Therin and Scarlet wake early in the myconid colony to find Taskhand Serath Mirimm already deep in silent conference with the Echo Knights, his lips moving wordlessly to ears that hear through magic alone. At breakfast, the party learns from Serath that several myconid colonies are well-known and friendly to the Dynasty.
An escort of elder myconids arrives to announce that the Sovereign wishes to speak. Once led to the great fungal chamber, the Sovereign thanks the party again for Sprout’s safe return. Serath, in turn, delivers news that strikes at the heart of the colony’s troubles: the derro attacks are not isolated, but part of a broader campaign stretching south, cutting the myconid circles off from one another. He pledges the Dynasty’s aid. Then, with a diplomat’s practiced misdirection, Serath reveals that the aid he pledged is the party itself. Pressed by a summons from the Bright Queen, Serath and Aedric depart at once, leaving Vornesh Tasithar with the companions and pressing into Kragor’s hands a sealed letter of passage bearing the dodecahedron seal of the Kryn Dynasty.
The Sovereign, for his part, bestows four enchanted gourds of spore-dust—a blessing that grants clarity and a measure of telepathic communion—and ten days’ provisions for the road ahead. The party prepares mushroom-lanterns under the instruction of juvenile myconids, Kragor firmly convinces Sprout to remain and protect the colony, and the companions strike out once more into the Underdark, retracing their steps to the fork they passed the day before and plunging down the darker path.
What awaits them there is a gauntlet of oozes—five amber-grey globs of adhesive hunger that pour from the walls of a suffocatingly narrow tunnel and very nearly claim Doctor Pepe’s life. The party fights with everything they have: Scarlet’s moon magic scorching the creatures where they cluster, Elara’s music and inspiration threading through the chaos, Therin’s holy fire, Kragor’s relentless eldritch barrage, Brennik’s warpick, and Vorensh’s spear & scimitars flashing with grim determination. The oozes drop, split, and ultimately give way to the assault.
Therin and Scarlet were the first to stir, as surface-dwellers will when the sun they have known all their lives is replaced by the patient, unvarying dark of the Underdark. They emerged from their sleeping-chambers into the common area and found the Taskhand already there, head bent close with Vornesh and Aedric in a conference that had plainly begun some time ago. The remains of a breakfast sat on the table near them, picked clean.
The Echo Knights acknowledged the two companions with the briefest flick of attention and returned to their conversation. Therin and Scarlet watched, and after a moment they noticed something odd: Serath’s lips would move and stop, move and stop, without any sound reaching them across the room. The Taskhand was using Sending: a spell that carried words across any distance in the world, and he was using it here, a dozen feet from his own guards, to speak with someone none of the rest of them could hear.
Scarlet greeted the group and asked, directly enough, what was going on. The answer was the diplomatic equivalent of a door closing gently but firmly in her face: the three of them wished to continue their conversation among themselves. Serath did allow, before returning to his silent conference, that once everyone was awake they would have an appointment with the Sovereign. Scarlet asked how they would know when it was time. The Taskhand told her, with the offhand certainty of someone describing the weather, that if she listened in her mind she would hear.
At that hour, the colony was quiet. The great telepathic hum that had nearly overwhelmed them the night before had subsided to something distant and manageable, like the surf heard from far inland.
The rest of the party woke by degrees—Doctor Pepe last, as was his custom—and joined the table for breakfast. The Taskhand came over to sit with them, and the Echo Knights remained standing nearby. Kragor asked after them; they had eaten before the rest of the company had risen. Therin noted that he was feeling particularly… robust… this day, and the Taskhand remarked, “Spending an extended time within the spores is known to temporarily boost one’s constitution.”
The talk turned to their hosts. Serath confirmed what his earlier curiosity about mushrooms had implied: the Kryn knew of the myconids and were on good terms with them generally, though the Dynasty rarely encountered circles this large or this welcoming to surface-dwellers.
