All things considered, Samgar found his first trip through a magical gateway buried in the heart of a deadly dungeon a bit of a letdown.

As he stepped over the threshold into darkness, there was a distinctly uncomfortable lurch in his stomach, the unexpected drop-off of miscounting the steps in a dark stairwell. There was a roar in his ears halfway between the thunder of a waterfall and the howl of a high wind. For an awful minute, Samgar was being crushed under a hundred mountains–the next, tiny roots were worming their way into his every crevasse, piercing and prying him apart. Then–

Samgar gasped in a breath as he landed hard on his feet. The impact jammed his knee, and he collapsed to the left, slamming into a cool, smooth surface. Everything around him was dark. Samgar staggered to his feet just as Jindi tumbled out of the ceiling, accompanied by the flameless lantern. Eerie blue light filled the narrow passageway, and Samgar had a bare moment to realize their entry point was the same smooth stone as the rest of the tunnel. Jindi landed on her feet in a crouch with a swirl of blue robes, the elegance of it only disrupted by the way she immediately fell backward onto her ass, gripping her head and groaning.

"You alright?" Samgar asked once he was reasonably sure he wasn't going to throw up. Jindi slowly stood up, still pressing her palms to her temples.

"No," Jindi answered, blunt as a mace to the head. "That was the single most disagreeable form of transportation I've ever had the misfortune to experience. And it's only the beginning. Something is very wrong with this place, Sam xiansheng."

"I suppose the day does end in Y," Samgar replied. He took the flameless lantern from where it had fallen between them and hoisted it up. They were standing in a winding cylindrical passageway even narrower than the deathcoil-carved tunnels, shaped from a seamless piece of stone that felt crystalline under his gauntlet-free hand. The ceiling was too low for him to stand up straight, and Samgar grimaced at the thought of further days in claustrophobic tunnels.

With a start, Samgar realized he recognized the stone of the passageway. "Blackglass?" He murmured. He had only seen it a few times–the barber-surgeon had a delicate set of scalpels made from the mirrorlike material. His lips parted as he realized how much blackglass mus have gone into making the place–only mined from faraway volcanos, it was worth its weight in gold. He and Jindi were standing in a treasure trove.

"Samgar, this place is evil," Jindi insisted with a grimace. "I don't know where we are, but it's unnatural. The breath of the world...I don't know how to describe it."

Samgar turned to her. Somehow she looked green even in the blue light. "There's something wrong with the world's magic?"

"It's not there. That shouldn't–it's not possible. But it's gone." Jindi had released her head, but Samgar wasn't foolish enough to think whatever plagued her was gone. "We've gone from a rushing ocean to a stagnant pool. The great web of existence has been cut away. But somehow it's all moving so fast around us like a whirlpool, with nothing but a void at the center. This place should not exist."

"Delightful." Samgar turned to the distant curve of the passageway. "Something tells me standing in this hall isn't going to make the great web of existence come back. We'd better get moving."

Jindi didn't answer him, but after a moment she fell into step behind him. The long curve of the passage yielded another, tighter turn in the same direction. As the pair proceeded, Samgar realized that they were walking in a spiral, constricting slowly towards an unknown center. Their footsteps echoed in the strange, mirrored passageway, his heavy and ringing, hers soft and quick. Eventually, the endless blue on mirrored black started to shift. Light, tinted azure but player than the lantern, began to reflect against the passage ahead of them. They proceeded faster until one final turn opened them out into the largest cavern Samgar had seen yet.

It was perhaps three hundred feet in diameter and circular, a hemispheric dome made of pure blackglass polished to countless facets. A witchlight the color of glacial ice hung suspended a hundred feet in the air, filling the cavern with flat, unnatural radiance that had neither the vitality of sunlight nor the warmth of a torch. Everything was flat, dead, and still, with a noticeable chill in the air. What Samgar initially took to be more blackglass on the floor was instead frigid water, a fact only discovered when he took a step and sank a foot into its frigid depths. He pulled back, swearing, and watched dark ripples spread slowly away from the entrance to the passageway.

In the center of the cavern rose a mound of gray stone, a hundred feet across. It cleared the surface of the water by only a handful of inches, but in this featureless, mirrored realm that made it a heroic monolith. Atop the rock was a hut of brown wood bleached gray by the witchlight. There was no motion.

The water was not stagnant because there was not enough life to see rot. The weight of the earth could not be felt when the walls only cast back dark, scintillatingly blue tesselations. Jindi was right. This was an unnatural, alien place.

Samgar and Jindi stood transfixed until a woman stuck her head out of the hut and gave a piercing call: "Are you going to stand there all day? Or will you come over here so I can take a look at you?"

