No one remembered who struck the first blow.
One moment, the square had been filled with the ordinary noise of the city: merchants shouting over one another, cartwheels grinding against the road and guards pretending not to be tired. The next, something came tearing out of the Hollow.
It burst from the darkness in a spray of shattered stone and snapping limbs.
The creature was all armour, mandibles and fury. Acid hissed from the wounds carved into its body, spattering across the ground and eating smoking pits into the street. The guards rushed it first.
They died first too.
Barty stood frozen at the edge of the chaos.
The creature was not the worst thing he had ever seen. It was not even the most frightening. But fear did not care about comparisons. It reached into his chest, closed around his lungs and squeezed.
Then someone charged past him.
A warrior with a weapon raised.
Another followed.
A strange rabbit-like figure, pristine despite the dirt and blood around him, leapt into the fight with the furious indignation of someone personally offended by the existence of mud. A towering horned figure planted himself between the beast and those behind him, locking shields with the discipline of a soldier. A blind warrior moved with impossible certainty. A shapeless creature rippled across the battlefield. And near them was Further, silent and unsettling, his thoughts brushing against the minds around him more easily than spoken words.
They had not arrived together.
They did not know one another.
But when the ground shook and the creature screamed, they fought as though they had.
Barty raised one hand.
Darkness curled around his fingers.
The first blast of eldritch power struck the monster and almost knocked Barty from his feet. He stared at his own hand for half a heartbeat before remembering that the creature was still trying to kill them.
By the time the fighting ended, the street was scarred with acid, the guards were collecting their wounded, and a group of strangers stood together amid the wreckage.
That should have been the end of it.
Instead, a Guild officer approached them.
“You lot,” the officer said, looking over the mismatched collection of warriors, mages, monsters and whatever Blexalgleb happened to be. “You’re wanted at the Guild.”
Barty glanced at the others.
“We’re not a house,” someone said.
The officer appeared entirely unmoved.
“You’re still wanted.”
And so, before they had even properly learned one another’s names, they were summoned as a group.
Naturally, they decided to go drinking first.
The Verge was warm.
Barty hated it immediately.
A great fire burned within the tavern, filling the room with a heat that most people appeared to find comforting. To Barty, it was a living thing. It shifted in the hearth, consuming wood with patient hunger.
He took the coldest corner available and sat with his back to the wall.
Ghodrat watched him for a moment.
“Hormones,” the towering warrior decided.
Barty chose not to ask what that meant.
Drinks arrived. Introductions were attempted. Some names were repeated more than once. Bun Bun objected to several stains that did not yet exist. Further disappeared and returned. Vaelora came and went with the quiet confidence of someone who already knew more than she was saying.
As the evening wore on, one practical question emerged.
Where was Barty going to sleep?
He had expected the answer to be nowhere.
Ghodrat offered him a place, though it was far from the centre of the city. Further offered lodgings as well. The offers were made casually, without ceremony, as though sheltering a frightened tiefling they had met beside an acid-spitting monster was entirely ordinary.
Barty did not know how to respond to kindness that did not demand something in return.
In the end, he accepted Further’s offer.
That night, he did not sleep in the street.
It felt like a victory.
In the morning, Further brought him porridge.
It was not bad.
More importantly, Barty discovered that he and Further could speak without words. Thoughts passed between them in secret, hidden beneath the ordinary conversation of the city.
Barty had spent much of his life hiding.
It was strange to find someone with whom silence could become a language.
They met the others beside the fountain.
Derek held the Guild’s letter and waved it like a battle standard.
Together, they entered the Guild hall.
Any hope of arriving unnoticed disappeared immediately.
Seteta recognised Gleb. Everyone appeared to know Ghodrat. The Goliath from the battle worked there. Guild officers pointed them out to one another. Important-looking adventurers drifted through the chamber, including Carastaro, Ahyano and a silver-haired man who attracted more attention than Barty understood.
Then Ghir appeared.
Whatever plan the group might have had to slip quietly into the background died beneath his attention.
They were offered the chance to form a house of their own.
For a moment, no one answered.
A house was more than a name. It was a promise. A declaration that they intended to remain together long enough for the Guild to remember them.
They had met during a street battle.
They had shared one evening of alcohol and one breakfast of porridge.
It should have been absurd.
Yet no one walked away.
Seteta placed fifty silver pieces into each of their hands.
It was more money than Barty was accustomed to holding.
The group left the Guild richer, officially acknowledged and still uncertain what they were supposed to call themselves.
Their first act as prospective adventurers was to walk into an ambush.
