“D’vale infused their cave prisons with some kind of magic to keep them confined,” Sikurgurd explained. “There are thousands of them down here in the underrealms, and obviously they’re very strong. But the magic in the rocks keeps them trapped, so if we didn’t care for them, they’d not live very long.”

“Okay, enough,” Rachel said, shaking her head. “There’s no way we can cross this whole city, not in a few hours. We have to turn back.”

“Can we take one of these lightning carriages?” Gabriel asked, looking down into the city. “They move pretty fast.”

“You’d be fighting your way through hordes of my kind,” Sikurgurd said. “People are headed to their daily tasks now, so the carriages are always full. Four went by before I could even get on one when I was on my way here..”

“Fort, think about this,” Rachel said, looking him in the eye. “Do you really want the Old Ones to return because of you? Would… would your father—”

“Don’t,” he growled, cutting her off. “Don’t… just don’t.”

She sighed. “You’re right, that was too far. But still, we can’t just—”

“We won’t put anyone in danger,” Fort said, turning around so he didn’t have to look at her. “But we can’t go back now. We can’t.”

“What about using the Teleport spell?” Jia asked.

Gabriel shook his head. “It doesn’t work like that. You can only teleport if you’ve seen the location you’re going to. And even from here, I can’t make out that tunnel.”

He was right. There was no way they could open a teleportation circle, not without at least some kind of telescope or something. If only Fort could have read Sikurgurd’s mind, and seen what the mining tunnel looked like. Or…

Or seen it in a dream?

Fort’s eyes widened, and he turned back to his friends. “Jia, that actually might work.”

Gabriel gave him a questioning look as Fort quickly cast a teleportation circle on the wall next to them. It opened into darkness, but Fort didn’t wait for Rachel to light it, and quickly stepped through.

He emerged into a long, dark tunnel, dimly lit on one side by light filtering through some vertical rock formations that more than anything resembled the teeth of a dragon.

“It’s okay, you can come through,” he whispered back through the teleportation circle. “I got us here.”

Gabriel was first through the circle and looked around in amazement. “But how? You’ve never been here.”

“Not physically,” Fort said. “But it looks like I’ve had some pretty realistic dreams of it.”

He didn’t add what he’d seen at the end of the tunnel in those dreams, the thing that terrified him almost as much as the Old Ones.