good name as soon as one came to him.
It took the better part of an hour to reach the base of the hive. Looking up its sloping height, Amric was struck by the sheer size of the structure. He had known it was huge in comparison to the more ordinary mounds around it, but here, at its foot, it seemed to stab at the very sky. The surface was hard and unnaturally smooth. It was not the slickness of water-worn stone, or the polish of a cut gemstone, but rather an unbroken, unblemished expanse of sand somehow welded together into a curved surface as hard as granite. There was an abrasive tooth to it, such that even the iron-shod hooves of the horses were able to find purchase on its steep slope.
Amric scanned the rolling hills again, finding them still devoid of life. He motioned for the others to spread out, and then he took the lead up the slope. The incline proved too steep for the horses to make a direct ascent, but he was able to guide his bay gelding in a more gradual circuit of the thing, making a slow spiral to its peak. From its towering height, he was afforded a panoramic view of the surrounding desert, and he stopped more than once to survey the land. The swirling winds still limited sight distance, but nothing stirred in any direction aside from the shambling dunes themselves.
They reached the peak and found that the outer lip marked the outline of a broad crater with a gaping hole at its center. Descending from the edges of the maw were numerous crude stairways which appeared to be carved from the interior wall of the structure. They twisted away into the darkness far below. The entire thing was hollow, Amric realized; given its mammoth size, there was no telling how many more of the creatures might still be contained below.
Amric slid from his horse, and Valkarr did the same. They left the reins with the others and crept forward to the edge of the opening, crawling in silence for the last dozen paces. They peered over the rim, tilting their heads at an angle such that only the barest sliver of silhouette would show to any observers below.
It was afternoon and the sun was no longer at its zenith. Skewed now in the sky, it sent a slanted shaft of thick, muddled light into the hive to pool off center on the floor of the cavern far below. Thus it was that, as Amric’s eyes adjusted to the darkness inside, he was able to pick out details of the room’s perimeter there first.
The place was huge and circular, and far from deserted.
Scores of large openings were cut into the wall at ground level along the outside arc of the room, and hulking black creatures vanished into or emerged from their depths, moving with industrious speed. Amric noted that the floor of the place was well below the wasteland’s ground level. His jaw clenched as he wondered how far that network of tunnels extended beneath the desert. Not terribly far, he decided, or the mass exodus they had witnessed earlier need not have taken place above ground.
The creatures were larger than the humanoid forms he had seen from these fiends thus far, perhaps half again the height of a tall man, with elongated heads pulled in tight to their chests. They were heavyset, at least twice as broad at the shoulders as a man, and they moved with ponderous strength. Their arms were overlong, ending in strange appendages that were not hands, and several thick, sinuous tentacles sprouted from either side of a ridge of spikes that ran down their hunched backs. Even so, there were some obvious similarities; many of the creatures trailed the same strips of tattered cloth, and their flesh was the same dull black as the others had been. It was evident that they shared a common nature.
All this he absorbed in the first few instants of observation, and then a cluster of activity at the heart of the chamber drew his eye. He focused upon the shadowy movement there. The uncertain light from above was not the only illumination, he realized with a chill. Murky pools of some green, viscous liquid shimmered in an array around the upraised center of the room, like sinister spokes radiating from the axle of some great wheel. The fluid gave off a spectral light that bathed the cavern from the