~*~

Two minutes later, Samgar and Jindi were sitting cross-legged across from a witch. Samgar had allowed himself to slump a little after their ordeal, while Jindi perched with rigid dignity. He could tell from the set of her jaw that she had grown no more comfortable with their surroundings; however, she seemed to know better than to show weakness in front of their companion. For his part, Samgar devoted his hands to adjusting the leather straps that kept his pauldrons from sliding off his shoulders in the absence of his ruined breastplate.

The witch sat across from them on the gray rock, arms crossed, legs folded beneath her. She looked to be in her early sixties, with long brown hair pulled back in a gray-streaked bun. She wore a long, old-fashioned dress of the ritually purified fabric favored by mages, dyed sapphire blue and paired with a considerably clumsier shawl of lumpy yarn. Her eyes were the color of a snowmelt river: gray streaked with brown, tinged blue in the light along with the rest of the cavern. Though her mouth was pulled in a sour grimace, her eyes were hungry, drinking them both in like cool water on a summer's day.

"So," the witch began. "What did you do to piss off Charles?"

"Exist in harmony with the universe," Jindi answered at the same time Samgar replied: "What?"

Dismissing Samgar's confusion, the witch addressed Jindi. "That's a novel crime, but I suppose there's some precedent for it. You're a Southron dragon cultist, then?"

The lines around Jindi's mouth tightened further, and Samgar cut in. "What do you mean, piss off Charles?"

The witch rolled her eyes and made an expansive gesture at their surroundings. "Look around you, young man. You're only thrown in the deepest prison in Nuhan for crimes that make you the personal enemy of her king. For a long while it was only two of us. Some time ago a third was added, though she's not much company these days. Now we have you two. So why are you here?"

Jindi leaned forward, composure evaporating. Raw longing shone on her face. "So she is here? Her call was so faint I thought maybe she might be in another dome."

"The dragon?" The witch jerked her chin towards the water. "She's curled up around the island, under the water. I wouldn't expect–"

Jindi was already moving with a snap of fabric. She turned and leaped from her seated position, arcing through the air and curving into a swan dive. In a moment she disappeared into the water with barely a splash, pulling something shimmering from her bag in the process.

"–any response," the witch finished, and sighed. "Oh well. She'll see for herself in a moment. What's your name, young man?"

Samgar considered lying, and then gave up. If she wanted to hurt him, disarmed and missing most of his armor, she'd hardly need his true name to do it. "I'm Samgar. Are you telling me this isn't your lair?"

That earned him a hearty cackle, equal parts bitter and amused. The witch settled off her legs and looked at him with the weary tolerance owed a child asking why the sky was blue. "This hasn't been my lair in a very long time, young Samgar. Not since I battled your king. Not since I lost."

Jindi hadn't come back up for air. Samgar was beginning to feel very naked with her absence. The witch sighed.

"Fine. I'll go first. My name is Pakhni, and I tried to destroy Minoa."

Samgar's blood ran cold.

There was a splash from the edge of the water. A sopping wet Jindi clambered over the side of the rock. Her hair was clinging to her face, and she had the distinct air of a drowned rat. For a moment, she was still. Then, she pounded the rough stone with her first and screamed in frustration.

"Why didn't it work?" Her voice was ragged and despairing. "I heard her call. I returned her pearl. Why isn't she answering me? Why won't she wake up?"

Samgar was on his feet and rushing toward Jindi. As soon as he reached her side, he gripped her arm and hauled her upright like a ragdoll. "Jindi, I know you're really going through it right now but we have to go. Now. It's her, she's going to kill us both–"

There was another ascerbic cackle. "I see you've heard of me, Samgar!"

Jindi yanked her arm away, eyes blazing. "I'm not going anywhere, Sam xiansheng. The only reason I came to your benighted country was to free the last true dragon, and I'm not leaving here asleep in this place."

"Have neither of you been listening?" Pakhni complained aloud. "Nobody is going anywhere. This is a prison, young idiots. You've broken yourself in. Well done to you both. But I've been here a long, long while. There's no getting free. You've found your dragon just in time to watch her slowly starve, deprived of the energy of the world she requires. I hope you enjoy dying beside her."

~*~

It had taken some convincing to get Jindi to take a begrudging seat to hear the witch out. It had taken considerably more convincing to get Samgar to do the same.

"You're Pakhni," Samgar said.

"I believe I've said that, yes."

"The Winter Witch."

"Are they still calling me that? How flattering."

"The mad winter mage who blanketed the northern marches in a fifteen-month winter."