A gang of vagabonds waited in an alley beside Frank’s tavern. They tried to bait the newcomers into a trap, perhaps expecting frightened amateurs with fresh Guild money.
What they found instead was Derek.
Two attackers were unconscious before they properly understood the fight had begun.
The rest were blasted, cut down or otherwise introduced to the sudden consequences of poor judgement. Barty’s magic tore through the alley. Ghodrat advanced like a wall. Further slipped inward, retreating into the strange architecture of his own mind while the violence unfolded around him.
When it ended, the alley was quiet.
They searched the fallen, collected what could be collected and continued to Frank’s.
It was, Barty thought, a surprisingly productive first day.
Their first proper contract took them down into the Hollow.
The descent began with farmland.
Barty had expected darkness, stone and monsters. Instead, the first layer opened into fields beneath an impossible sky. Crops grew in perpetual warmth. A lake stretched toward a distant mountain. The air was still, the seasons seemingly trapped in perfect growing weather.
A husband and wife maintained the farm they had been hired to defend.
For the first few nights, the work was almost peaceful.
They killed a handful of ordinary beasts. They ate beside the farmhouse. They explored the surrounding land and spoke about the creatures that lived below.
Ghodrat looked out across the distance and saw members of his tribe.
For a time, the Hollow seemed less like a wound in the world and more like another world entirely.
Then the badgers came.
They emerged during the night in numbers no reasonable person could have expected.
Barty barely had time to stand.
Something struck him.
The world tilted.
He hit the ground without casting a single spell.
Sound became distant. Shapes moved above him. He heard shouts, snarls and the wet impact of weapons. Somewhere nearby, Gleb tried to keep him alive.
Then the wolves arrived.
Barty remembered almost none of the battle. Only fragments remained: the taste of blood, the pressure of someone’s hands, cold air filling his lungs and the moment consciousness returned with the terrible realisation that everything was still trying to kill him.
He ran.
There was no dignity in it. No tactical elegance. He scrambled away from the fighting as quickly as his legs would carry him.
Behind him, the others held.
By dawn, the wolves and badgers were dead.
The farm had been damaged, but no one in the party had been lost.
They dragged the corpses together into a slaughter pile.
Barty stared at Derek across the remains of the battle.
Derek had horns. Different horns, perhaps, but horns nonetheless. His ears were not entirely human either.
“Are we the same?” Barty asked.
The question sounded childish the moment it left him.
Derek did not laugh.
Barty looked away.
“My parents aren’t like me.”
It was the closest he came to explaining.
The Hollow continued to reveal strange things.
They found the body of a dire wolf that had escaped the battle only to bleed out in the wilderness. They studied it, butchered it and learned what they could.
They discovered that Further was two years old.
No one seemed entirely certain what to do with this information.
At a settlement called Talya Echano, the group rested among those who had made a life beneath the surface. There were fires, food and conversation.
Barty tried to enter a tattoo parlour and was turned away.
He was unsure whether this was because of his age, his appearance or some other rule that had not been explained to him. He privately decided it was discrimination of some kind.
When the settlement gathered around the bonfire to eat, Barty stayed away from the flames.
Further stayed with him.
Barty cast a sphere of magical darkness so Further could eat in peace.
The others sat in the firelight.
Barty and Further shared the dark.
On the journey back toward the surface, Ghodrat told them about the deeper layers.
The second was said to be a labyrinth.
The fifth was the deepest anyone had reached.
No one knew what waited beneath that.
The road was not empty. They passed a wrecked cart, signs of an ambush and creatures that erupted from the earth with snapping claws. The monsters burrowed beneath the ground, surfaced without warning and vanished again.
The party struggled to strike them.
Barty struggled more than most.
Still, they survived.
They reached the entrance, collected their payment and prepared to return to the city.
There was one final problem.
Further needed to eat.
Barty cast darkness.
The guards panicked.
Weapons were drawn. Orders were shouted. For a few dangerous moments, Barty stood at the centre of the magical void while armed soldiers assumed something terrible was happening inside it.
The misunderstanding was eventually resolved.
A sergeant agreed that screens could be provided in the future.
It was a small compromise, but it mattered.
So did the knowledge that they had survived their first contract.
The Guild recognised their progress.
They were no longer novices.
They were stronger now.
And, perhaps more dangerously, they were beginning to believe they belonged together.
They returned to the Hollow with better equipment and greater ambition.
This time they found a cave that had not been carved by any ordinary creature. Its passages led deeper, toward the second layer.
They established camp near the entrance and began mapping.
The caves answered their intrusion with Kruthiks.