As they finished their meal, a myconid appeared to clear the dishes, and the companions received, unbidden, a gentle wash of thought about the origin and preparation of the food—where it had grown, how it had been harvested, the slow and careful process by which it had become what they had just eaten. It was deeply strange and strangely reassuring.
Two elder myconids entered the common area and took up positions on either side of the doorway. The Sovereign, their presence announced, would like to talk—the myconid word for it arrived in their minds translated imperfectly as flesh talk, a phrase that was either charming or faintly alarming depending on the listener.
They followed the elders back through the colony. Sprout found them along the way, radiating happiness so pure it required no translation, and fell into step at the front of the procession as though they had been waiting all morning for precisely this parade.
The Sovereign’s chamber was as vast as they remembered it, the great fungal monarch swaying at its center while elder myconids ringed the walls in silent attendance. The layered, many-toned voice reached them before they had fully entered.
“Thank you again for bringing our sprout back to us.”
Scarlet answered first, with the unguarded warmth that seemed to be her native tongue: “Our pleasure, sir.”
Then Serath stepped forward and spoke with the measured weight of his office. He thanked the Sovereign for the colony’s hospitality, and then—with a diplomat’s instinct for when to turn a pleasantry into a pivot—he delivered the news. He had heard, he said, that this was not the only circle suffering. The derro attacks had struck farther south. The lines of communication between colonies were being severed, one by one. The Dynasty, he added, wished to pledge whatever assistance it could give.
The Sovereign swayed, and through the spore-link the party felt a deep, spreading ache of worry—not for this colony alone, but for kin, for spore-mates somewhere in the dark with whom they could no longer speak.
“We have lost communication with our brethren,” the Sovereign said, “and we thank you for this knowledge. We thank your above-worlder friends for their help.”
And then—quite without meaning to—the Sovereign shared an image of what it imagined the surface world looked like. It was, by any objective standard, completely wrong: an upside-down forest of stone pillars, a ceiling of blue emptiness, trees growing downward into a void. The party received it with the careful blankness of travelers who have learned not to laugh at the strange beliefs of their hosts. Doctor Pepe responded by projecting an image of his own: the Savalirwood as it actually was, streams and sky and birds and the tall, proud trees reaching up into sunlight. The Sovereign admired it with quiet fascination, its attention lingering longest on the tallest trees, as though trying to reconcile them with some deeply held conviction about which way growth was supposed to go.
Serath continued. The Dynasty, he said, had long felt goodwill toward the myconid circles. He shared that his colleagues had been in contact with a colony farther south—and he was happy to confirm that they were safe. The Sovereign’s relief was palpable, a loosening in the air.
Then Serath laid out what he was actually offering. The path the companions were walking, he explained, would take them in the direction from which the attacks had been coming. He would assign people to investigate—to look into the severed communication lines, to help regrow the connection south. But he himself had been called away. He would send one of his Echo Knights, and the rest of his comrades, as a token of the Dynasty’s friendship.
The Sovereign swayed, turning the word friendship over against the word kin, weighing them. Then it turned and looked at each of the companions in turn. It was puzzled by Scarlet in particular—the proportions were wrong, the demeanor confusing, and the Sovereign could not quite determine whether she was an adult or a child. It found Therin’s draconic features and Elara’s horn fascinating in the way a naturalist might study an unfamiliar beetle.
“Thank you for your help,” the Sovereign said at last. “We would like to give you some helpful spores for your journey. We will show you”—it paused, searching for the word—“a map, to find where our people were hurt.”
Kragor and Therin caught something in that moment that the others missed: a flicker of irritation on Vornesh’s face, there and gone. Kragor reached out telepathically to Therin to share the observation. The Sovereign noticed. The Sovereign, it turned out, noticed everything.
And then the companions were bombarded—there was no gentler word for it—with images of the Underdark, hundreds of them, thousands, arriving faster than a waking mind could sort, a roaring cataract of tunnels and chambers and junctions and landmarks, a map delivered at the speed of panic. The Sovereign chuckled, a strange, deep vibration that passed through the spores and settled somewhere in the chest.