The witch had the audacity to smirk. "I am the greatest winter mage to ever live."

Samgar almost rose to his feet at that. "I'm glad you think it's greatness to let thousands starve as their crops die in the frozen ground. How great you are, killing countless innocent people while the powerful purchase their food from the southern provinces. It was an amazing way to kill almost everyone except the enemies that matter, half my relatives among them."

Pakhni was no longer smiling. Her snowmelt eyes were contemptuous. "I'd apologize for killing your family, young man, but I'm not actually sorry. They were beneath my notice. This is the way of things. I suggest you get accustomed to it."

Beside him, Jindi snorted. "You're a fine match for the barbarian king. He places no value on life either, save what he can rip from it to serve himself."

The witch's face turned ugly. "Don't you dare compare me to that upstart, dragon cultist. I could have scattered Minoa itself to the four winds if he hadn't caught me off guard."

"And yet you didn't," Jindi shot back. "Why is that?"

The witch sniffed. "I knew Charles was a formidable spring mage in his own right, but I didn't anticipate the lengths he would go to trap me. This place used to be my sanctum, connected to the underground rivers. He dragged blackglass–western obsidian–hundred of miles and slowly built this prison in the earth around the original cavern. Just when I was prepared to launch my final assault, he showed his hand and locked me in a prison of spring magic. I'm cut off from any power that isn't inherent in these waters, and the blackglass reflects back any attempt to break it. The perfect mage prison. I suppose he dumped your dragon here for the same reason. There's only one way in, and no ambient life to strengthen her. She's suffocating, as am I–probably Charles' idea of poetic justice. When our reserves are expended, we'll both die–and you with us."

"It's you," Jindi said with wonder. "You're the void I feel. The center of the whirlpool of energy."

Pakhni spread her hands. "Void is hardly the worst thing I've been called in my life. Ah, how I loathe that man! Cleverness and cruelty compound in him. As winter turns into spring, the very power I exude to sustain myself is absorbed by the trap. I am its prisoner and power source."

Samgar frowned at her. "If you're the fuel, can't you just...stop? Pull your power back in. Let the place collapse."

The witch gave him a bitter smile. "If only it were that easy. If only I could take in the energy that purifies the air, lights the cavern, and keeps me from starvation and wait for the trap to slowly expend what it's already absorbed. I'd die of hunger waiting. No, I would need an injection of power to destabilize it. Pure energy of earth and water, filling me up. Tilting the balance and making the riptide end. But the two of you are no mages–I can see that much. So get comfortable. We've got a few decades to kill."

"Pure energy of earth and water?" Samgar asked.

"The stronger the better."

Samgar considered the witch. He considered the evil she had wrought, and the well-deserved end she would find in this hole. He considered the winter that had taken his father from him when he was five, and his grandparents with them, leaving his mother a widow with an unruly son. It was poetic justice to let her starve and die with her. The end of a long revenge. The hero's journey coming to a close.

Then, Samgar thought of Jindi and her dragon. How far she had come and how much death she had suffered already. How the innocent in the old stories never had to pay for the price of another's vengeance.

He sighed.

"You want an injection of earth and water magic, winter and spring combined? All you had to do was ask."

With one smooth motion, he pulled the deathcoil fang from his pack and buried it in Pakhni's shoulder.

~*~

The next period was a blur. The first thing to happen was a grand peal of shattering glass. Jindi inhaled sharply as the witch in Samgar's arms collapsed–and with her fall, cracks began to spider up the dome, enough broken mirrors for ten millennia of bad luck. Then, there was a grand rockslide of mirrored stone churning the still waters to foam. Pakhni, her wound closing, shouted with rage and victory, a dome of ice forming over her as the deathcoil fang spun away. Jindi had cried out a word in Southron, her eyes fixed on the moat where colossal rocks were coming to crush her god.

Then, with a sound like howling gale, a great serpentine form as blue as a cloudless day twisted from the water. A round pearl blazed at her throat, and a great beard line with obsidians parted as it spoke.

The words weren't Southron but pure magic, beyond season, beyond time itself. The air of the dome and the waters of the moat were arrested with the force of it, tightening in a swirl of foam mightier than a hurricane. The sound picked Samgar up from his place on the crumbling rock and tossed him about, turning his world into a blur of white foam and blackglass, light and shadow swirling together. He lost track of Jindi–of Pakhni–of his own senses as he drifted through time and space, air and water and stone. All he could tell was that he was moving incredibly quickly, passing through earth and water at a blistering pace. This was no magic. This was to the mightiest mortal sorcery what a siege engine was to a butter knife.

