Ttwo days after the landslide, the final boulders were removed quietly, stealthily from the canyon by an enormous army of ellgru. Their lizard-like black bodies blended with the deepening shadows in the canyon as the sun sank slowly below the horizon. It looked almost as if the boulders were rising on their own, hovering unnaturally before drifting out of the passageway. The eerie specter-like crew moved soundlessly about, clearing the path in perfect coordination, as if they were a single organism.

  In every practical sense, Valen thought, the army is just one being—each soldier an extension of the budmother. Once the amorphous black creature had spewed hundreds more of her children from the lair beneath Hellsgate, she had commissioned dozens of her gnal to fly them south. Mere hours after the humans had blocked the canyon, the ellgru had descended from the sky to help clear the road—done so quietly, so carefully, that the humans below were unaware.

  Valen knew the people of Hylan were ignorant of the work of the ellgru because of a new spawn. At Nilrem’s request, the budmother had birthed a new form of goblin, one Valen had never heard of. Nilrem called them minox in his messages, which he said meant phantombats. Whatever their designation, they were small, hand-sized fiends that looked more like inky black cleaning cloths than bats. They moved through the air like smoke, hardly noticeable. While they had no teeth or claws like most of the budmother’s children, they could get almost anywhere and provide instantaneous eyes and ears. Nearly a thousand of these phatombats now lurked in the shadows in Hylan, watching, listening, and reporting. Because of this intelligence, Valen knew the entire village had moved to witch’s house for some kind of ritual banquet. He also knew that the body of the witch remained in state within that house—still fresh enough for Nilrem to possess.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  “Thank you so much for gathering everyone in one place for us,” Valen whispered out loud as he dug his heels into his rock troll steed. The ird began to carry him down the canyon road with nearly two thousand different kinds of demonspawn following him.

  “You have made yourselves much easier prey than I had hoped. You delayed us here through a clever trick. Yes … a very clever trick, indeed. But don’t worry. You will pay for your insolence. Oh yes,” said the vizier, grinning inhumanly, “you … will … pay!”