Danica put her head down and ran with all speed, sparing a heartbeat to wave Cadderly back into the cathedral, to remind him with her desperate expression that he, too, was in grave danger.

As the priest turned, he saw just how grave that danger was. Coming out of the woods were more of the crawling beasts, many more. That unseen but oft-heard bear lumbered out, too, thrashing and stumbling, covered with the shadowy creatures.

His heart pounding, Cadderly leaped to the stairs, but on the porch, the many wizards and priests were in a panic, crushing against the door with few actually getting inside. To both sides of the double doors, windows flew open, those inside beckoning their companions to dive in from the porch.

They weren’t going to make it, Cadderly realized as he glanced back at Danica. How he wished he had his hand crossbow, or even his walking stick! But he had come down thinking that nothing was seriously out of sorts. Physically, he was unarmed.

But he still had Deneir.

Cadderly turned on the top step and closed his eyes, falling into prayer, praying for some solution. He began spellcasting before he even realized what he was attempting.

He opened his eyes and threw his arms wide. Danica hit the bottom step and sprang up past him, a host of creatures right behind her.

A blast of energy rolled out from Cadderly across the ground and through it in a great, rolling wave, lifting the cobblestones and grass, and many of the creatures.

More waves came forth, washing the beasts back in a series of rolling semicircles, like a ripple of waves from the shore of a still pond. The hungry beasts tried to fight past it, but inevitably lost ground, washing farther and farther backward.

“What is that?” a wizard asked in obvious awe, and despite his concentration, Cadderly heard the woman.

He had no answer.

None, that is, except that his spell had bought them the time they needed, and into Spirit Soaring they all went, Danica and Cadderly coming last, with Danica practically pulling her stunned husband in behind her.

Danica was relieved to hear other people calling out commands to guard the windows and doors, because Cadderly could do little at that moment, and he needed her. She looked around only briefly, suddenly realizing that someone was missing. Spirit Soaring was a huge place of many, many rooms, so she hadn’t noticed the absence before. But in that moment of urgency and danger, she knew that the Spirit Soaring family was incomplete.

Where was Ivan Bouldershoulder?

Danica glanced around again, trying to recall when last she had seen the boisterous dwarf. But Cadderly’s gasp brought her back to the situation at hand.

“What did you do out there?” Danica asked him. “I have never seen—”

“I know not at all,” he admitted. “I went to Deneir, seeking spells, seeking a solution.”

“And he answered!”

Cadderly looked at her with a blank expression for a moment before shaking his head with concern. “The Metatext, the Weave …” he whispered. “He is part of it now.”

Danica stared at him, puzzled.

“As if the two—perhaps the three of them, Deneir, Metatext, and Weave—are no longer separate,” Cadderly tried to explain.

“But save for Mystra, the gods were never a part of—”

“No, more than that,” Cadderly said, shaking his head more forcefully. “He was writing to the Weave, patterning it with numbers, and now …”

The sound of breaking glass, followed by shouts, followed by screams, broke short the conversation.

“They come,” said Danica, and she started off, pulling Cadderly behind her.

They found their first battle in the room only two doors down from the foyer, where a group of priests met the incursion of a pair of the beasts head on. Smashing away with their maces, and mostly armored, the priests had the situation well in hand.

Cadderly took the lead, running fast to the central stairwell and sprinting up three steps at a time to get up to the fourth floor and his private quarters. Just inside the doorway, he grabbed his belt, a wide leather girdle with a holster on either side for his hand crossbows. He looped a bandolier of specially crafted bolts around his neck and sprinted back to join Danica, loading the crossbows as he went.

They started for the stairs, but then discovered an unwelcome talent of the strange, crawling beasts: they were expert climbers. Down the hall a window shattered, and they heard thumps as one of the creatures pull itself through.

Danica moved in front of Cadderly as he dashed that way, but as they reached the room and kicked the door wide, he pushed her aside and lifted his arm, leveling the crossbow.

A beast was in the room, a second in the window frame, and both opened wide their mouths in vicious snarls.

Cadderly fired, the bolt flashing across the room to strike the chest of the beast in the window. The dart’s side supports folded inward, collapsing on themselves and crushing the small vial they held. That concussion ignited magical oil in an explosive burst that blew a huge hole in the monster’s black flesh. The force blew the crawler back out the window.

Cadderly aimed his second crossbow at the remaining creature, but turned his arm aside as Danica charged it. She stutter-stepped at the last moment, brought her left leg across to her right, and swept it back powerfully, deflecting both clawing arms aside. She expertly turned her hips as she went, gaining momentum, for as her left foot touched down, she snap-kicked with her right, driving the tip of her foot into the beast’s left eye.

It howled and thrashed, arms swinging back furiously, predictably, and Danica easily stepped out of reach, then followed through with a forward step and front kick to the creature’s chest that drove it back against the wall.

Again it reacted with fury, and again she easily leaped out of reach.

This was the way to fight the creatures, she decided then. Strike hard and back out, repeatedly, never staying close enough to engage those awful claws.

Cadderly was more than glad that she had the situation under control when they heard the window in the adjoining room shatter. He spun around the jamb, turning to kick open the next door, and swept into the room with his left arm upraised.

The beast huddled right before him, waiting to spring at him.

With a startled cry, Cadderly fired the hand crossbow, the bolt hitting the charging crawler barely two feet away, close enough that he felt the rush of concussive force as the dart exploded. Then the beast was gone, blown back across the room where it settled against the wall, its long arms out wide and trembling, a hole in its torso so large that Cadderly realized he could slide his fist into it with ease.

His breathing came in surprised gasps, but he heard a commotion just outside. He dropped the hand crossbow from his left hand—it bounced off his mid thigh, for it was securely tethered—and worked fast to reload the other weapon.

He nearly dropped the explosive dart when Danica rushed into the hall behind him, slamming the door of the first room.

“Too many!” she cried. “And they’re coming in all around us. We’ve got to call up help from below.”

“Go! Go!” Cadderly yelled back, fumbling with the dart as a shadowy form filled the window across the room.

Danica, hardly noticing the nearby enemy, ran for the stairwell. The fleshy beast hurled itself at Cadderly.

The crossbow string slipped from his grasp, and he was lucky to stop the dart from falling out of its grooved table. His eyes flashed from bow to beast and back again, and back, to see a filthy clawed hand slashing at his face.

The center stairs at Spirit Soaring ran down a flight, turned around a landing, then ran down another flight in the opposite direction, two flights for every story of the building. Danica didn’t actually run down the steps. She went halfway down the first flight and hopped the railing, landing lightly halfway down the second flight. She didn’t bounce right to the third set of stairs, but leaped down to the landing to reconnoiter the third floor.