As swiftly as it began, however, it was ended. The great scaled form was gone from his sight, and Samgar found himself drifting in clear, cool water. He allowed a precious few bubbles of air to escape his lips, following their path upwards. A twist and Samgar followed them up–and up–and up–

He broke the surface of the Cistern, gasping for air. For the first time, Samgar was glad he was without his sword and breastplate; it would have been all but impossible to swim up in full armor. For a moment he did nothing but breathe, cough, and recover.

"I did it." Jindi's voice was only a few feet to his side. Samgar would have been startled if he had the energy for such a response. She sounded punch-drunk and disbelieving. "By heaven, I actually did it."

"You sound surprised," Samgar managed eventually.

"I am."

"Planned to fail?"

"Just because you don't plan for failure doesn't mean you think you'll actually succeed, barbarian." The insult was said with enough affection to make it hard to resent. "It just means you know there's no such thing as a life where you've lost. I half-thought I would die in your land. It's still hard to believe I didn't."

"You won," Samgar agreed. "And lived to tell of it."

He twisted his head to look at the woman who had been his ally, companion, and occasional savior for two weeks. Jindi was as drenched as he was, and there was a bruise forming on her forehead. Her hair was a mess of soaked strands, some cut by their passage, and her outer robe had gashes from the storm of blackglass and foam.

Somehow, she looked more splendid than he had ever seen her.

"So now what, Zhang Jindi? What will you do with your life now that it hasn't been squandered underground?"

She hesitated and looked across the Cistern.

"...I don't know, laoxiong. The last dragon is free, but my home is still gone. My country is dying, and I've never tried living beside them. I'm going to be alone. Nothing is fixed, not really."

Samgar considered her words as he clung to the rocks like a limpet, a sorry sight if ever there was one.

"When you first came to Nuhan," he said eventually. "Your problem was that the dragon was captured. Now it isn't."

Jindi glanced at him, brow furrowed.

"When Nuhan attacked you, you were in danger of being slaughtered. Now you aren't."

"What's your point, Samgar?"

"My point," he answered. "Is that you can't fix every problem at the same time. You can't be everything everywhere to everyone. Pick one problem at a time. Work. Live. Breathe. Do it again, and again, and again. It won't fix everything, but it's the only thing that can make a difference."

Jindi suddenly looked very old. "I'm only one person. My people are gone. One person working alone isn't going to make a difference in time."

Samgar laughed aloud. Then, in a fit of inspiration, he splashed water in her face. Jindi spluttered for a moment, then looked at him, bemused.

"You won't be alone forever, you sour old bat," he said with affection. "I can guarantee it. Want to know how?"

"How?" She asked, stunned.

"Because you aren't alone now."

~*~

Adeline arrived home a little after sunset with a sack of vegetables slung over her shoulder, stone-faced and red-eyed, to find a half-armored Samgar packing her bags and squinting critically at a set of tunics.

"Evening, kiddo," he said by way of greeting. "Do you think the sea green should go in? Space is limited, after all, and there's already a lot of blue and brown in our wardrobes."

"DAD!" Adeline dropped the sack with a wet thud and hurtled towards him, flinging herself into a bone-crushing hug. Samgar shifted to catch her, the impact pressing a huffed laugh from his chest as he returned the embrace. "Gods, it's been weeks! I thought you were dead!"

"Dead? Pssht. Show a little faith in your old man. It'll take more than a little dungeon crawl to put me down for good–" Samgar paused and noted how Adeline's eyes were filling with tears. Hero's bravado could come later–right now, Adeline needed her dad. He pulled her close and softened his voice. "Addy. I'm here. I'm alive, and everything will be all right."

Adeline buried her face in his chest, mightily and fruitlessly restraining a sob. "I thought I had killed you. You wouldn't have been chosen if I hadn't signed up for the qualifying bout, and you were down there so long."

"It turned out that we were a bit misled about the scope of the task," Samgar admitted. "The tunnels under Minoa go for miles, and at least some of the dangers were manmade. If I hadn't had Jindi with me, things could have gone very badly–"

Adeline made a choked noise and abruptly lost control of herself, gripping Samgar's tunic like she was a little girl again. He hastened to add "–so it's good that it was me and her down there facing the dangers, not you. Your friend is a hell of a fighter in more ways than one. Addy, shh. It's okay. I'm alive. I'm okay."

He waited for her sobs to quiet. When Adeline looked up at him, her composure once again intact, he gave her a reassuring smile. Then, with a calm and measured tone: "Now pack your bags. We have to flee the city."

The silence was palpable.