Then it reached behind its seat, produced a bag, and handed it to Serath.
Doctor Pepe’s mind wandered, as it tended to, toward practical concerns: supplies, provisions, what they would eat on the road ahead. The Sovereign caught the thought and answered it in its own idiom. Tree-show-er, item-taker, we will give you food for your journey. Then Doctor Pepe’s mind slipped toward the darker thing beneath the practical—the fear of the derro, of what they had seen in the vision, of what waited in the dark ahead. The Sovereign sent a soft pulse of spores in his direction, and Doctor Pepe felt the fear slide from his shoulders like a heavy cloak.
The diplomatic formalities continued for some time after that. No one present could have repeated them afterward with any accuracy.
Sprout had watched the entire audience in silence, and as the party withdrew they sent one last image into the companions’ minds: the Echo Knights and the party, twelve feet tall, weapons blazing with impossible light, cutting through ropers. Sprout walked back with them to their chambers and posted themself outside the door like a sentinel grown from the floor.
Serath gathered the company in their quarters and spoke without preamble.
“I apologize for surprising you with that. I have been called back to Xhorhas by the Bright Queen. Aedric will come with me.”
He let the silence hold for a beat.
“Vornesh will continue with you. The path we were on will take you near the derro problem. The Dynasty and the Bright Queen will be grateful for your help resolving this issue.”
Kragor’s voice was flat. “Did I understand that you told the Sovereign the Dynasty would send help?”
Serath turned to him. “You are that help.” He pressed a sealed letter into Kragor’s hand—parchment, wax, the dodecahedron seal of the Kryn Dynasty pressed into the cooling amber. “This will clear you with anyone in the Dynasty. While unusual”—and here the Taskhand’s mouth tightened into something that was very nearly a smile—“you have been good traveling companions.”
He left the bag on the table and was gone before anyone could frame an objection, Aedric a silent shadow at his heels.
Therin, never one to let a mystery sit unopened, had his hand in the bag before the Taskhand’s footsteps had faded. He pulled out a gourd. Vornesh, still standing where she had stood through Serath’s departure, spoke for the first time.
“Those are spores that will make you better at”—she paused, searching for a word sufficiently beneath her—“most everything, for a time.”
The tone suggested they should already have known this. There were four gourds in total. Their effect, once investigated, proved to grant a sudden, guiding clarity that would briefly steady a weapon’s strike and fortify the body against harm, married to a gentle telepathic communion among those who partook—a parting gift from a Sovereign who understood that travelers in the Underdark needed every edge they could get.
Shortly afterward, a group of adolescent myconids arrived bearing food: ten days’ rations, carefully prepared. Water was not a concern; they were nearly underneath the lake, and the stone around them wept with moisture.
Therin and Kragor fell into a quiet argument about Sprout. Therin saw no reason not to bring the little myconid along; Kragor saw every reason. The colony had just gotten its sporeling back. The road ahead led toward the very creatures that had been attacking myconid circles. Kragor ended the debate by reaching out to Sprout directly and communicating, in the wordless way they had found together, that Sprout’s place was here—protecting the colony, growing into the myconid they would become. Sprout accepted this with the solemnity of the very young receiving their first real duty.
What followed was one of those interludes that adventuring parties will later recall with disproportionate fondness. Doctor Pepe and Therin, having observed the myconids’ bioluminescence at work throughout the colony, became seized with the idea of harnessing fungus as a light source. Several failed attempts ensued—mushrooms held at awkward angles, spores puffed in the wrong direction, one briefly glowing specimen that promptly went dark and refused to be coaxed back. An adult myconid, watching this with what might have been patient amusement, finally intervened and taught them the trick of it: a mushroom-lantern, cultivated just so, casting dim, steady light to a radius of thirty feet. Everyone made one. The party that set out from the colony that morning glowed faintly, a string of soft green stars moving through the absolute dark.
Kragor, for his part, spent the last minutes before departure re-establishing the telepathic scouting arrangement with Vornesh—the silent thread that had served them well on the approach to the colony and would, he hoped, serve them better on whatever waited ahead.
