And before Beowulf has gone very far, the current has grown markedly stronger, so that he hardly has to swim at all. The chasm narrows, becoming another tunnel, and the current sucks him helplessly along its moss-slicked course. The golden horn glows more brightly than ever, but it is cold comfort indeed that he will not die in utter darkness. The spent air filling his lungs is aching to escape, and his heart pounds loudly in his ears. The tunnel becomes narrower still, so that he is dragged roughly along this stone gullet, his flesh cut and battered by the pockets of quartz crystals and by every irregularity in the rock. And still the tunnel grows narrower. Soon, he thinks, he will be able to go no farther, so constricted will be this passageway, and as he lacks the strength and air to fight his way back against the current, he will drown here. This will be his grave, and the mother of the demon Grendel will have won. He feels his grip on Hrunting growing slack, and the golden horn almost slips from his fingers. Oblivion begins to press in at the edges of his mind, and Beowulf closes his eyes and waits to die.

But then the tunnel releases its hold on him, and he is buoyed suddenly upward, and Beowulf finds himself gasping at the surface of another underground pool. The current carries him onto a rocky shore, where he lies coughing and vomiting gouts of salty water, coming slowly back to himself. He opens his stinging eyes, blinking and squinting, trying to force them into focus.

“Where have you brought me to, demon?” he croaks, then begins to cough again.

“To me,” replies a voice from somewhere overhead, a voice that is at once beautiful and loathsome and fearsome to hear. “Is that not where you wished to find yourself, here with me?”

Beowulf rises slowly onto hands and knees, rough bits of gravel biting into his exposed skin. “You are the mother of the monster Grendel?” he asks the voice, then coughs up more water.

“He was my son,” the voice says. “But, I assure you, he was no monster.”

“Your voice,” says Beowulf, rolling over onto his back, turning to face the voice and brandishing Hrunting. “Your voice…it’s not what I would have expected of a sea hag and the mother of a troll.”

“He was no troll,” the voice replies, and now Beowulf thinks that there’s a hint of anger there.

“Show yourself, beast!” Beowulf calls out as best he can, his voice still raw from having swallowed, then spat up so much of the pool. “Let me see you.”

“In time. Do not hurry so to meet your doom.”

“Bitch,” he hisses and spits into the mud. Sitting upright, fighting back dizziness and nausea, his vision begins to clear. And at last Beowulf looks for the first time upon the strange realm into which the current has delivered him. At once he knows this can be no ordinary cavern, but instead the belly of some colossus. The fyrweorm slain by Beow, perhaps, just as Unferth said, and now its calcified ribs rise toward the ceiling like the arches of Hel’s own hall. They glow blue-green with an unearthly phosphorescence, as do the walls, and Beowulf sees that there is a mighty hoard of treasure heaped all about the floor and banked high along the walls. In some places, the stones and those titan ribs are encrusted with a dazzling mantle of gold and gemstones.

Slowly, he gets to his feet, clutching Hrunting and holding Hrothgar’s horn out before him. Its shine illuminates more of the cavern floor before him, and Beowulf can see one corner heaped high with the rotting corpses of recently dead thanes, their armor ripped apart as though it had been no more than birch bark, their bellies gutted, their faces obliterated by claws and teeth. And Beowulf also sees the stone slab where the body of Grendel now rests. The monster’s severed arm lies propped in place against its mangled shoulder. The corpse is a shriveled, pitiable thing, a gray husk devoid of any of its former threat, and Beowulf finds it hard to believe this could be the same creature he battled two nights before. Above the corpse and the slab hangs a broadsword, sheathed and mounted on iron brackets, a sword so large and heavy no mortal man could ever hope to lift it, a sword that might well have been forged in the furnaces of the Frost Giants.

“Does it pain you,” Beowulf says, taking a single cautious step toward the altar, “to see him dead? To see him lying broken and so diminished?”

“You do not yet know pain,” the voice says. “As yet, that word means nothing to you, little man.” And then there’s a scrabbling, scratching sound from somewhere close behind him, and Beowulf turns quickly about, peering into the shadows and the eerie blue-green light of the cavern for its source. But there’s no sign of whatever might have made the noise, no evidence except the taunting voice to say he’s not alone. Beowulf holds the golden horn still higher.

“I see you brought me treasure,” the voice says.

“I have brought you nothing but death,” he replies.

And now Beowulf catches sight of something there amongst the hoarded riches, what appears to be a golden statue, though a statue of what he cannot say. Perhaps it was an idol, long ago, for he has heard stories of ancient cults and the old religion once practiced by the Danes, of blood sacrifices made by men and women who did not hold Odin as the highest among the Æsir. Sacrifices to goddesses said to inhabit especially deep lakes, though this statue surely resembles no goddess. It is a grotesque thing, as though its creators had in mind some hideous amalgam of a lizard and a sea beast. Its eyes are lapis lazuli, and its coarse mane seems to have been woven from a golden thread. Beowulf turns back toward the altar, and he gazes in awe at the giant sword hanging there above Grendel’s body.

“Your beautiful horn,” the voice says. “It glows so…delightfully.”

And once again he hears that scurrying from somewhere close behind him, and this time Beowulf does not turn, but only glances back over his shoulder. Light reflecting off the pool dances across the walls of the cave and across the statue. Something seems different about it, as though it subtly shifted position—the angle of its head, the arrangement of its reptilian limbs—when he looked away. But this must be only some trick of the cave’s peculiar lighting, some deceit his eyes have played upon his mind.

“Show yourself,” he says. “I have not come so far, through flood and muck, to bandy words with a shade.”

“You have come because I have called for you,” the voice replies, and now Beowulf does turn to face the statue once again. But it is vanished, gone. Before he can long ponder its disappearance, there’s a loud splash from the pool, as though something has fallen from the wall into the water. Only a loose stone, perhaps, but he raises Hrunting and watches the pool.

“I have come to avenge those who were slain while they slept,” he says. “I have come to seek justice for the thirteen good men who sailed the whale’s-road and fought with me.”

Ripples begin spreading out across the surface, creating small waves that lap against the shore, and from the shimmering water rises the likeness of a woman, entirely naked and more beautiful than any Beowulf has ever before beheld or imagined. There is an odd metallic glint to her complexion, as though her skin has been dusted with gold, and all about her there is a glow like the rising sun after a long and bitter night. Her flaxen hair is pulled back into a single braid, so long that it reaches almost to her feet. Her pale blue eyes shine bright and pure, as though blazing with some inner fire. And then she speaks, and it is the same voice that has mocked him since he entered the dragon’s belly.

“Are you the one they call Beowulf?” she asks. “The wolf of the bees? The bear? Such a strong man you are. A man with the strength of a king in him. The king you will one day become.”