"I've already started packing for you. I bought a horse and wagon–they're around back, so get a move on. We don't have much time. I warned a few guards already–they'll be responsible for evacuating the rest of the city. While you get ready, I can send a runner to your mother as well. She deserves a head start, at least."

"Dad." Adeline was watching him, brows furrowed. "Why are we fleeing the city?"

Samgar let her go and turned back to his packing. To hell with it–the sea-green tunics were a gift from his mother. In they went.

"Three reasons," Samgar said aloud. "In ascending levels of importance. First, the Winter Witch is alive–"

Adeline went white. "The Winter Witch is alive? But she was supposed to be defeated decades ago!"

"Defeated, not dead. She's alive, angry, in the Cistern gathering power, and about to have a mage's duel with King Charles. He's a spring mage, by the way, probably the strongest one in the world. It's about to get very, very messy in here. Best to not be around for it."

Adeline's hand went reflexively to grip for the hilt of a sword she wasn't wearing. Samgar took a moment to appreciate the strength of her battle instincts. "Dad, we can't run. If she's back, we have to go help the king. I don't care how strong a spring mage he might be, she's a monster."

"So's King Charles," Samgar bit off, closing the full pack with considerably more force than necessary. "Second reason: the war with the Southern Regents? He started it. No defense. Hardly the flimsiest justification. And in the process, he collaborated with dragons, Addy, just because they would give him an edge in killing innocent people. Jindi's people. The second reason we're leaving Minoa is because fuck the king. He and the Witch deserve each other. I hope they drag each other to hell, but in the event that they don't, I will not be ruled by him. Neither will you. End of story."

For a minute, the only sound was that of the embers in the hearth quietly crackling. Samgar moved across the dusty floorboards and through the door to the kitchen. He opened the pantry and started inspecting the contents for food that could travel well. As much as he was loathe to abandon the first non-jerky and hardtack food he'd seen in weeks, their garden lettuce was unlikely to survive a trek.

"What's the last reason?" Adeline's voice cut through his reverie. There was a tremble in her voice and she was leaning on the table for support, but her eyes were hard as diamond. Burning pride swelled in Samgar's chest at the sight of his daughter, as strong and splendid as he could have ever wanted. His absence the past weeks had shaken her spirit, but nothing in this world would break her. "What's the most important reason to leave?"

Samgar considered how to phrase it as he took down several pouches of dried herbs that could be rubbed into roadside game. He meandered through the kitchen, taking a pot that could be suspended over a campfire, a leather strap that could double as a slingshot, and a tinderbox.

"You and I are too much alike," Samgar told her. "We're no good stuck in one place for too long. We chafe. We sour. We spoil, all our dreams and desire for adventure curdling into sometime lesser. We need swords by our side, bows on our back. The sky above us and the road under our feet, the wind of faraway places filling our lungs. Only then can we breathe. Only then will we live like human beings, becoming what we've always wanted to be–what we've needed to be."

The shaking had stopped. Adeline stood up from the table. Her hands were bunched in fists not at her side, not out of a suppressed need to fight, but like she might burst at the seams if she dared release them.

"Heroes? Like in all the old stories?"

Samgar couldn't help but echo her excitement. He grinned without a whit of pretense or bravado. "Let's start with adventurers. We can work our way up. We've got the time, kiddo."

Adeline opened a cabinet to Samgar's right and rooted around in the back. With a brief huff of effort, she pulled out a heavy green velvet bag that clinked as she shifted it. "We'll be needing this, I think. No use letting all the family savings get destroyed in a mage duel. Where do we go first?"

Samgar considered as he took more dried foodstuffs into the pot on his hip. "I've never been to your grandmother's homeland in the Sunrise Islands. She's told me about the island where she grew up, Bruo. They have beaches made of round stones, white granite and marble worn smooth by the waves. I've always wondered what that would look like."

"She told me there were wicked sea spirits there, and man-eating one-eyed giants on deserted islands," Adeline mused aloud. The warning in her words was belied by the broad grin on her face.

"Your grandmother would know best," Samgar agreed. "It sounds like trouble."

Adeline's eyes danced. "Lucky for me I can get in trouble twice before second bell, right?"

Samgar drew a kitchen knife, holding it gripped in his fist like a sword. He caught his reflection in the polished flat of the blade. A man he didn't recognize looked back: his hair hadn't been washed in an embarrassingly long time. He was missing his breastplate, and the pauldrons were sliding off his shoulders in its absence. Tiny scars from rocky shrapnel and acid dotted his face. The man had lost some weight and gained some years.

The man looked alive.

Samgar tossed the knife into the pot. "Lucky for us."