The Minotaur and the Feast
They'd almost missed this cave.
It was set back from the main cluster, farther along the mountain face, its entrance framed by stone that someone had carved a long time ago. Not a cult symbol — older than that, a different hand, different intent. The symbol of Bahamut, worn smooth by weather but still legible.
Nihion had been restless since yesterday, shifting and warm against Elaazar's neck in the way he moved when he was receiving something and trying to communicate it back. When they passed the cave, he went still with the stillness of directed attention.
"Here," Elaazar said.
The Minotaur of Bahamut was not a servant of chaos or darkness. It was a guardian, bound to this cave by something older than the cult — a sentinel left by a different era, corrupted over time by proximity to the rot that had spread through the mountain. Its eyes were wrong. The binding had gone bad, and what was left was an enormous creature with divine markings on its hide and the fixed hostility of something that had forgotten everything except the instruction to stop what entered.
The fight was the hardest individual combat the party had faced. Not because of numbers or tricks — just size, strength, and the specific difficulty of something that didn't tire and didn't feel pain the way living things do. Cylia took hits that she'd be feeling for a week. Elaazar held it with every divine resource he had. Arya burned through more spells than she'd intended to.
When it fell, it fell with a certain weight — the release of something that had been held too long.
Elaazar stood over it and said the prayer for corrupted things, which was longer than the prayer for enemies. It felt right to say it. Nihion was quiet on his neck.
Deeper in the same stretch of mountain: a small cave, warm.
The scarabs came out of the cracks in the wall as if they'd been waiting for an audience. Small, amber-plated, radiating heat like tiny furnaces. Five of them, moving toward the party with the curious directness of creatures that had apparently decided humans were interesting.
They were not hostile. They were the opposite of hostile — insistently present, attaching to boot buckles and pack straps and the hem of Arya's cloak with the cheerful certainty of creatures that had found their people.
Cylia stood with two of them on her shoulder, looking at them with an expression that was trying to be neutral and not quite getting there.
"We're keeping them," Elaazar said.
Nobody argued.
The feast at the Keep that evening was the genuine article — the community understanding what had been accomplished, choosing to mark it properly. The tavern, the courtyard, the temple steps all full. Food that had been held back for occasions. The scribe, normally a man of strict economies, was on his third cup of something and looking pleased about it.
The party sat at the center of it and received the Keep's gratitude with varying degrees of grace. Elaazar handled it well, because he understood that the celebration was also the community reclaiming something, and that mattered more than whether he found the attention comfortable. Arya accepted it politely and spent most of the evening in quiet conversation with the priest. Cylia sat next to Winvarle and ate and didn't talk much, which was its own kind of conversation.
Late in the evening, when the noise had settled, Winvarle raised the problem she'd been holding back.
The red dragon.
He'd given them dragon fire, and they'd used it, and the deal was that he would come back for his payment. A dragon who felt underpaid or bored was a threat to the Keep on a scale the gates couldn't handle. He'd made it clear, in the arrogant shorthand of creatures who don't bother with subtlety, that he considered the current arrangement open-ended and in his favour.
"We need to deal with that," Winvarle said.
"We know," Cylia said.
Next episode: The party goes back to face the red dragon — and the darkness he brings is for Cylia alone.