A guardian five stories tall stood over a dying light it had been set to keep, and wept that light down its own body. They broke it open, and the light came up out of it like a geyser — and she drank it.
They gave the Living Fortress a name at last — Bob — and went on deeper, quiet, Heyou leading. Sylvie felt a flaming skull sentinel ahead and they turned aside from it; the bridges beyond ran too narrow for Bob, though the mount could cross, and they marked the Acid Bile Sack Bob carried as a thing that might break a way through. The Compass steadied for once, settling at eleven o'clock. Then they went back to deal with the skull. Golden membranes hung across the passages like mucous, and Sylvie read them, and read the whole place — the caves, the membranes, the goblinoids themselves — drowned in Splendor, a fallout of it. Jamal drew one healing from that flood; and Sylvie caught the flaming skull in a lock of frozen time, to keep it still until they rested.
Two astral assassins phased in out of nowhere. One touched Draz and marked him for death — turned his fear against him, and struck through his armor as if it were not there — and the other's blow came apart before it landed; conjured beetles took the worst off him. Then the guardian came: Mollthain's Warden, five stories of it, pouring Splendor off itself. Draz spoke to it in the tongue of living things and learned what it was — a shape a far greater power had made and left here to keep one small light after the great light departed, with a whole reef of creatures below it feeding on the glow. Ygva had said as much.
A fireball slid off its hard skin and did nothing but turn its eye on them. It threw up a wall of bismuth crystal from the floor to cut Draz off from the rest, and pulsed a strange, harmless energy through him where he stood; he climbed instead onto its shoulder. An assassin came together behind Heyou and he opened it with a stab; Sylvie broke the crystal wall down into rubble with a shove of force; another assassin hardened brittle under the pressure and shattered across the floor. The guardian set its hands to either side of the way and pushed, and the chamber shook, and the ceiling came down in pieces.
An assassin ran You Bastard through, and the beast charged it down. And Draz, pleading with the guardian, was taken by his own returning visions into a waking ancestral dream, out of his own hands for hours — his Elder telling him there that to stand under the great powers is a kind of shelter, and a fickle one. Bob charged and threw its acid bile into the guardian and chewed deep grooves in it; Heyou stabbed; the crystal wall sank away and cool magma welled up from beneath. The guardian smeared the molten light over its fists and hammered Heyou, and began to weep it in streams down its whole body, a flowing barrier of fire — and a fireball set those streams alight, so that it burned and kept burning.
It slammed both hands into the ground and the shock of it near took them off their feet, and Heyou rode it out. Then Jamal and Heyou and Sylvie struck as one thing and opened a fissure the length of it, and a geyser of luminous liquid came up out of the wound as its body crumbled and would not yet fall. And Sylvie spent her own health and called up Damnation, and turned the geyser onto herself, and drew the light down into her body until it coated her over. The flaming skull stayed frozen where she had left it; the Warden stood crumbling and unfallen; and she was shining with what she had taken.