They retraced their steps to the fork where, the day before, Serath had urged the left-hand path and Sprout had pointed right. This time there was no argument to be had. They took the other way.
The rock underfoot had changed. Where the approach to the colony had been smooth and worn—the stone of a well-traveled road—this passage was fractured, split here and there by cracks that had no pattern and no obvious cause. Every now and then a slab shifted under someone’s weight, a grinding whisper of stone on stone that echoed down the tunnel ahead of them and died somewhere in the dark.
They were following the vein of pink coral-fungus that had guided them to the colony, but the deeper they walked, the dimmer it grew, its vivid color leaching away into a greying pallor. Kragor reached out and touched it. What came back was a faint, distorted echo of the vision they had shared before—the myconid collective, the daily hum of a village thinking together—but threaded through with something like static, a crackle of interference that set his teeth on edge. He described it to Brennik, and the two of them fell into a low discussion of the tunnels beneath Xhorhas, the deep history of the stone, the things that had walked these passages before the Kryn ever raised their first city.
The Faerzress returned, thickening as they walked, its pale violet glow painting the walls in familiar, uneasy light. And then Therin stopped.
He sighted a hole in the cavern wall that was roughly round, and too regular to be natural, its edges rimed with the unmistakable scorch. Kragor reached out to Vornesh across their telepathic link. I saw it, she sent back. They collapsed it. Kragor filed this under problems for later and they continued.
The passage tightened. Five feet across, then ten at its widest, the ceiling dropping low enough that Kragor had to duck. Vornesh, who had been ranging ahead, dropped back to warn them: they should stay close. Therin, squinting into the dark ahead, asked what exactly was going to choke them off in a tunnel of rocks.
“Dragonborn,” Vornesh said, without turning around, “this is the Underdark. Everything considers you food.”
The walls were riddled with openings now—fist-sized holes, head-sized holes, gaps that could have hidden anything. Therin noticed something in one of them: a glint, a suggestion of moisture, a texture that was wrong for stone.
Kragor wrapped himself in the cold shell of the Void and readied a crackling bolt of eldritch force. Vornesh marched ahead without breaking stride. Brennik and Therin tensed, weapons half-drawn, the old animal instinct that precedes ambush prickling at the base of every skull.
A grey-golden glob of something shot out of the wall at Therin. It fell short, just barely, and splattered against the stone with a wet, adhesive slap. Then another, then another, and suddenly the company was surrounded by five of the things, oozing out of the holes like honey poured sideways, their surfaces rippling with a slow, hungry intelligence.
Therin’s mace came down on the nearest with a precision that bordered on the divine, the impact shattering its outer membrane in a spray of viscous ichor. A heartbeat later, Kragor unleashed a concentrated bolt of freezing darkness drawn straight from the void of the Far Realms, the frost-rimed energy punching a fist-sized crater through its flank. Brennik flipped his warpick around and brought it home with the same uncanny accuracy, and the creature—the first of them, the one the party would later think of as the vanguard—was already coming apart.
Vornesh’s echo flickered into being and drove its spear into a second jelly with the grim efficiency of a woman who had been killing things in the dark for longer than most of the party had been above ground. Then the jellies answered.
One slammed into Brennik and clung there, and where it touched his skin began to burn. This was not the clean burn of fire but the slow, corrosive sizzle of acid eating through flesh. Another found Doctor Pepe and did the same. A third charged Vornesh and missed; a fourth and fifth went for her echo and found nothing but violet smoke.
Elara sang three rising notes—a thread of courage that climbed the spine and settled in the chest—and four of the company felt their feet lighten beneath them. She followed it with a shard of ice that burst among the clustered jellies, freezing and shattering in the same instant. Scarlet called down a column of pale, terrible moonlight and pinned two of the creatures beneath it; they steamed and shriveled where the radiance touched them.