The insectoid creatures poured from the tunnels. Claws scraped against stone. Mandibles snapped in the dark.
Barty raised his hand and fired.
One Kruthik vanished beneath the force of the blast so completely that Barty briefly wondered whether he had knocked it into another dimension.
Two more died soon after.
Then the Hive Lord arrived.
The creature filled the passage, vast and armoured, its presence turning the smaller Kruthiks into little more than heralds.
The battle was brutal, but the party endured.
Afterward, Derek found a book.
It was a guide to the flora and fauna of the Hollow, written by someone who knew far too much about the depths.
The book instructed them to turn around.
They did.
Tracks crossed the ground behind them: running footsteps accompanied by heavier impressions sunk deeply into the stone.
Something had been moving through the caves.
Something large.
The spiders found them first.
Swarms spilled across the floor and walls. Barty’s magic tore through them, blasting the creatures away from Vaelora. When the last of them stopped moving, the survivors scattered in confusion.
Then more spiders came.
And more.
The caves seemed infested beyond reason.
Between attacks, the party became aware that something was following them.
A sound echoed through the tunnels.
A child crying.
They followed it.
The girl was called Ellouise.
She was alive, though only because an Umber Hulk had protected her. She had written the book Derek carried. Something had called her into the Hollow, promising that she would be safe.
The promise had not been entirely false.
The Umber Hulk had kept her alive.
With Further’s help, Ellouise marked the location of the creature’s colony on their map.
They escorted her out.
Above ground, life resumed with unsettling ease. Food was eaten. Goods were sold. Conversations drifted toward ordinary things.
But the Hollow had changed.
Or perhaps they had.
When they returned to the second layer, they travelled through red granite caverns until they reached an underground sea.
The water stretched beyond sight.
Barty stood at its edge and felt something he had not expected.
Calm.
He picked up a stone and skipped it across the surface.
Fish moved beneath the dark water. A strange duck-like creature drifted in the distance. The cavern was enormous, the ceiling lost somewhere above them.
Beyond the shore waited the Umber Hulks.
Three of them sat upon stone thrones.
They had occupied the seats for so long that the rock had shaped itself around their bodies.
Statues near the thrones translated between the party and the creatures.
The leader called himself Red Granite.
The Umber Hulks were not mindless beasts. They had a colony, a hierarchy and a history. They understood the Hollow in ways the surface Guild did not.
The party listened.
They learned.
And the world beneath the world became larger.
On their journey back, the spiders attacked again.
Derek fell.
Barty fell soon after.
For a time, the cavern floor was all blood, webbing and distant voices.
Then Derek rose.
Then Barty opened his eyes.
The spiders were dead.
Once again, against all reasonable expectation, so were none of them.
They returned to the surface, visited Cerceril Creations and ended the expedition at Frank’s.
For most of the party, the delve was over.
For Barty, it had only begun.
That night, he dreamed of the Hollow.
He stood alone within the second layer.
A droplet of water struck stone somewhere in the dark.
Voices called from two directions.
Barty walked north.
He crossed a beach where strange fish-like people danced along the coast. They did not appear to see him. Their movements were frantic and ritualistic, their bodies twisting beneath a sky of endless stone.
Barty stepped into the water.
He descended.
The depth should have crushed him. The cold should have stopped his heart.
Instead, he floated.
He breathed.
Something enormous moved in the darkness below.
“Come and find us, Barty.”
The voice came from everywhere.
He was returned to the fork.
This time, he went left.
Something seized him and dragged him through the unknown. Water became coastline, coastline became caverns, and caverns became an underground river rushing through darkness.
His eyes adapted.
The voice continued.
“You are not alone.”
The river carried the words.
“We will not abandon you.”
Across the water stood the ruins of a settlement.
A shrine waited at its centre.
Upon it rested a crystal.
Barty touched it.
Magic poured out of him.
It streamed from his body into the crystal, leaving him hollow and breathless. The stone blazed with power that had once belonged to him.
Still, he walked onward.
The tunnels narrowed. Tool marks scarred the walls. Broken bodies had been crushed into the floor.
Ahead stood a temple.
Its doors opened.
A vast statue waited within.
Stone lips moved.
The voice called his name.
Barty awoke.
The darkness of Further’s house surrounded him.
For several moments, he could not breathe.
He felt exactly as he had in the dream: cold, weightless and watched.
No one had noticed him wake.
No one had heard the voice.
Barty stared toward the floor, imagining the impossible layers beneath it.
The Hollow was waiting.
And now he knew it was waiting for him.