfortably close to Neverwinter. And beyond the security dimension, the devouring worm itself occupied more of his attention than he’d admitted aloud.
He had been thinking about the Impassable Mountain Range as a natural defensive line for some time. The problem had always been the engineering: how to move cement and bricks through terrain that was rugged, narrow, and weather-hostile. How to build and supply a garrison at altitude. How to construct barbettes, barracks, roads — the infrastructure that would let soldiers actually function there rather than simply survive.
A devouring worm solved the first part of that entirely. Not a road to the mountain but a tunnel through it. Straight lines instead of switchbacks. Underground ammunition stores, protected from weather and bombardment. Barracks beneath the stone, warm and dry. A rail line running inside the tunnel itself, so that steam trailers could move soldiers and supplies without fighting the mountain road.
And below the mountain, if such a tunnel could be extended toward Neverwinter — underground utilities, drainage, the city’s first real sewage system. He could tell people, without exaggeration, that Neverwinter had the first underground passage system a person could walk through freely. In any age without a tunnel boring machine, a devouring worm was the most important civil engineering tool imaginable.
He rose from the chair and walked to the curtain.
Pasha towered over him by several meters. He raised his right hand toward her — palm open, fingers extended.
“Your Majesty, this is—”
“A handshake,” he said, calmly. “An agreement between us. The beginning of trust.”
A moment of hesitation — then Pasha lowered one of the main tentacles from her head. It coiled slowly through the air, unwinding in a spiral, and came to rest against his palm.
I wish Soraya were here, he thought. This moment deserves a painting.
The image through the curtain shivered. Pasha’s outline blurred and then steadied, and Roland spoke again before the connection could close.
“One more question — you mentioned that every high mountain might contain ruins of the underground civilization. What about mountains underwater? Formations on the seafloor?”
Pasha’s tentacles stirred. “Mountains under the sea? According to the literature, the civilization did not go to the sea — their carriers were heavy, not suited for open water, and they seemed to have kept entirely to the Land of Dawn. There would be no reason for them to build there.” She paused. “Why do you ask?”
“Curiosity, mostly.” He shook his head. “Nothing specific.”
They only lived on the Land of Dawn.
He stood with it as the connection began to wind down. The underwater spire. The strange telescope. The ancient stone gates that Thunder had glimpsed through the old instrument, gates standing half-submerged above land that only emerged at low tide. None of that matched the pattern of the underground civilization.
So whose was it?
I hope Thunder finds the answer.
The purple light contracted, folded, and was gone.
The reception hall returned to itself — the ordinary proportions of the room, the familiar weight of the air, no window onto the world’s underside. Just the chairs, the fire, the faces of the witches around him.