Doctor Pepe, moving through the chaos with the silent economy of a man who understood exactly how close he was to dying, drove his dagger into the nearest jelly again and again—five quick thrusts, each one finding something vital in a creature that had no vitals. Kragor spoke a word of curling darkness and the same jelly came apart, necrotic energy and raw force reducing it to a spreading pool.
Vornesh’s echo dashed across the tunnel and buried its spear in the vanguard—the first jelly, already shredded by mace and blast and warpick—and the thing finally gave up its grip on existence. Vornesh herself found that deep, stubborn reserve the Echo Knights were famed for and struck again before the first blow’s echo had faded, killing a second creature outright.
Brennik’s warpick connected with a wet, percussive thud, and he paused to draw breath—a soldier’s trick, a few heartbeats of discipline that pulled him back from the edge. Therin raised his holy symbol and a wave of searing radiance washed outward, three of the remaining jellies blackening and bubbling under the assault. From his mouth a whispered word of healing reached Brennik in the same moment, knitting the worst of the acid burns.
But the jellies were not finished. One lunged at Vornesh’s echo and tore it apart in a spray of violet light. Another connected with Doctor Pepe again, burning him badly. A third—a fourth—the count was beginning to blur—and Doctor Pepe went down, the acid eating through the last of his strength, his life fading to a frayed thread before anyone could draw breath to shout.
Scarlet was already moving. She crossed the tunnel in a sprint that owed nothing to halfling proportions and everything to the particular courage of someone who had decided that her friend was not dying in this hole. The healing magic poured out of her and into the crumpled rogue, and Doctor Pepe’s eyes snapped open.
He rose. He drove his dagger into the nearest jelly—a single, brutal thrust from a man who had been pulled back from the brink and meant to make it everyone else’s problem. The strike found the creature’s center, and it slumped into shapelessness. He turned, without breaking stride, and slashed into another.
Kragor’s next blast turned a jelly inside out. Vornesh, having learned what spears and scimitars did to creatures of this consistency, tossed her weapon aside and drew her curved blades. She slashed once—and the jelly split. Two smaller jellies pulsed where one had been, each one half the mass and just as hungry. Her second slash killed one of the pair outright. Brennik’s warpick crunched through the other.
But the lesson was spreading faster than the warning. Her echo’s blade came down on another jelly—and it split too. The party was winning and losing at the same time, the tunnel filling with smaller and smaller mouths.
Therin sent a volley of searing flame screaming through the dark. Two streaks went wide; the third caught a jelly square and boiled a third of its mass away in a hiss of steam. Elara’s arrow punched through another, and she called out a clear, defiant note that landed on Doctor Pepe like a steadying hand on the shoulder. Scarlet swept her arms through the air, guiding a towering cylinder of pale, silvery light across the cavern floor. The unearthly illumination drifted through the dark, its cold radiance scourging the oozes wherever it touched them.
A jelly engulfed Doctor Pepe a final time, and he went down again, the acid doing what acid does to flesh that has already been asked too much of. Scarlet’s shifting column of moonlight caught the creature in the same instant, searing it with blinding brilliance, but the damage was done. Doctor Pepe lay still.
Scarlet reached him again. The healing this time was less dramatic but more certain, the practiced work of someone who had now pulled the same rogue from the brink twice in as many minutes and was beginning to form opinions about his life choices.
Doctor Pepe got up and just kept stabbing. Kragor’s next blast erased another jelly; Vornesh’s echo and scimitars worked in grim synchrony; Brennik’s warpick crushed one of the split pairs into paste. Therin’s final strike eliminated the last of them, and the tunnel fell quiet but for the sound of eight people remembering how to breathe.
Doctor Pepe walked over to Vornesh, still dripping faintly with acid and adrenaline, and asked—with the careful neutrality of a man who had just discovered the hard way what happened when you slashed an ooze—about the splitting.
Vornesh looked at him. She looked at the spreading pools of dissolving jelly that had, not long before, been twice as many jellies as the party had started with. “Splitting them,” she said, “makes them half as strong each.” She considered the wreckage. “Few, no problem. Many, big problem.”