Page 853 of End Game

The name changes the room.

Good.

“The towers are mostly ruins now. The banners are gone. The western wall collapsed months ago. But beneath it, far below the stone you first walked through years ago, the catacombs remain.”

Dex groans softly. “Oh, fuck me.”

“No,” Micah says. “That’s how you got us cursed the first time.”

“I flirted with one necromancer.”

“You flirted with a skull.”

“It had cheekbones.”

Cami laughs.

Griffin points at Dex. “Can we survive the opening narration first?”

“Fine.”

I wait until they settle again.

“Your path has taken you through the Mistfen Marsh, the Embervault, the Whispering Fair and the Reliquary of Thalos. You fought the Headless Horseman on the old trade road, survived a frankly unreasonable number of mimics—”

Dex points at me. “Your fault.”

“—and somehow escaped every consequence of touching things I explicitly described as cursed.”

Micah lifts one shoulder. “They were interesting.”

“They were glowing.”

“Exactly.”

I let myself smile.

“All of it led back here.”

Silence settles again.

“The corrupted paladin’s journal you found beneath this keep during your first descent contained a name none of you understood then.”

Griffin exhales.

Of course he remembers.

“The Hollow King,” he says.

I nod. “The Hollow King.”

Dex sits forward. “Oh, this is some full-circle bullshit.”

“Correct.”

“I respect it.”

The final chamber exists beneath the same catacombs where they found that journal, and I designed it months ago—a circular room of black stone, four broken pillars surrounding a sunken center and something resembling a throne at the far side.